Private 5384940 Henry ‘Spud’ Durley – 1st Bucks Battalion (Territorial Army) – POW

by John Sheldon

Part of a series of articles covering Second World War stories with county connections, celebrating the 80th anniversary of VE and VJ Day in 2025. Our commemorative exhibition is now open until 18 November 2025, but when we called out for your stories from the local area, we received more than we could fit into the exhibition alone!

John Sheldon has long been a research volunteer at the museum, contributing to exhibitions, articles like this one, and researching people’s wartime relatives for our Research Enquiry service.

Henry ‘Spud’ Durley POW Stalag XXA personal record card photo.

‘Spud’ Durley was born and lived in Whitchurch, Bucks in 1915. He was one of the 1 st Bucks Battalion riflemen in the final battle around the Warein Orphanage in the town centre of Hazebrouck, who under cover of darkness when all seemed lost on 27 May 1940, was ordered to withdraw from the town and to attempt to escape north-west towards Dunkirk.

In the mayhem and confusion of battle and the encircling enemy forces, Durley struggled to steal only seven miles north close to Cassel, before he was rounded up by the Germans on 30 May and became a prisoner of war.

The shame and anger at capture and surrender were quickly followed by the shock of a long and difficult transit from battlefield to POW camp. The men captured after Hazebrouck were force marched across France and Belgium before being entrained in cattle trucks to Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland. On arrival, they were officially registered as POWs and recorded by the Red Cross who would inform their Allied governments and in turn, their next-of-kin. Weakened and hungry from weeks of defensive fighting, men were deliberately deprived of food and water, and forced to endure atrocious, confined transport conditions for three or more days to Polish camps.

Durley was initially held in Bau und Arbeitsbataillon (Construction and Work camp) B.A.B.40 from September 1940 to March 1943. Its role was to provide arbeitskommandos (working parties) for forced labour on a multitude of building projects for the Third Reich. Along with other satellite camps, it was under the administration of Stalag VIII B, which had been established in late 1939 to hold Polish POWs after the German invasion. POW numbers from many more European nations increased exponentially as the Nazi war machine ground on.

British POWs in an Arbeitsbataillon quarry attached to Stalag VIIIB (Imperial War Museum Collection)

Some 4,500 British soldiers arrived in Polish camps after the fall of the Dunkirk pocket alone. ‘Spud’ Durley gained his nickname at this time as his lean, rangy physique allowed him to crawl through ventilation shafts into the German food stores and steal potatoes to supplement the food supply.

In March 1943, Durley was moved to Heydebreck (now Kędzierzyn-Koźle in Upper Silesia, Poland) where B.A.B.40 was amalgamated with B.A.B.20 Arbeitsbataillon to form a single work detachment of about 1,200, almost entirely, British POWs. They were to be employed in the construction and maintenance of a new chemical plant to produce a synthetic fuel from coal which the German I.G.Farben Chemical Company was building at Heydebreck. The prisoners were housed in new wooden barracks, with their own kitchen, a 15-bed sick bay and satisfactory sanitary facilities. The inspecting Swiss International Red Cross reported that it made: an excellent impression on them, and that: the prisoners did not complain about their work and that their efforts were appreciated by the directors of I G Farben.

However, working conditions and life in the camp had deteriorated by spring 1944 with increasing ill health amongst the prisoners, a marked reduction in the supply and quality of food and medicines, and a tightening of camp security controls. The situation worsened further in summer 1944 when the chemical plant began to be a target for American air
bombing, and by September, five British POWs had been killed in air raids. In November 1944, Durley was transferred to Stalag XXA at Torūn (Thorn) in East Poland. It
was a defensive complex of 17 underground forts built by the Prussians to keep out the Russians in the 19 th -Century. At its peak, Torūn held over 20,000 POWs and by late 1944 as the war turned against Germany, its prisoner conditions were miserable, distinguished only by dirt, decay, disease and vermin.

In January 1945, as the Russians advanced from the east, Stalag XXA was evacuated by the Germans ahead of the approach of the Red Army. The surviving POWs that were able to walk, began the long and terrible forced march westwards towards Germany during the bitter winter of 1944-45. ‘Spud’ Durley and his fellow prisoner Bill Clarke had marched in their bedraggled column for almost a month as dysentery began to run rife through the prisoners, poorly dressed and fed for the cold and snow of a Polish winter. As they crossed the frontier with Czechoslovakia and climbed into the Bohemian mountains, the two friends knew they had to try to escape. When they came to a twisting downward slope in a thickly-wooded valley, they saw their chance: Fifty yards in front and fifty yards behind, the weary German guards were patrolling the column. We picked our spot…when we thought the guards’ view was blocked by a bend in the road, we dived into the forest. The guards did not miss them… they had escaped.

At Christmas 1951, the Bucks Advertiser published Durley’s account of escape from enemy guards, how they were hidden and sheltered by a brave Czech woodsman, and of
dangerous encounters with German troops in the forests who refused to accept capitulation on VE Day. He was liberated only on 17 May 1945 by US troops in Bavaria.

‘Spud’ Durley returned home to the building trade in Whitchurch, married a village girl, and stayed there until he died in 1993 aged 78.

Henry ‘Spud’ Durley POW Stalag XXA – Personal record card.