George (Bob) Jacobs

I heard from John Jacobs in January 2005 as he had opened a copy of the Daily Express newspaper and been astounded to see a photographs of the Death March at the end of WWII with his father staring out at him from the page. You can read the article on Danny Dorlin's page here.

George on the day he left home for training, April 1940 aged 20yrs

John provided me with the following information on his father, George Jacobs (aka Bob) as follows:
" As I have read from a lot of families listed on different sites, my father did not talk about his experiences during his time as a prisoner. He did on certain occasions say things about the march and how cold it was, and how he 'bonded' with certain people and did not get on with others. All very vague and not much to go on!!!!"

George was at Dunkirk in 1940 and was captured 3 days later after being 'grassed' by a frenchman who had put him up in his barn and promised he would look after him.

"During the 'march' he had a handful of potato peelings that he had somehow boiled ready to eat. As he was about to eat them he saw, through a fence, a young woman with a small child looking at him. He was cold and hungry but he gave his peelings to the woman. How could he do that???? I guess they were made of different stuff than us."

George was in Stalag XXB for 5 years. He was friends with Rex Pearson and Jim Gates.

The ‘Rascals’, Stalag XXB 1943. George is on drums.

"Sadly, he died last January aged 83, but I got a shock in todays' Daily Express, on page 40-41 there is a story regarding the 'death march' and looking out from the page is my father - he is third from left wearing a white shirt."
This is the story that John provided to me - in his own words...

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1939 – 1946 Stalag XXB Poland and the Death March
My father, George William Frederick Jacobs was 19 years old in 1939 when he was ‘called up’ for action. He was the eldest of five children, living at home in Yiewsley Middlesex and he worked for the local grocer delivering goods on a tradesmen’s bicycle.

He was not well travelled and in some circumstances quite naïve, for instance, the local wood yard had a ‘hooter/siren’ that was sounded every day at 12.00 to signify to the workers that it was lunchtime, the local people took advantage of this by setting their clocks to the sounds of the 12.00 hooter.

The first time my father left home was in 1939, on his first day’s army training he realised that the time was 12.15, looking amazed he said to everyone in his billet “did anyone hear the 12.00 hooter?” he really thought that everyone in the country had a 12.00 hooter!!!!

He was part of the landing party at Dunkirk and apparently was landed on the wrong beach where he, and a dozen other troops, ran for cover in a sparsely wooded area, as they were separated from their commanding officer and had little or no ammunition they decided to stay where they were for the night or until they could return to their battalion.

George ‘Bob’ Jacobs is front row extreme left

They were woken suddenly on the second day, a dive-bomber was screaming out of the sky down towards their position; my father and his mates ran in all directions, my father decided to run towards the woods but was grabbed from behind by a man named Jim Gates, he said “no, not that way, lets go over there”. They ran and hid behind a tree, when the attack had finished they made their way back to the others.

They were amazed to find an 18-foot wide river between them and where they left the others, Jim said “how the bloody hell did we cross that”!!! They checked their clothes and found them to be totally dry. They could not understand how they got across the river but they assumed they must have jumped across.

So they tried to jump back; taking a long run up Jim Gates made it only half way across, Dad fared no better. When they dragged themselves out, now soaking wet, they found the other men, all killed by the dive-bomber, somehow Jim knew which way to run and Dad was pleased to have met him.

From that day, Jim and my father became inseparable.

Jim and my father had now become separated from the rest of their unit; they made their way inland and were taken in by a kindly French couple that fed them and offered them shelter in the outside barn, they stayed there for three days.

On the third day they were roughly woken by German soldiers where my father received a blow to the side of his neck by a rifle butt, this blow snapped a tendon in his neck, which affected him, for the rest of his life.

George aged 20yrs, 2nd from right on the day of his capture, June 1940 France, also Tom McGrath but not sure which one?

They were arrested and became PoWs the Frenchman had betrayed them.

I don’t know what happened next but my father ended up in Stalag XXB in Poland.

He only ever spoke of two other inmates, Jim Gates and Rex Pearson who, so he said, “played football together in the camp” apparently one day they played against a German team, he used to tell his grandchildren that he “Once played for England”!!!

Whilst interred in the camp he said that conditions were not so bad, he had food/water and a place to sleep. Red cross parcels arrived regularly but his letters home never reached there. The only letter to get ‘home’ was from the war office telling his parents that he had been killed in action.

He told me about life in the camp, when the Red Cross parcels arrived, how the prisoners would ‘swap’ items, he said that cigarettes were the best currency you could have, although Dad didn’t smoke he always kept a good supply of cigarettes, he would charge one cigarette for a packet of sweets/chocolate, two would get him a tin of corned beef etc.

George and his mate Jim Gates, Stalag XXB 1943

He spoke about the forced march; he called it the “2000 mile march”. He used to tell me about having to sleep in the snow; they would all lie down in long rows, if someone wanted to ‘roll over’ the shout went out, “all turn now” and in unison they all turned over together. The lucky ones were those in the middle where it was quite a bit warmer, so they would all take turns at being on the outside.

At some point as a prisoner, my father had managed to collect and save some potato peelings that he found lying on the ground, during one of their rest breaks he went off and hid behind a broken wooden fence, he lit a small fire and started to boil the peelings in an old tin to make, what he referred to as ‘soup’, this was going to be quite a feast!

He was about to taste his concoction when he noticed a young girl, possibly in her teens, cradling a small child in her arms, looking at him from the other side of the fence. She was dirty and bedraggled and was looking hungrily at his ‘soup’.

Ignoring his own hunger he handed his tin to her, she hesitated for a moment then grabbed the tin, my father did not look back as he rejoined his group.

On his return home he often told me that as he walked through the door, his father, who by the way lost his leg in the First World War, was sitting on the kitchen table with his head bowed. For nearly 6 yrs he thought my father had been killed in action, it was a lot for him to take when he walked in.

Shortly after his return home, my father started work in the local wood yard, his first job was ‘pushing a broom’, and he told me once how that felt, after being away and kept prisoner for nearly 6 yrs, and now all was doing was sweeping up sawdust, he became very depressed at that time.

My father married Annie Woolley in 1947 and had two children, my brother ‘Brian’ was born in 1948 and I was born in 1951 and we lived in West Drayton, Middlesex.

Jim Gates and my father lost touch with each other, although he knew that Jim had returned to the Channel Isle of Jersey. In 1966 we had a family holiday in Jersey, the main aim was to try to contact Jim again. As we boarded the taxi to our hotel my father begun talking to the driver, he said that was trying to find his old mate, the taxi driver asked what his name was, my father laughed and said “oh you won’t know him, his name is Jim”, the taxi driver said “do you mean Jim Gates”?

My father could not believe his luck, what seemed like and impossible task, to track down someone he had not seen or heard from for over 20yrs and the first person on Jersey he spoke to actually knew him.

Within 20 minutes we pulled up on Jim’s driveway, my father was convinced that the taxi driver had got the wrong Jim Gates until Jim opened his door to see who was sitting on his driveway. “Bloody hell, it is him” my father said and he jumped out of the taxi, they did not say a word, they just stood there looking at each other, then ran towards each other and hugged. I was around 14yrs old and did not appreciate the moment.

My father and Jim spent the best part 14 days together reminiscing about their ordeal and catching up on their lives, and never lost touch again.

My father became a carpenter; although he was a cabinet maker his passion was making moulds for reinforced concrete, which he did for many years, later in life he made the sets for television shows such as ‘The Good Life’, he actually made the black range (stove) in Tom’s kitchen!!

After he retired he made Georgian dolls houses to order and he gave a lot of his time working for the local shopkeepers, repairing windows, fixing doors, making counters, etc.

When he was 80yrs old he complained that his legs hurt, I asked him why and he said that he had been playing in goal with the local kids over the park!!!

At 82 yrs he was still doing a paper round!!!

My father died in January 2004 aged 84yrs.

20th August 2009
I received an email from Julie as follows:
"Hi, my name is Julie Crotty and I was trying to find out details of my Dad's movements, capture and incarceration during WWII, when I happened upon your website.

My Dad didn't talk much about his experiences and he died, sadly in 1981. His name is Norman Kay, he was the youngest of seven from Blackburn in Lancashire and he was in the Royal Engineers from 15.10.39 to 24.6.46. I believe he was captured at Dunkirk and that he was on the 'Death March'. His prisoner number was 15251 and I know he was in Stalag XXa(35) as this is recorded on the back of a photo from there.

I have a couple more photos with my Dad on them, one of which has puzzled me because it has the address of a R.G. Jacobs, Yiewsley in Middlesex. Imagine my shock when browsing your website that I came accross an account from John Jacobs about his Dad - George Jacobs (aka Bob) from Yiewsley in Middlesex! It sounds as though he was captured in similar circumstances to my Dad, although I have only a sketchy idea of this from my Mum, and that he became a carpenter like my Dad.

I am really excited to find out whether the R.G. Jacobs of my photo is John's Dad or maybe a relative.

Another photo is of Arthur Reginald (Reg) Howard from the Bury/Bolton area of Lancashire competing in a boxing match. He was captured with my Dad and they remained very good friends. My 'Uncle' Reg was Best Man at his wedding and I was a bridesmaid at his son John's wedding. Sadly we lost touch after Reg's wife, Agnes, died.
I would be immensely grateful if you could find any information about my Dad and if you could enlighten me any more about George Jacobs.

I eagerly await your reply".
I have contacted John Jacobs to see if this is indeed George!

21st August 2009
Heard from Julie that John had been in touch and it was indeed his father's address. Julie will be sending the photo shortly.

Danny Dorlin

I have received kind permission of Mr Jack Gee and Danny Dorlin himself to reproduce the following article that appeared in the Daily Express on Saturday, January 29th, 2005.

The article was written by Mr Jack Gee, a photograph of whom appears here (click to enlarge).
If you would like to contact Jack or Danny, please use my 'contact' page above and I will be happy to pass on your information.

Article written by Jack Gee and entitled "My Nazi Death March"

Sixty years on, a British PoW relives the horrific trek he and his comrades were forced to make by their retreating captors

The sound of Red Army cannon fire was echoing across the Polish countryside. With rifle jabs and shouts of "raus! raus!" - out! out! - nervous German soldiers drove Danny Dorlin and a dozen other British prisoners from the farm where Danny was working as a stablehand. After five years as a prisoner of war in northern Poland, they were finally on the move - and fast. They hardly had the chance to scrape together their meagre belongings.

It was January 1945 and time was running out for the Third Reich. The Americans were poised to cross into Germany after smashing a massive counter-offensive in Belgium's Ardennes Forest. On the eastern front, Stalin's forces stretched across Eastern Europe, ready to push the Germans back into their heartland. At the northern end of this front, the 2nd Byelorussian Army was advancing through East Prussia towards the Baltic region where Danny had been held prisoner since July 1940.

He had arrived at Stalag XXB in Marienburg, the Germans' name for the Polish town of Malbork, after being captured in Normandy. Set to work as a farmhand, carpenter and furniture remover, he had toiled for the German forces and civilians. But now, on January 14, panic-stricken German guards rounded up their prisoners in the nearby town of Ilawa.

Danny is front row, far left

"We didn't know it then but it was the start of the death march," says Danny, now a hale 85. "Gradually, hundreds of other British PoWs joined our column. About 1,000 were soon tramping across Poland into Germany." Similar processions were underway from other camps.

The German guards knew they could expect short shrift if they fell into Russian hands, and were better off surrendering to the Americans. They resolved to use their captives as human shields and drive them on relentlessly until they met Allied troops advancing from the west.

It was to be a horrifying ordeal. In their helter-skelter dash to escape the Russians, the Germans herded Danny and his comrades along a vast semicircle from Poland along Germany's North Sea coast and then back inland.
It was the coldest winter of the war. At night, the prisoners shivered in unheated barns. They crossed the icebound Visula, Poland's widest river, on foot. With only threadbare clothing, many a soldier ws crippled by frostbite. Laggards were dragged out of sight and shot.

"Blisters became infected and many men collapsed from hunger, fear, malnutrition, exhaustion or disease," says Danny. "Rations were meagre, usually just a small piece of bread. British army doctors did their best but they got almost no help or medicine from the Germans."

I have heard my cousin Danny's story many times since boyhood. His taste for adventure had always aroused my envy. Ten years my senior, he was working as a hairdresser on a cruise liner, dropping anchor in exotic spots such as the West Indies and the Pitcairn Islands while I was still stuck at boarding school.

He was dark and dapper and his travels turned him into an exciting, esoteric figure who popped up at rare intervals. After he was called up at the outbreak of the Second World War and sent to France, contact was even more sporadic. In his few letters, Private Daniel Dorlinsky of the Royal Norfolk Regiment's 2nd battalion told the family he was bored to tears by the "phoney war" and lack of action.

Action finally came when the Germans invaded France. On June 14, 1940, a fortnight after the evacuation of 300,000 British troops from Dunkirk, Danny was made prisoner at Saint-Valery-en-Caux in Normandy. General Victor Fortune - a double misnomer - surrendered with 50,000 troops of the 51st British Highland Division. Danny watched the future Field Marshal Erwin Rommel ride triumphantly among them in his command car.

Squatting beside the English Channel with his fellow prisoners, my cousin noticed a British captain studying his identity tag. "Pull that off and throw it away," the officer hissed. Danny's tag, like all those worn by British soldiers, identified the wearer's religion in case he was killed. With his J for Jewish, Danny would be courting trouble. "And no more of Dorlinsky. You will be safer as Dorlin." That was the name Danny used as a PoW, confirmed by deed poll after the war.

Danny front row, 2nd from left

Over the next five years letters from Stalag XXB to England were infrequent, but Danny sent photos. Back in London his widowed mother, my Auntie Eva, could see him with the camp's boxing team or digging a road. Some showed him wearing a new British uniform. "It was a cunning hoax," he recalls. "We were lent the smart garments just for the photo session and then got our old ragged clothes back again."

Some moments sent stabs of terror down his spine. A German guard escorting him with fellow PoWs to a work site looked closely up and down. "You have to be a Jew. I'll deal with you when we get back," he said. A chorus of protest rose from the other prisoners: "Nein, nein, sergeant. Danny?" A Jew? Not on your life, sergeant." The German shook his head and never raised the issue again.

Danny never forgot his dangerous situation as a British PoW and a Jew. Sent to deliver timber to the Stutthof concentration camp, he was horrified at the sight of the skeletal prisoners, most of whom would die in the gas chambers.

His greatest ordeal was yet to come. "When we left Ilawa I was in a group of four British soldiers. We picked up others as we marched through fields and forests and along muddy tracks. Within hours we joined a longer column of Tommies heading west and urged on by their German guards.

"Each day was tougher than the last, as our energy was sapped away by lack of food and rest. Often we marched for 15 hours at a time in the rush to put as much space as they could between us and the Russians.
"Occasionally they provided a horse and cart for a sick soldier. Some were delivered to hospitals. They never rejoined us. That meant their comrades always feared the worst. But hospital treatment was not frequent. More often, struggling marchers were escorted into a wood and executed."

Throughout the ordeal, marchers hung together, helping each other to struggle onwards. "We quickly developed a buddy system in which two to four men ate and slept together and looked out for one another. I am sure that many of us survived thanks to this solidarity between us. My chum Jim Berman got a foot infection. He leaned on my shoulder for miles. I persuaded a villager with a horse and cart to take him to hospital. Jim would have died but for that merciful German."

At night, aching and tired men carried comrades collapsing from dysentry to the latrine. "Even beyond our buddy system, everyone tried to help everyone else," says Danny. "I was amazed by the bonds that tied us all together. It was never every man for himself."

The march had its lighter moments. On one occasion two PoWs ran to the bottom of a slope to grab a piece of firewood. Pursuing them, their irate guard slipped and jammed his rifle barrel in the mud, triggering a shot which split the barrel. Another time a prisoner traded a chocolate bar from a Red Cross package to a German woman for some bread. She probably had no way of translating the label on the chocolate: Ex-Lax.

Danny says: "For months the great march continued as a kind of black comedy that saw the weary prisoners herded first in one direction, then another, depending on the position of advancing Allied forces."
At last the sound of Allied artillery grew closer. The German guards became less harsh. Many asked prisoners to sign letters certifying they had treated them decently.

On April 25, 1945, Danny's group encountered an American tank unit in a village near Leipzig in Saxony. They approached the US soldiers with caution. "I had never seen an American uniform before. Then we heard their voices and realised we were free. Our guards eagerly surrendered to us."

By the end of his ordeal, Danny had covered 800 miles in three months. More than 400 of the original 1,000 marchers had died from hunger or disease. Those on similar marches from the concentration camps in Germany and eastern Europe suffered an equally grim fate.

Throughout January 1945, columns of former inmates set out for Bavaria where Hitler hoped to make a last stand. In all, 65,000 were evacuated from Auschwitz - 15,000 died along the route. Others were shot inside the camp just before the evacuation on January 18. In another march, 7,000 Jewish prisoners - mainly women - were moved from camps in the Danzig region. On the 10-day march, 700 were murdered. Those still alive when they reached the Baltic were driven into the sea and shot.

Danny returned home suffering from tuberculois. The British Red Cross sent him to Davos in Switzerland where he spent 18 months in a sanatorium, but the TB came back and he had to spend a further two-and-a-half years in a British rest home.

After the war, while I went to university, Danny started a textile business. He had every reason to dislike Germany but Lieselotte, a German woman he met on a train in Kiel, became his wife. Although they divorced after 25 years, they had two children - Robert, a teacher, and Amanda, a dentist. Danny now has two grandchildren. "I am astonished I have made it to such a ripe old age," he says.

Every year on the anniversary of the start of the march he gets out a photo of his Stalag chums from his wallet. "As usual, I will be wondering who is still around."

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2nd February 2015: Email from Elaine Gilbert saying "My husband, Arnold, is a first cousin of Danny (mothers were sisters)."

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