With their rifles and tin hats and bits of wood, they were buried. Well, that was over the three days, that.'
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Pte Syd Shutt of B Company passed through the same casualty clearing station while helping to carry a dead DLI man to the same burial area. He remembers seeing the German medics eating captured British rations of tinned steak and kidney pudding. He also recalls the German doctor spinning a coin to choose between a seriously wounded British and German soldier for a space aboard the little Fiesler Storch spotter plane which was busily flying out casualties back to the main German hospital at Ferryville. The coin favoured the British man.
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Tom Tunney's friend from civvie street, Norman Cook was also in the Platoon and also made a POW that morning.
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'Norman was in another Section, he was took prisoner the same morning. I met him at the back. When we got back behind the lines they put us all in like a big barn.'
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The Germans took their new prisoners' cigarettes.
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'Oh aye. They got us back and they lined us all up, went through our pockets and I had a couples of 20s. Why everybody had. They took them. "Kamerad!' For you wounded!" For our mates--so they said. Well they would too, I suppose.'
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The Frontline troops didn't take anything.
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'No, we were further back. There was one officer, one of them took his watch off him. He was playing hell with the bloody Germans. A lot of them could speak English and he says: 'He took my watch!' And he got it back!
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'Another one, he took my glasses when he was going through my pockets. I had my glasses in. He took them out [they were gold plated reading glasses]. And then it was on a night when we were in the big barn and he must have shoved them in to somebody, opened the door and shoved them in and somebody had them. Well, my name was inside and they shouted my name out: "Anybody in here called Tunney?" "Aye!" "There's thee glasses!"
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'So they were decent blokes. I was talking to an Officer, he said he'd been to England and the different towns he'd been to before the war. Oh, they were decent blokes. I think it was a special mountain division. They were specially trained for mountain fighting [in reality they were Parachute Engineers]. Oh, they were big young fellas, hand-picked. A lot of them could speak English.'
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The new POWs realised all too well then that their attack had failed.
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'Oh aye--for then. I don't know what happened after that because we were only in that place one night and the next morning they lined us all up and marched us back. That was when we got strafed by a Spitfire.'
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How many POWs were there? 'There'd be about 30.' All DLI?
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'No, there were different regiments. There were Yorks and Lancs and some Foresters among them. So they must have been going up further along from us. They must have had a go there as well. They marched us back to a place called Ferryville, just outside Bizerte and they put us in some barracks there for the night and we got something to eat off them, some soup and some bread. And the next morning they put us on these trucks and took us down to the docks, Lake Ferryville, I think they called it And a ship was there and they put us on the ship. We were on the bugger ten days.'
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Meanwhile, the remnants of the DLI, plus the 6th Lincolnshire Regiment and No 1 Commando were engaged in savage fighting to hold onto the village.
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NEXT PAGE: The Battle for Sedjenane Village, 3-4/3/43.
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