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from The Guardian Thursday  31 August  2000

Huge toll of first war PoWs revealed
by John Ezard

Though Bill Easton lived to be 100, he never forgot the horror he took part in as a fresh-faced 18-year-old.

He was forced to help bury British fellow soldiers two deep, without crosses or identity discs, in a trench that stretched across a French field farther than his eye could see.

Their families were never told what killed them. They were a small part of an estimated 20,000 British troops who died not from bullets or shrapnel but from starvation and disease in German prisoner of war camps during the first world war. The estimate, which is close to one known to civil servants soon after the war ended in 1918 but unpublished for 70 years, is nearly double the officially announced figure. This month it emerged for the first time from an investigation of official papers made for Prisoners of the Kaiser, a channel 4 documentary which is to be shown this evening.

It indicates that more British soldiers died as captives in France or Germany than were killed on the first day of the battle of the Somme two years earlier— a toll of 19,700 that Is one of the most famous statistics in military history.

The scale of the tragedy has come to light partly through the testimony of the last surviving prisoners, such as Mr Easton, of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, who died 10 months ago.

Another survivor told interviewers that only 292 of the 2,000 captives taken with him to Germany were alive when the armistice was declared.

The prisoners were the undisclosed victims of a German army that was itself close to starvation because of a food blockade by the allied nations. Some were murdered by guards, and others were brutally punished.

The programme, based partly on interviews with survivors who were eyewitnesses, accuses successive government of "closing the book" on PoWs.

"Thousands were killed and never seen again," another survivor, Norman Cowan, 101, who lives near Newcastle on Tyne, said yesterday. "It is desperately sad that so many families never knew. But that was war.

"I was lucky I had the opportunity to live again.

According to War Office figures, 11,403 troops died in German hands.

But research for the programme shows that the 1919, a year after the war, British officials found that a total of 22,000 prisoners were unaccounted for.

Efforts to trace many of them or punish their captors were "ineffectual’, according to Richard van Emden, associate producer of the programme and war historian. War memorials list thousands of their names only as "missing", a term normally used for untraced battlefield victims. Not until the early 1940s did the government commission an official history of the last phase of the first world war.

It chose a distinguished historian, Brigadier General Sir James Edmonds, director of the War Office committee of imperial defence historical section.

Edmonds’s volume, The Occupation of the Rhineland 1918-1929, which he submitted in 1947, highlighted the 22,000 soldiers unaccounted for in 1919 records.

"There is no record that the discrepancy was ever cleared up," he wrote.

But his book was banned by the committee on the publication of official histories headed by the leading Conservative politician RA Butler, because of Foreign Office objections to Edmonds’s strictures on treaties and reparation agreements reached by Britain after the first world war.

Immediately after the second world war, the topic was still sensitive. Only 100 copies of Edmonds’s manuscript were printed for intergovernmental use, marked confidential.

The book was so thoroughly buried that leading historians never heard about it, and with it was buried the revelation about the missing prisoners.

Edmonds died in 1956, still angry about the suppression. In 1987 Margaret Thatcher’s government made reparation to his memory by allowing its then publishing house, HMSO, to publish the volume, with a reception to launch it at the Imperial War Museum.

Even then the disclosure about prisoners of war was missed. But it was spotted in research by Mr van Emden, who has spent more than a decade interviewing the fast-dwindling number of first world war survivors.

Mr van Emden, who has done his own study of death totals, said his estimate of 20,000 was lower than Edmonds’s figure of 22,000 partly because some prisoners were found later in 1919 to be alive.

Mr Cowan said that when he came home in 1918 "the civilians had forgotten the war. They were fighting each other to gain a job, there were strikes and all sorts."

Another survivor, Jack Rogers, who died in April In Lincoln aged 106, said: "I don’t think the government cared much about the PoWs.

"I don’t think a lot of notice was taken."

A PoW remembers: Bill Easton's story