Roderick “Roddy” Christie of Drummond Street, Tain, served with the 4th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders and was captured following the fighting at St Valery in June 1940. His surviving wartime diary provides a remarkable first-hand record of almost five years as a prisoner of war.
Private Roderick Christie, Drummond Street, Tain
4th Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders
Among the records relating to Tain's wartime generation is a remarkable little diary kept by Roderick “Roddy” Christie, one of the local men of the 4th Seaforth Highlanders captured following the fighting at St Valery in June 1940.
Roddy's diary begins before his capture and records the retreat and fighting in France in a series of short, matter-of-fact entries. Occasionally the human cost appears starkly. On 2 June 1940, he noted simply that “Bill Swanson [was] wounded & Tom Sutherland killed.”
Ten days later Roddy was himself a prisoner. His diary then follows the beginning of a journey that would keep him away from home for almost another five years.
The early entries document the march into captivity and his subsequent movements through the German prisoner-of-war system. Camps, railway journeys and working parties appear alongside the much more mundane details of everyday life. Roddy records the work he was made to undertake, the food he received, games of football and occasional escape attempts by other prisoners.
There are also small glimpses of how the men occupied themselves. On 7 January 1942, after noting that it was his fifth wedding anniversary, Roddy added simply:
“Bought new violin.”
His diary also reveals occasional acts of defiance. On one occasion Roddy and two other prisoners refused to work on what he called the “Flying Field” and were put in jail at 10.30 in the morning, remaining there until 5 p.m.
Only a few other local prisoners are mentioned by name, and the diary suggests that the men from Tain and the surrounding area were not necessarily imprisoned together throughout the war. Men were moved between camps and detached to different working parties.
In August 1940 Roddy recorded helping John Macdonald prepare to leave. The following day he wrote that John had gone away on a working party while “Hughie & myself [were] still together.” With more than one local prisoner bearing the name John Macdonald, we cannot yet be certain which man Roddy was referring to, while “Hughie” is not identified by surname in the diary.
As the years passed, much of the diary became a record of something even more ordinary, but clearly enormously important to Roddy: letters and postcards.
Again and again he recorded receiving letters from his wife and sending postcards home. He also noted correspondence with his son and with relatives at Edderton, Kildary and Dundee. He kept count of the correspondence reaching him. By July 1942 he recorded:
“Up to date received 143 Letters.”
For long stretches there is little drama at all. Letters arrive, postcards are written, parcels are received, work continues and another day of captivity passes. Then, in January 1945, the character of the diary changes completely.
With the Soviet armies advancing from the east, Roddy and his fellow prisoners were marched westwards through Germany. The brief entries which had previously counted letters and postcards now begin counting kilometres.
They marched through the winter, often sleeping in barns and other temporary accommodation. Roddy records days of 20, 25 and 30 kilometres on foot, sometimes marching throughout the night. The entries remain characteristically brief, noting where they stopped, how far they had travelled and occasionally even what they ate — on one day, simply “Hen for Dinner.”
On 11 February, after reaching Sagan, they were forced onwards again. This time Roddy recorded exactly why:
“Left Sagan 8 P.M. owing to Russian advance, marching all night until 8 A.M.”
That march alone covered around 32 kilometres.
The distances continued to accumulate: 25 kilometres, 23 kilometres, 30 kilometres, 28 kilometres and more. By 22 February, Roddy appears to have calculated that they had marched some 408 kilometres.
Eventually the marches carried Roddy far enough west to meet the advancing Allied armies.
On 10 April 1945, his diary contains perhaps its most important entry:
“Day of Liberation by the Americans 3.45 P.M.”
After almost five years as a prisoner of war, Roddy Christie was free.
His diary is valuable precisely because so much of it is mundane. It records captivity as Roddy experienced it: marching, working, eating, waiting, playing football, writing home and counting the letters that came back. Then, as the war finally approached its end, those familiar routines disappeared and the diary became a record of kilometres marched and the attempt to stay ahead of the Soviet advance.
Through those brief handwritten entries, we have something unusual — not a story reconstructed many years later, but Roddy Christie's own record of nearly five years spent as a prisoner of war.