A True Story of Escape from the Nazis

All for Freedom: a True Story of Escape from the Nazis, D. T. Davies [with Ioan Wyn Evans], Gomer Press, 2016, 160 p, £9-99. ISBN 978 1785621680.

After the Second World War, David Davies worked successfully in the electrical installation business for over forty years and also became prominent in the local government of Carmarthenshire and Dyfed County Councils, on which he served between 1970 and 2003.

What few of the people who dealt with this businessman and local politician did not know was that he had had extraordinary series of experiences during the Second World War.  Having enlisted in the Royal Artillery in 1939, from being an office worker, he served in Egypt and Crete, after the latter becoming  a prisoner of war. This latter experience, from which he endlessly tried to escape, took him through Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary and finally, on his successful escape, through Italy.

David Davies has a very good recall of detail and explains well the various circumstances in which he found himself. His occasional pre-War employment driving lorries for a local farmer meant that, in Egypt, he travelled extensively in military vehicles on official business, thereby seeing much more than a conventional soldier. As a prisoner he was held briefly at the Stalag 18A in Austria, where he described the dreadful and inhumane treatment of the Russian prisoners, and in Hungary he was held at the Zemun camp which had previously been a an extermination centre and which he described as being like ‘simply hell on earth’.  After he managed to escape during Allied bombing, he crossed Yugoslavia with the support of the Partisans and, through their links with the Allies, he was put on a plane to Bari in Italy.

His clear insights, written sixty years later, are a very useful window into the experiences of British troops in the southern Mediterranean, but it has to be observed that this is also the understated testimony of a very brave man.