Book launch raises cash for Red Cross

Jonathan Wills and his granddaughter Cleo Gifford with the new book at the Shetland Library launch event.

The work of the Red Cross in safeguarding prisoners of war has been commemorated at the
Shetland Library, with the launch of a new book by Jonathan Wills.

Over £100 was raised for the organisation at the launch of Uncle Davie’s Red Cross Blanket, which tells the story of the writer’s Scalloway-born uncle, Private Davie Slater of the Gordon Highlanders, who was among those taken prisoner by the Nazi General Erwin Rommel at St Valéry on 12th June 1940.

Davie and 18 other young Shetland soldiers were with the 51st Highland Division, fighting a rearguard action to protect Allied troops trying to escape from western French ports in the days following the Dunkirk evacuation.

After a gruelling three-week forced march through France and Belgium, the 10,000 prisoners
were shipped up the Rhine on coal barges into Germany and then sent in cattle trucks to
various camps.

Davie ended up at Stalag XXA in Toruń, in Poland, where he worked on farms for four-and-a-half years until January 1945, when the guards marched their prisoners back to Germany through the snow, with the vengeful Soviet Red Army on their heels.

Somehow, Davie and his boyhood friends, John W. J. Smith of Scalloway and Duncan
Houston of Veensgarth, Tingwall, made it back to British army lines a few days after the
German surrender in May 1945.

The 320-page book, illustrated with photographs and maps, is based on over 200 letters and postcards that Davie sent home from Stalag XXA.

It also contains letters from his father, Jack Slater, and sister Nina at Myrtle Cottage, Scalloway; Red Cross reports held in the National Archives at Kew; and regimental records of the Gordon Highlanders, including the 5th Battalion’s war diary from January to May 1940.

Addressing a crowd at Shetland Library on Thursday, Dr Wills described the regular inspections of the prison camps by the Swiss Red Cross under the Geneva Convention, which undoubtedly prevented conditions becoming even worse than they were.

He noted that without the Red Cross food parcels sent to the camps many more prisoners would have died.

“Sadly, the Red Cross is still having to do such work in today’s conflicts,” he said, “so
I think it’s important to remind younger folk that, unless we know our history, we may end up
repeating it.”

The sum of £117 was raised to help the organisation’s continuing good works.

Uncle Davie’s Red Cross Blanket is published independently by Jonathan Wills and is on sale at The Shetland Times Bookshop.