The Rogerstone Directory - History Articles

A Soldier’s Story

The man you see in the photograph is just about ninety years of age but one would never think so. I have known him for some time and have recently heard his story first hand, what a revelation! If hardship is the key to long life it certainly worked in his case. Just about sixty years ago he was a shuffling tramp like figure with a beard and dressed in the remains of a uniform just like a walking skeleton. His feet were wrapped in old pieces of sacking as his boots had long since disintegrated and he was on a long march. I must stop there and turn the clock back to the real beginning.

~Ron Jones of Highfield Road, Bassaleg

Our soldier boy was born in Church Street, Rogerstone in 1917 towards the end of the First Wold War, into a local family. His father was employed as a blacksmith in the steelworks in Rogerstone. He attended Rogerstone school at Ty-du and was selected for secondary education but actually started work in the nail factory at the age of fourteen, and eventually became a wire drawer. Soon after the Second World War started he found himself at Brecon in the South Wales Borderers, and that is the uniform he is wearing in the photograph. An active boy, he had ridden his bike from Rogerstone to Cardiff every day to get to work. This fitness was to stand him in good stead when faced with the privations of military life, and imprisonment in foreign lands.

After travelling half way round the world he arrived in the Middle East at Cairo and then at Benghazi in Libya after he had transferred to the Welsh Regiment.

After chasing the Italians across North Africa his regiment was cut off by the German Army and most of his Battalion was captured and eventually transported to Italy landing in Naples. They were then kept at Brindisi for several months, and moved by train to North Italy to work in a car factory in Turin. This work never came about and instead they found themselves in cattle trucks going from Brenner all the way to camp Stalag 8B where prisoners were sorted out and sent on to work as slave labour in many places.

Many of the boys who went to Poland worked in coal mines but our boy ended up working at a chemical works belonging to a large German company called I.G. Farben. They lived in camp E715 which was nearby, not far from a place called Monovice in Poland. On arrival and looking through the wire at another camp they saw prisoners in striped pyjamas digging holes. Of course we now know what the holes were for. They were Jewish people and their camp became the notorious Aushwitz extermination camp. About 280 of our boys worked at I.G.Farben but sadly 49 of them were killed in an allied air raid.

Towards the end of the conflict the Reich was being squeezed by the Allies in the West and the Russians in the East. Neither the prisoners or the guards were keen on being released by the Russians so they started on what became a circuitous route all the way to Austria a total distance of about 900 miles. During the march they all became emaciated and, typically, our soldier went down from thirteen to seven stone in weight. Many fell by the wayside and, as it was very cold weather, probably died of hypothermia.

Shelter overnight was very hard to come by and the boys frequently were herded into barns where, as they were so hungry, they ate any animal feed they could lay their hands on, and even one farmers dog went missing over night. I leave you to your own conclusions on that subject. The march took, in all, seventeen weeks and at one point they passed near Dresden and wondered what the red glow was in the night sky, we now know that the last great allied air raid happened at that time.

The end came when an American tank burst into the barn where they were sheltering and the boys were finally taken care of. Our soldier was put in hospital as a stretcher case and eventually repatriated to the UK. He arrived back at Pye Corner, where his wife was with her parents, still wearing an american uniform he had been given after travelling about thirteen thousand miles, nine hundred miles of which were on foot. What a feat of endurance - "Well done Corporal Jones" known to us as Ron Jones of Highfield Road, Bassaleg. Should you meet him he will almost certainly show you a ring that he wears, given to him by an old Jewish man after Ron gave him a piece of sausage through the barbed wire at Auschwitz. This has been a constant reminder of his captivity and of course the old man he never saw again.

Ron is still active with the British Legion and his part time job but most of all he loves to reminisce about old times with friends of which he has so many.

Vernon - A member of the Rogerstone Local History Society

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