SEAMEN PRISONERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 106, 1 November 1943, Page 4

SEAMEN PRISONERS

LIFE ON GERMAN RAIDERS

O.C. SYDNEY, October 28. When five Australian merchant seamen, who were among 111 Allied prisoners exchanged for Germans at Portugal reached an Australian port this week one of them, Able Seaman. W. A. Jones, of Sydney, knelt and kissed the ground. His companions were Arthur Wilson, second cook, of Sydney, Keith Godridge, fourth engineer, of Melbourne, Percy Robinson, chief steward, of .Melbourne, and Albert White, steward, of Melbourne. Jones was in the Mareeba (3472 tons, Australasian United Steam Navigation, Co.), sunk by torpedo ■in the Bay of Bengal in June, 1941. He said that the Mareeba's survivors were taken, aboard the German raider Kormoran (9400 tons) for five months. Transferred to a prison ship, they were torpedoed in the Atlantic. After three days in lifeboats, the survivors were picked up by a U-boat. After> short rations on the prison ship, food on the U-boat comprised scrambled eggs for breakfast and ham, soup, and coffee for dinner. Attacked by Sunderland flyingboats, the U-boat crash-dived, and lay on the bottom for nine hours. The prisoners were told not to speak or move. THIRSTY JOURNEY. They were landed at Lorient (France), and were given no water for three and a 'half days in the train to Germany, and licked frost from the» window panes to ease their thirst. Wilson was taken prisoner by a German raider after the shelling of the Australind (5020 tons) near the Panama Canal. He was 19 months in a German prison camp. Godridge andi Robinson were among 12 survivors' taken prisoner by a raider which sank' the Triaster (6032 tons), off Nauru Island, Central Pacific, on December 8, 1940. Godridge said the 12 survivors, including the captain, were six weeks on. the raider which sank their ship. They lived on two slices of black bread a day. With 12 other prisoners, they were crowded in a room 12ft by 15ft. Twice the raider went into action, but they were sent below, at gun-point and battened down. . Godridge said the raider called atan unidentified island off the coast of Japan in January, 1941, and took on supplies and stores. This was 11 months before Japan entered the war. The prisoners were transferred to the Ermlandt (12,000 tons), sailed around Cape Horn (South America) under false flags, and met a German fleet off | Montevideo. In the fleet were the 26,000-ton battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, the 10,000-ton pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, two other German ships, and 12 to 15 U-boats. At Bordeaux (France) they were marched through the streets in ..scanty clothing to a temporary camp, "Frenchwomen tried to help us by throwing food and clothing, but German soldiers stopped them and battered them to death with the b,utt ends of their guns." Godridge said. "On a five-day train journey to Germany in horse trucks we slept on straw previously used by horses. Food was poor at Stalag 108 camp until September. 1941, when each man received a British Red Cross food parcel a week. . At' Lisbon German prisoners told" us they did not want to go home, as they would be sent to the Russian front or placed in U-boats."

White was in the Norwegian tanker Madrono (5894 tons), captured in the Indian Ocean in July. 1942. ,