Great P.O.W. robbery

Press, 27 November 1980, Page 21

Great P.O.W. robbery

Has the British Treasury been cheating British commissioned ranks who were taken prisoner in the Second World War? At the time they had one-third of their pay deducted; 35 years later they have still not had their money refunded. If present moves do lead to refunds, those in New Zealand who will benefit will be New Zealanders who served with the British forces and later returned home, and British servicemen who emigrated to New Zealand.

SUSAN THOMAS, in the "Guardian,” London, looks at the attempt to make the Government pay up.

"Former prisoners of war wishing to claim a refund of money deducted from their pay during captivity are urged to write to .PO.W. Claims, The Ministry of Defence, Main Building, Whitehall, London SWI.

What captivity? Which war? Amazingly, this contemporary advice refers to the period between 1939 and 1945. Because 35 years on, there are still thousands of angry disillusioned, or sick former P.O.W.s who believe that the government owes them a considerable sum of money: around onethird of their pay for the

whole period of their captivity, in fact. An average junior lieu» tenant in the Royal Navy who had endured five years mental and physical hardship in a prison camp would. have been docked about $750 by 1945. What is that by today’s standards, allowing for inflation and interest? If the issue is becoming news again, it’s an old, old story to the servicemen. Most of them had given up fighting for a refund years ago. Captain Dick Howe. Escaping Officer for the infamous Colditz camp, stopped when he found that his letters were simply being

passed from one department to another and never answered. ' “In the end I wrote it off as an act of robbery by the Treasury. You can’t fight a government department. It is like a plastic bag —no recoil,” he says. Now, championed by Lord Kimberley, the for-mer-P.O.W.s are fighting for their rights again. They are also fighting for those who are still too mentally or physically injured by the ordeal to do so for themselves.

In the House of Lords this month, the Earl of Kimberley- asked whether the government intended to make good the deficit

and whether it would ensure that a fair rate of interest was added to compensate for 35 years of inflation.

The Ministry of Defence has promised an answer soon. However, "making an investigation of this kind is far from easy 35 years after the event, when so many of the relevant records are destroyed,” according to Lord Strathcona.

The P.O.W.s may be forgiven for wondering why it was necessary to wait 35 years to begin, and how the records came to be destroyed when their business had not been satisfactorily completed. The money in question was deducted under the terms of the Geneva Convention, which laid down

that officer prisoners were to be paid camp money to allow them to buy necessities and such luxuries as were available. Each officer was to be given about one-third of his pay by the retaining power which would be reimbursed by the other side at the end of the hostilities.

On the face of it, a relatively straightforward arrangement. In fact there was no common practice, except that as soon as an officer was captured, his pay was docked at this end. Some P.O.W.s never saw camp money at all, others received it for a small portion of their captivity, and those who got it on a regular basis had nothing to spend it on. In many camps there were

no luxuries, no necessities even. The camp money was worthless.

In Colditz, for example, the money went on subscriptions to the escaping fund, in payment of fines for escaping, or on gambling. “We had a 24-hour-d a y, seven-day-a-week poker game going. There was absolutely nothing else to do with it; it was just so much Monopoly money,” Howe says. This camp money, or to be more precise the pay docked to account for "it, is the bone of contention. The Minister of State for Defence informed the Lords that “at the end of the war arrangements were made across the three services for any such payments which had not been received to be

refunded . . t the onus was on individual officers to make claims for such refunds . . . and these arrangements were drawn to the attention of returning officer prisoners.” This statement brought an outraged response from the P.O.W.s who largely deny all knowledge of these arrangements. It seems unreasonable, too, to expect men who found life “totally unreal — at first we were in a state of euphoria and then complete unsettlement for months,” to check bank balances, fill in forms, and apply for rebates. There was no need for them to do it, either, because most camps had appointed an accountant who duly returned the books to the War Office on his repatriation.