The Collection of Medals Formed by Bill and Angela Strong

A very well documented Second World War escaper’s group of four awarded to Bombardier A. West, Royal Artillery, including the extensive manuscript of his unpublished wartime memoirs Make Me a Captive

1939-45 Star; Africa Star; Defence and War Medals 1939-45, together with his R.A. cap badge, silver identity disc and a piece of shrapnel, extremely fine (7) £300-500

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Bill and Angela Strong Medal Collection.

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The following summary of Alan West’s war appeared in the Shields Gazette on 18 July 1974:

‘The worst day of Alan West’s life was spent under sentence of death in an Italian prison camp. The year was 1943 and he had been taken prisoner in the Western Desert 12 months before. Starvation rations of a tiny loaf of bread a day had brought his weight down to nearly six stones. When an Italian guard stole that loaf, he lost his temper and hit him. He was told he was going to be shot and he waited in a guardroom for 24 hours for the sentence to be carried out.

Mr. West, 55, of Sunderland Road, South Shields, recalls his traumatic wartime experiences in a book he has yet to publish. Called Make Me a Captive, it tells the story of his capture by the Germans in the Middle East, in April 1942, and his ultimate escape from Italy in November 1943. The book was written from diaries kept at the time which eluded the regular searches of the prison guards. He still has those diaries and the bag in which he carried them as he walked, dressed as an Italian peasant, through German lines. Which is what makes Mr. West’s work unique among 101 books about wartime escapers. He wrote it out in long hand from his diaries and typed it himself, as a lasting personal record of his adventures.

But even more lasting have been the effects of his incarceration. Mr. West still receives an army disability pension - technically it’s called psycho-neurosis gastritis - and has been left with a violent claustrophobia, which started when he was locked in the pitch black hold of a ship for three days on the journey from North Africa to Italy.

Mr. West survived the death cell due to the intervention of another South Shields man in the prison camp, Ken Crofton, son of the solicitor Henry Crofton, who pleaded for him with the guards.

Ken and he had been captured together in the desert when their patrol was surrounded by 30 German tanks. They were handed over to the Italians and taken eventually to Sulmona, where after eight months as a prisoner, he made his first attempt to escape. He had learned a little Italian by this time, and he bribed a guard to get a compass and a map and while out on a working party, he dived into a ditch while the others started a fight as a diversion. He did not get far. Four hundred yards away a farmer spotted him and he was recaptured and given a month in solitary confinement. Four months later, on the way to a work camp, he jumped a train at dusk, was shot at and recaptured again. The same thing happened on the way back.

When the Italians capitulated, the Sulmona prisoners were set free. Six of them took to the mountains, but they had no food and Mr. West volunteered to go back to the camp and find some Red Cross parcels. When he got there he found the Germans had taken over. He spent two days behind barbed wire again before escaping during the night through a hole in the wire, cut and camouflaged by someone else, and rejoined his comrades.

So began a long walk to freedom over the Apennine mountains, sleeping during the days and travelling by night. The met a friendly farmer and stayed hidden with him for two weeks, trading their uniforms for peasant clothes. Then the Germans came. Four were recaptured, two fled in a hail of bullets. They headed south-east, hearing that the Canadians had landed at Campo Basa, and stayed five weeks with another farmer, who had worked in America. There, they were contacted by an Italian guide sent to the mountains by allied troops to find escaped prisoners. Carrying bundles of twigs and wood, they set off on the last few days’ walk through the German lines.

They had many narrow escapes. In one farmhouse, they ate a meal with three Germans who, luckily, could speak no Italian. Crossing a road one day, they were stopped by a motorcycle and sidecar rider, but nothing gave them away. As they neared the Canadian lines, they walked into their own side’s barrage and Mr. West’s companion was hit in the foot. But they struggled on, helping each other along, and walked in to Campo Basa in November - 19 months after being captured.’

West, who had earlier seen action at Dunkirk in 74th Field Regiment, R.A., was also commended for his gallantry on the day of his capture in April 1942, Lieutenant K. H. Crofton of his Battery writing:

‘In the face of the enemy and under shell and small arms fire, he assisted me throughout to evacuate the wounded and refused to leave me after the guns had run out of ammunition and they had been made unserviceable’ (accompanying typescript letter refers).

West was discharged as a result of ceasing to fulfil army physical fitness requirements in January 1944, but nonetheless appears to have joined the 101 Durham Home Guard Rocket A.A. Battery.

Sold with a mass of original documentation, including the recipient’s Soldier’s Service and Pay Book; his 1940 pocket diary; approximately 55 letters from friends and family to the recipient in Italy while a P.O.W., all airmail ‘Prisoner of War Post’ format with official stamps, together with a quantity of letters from the recipient home prior to his capture; a Christmas 1942 pocket book, inscribed to ‘Alan West, Camp 78, Sulmona, Italy’; an album of P.O.W. photographs, with official stamps to reverse (approximately 25 images); two notebooks kept while in captivity, with extensive entries; a large file of official correspondence from the B.R.C.S., War Office, etc., regarding his capture and P.O.W. status; his Home Guard certificate of service for the period 21 July 1944 to 31 December 1944; the typed manuscript for his hitherto unpublished wartime memoirs, Make Me a Captive, 208pp, and a quantity of other shorter wartime stories in a separate file, one of them entitled His Path of Duty, 9pp., and another describing the Dunkirk operations, this last accompanied by the original prayer book presented to West by his unit’s Padre at that time, as referred to in the manuscript; a mass of wartime photographs mounted (both sides) on 50 card pages, largely the Middle East 1941-42, and much besides.