The Scillin tragedy

Ernest Hall writes about a little known tragedy and reflects on the futility of war

Many men who were conscientious objectors refused to join the forces in the second world war. Others signed up and, later in life, became Quakers. Their Quakerism often grew from a personal experience of conflict.

It was in the winter of 1942/43 when I first heard a rumour that a British submarine had torpedoed a vessel transporting British and Commonwealth prisoners of war from Libya to Italy with heavy casualties. I didn’t pay much attention. The rumour probably wasn’t true – most prison-camp rumours weren’t. In any case, I was much more concerned with my own survival.

I was one of about 5,000 British prisoners of war (POWs) in a large concentration camp near Carpi in northern Italy. We were housed in jerry-built unheated huts with walls less than six inches thick. They were unbearably hot during the summer months and freezing cold during the winter. Our daily ration of food was a mugful of watery tomato-and-rice soup plus a tiny maize-bread loaf (scarcely larger than a bread roll) shared between two. Red Cross food parcels – biscuits, tins of meat or fish, powdered milk, honey or jam – kept us alive. To this day, some seventy years later, I never refuse an appeal from the British Red Cross Society! We were each supposed to get one every week but we often went for weeks without: ‘They’re at the station. We can’t get the transport to bring them to the camp’.

We were cold. We were hungry. We were louse infested. At least once every week there was a notice on the camp notice board announcing that a prisoner had died, usually of a hunger-related cause. The notice always carried a note from the camp commandant: ‘Great honour to the soldier who has given his life for his country. Signed, Guiseppe Ferrari, Colonel of Cavalry.’ I wondered whether that would have eased the pain of his nearest and dearest in England, if they could have seen it – which, of course, they couldn’t!

Italy surrendered to the allies. We were transported to Germany in cattle trucks. I was very fortunate in being sent with a party of thirty British POWs to a working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Zittau, a small town where the frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic now coincide. We were better housed and better fed than we had been in Italy and the Red Cross parcels arrived regularly. Our guards were wounded or frostbitten veterans of the Eastern Front and were neither the sadistic bullies nor the brainwashed automatons of fiction and, sadly, sometimes, experience. We were expected to work hard (mostly loading and unloading railway trucks but we could be given any work requiring brawn rather than brain). We had a large degree of freedom while we worked. We soon picked up enough very ungrammatical German to converse freely with German civilians and allied POWs and civilians, pressed or volunteers (mostly Russians and Ukrainians), who were our fellow-workers. I learned enough Russian to help me hitchhike my way through Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia when the war ended. I have spoken to a number of returned POWs and realise that a great many had experiences in German POW camps that were very different and much more unpleasant than mine. Perhaps I was just lucky.

I survived, and thought little more about my experiences during world war two for half a century. Then, in the 1990s, I was contacted by two Ipswich ladies whose fathers, now deceased, had served in the same regiment as me (67th Medium Regiment RA). I hadn’t known their fathers, but I was able to tell them a little of the few weeks of almost continuous combat that had ended with our being part of the garrison of Tobruk, and of being overwhelmed by the tanks of Erwin Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 20 June 1942. The following morning we had been ordered by Hendrik Klopper, the South African officer who commanded the Tobruk garrison, to burn our vehicles, put our guns out of action and surrender.

I think that I learned more from those two ladies than they learned from me. They supplied me with a complete list of the 67th Medium Regiment RA’s fatal casualties – 100 in all out of a regiment of less than 1,000 men. Ten per cent – a pretty high proportion for a mobile artillery regiment that had been in combat for little more than six months in all. The figure seemed even more extraordinary when it was discovered that many more fatal casualties occurred after the regiment had surrendered than in battle. Some had died in the epidemics of dysentery and diphtheria that swept through the POW camps in Libya after I had been transported to Italy. Some died – I knew a few of them – of starvation related illness in POW camps in Italy. I think it unlikely that any British prisoners of war died of starvation in Germany. Unlike Soviet prisoners of war and the Jews, Gypsies and political dissidents starving to death in concentration camps run by the SS, we did enjoy the protection of the Geneva Convention. The Germans took that seriously – there were many German POWs in British camps!

There were fatal accidents though. A fellow POW (it could have been me) died when a runaway truck on Zittau’s railway sidings crushed him. He was given a military funeral with a firing squad from the local German army barracks firing a volley over his grave. Some died in forced marches from prison camps in eastern Poland during the bitter winter of 1944/1945. The Germans marched them to Germany to prevent their liberation by the ever-advancing Soviet Army. Fifty of my comrades though – most of them, like me, volunteers from East Suffolk aged between twenty-one and thirty – died from ‘friendly fire’. By the end of the first week in November 1942 the German and Italian armies had been defeated at El Alamein and were withdrawing westward across Libya. To prevent their liberation by allied forces some 800 British and South African POWs from prison camps in Tripoli were crammed onto the Scillin, an Italian cargo ship, to be transported to prison camps in Italy. The Italians would have crammed even more on board had it not been for the determined protests of a British medical officer who was among the prisoners. Fifty of those prisoners on the Scillin were from my regiment. I didn’t know them all but I did know several of them well.

Ten miles off the Libyan coast the Scillin was intercepted by the Sahib, a British submarine, whose captain believed it to be loaded with Italian troops. The Scillin ignored warning shots from the Sahib, which then fired a torpedo that struck the vessel’s engine room and sank it. The captain and crew of the Scillin and twenty-seven of the prisoners were rescued. Seven hundred and eighty-three prisoners, including the fifty from my regiment, died. I can only hope that the exploding torpedo killed them all. The thought of being trapped and drowning in the hold of a slowly sinking vessel haunts my nightmares! What I find unforgiveable is that this tragedy need not have happened. British submarine commanders operating in the Mediterranean could have been told by their Egyptian naval HQ which vessels leaving Libyan ports were carrying POWs and which were carrying German or Italian troops; but that might have revealed to the enemy that British code-breakers had intercepted their radio messages and broken the codes in which they were sent!

It was not until 1996 – fifty-four years later – that the facts of the sinking of the Scillin were made public. Prior to that date enquiries from relatives had been told that their soldier sons/husbands/boy-friends had died in Italian POW camps (certainly a plausible lie) or had been lost at sea (almost the truth).

They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them!

Those words from Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘To the Fallen’ will be repeated thousands of times on Remembrance Sunday. They almost make it sound as though the fallen have been rewarded. I have little doubt that every one of those 100 casualties from the 67th Medium Regiment would have gladly endured growing old, the weariness of advancing age and the ‘condemnation of the years’ (whatever that means) in exchange for the fifty, sixty or seventy remaining years of life that they would normally have expected – had they been given the choice!

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