Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

64 Prisoner of War details to the brief entries in Keith’s ‘Log’: I was bringing up the rear with the medical team, pulling a cart with medicaments on it and occasionally frost-bitten PoWs! … The German Commandant was furious (when he came to the end of the marching column) to see the Senior Officer who happened to be with us, the medics, and said, Group Captain, I have lost ten prisoners but 17 GUARDS!!’ On 3 February, the prisoners marched to Spremberg, some 145 kilometres west of Sagan, and were moved by train to Luckenwalde, only about 35 kilometres south of Berlin. Unknown to them at the time, this was the date of the heaviest attack yet on the German capital. The U.S. Army Air Force, with 937 bombers and 613 fighters, levelled large areas of the city and killed more than 25,000 civilians. While one of the largest groups of RAF prisoners were taken north by train and eventually, after a further exhausting march, evacuated from Lübeck on the Baltic coast by the Royal Navy, Keith’s group remained in the huge Luckenwalde prison camp among some 16,000 British, American, French, Italian, Russian, Yugoslav, Czech and Norwegian prisoners. Until Red Cross parcels arrived over two weeks later, hunger, illness and frostbite were almost as much a threat as the thunderous Battle of Berlin reducing the Third Reich to physical and political rubble. For four successive days some of the shortest of all entries inKeith’s ‘Log’ recorded ‘Bed at 0300 hrs slept until 1000 hrs’; ‘nothing of note’; ‘Sun shines for a change’; and ‘Nothing – soup and bread’. On 11 February a longer entry summed up the prevailing misery: ‘Carried soup and coffee from cook-house – food very short. Am writing letter to Elsie. Received soap ration for month. 1 cake and 1/3rd shaving stick’. If the letter to Elsie was one reference to home, another was brother ‘Noel’s 22nd birthday’ on 12 February. A more consistent link with Keith’s Mosman roots was Pearson. Just before they left Belaria he’d spent a day ‘designing a house for Peter’. Remarkably, all he recorded on 14 February was ‘helped Peter design his house’. This was the date of the fire-bombing of Dresden. One of the war’s most notorious events, some 90 kilometres to the south, passed unnoticed among constant waves of American and British bombing. ‘Log’ entries for the next three days mixed mundane activity with unsettling nostalgia. The first was ‘another day in the pit – sewed socks and reorganised bag – mended pipe and had first smoke