WWII march re-enacted for Armed Forces Memorial

[Matzos]

RAF personnel who recently re-enacted a forced march undertaken by RAF Prisoners of War during the Second World War have presented the money they raised to the Armed Forces Memorial this week.

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The original Long March was a sad but proud moment for the RAF. It took place in the winter months of 1944-1945 when Russian forces started advancing on Germany's eastern front and Hitler ordered the evacuation of the Prisoner of War camps in Germany's eastern territories (now in Poland).
The RAF prisoners were made to march west, sometimes hundreds of miles, towards Berlin, in freezing temperatures, with little food, water or accommodation. Many would collapse through malnutrition and exhaustion and hundreds died of starvation and disease.

The Second World War witnessed the most aerial warfare the world had ever seen. Thousands of operations were flown by Allied Forces over Europe and aircraft were shot down at greater frequency as the war progressed. The German authorities decided to house the allied aircrew survivors in special air force prison camps, guarded by German fliers from the German air force, the Luftwaffe.
The most famous of these camps was Stalag Luft 3, immortalised in the films The Great Escape and the Wooden Horse. It was from the site of this camp that RAF personnel in January 2007 re-enacted the long march undertaken by thousands of their brethren over 50 years earlier.

In all, 70 RAF personnel participated in the challenge, taking three days to march through temperatures as low as minus 21C from the site of Stalag Luft 3 in Zagan, Poland to Spriemberg in Germany, which in the war was the site of the railheads that the POWs used to head further into Germany.

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The route took the modern RAF personnel through local villages where the POWs had stopped in 1944/5. On the first night they stayed in the very barn that their predecessors had.

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The Armed Forces Memorial, being built by money raised through public subscription will include on its walls the names of all Servicemen and women killed on exercise, during operations, on peacekeeping duties or as a result of training accidents as well as battle casualties, since the Second World War.
In all, the long marchers raised £2,000 and presented the cheques on Tuesday 1 May 2007 to the Lord Lieutenant of Staffordshire, the Queens representative in the county, where the memorial is being built. The re-enactment also helps keep alive this sometimes forgotten episode of the RAFs history.

[ArcticWolf]

Well done to all of them. sal;
Makes me even more determined about my own project.

[Matzos]

Some more information on the march

As the Soviet army was advancing on Poland, the Nazis made the decision to evacuate the PoW camps to prevent the liberation of the prisoners by the Russians. During this period, also hundreds of thousands of German civilians, most of them women and children, as well as civilians of other nationalities, were making their way westward in the snow and freezing weather and many died.
January and February 1945 were among the coldest winter months of the twentieth century, with blizzards and temperatures as low as –25 °C (–13 °F), even until the middle of March temperatures were well below 0 °F (–18 °C). Most of the PoWs were ill-prepared for the evacuation, having suffered years of poor rations and wearing clothing ill-suited to the appalling winter conditions.
In most camps, the PoWs were broken up in groups of 250 to 300 men and because of the inadequate roads and the flow of battle, not all the prisoners followed the same route. The groups would march 20 to 40 kilometres a day - resting in factories, churches, barns and even in the open. Soon long columns of PoWs were wandering over the northern part of Germany with little or nothing in the way of food, clothing, shelter or medical care.
Prisoners from different camps had different experiences: sometimes the Germans provided farm wagons for those unable to walk. There seldom were horses available, so teams of PoWs pulled the wagons through the snow. Sometimes the guards and prisoners became dependent on each other, other times the guards became increasingly hostile. Passing through some villages, the residents would throw bricks and stones, and in others, the residents would share their last food. Some groups of prisoners were joined by German civilians who were also fleeing from the Russians. Some who tried to escape or could not go on were shot by guards.
With so little food they were reduced to scavenging to survive. Some were reduced to eating dogs and cats -- and even rats and grass -- anything they could lay their hands on. Already underweight from years of prison rations, some were at half their prewar body weight by the end. Because of the unsanitary conditions and a near starvation diet, hundreds of PoWs died along the way from exhaustion as well as pneumonia, diphtheria, pellagra, and other diseases. Typhus was spread by body lice. Sleeping outside on frozen ground resulted in frostbite that in many cases required the amputation of extremities. In addition to these conditions were the dangers from air attack by Allied forces mistaking the POWs for retreating columns of German troops. At a village called Gresse, 60 Allied POWs died in a "friendly-fire" situation when strafed by a flight of RAF Typhoons.
As winter drew to a close, suffering from the cold abated and some of the German guards became less harsh in their treatment of PoWs. As the columns reached the western side of Germany they ran into the advancing British and American armies. For some, this brought liberation. Others were not so lucky. They were marched towards the Baltic Sea, where Nazis were said to be using PoWs as human shields and hostages. It was later estimated that a large number of PoWs had marched over five hundred miles by the time they were liberated, and some had walked nearly a thousand miles.
On 4 May 1945 RAF Bomber Command implemented Operation Exodus, and the first prisoners of war were repatriated by air in aircraft. Bomber Command flew 2,900 sorties over the next 23 days, carrying 72,500 prisoners of war.