One Order Too Many
A Story Hidden in the Records
For decades the family carried a single line about their cousin, yet the records had rather a lot more to say.
The family always told it the same way. Mervyn Daniel Thomas, a baker from Northampton in Western Australia, went off to war, was taken prisoner, and was shot in a German camp for disobeying an order. One hard line, handed down through my husband’s family. But was there was more to it than that?
It turns out they were right but there was more to this story as I soon found out. Over the past few weeks I have been piecing Mervyn’s story together from the records. A British wartime ledger gave me the line I had been missing: shot dead whilst escaping, at a place called Sosnowitz in occupied Poland. Not a man cut down for defiance on a work party, but a prisoner of war who made a run for it. Escaping was, when you think about it, one order too many.
I joined the Stalag VIII B POW Camp Facebook group and was shown records that I might not ever have found in the UK National Archives. That file was the clincher. He was trying to escape!
There is more. A German camp report, records from the Australian War Memorial, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, an Australian Red Cross prisoner of war enquiry card, and a handful of old West Australian newspapers each held a piece of him. Read together, they let me trace his story from a young bloke’s enlistment at Geraldton to a grave in Poland, by way of Greece, Crete, a wounded knee, and more than two years behind the wire.
Along the way I found the man who almost certainly was beside him when he died. Horace Joseph Kipping, a British soldier, is buried in the very next grave. There is also a sad twist to his story. Mervyn’s mother died just a fortnight before him, never knowing what happened to her son.
To read the full story, head over to my WeAre.xyz family archive on Jenealogy Scrapbook and look for One Order Too Many. There you will find the records and documents behind Mervyn’s story, together with articles about the places where he lived, worked, was held prisoner, and died. Make sure you select his linked name at the top of the article.
Tough details to preserve as the real story; given what family had previously been told! Your detective work on this is a satisfying achievement. Your storytelling superb, as usual!
Love the way you have given us a taster here and an enticement to read the full story on WeAre.xyz.
It surprising the family weren't told the detail of why he was shot given that attempting to escape was considered an honorable thing to do, I believe.