World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF EUROPE: The Lucky Ones

“The little commandant, in full regalia, called out Commander Beattie and saluted him, which was gentlemanly. There was wild applause. We all feel now that the raid must have been thought worthwhile at home.”

From the barbed-wire fastness of a German prison camp a Briton wrote thus last week, describing an extraordinary scene which had broken prison monotony. The Germans, with great ceremony, paid tribute to one of their own prisoners, Lieut. Commander Stephen Haider Beattie. Through the Red Cross notification had come of the award to Beattie of the Victoria Cross, highest British military medal, for gallantry against the Nazis. Beattie’s feat: skippering the destroyer Campbeltown into St.-Nazaire during the war’s biggest Commando raid (TIME, April 6), ramming his ship’s nose against drydock gates to plug the important German-held repair yards. During hand-to-hand fighting before the British withdrew, Beattie and a number of other Commando-men were captured, have languished since in a prison camp. One of them, Lieut. Colonel Augustus Charles Newman, in a regular installment of his Barbed Wire Diary to his wife, last week told of the honor to Beattie. Other excerpts:

“About 123 of us are here. Fearfully lucky to be here at all. Very funny being behind barbed wire all the time. . . . We have sweepstakes with awful Polish cigarets as to when the first letter from home arrives. . . . Tobacco like gold. Socks and toothpowder a bit difficult. . . . Wonderful dinner, most odd dishes, to celebrate Lieut. Commander Beattie’s VC.”