James' identity card

When James Finnie, originally from Aberdeen, left school he started work as a messenger boy for William Patterson and Sons the city's wholesale chemist and druggist. Little did he know he'd be back working for them after the war, armed with specialist knowledge, gained in a prisoner of war camp.

"I was 19 and in the Territorial Army when war was declared," says James who's lived in Hamilton for 30 years. "I'd been on their annual camp for a fortnight and I came back, started work on the Monday and was mobilised on the Friday so I didn't really have time to think about what lay ahead."

James' basic training with the 51st Highland Division took place in Aberdeen then he was asked to go the School of Hygiene to learn how to purify water for drinking. His embarkation leave was over Christmas and he got engaged before he left on January 5th, 1940.

"We made our way to Farnborough station where we met up with the Gordon Highlanders," says James. "The train was delayed for hours so they struck up the band and we danced in the snow as we waited.

"We boarded ship in Dover and spent the next five days listening to Lord Haw Haw on the radio. He was saying that knew the Highland Division was boarding and that we would never see France - we were only 19 and at that age you think you've nothing to worry about."

James' Division marched through France until news came through in March that his mother was dying of breast cancer. James was given leave but only made it back home on the day of her funeral. He stayed for a week before heading back to France.

"When I got back the Division was out in no man's land between the British and the Germans and we were taken prisoner by General Rommel at St Valery," explains Jim.

"We were made to march out in front so that the Germans could advance without being bombed by the British.

"We marched for two days with nothing to eat – all we were given was a mug of coffee and some of the water from their boiled potatoes. I was hit over the back with the butt of a rifle two or three times because we tried to drink some water in a ditch out of desperation."

The men were kept marching for two months, becoming so exhausted that they slept where they fell at night. They transferred onto a barge and sailed down the Zuider Zee then were moved on to cattle trucks with 70 men in each one to be transported to Poland.

"We didn't know where we were going," says James. "We just lived from day-to-day, not knowing what was going to happen to us. Most of us got made it although some men collapsed and we never saw them again. We got to a place called Dombke which I've never been able to find on a map."

The men had no idea what was going on outside the camp and, apart from a nearby village they were in no man's land.

James was the medical orderly for 215 men plus the German guards. The main work of the others was to build an amphitheatre where Hitler was to come and give an oration and occasionally James would leave the hospital ward to treat broken or amputated fingers and cases of frostbite.

It was while he was imprisoned in Dombke that James took seriously ill with a bowel obstruction and the decision was taken to transfer him to Stalag XXa in Thorn where there was a German military hospital.

James in hospital bed

He was operated on to remove 54 inches of his intestine. It took three operations to correct the problem and he was on the ward for 10 months. When James had entered the services he had weighed 10 stones but by now had gone down to seven.

In fact, his illness was a blessing in disguise. As he had been so ill, James was put in the bed closest to the nursing station and soon became familiar with all the medicines and procedures. He also learned German during his convalescence and so once he was up and about he was promoted to nursing and theatre assistant.

"There were 52 British medical orderlies and I worked as their interpreter and assistant," explains James. "I was carrying out procedures I'd never have been allowed to do in Britain – giving anaesthetics, diagnosing blood groups, giving transfusions from person to person unsupervised and finding donors.

"During air raids we had to evacuate the outpatients from three floors into the cookhouse in the basement, although bed patients stayed where they were. Raids happened every other night and lasted about five hours."

James was once accused of signalling to the planes overhead so for a month he had a guard with a fixed bayonet watching his every move during raids.

"I deliberately went down to the basement with a dozen mugs and made coffee or cocoa for the prisoners but I never made one for him," laughs James.

"The was once an air raid during an operation and the surgeon turned to me and said 'It's a funny world - Tommy's here making Germans better to go up there to bomb' and he was right."

Another incident James remembers well is when a German Pioneer Corps officer was brought in for a hernia operation.

"Wounded German soldiers were found jobs in the hospital," explains James. This officer assumed I was Pioneer Corps because their khaki uniform was similar to ours. I put him on the table, strapped his legs and right arm down and was about to give him his anaesthetic when he asked which Corps I'd come from. When I said I was a Tommy he shouted to the surgeon, 'They're Tommys – they're going to kill me!'

"The surgeon replied, 'Without the Tommys I can't work' and he asked if he wanted to go ahead. He didn't so we put back in the ward and he lay in agony for two days with no treatment or food before he agreed to us assisting with the surgery.

"He'd to have a bath before his stitches came out but when the German orderlies lifted him he screamed in pain again so two British prisoners lifted him properly and he wouldn't let the Germans touch him after that!"

The chief surgeon had spent six months in a concentration camp and it was research he did in there that facilitated his release. He recognised the plight of James and his fellow prisoners and treated them fairly and with compassion, as did his head nurse, Sister Vanda.

"I needed a radio so I could hear the news and I asked some Polish slaters who were working on the roof if they had one," says James. "They wanted 300 German marks which I didn't have. I asked Sister Vanda and a few days later when she came into theatre she shook hands with me as usual and pressed the money into my hand. I had to hide it under the patient's neck and then wrapped it in my hankie and hid it in my bed. Had I been caught I'd have been shot on the spot.

"I got the radio but it needed converting into short wave so I dismantled it, covered it in cotton wool and marched four miles under escort to a neighbouring camp which held sergeants. Because of their rank they weren't obliged to work but I knew they were up to all sorts of things with radios.

"I used to listen to it in a cupboard and then I brought it into the ward and hid it in the top bed. We couldn't find an aerial so I made one by inserting a piece of wire into the window blind and then we got hold of six earphones so that a crowd of us could listen together.

"I take my hat off to any Japanese Prisoner of War because compared to them we were in the lap of luxury," adds James. "I had a cushy life as a POW - I could even have had clean bed linen every day if I'd wanted because I was in charge of 22 beds and all the linen went to the laundry twice a week."

James was eventually repatriated in October 1943, travelled back via Gothenburg where he boarded one of three British ships which sailed down past the Shetland Isles, along the east coast of Scotland to Leith.

Close-up of a wartime German banknote kept as a souvenir

"They'd heard we were coming because there were thousands of people on the Aberdeen prom to see the ships sail past," James remembers. "It must have been a marvellous sight - because we were sailing under the Geneva Convention the ships were fully lit when all other ships sailed in blackout."

At Leith they boarded a train to Aldershot where they were stripped, inoculated and issued with new kit. Unlike today's soldiers they weren't offered counselling or any help coming to terms with what they'd been through – they weren't even debriefed. All they were given was 28 days' leave.

James headed back to Aberdeen – he had a wedding to arrange.

"We came off the train at Aberdeen and there were over 10,000 people there to meet us," he says. "The mounted police formed an alleyway for us. The people had been told been told to step out of the crowd if they saw someone they knew and it was my future father-in-law who came out and grabbed me."

After his wedding it was business as usual for James and he was transferred to Edinburgh Castle as a lab technician. He was there until 1946 and says VE Day was just a day like any other for him.

"We didn't have any celebrations on VE or VJ Days – we just carried on as normal," he remembers. "I was glad it was all over but the war had affected my life for good and bad.

"I'd celebrated my 20th, 21st, 22nd and 23rd birthdays as a Prisoner of War which was bad but overall I think I gained confidence going through it. I was doing things that I wouldn't have otherwise and I had to make decisions that I wouldn't normally have had responsibility for."

While he'd been in Stalag XXa, James had managed to get hold of a book on accountancy and studied it voraciously. He continued his studies in Edinburgh and once he'd been demobbed he toyed with becoming an undertaker or a police pathologist.

"In the end I went back to William Patterson where I'd worked before the war," says James. "I'd been handling penicillin during the war before it was released for general use. They took me on as a specialist in the new antibiotics which were just being introduced and I was with the company, working up to management before I retired.

"If I hadn't been a POW and been introduced to medicine I may not have made it so far up the ladder."