Jack Calder - POW clothing

Transcript

When I went to Italy after being six months in North Africa, all I had was a pair of shorts and they weren't much good either. No boots, no socks, no shirt, no nothing. A pair of shorts and when we got to Italy, they issued us with a set of clothing, which was all Italian stuff, but it didn't matter, it was a set of clothing, which was a shirt, a pair of trousers, pair of old socks, a pair of boots, two shirts. That's all. That's what they issued and we kept those until we went to Germany and when we went to Germany, we were issued with English clothes and you'd say, "How come"?

All that stuff had been captured by the Germans in France, way back in 1940 and they utilised it to outfit all the prisoners of war. Same with the Russians. If a Russian became a prisoner of war, he would be clothed in Russian clothes, which had been captured by the Germans. Not that many Russians were prisoners of war because their belief was they either died or carried on, if they became a prisoner