An EFI Soldier’s Escape
Private Leonard Green, EFI and the Road to Sweden
The story of Private Leonard Green is not simply one of escape and survival. It is also the story of an ordinary Londoner whose life reflected many of the upheavals of the early twentieth century. Born Leonard Greenspan in London’s East End on 4 January 1916, he was the son of a Jewish immigrant who had fled Russia in 1905 to escape the pogroms and rebuild his life in Britain. Leonard grew up within the vibrant immigrant communities of the East End, his father establishing a shoe business while Yiddish continued to be spoken within the family home.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War Leonard worked as a salesman in the family business, which was now based in London’s West End. The 1939 Register captures a young man on the threshold of a very different life: newly married, volunteering as an ARP stretcher bearer as Britain prepared for war, and living within a Europe already descending into crisis. Shortly after the outbreak of war he volunteered for military service and, following training, joined the Royal Army Service Corps / Expeditionary Force Institutes (RASC/EFI) in early 1940.
Editorial Note: Leonard Green’s story first came to light during research for the four-part Sutlers Supreme series examining the role of NAAFI and Expeditionary Force Institutes personnel in France during 1939–40. What began as an attempt to better understand the experiences of EFI personnel during the collapse of France gradually revealed a far more personal and remarkable story — one which extended far beyond the retreat to Dunkirk and into the largely overlooked world of captivity, survival and escape.
Like many EFI personnel caught in France during May and June 1940, Leonard initially appeared only briefly within the surviving historical record: a name amongst casualty lists, prisoner-of-war records and medal citations. Yet as further documents emerged — including wartime POW reports, contemporary records and Warren Tute’s later account Escape Route Green — a far richer and deeply human story began to take shape.
Although Leonard Green’s period of service with EFI lasted only from 1940 until 1944, his experiences form part of the wider human history of NAAFI wartime service. Behind the familiar image of tea canteens and recreational huts stood thousands of individuals drawn from every background imaginable, many of whom would find themselves serving under dangerous and extraordinary circumstances. By October 1943, at least 251 NAAFI, EFI and NCS personnel had become prisoners of war. In Leonard’s case, that journey would eventually carry him from the collapse of France in 1940 to years of captivity in German prisoner-of-war camps and, ultimately, to a daring escape across occupied Poland to neutral Sweden.
“We Came Very Quickly to Our Senses”
By the spring of 1940 Leonard Green was serving with the Royal Army Service Corps / Expeditionary Force Institutes (RASC/EFI) in northern France as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Evidence from later movements suggests that he was likely serving within the area controlled by Headquarters EFI North East France at Arras, commanded by Major J. W. Martin. Like many EFI personnel stationed across France and Belgium during the so-called “Phoney War”, Leonard’s work would have combined elements of logistics, supply and welfare support for British troops stationed along the Allied front.
During the winter of 1939–40 EFI personnel helped establish stores, depots and recreational facilities across northern France and Belgium, work which at the time must often have appeared routine when compared with the dramatic events soon to engulf western Europe. Yet as the German offensive began in May 1940, many of these same personnel would suddenly find themselves caught within the collapse of the British Expeditionary Force and the chaotic retreat towards the Channel coast.
Much of what follows is drawn from Leonard Green’s later recollections recorded by the writer Warren Tute nearly thirty years after the events described in his book Escape Route Green. Although recalling these events decades later, Leonard’s memories of the retreat through France and the early days of captivity remained remarkably vivid.
“We came very quickly to our senses. I can even remember the date — 18th May 1940, four days before my first wedding anniversary.”
— Leonard Green, recalling the retreat through France
By mid-May 1940 the order had come for British personnel to begin withdrawing towards the Channel coast. In Leonard Green’s case this meant movement towards Boulogne amidst growing confusion, air attacks and overcrowded roads filled with retreating troops and civilian refugees. Railway lines were under constant attack while rumours, exhaustion and uncertainty spread steadily amongst the men moving westwards through northern France.
“Confusion was absolute,” Leonard later recalled. EFI personnel moving through the region increasingly found themselves caught within the same chaos engulfing the wider British Expeditionary Force as the German advance accelerated towards the coast.
Among the memories that stayed most strongly with Leonard was the destruction of EFI and NAAFI stores built up during the winter months. “We’d seen our own troops setting fire or blowing up all those lovely stores — NAAFI stores as well as armaments — which we’d laboriously built up over the winter months. That was a shock in itself.” For many EFI personnel, the destruction of those carefully assembled stores marked the moment they fully understood the scale of the collapse unfolding around them.
Yet even amid the growing crisis, humour and ordinary conversation survived. Leonard later remembered arguments about food, jokes about the Ritz Hotel, dreams of fish and chips wrapped in newspaper and evenings that might once have been spent dancing in London. “We made jokes. We had to,” he explained. Years later, it was these small fragments of normality and humour which remained most vivid in his memory of the retreat through France.
The immediacy of Leonard’s later recollections can be contrasted with the concise and matter-of-fact tone of his wartime prisoner-of-war report prepared shortly after his return to Britain. There, the same events are described with remarkable brevity: movements between Lille and Boulogne, Red Cross trains, German tank attacks and eventual surrender. Read together, the two accounts offer a striking combination of memory and documentation — one capturing the atmosphere and emotion of collapse, the other recording the stark sequence of events as they occurred.
“That’s When I Really Thought We Mightn’t Have Long to Go”
As the retreat towards the Channel coast accelerated in May 1940, Leonard Green and other EFI personnel found themselves caught within the growing collapse of the British Expeditionary Force in northern France. On 18 May 1940 Leonard later recalled being part of a party of around forty men ordered to travel from Lille towards Boulogne by train and report to the Railway Transport Officer there.
Three days later the train reached the St Omer area near Wizernes, where the situation had already deteriorated badly. According to Leonard’s wartime prisoner-of-war report, the train had been bombed repeatedly during the journey, forcing personnel to scatter for cover beside the railway line. Amid the confusion Leonard and another EFI man, Private Keefe, obtained permission from a sergeant to search nearby farms for food while transport arrangements were improvised.
Returning several hours later carrying eggs and bread, the pair discovered that the remainder of their party had already moved on. Leonard later recalled reporting to the commanding officer of an ambulance train preparing to leave for Boulogne that evening. Before being allowed aboard, the men were ordered to destroy their rifles, as weapons could not legally be carried aboard a Red Cross train under the Geneva Convention. Nearly thirty years later Leonard still remembered the strange experience of dismantling his rifle and throwing the pieces from the carriage window. “Funny feeling it was,” he later recalled. “That’s when I also got rid of my A.B. 64.”
Like all British servicemen, Leonard’s Army Book 64 contained personal details including religious denomination. “My Army Identity Card. What every soldier normally needs to prove he’s alive,” he later explained. “Mine was down as Jewish.” Fearing the possible consequences should the Germans discover it, Leonard tore the relevant pages into small pieces and discarded them from the moving train.
The uneasy journey on the Red Cross train came to an abrupt end near St Omer when a convoy of German tanks appeared alongside the halted train. At first some of the men mistakenly believed the approaching vehicles were British. Leonard later described the enormous tanks rumbling slowly past the carriages before machine-gun fire suddenly swept the train and the cry rang out: “Off the train! Every man for himself!”
Diving down the railway embankment into nearby wheatfields, Leonard and the others escaped immediate capture, though any remaining hope of reaching Boulogne by rail had now vanished. Amid growing confusion and exhaustion, some still spoke hopefully of evacuation while others increasingly realised that surrender was becoming likely.
“The War Certainly Was Over for Us”
After abandoning the Red Cross train near St Omer following the German tank attack, Leonard Green and a small group consisting of George, Frank and a young Red Cross orderly named Jim attempted to continue westwards on foot towards Boulogne. Moving through fields and woodland, they avoided roads wherever possible as German forces closed steadily around them.
Towards evening the group attempted to cross a main road in order to reach a nearby farm. Halfway across, a German tank suddenly appeared and opened fire with its machine-gun. Leonard, George and Frank managed to dive into cover, but Jim was badly wounded and left screaming in the roadside ditch. Leonard later described his foot as “just hanging on by the tendons”. Despite the danger, Leonard ran back and carried the wounded orderly to safety.
Improvising a stretcher from branches and battle-dress blouses, the group carried Jim to a nearby farm where they discovered an apparently abandoned British Red Cross ambulance. Placing Jim inside, they attempted once more to continue westward.
The attempt lasted only minutes. As the ambulance rounded a bend, it drove directly into a German machine-gun position blocking the road. Armed troops emerged shouting orders while a revolver was thrust into Leonard’s face. Nearly thirty years later he still described it as the single worst moment of his life:
“That was the worst moment I’d had in my whole life. I thought this is it, this is the end.”
— Leonard Green
The men were searched, stripped of personal possessions and assembled with other British and French prisoners under armed guard. Leonard never forgot the bitter irony of the date. Almost exactly one year earlier he and Nora had begun their married life together in London. Now he spent the night lying hungry and exhausted beneath the open sky as a prisoner of war.
Leonard’s later recollections recorded by Warren Tute are broadly confirmed by his wartime prisoner-of-war report, which records the movement from Lille towards Boulogne, the attack on the Red Cross train near Wizernes on 22 May 1940 and eventual surrender after travelling westwards in a captured ambulance convoy.
“You Are Now Prisoners of War”
The surrender marked the beginning of an entirely different ordeal. Alongside hundreds of other British and French prisoners, Leonard spent the night exposed in an open field surrounded by armed guards and machine-guns. The Germans made it immediately clear that obedience would be absolute.
“One thing we learnt,” Leonard later reflected, “the Germans made it clear they intended to be obeyed.”
By the following morning the prisoners had been assembled into marching columns for movement eastwards into Germany. German officers informed them in English that Britain and France had been defeated and that they were now prisoners of the Reich. For Leonard and many others, the speed with which retreat had given way to captivity remained deeply shocking.
Rickard, J (26 February 2008), British Prisoners from Calais, 1940, https://www.historyofwar.org/Pictures/pictures_calais_pows.html
The journey which followed, beginning on 23 May 1940, became a test of endurance. Leonard later estimated that the prisoners marched across France and Belgium for almost three weeks before finally reaching Germany and occupied Poland. The columns moved slowly eastward under armed escort, often sleeping in open fields, barns and temporary holding areas beside the road. Food was scarce, exhaustion constant and few prisoners had any clear idea where they were ultimately being taken.
The contrast between Warren Tute’s later interviews and Leonard’s wartime prisoner-of-war report is especially striking during this phase of the story. The official report records the movements in concise military terms: surrender near Boulogne, transfer through Luxembourg, arrival at Bitburg and eventual transport onward to Stalag XXA at Thorn. Tute’s account, however, captures the human experience behind those bare movements — the hunger, exhaustion and constant struggle to maintain morale.
Leonard recalled how prisoners quickly adapted to a primitive existence governed almost entirely by survival. Villagers and farmers sometimes left buckets of water, milk or eggs beside the road for the marching columns. Guards varied enormously in temperament. Some largely ignored the prisoners, while others appeared to take pleasure in kicking over water buckets or destroying food left within reach.
“We were all of us trying to survive. It was each man for himself.”
— Leonard Green
Yet companionship remained essential. Leonard, George and Frank continued to look after one another throughout the march, scavenging food whenever possible and attempting to maintain some degree of humour amidst increasingly desperate circumstances. One of Leonard’s most vivid recollections involved prisoners scribbling their names and addresses onto scraps of paper before hiding them in walls or between cobblestones in the hope that civilians might later post them to Britain.
Months afterwards Nora Green would receive one of those messages — the first confirmation that her husband was still alive.
As the columns moved deeper into Germany, the reality of captivity became ever more apparent. Leonard later admitted that neither he nor Nora had possessed more than the vaguest understanding of where Germany or Poland actually were before the war. Like many ordinary young Londoners of the period, their world before 1939 had been local and familiar. Now Leonard found himself being marched across occupied Europe towards prison camps whose names he had never previously heard.
Eventually the prisoners reached Bitburg before being transported onwards, on 6 June 1940, in overcrowded railway cattle trucks towards occupied Poland. In his official prisoner-of-war report Leonard later recorded that the doors of the trucks remained closed throughout the journey and that the prisoners received neither food nor water during transit.
On 9 June 1940 Leonard Green arrived at Stalag XXA at Thorn. The West End shoe salesman who had joined EFI only months earlier had now entered the uncertain world of long-term captivity from which escape still seemed almost unimaginable.
For Leonard Green, the journey which had begun amidst the crowded streets of London’s West End and the routine work of EFI service in France had now carried him deep into occupied Poland and the uncertain world of German captivity. Behind the wire of Stalag XXA lay years of imprisonment, labour detachments, survival and, eventually, the possibility of escape. Yet in June 1940 none of that could still be clearly imagined. Like thousands of other British prisoners newly marched into captivity, Leonard could only face an unknown future far from home.
Part Two will follow Leonard Green’s years as a prisoner of war inside Stalag XXA and the labour camps of occupied Poland, culminating in his extraordinary escape journey towards neutral Sweden.
Stalag XXA, Forced Labour and Escape
Continue Reading:
Part One concludes with Leonard Green's arrival at Stalag XXA (Thorn) in June 1940 and the beginning of almost three years of captivity. The story continues in Part Two, following his experiences as a prisoner of war, his escape from Camp 35/2 at Graudenz and his remarkable journey to freedom in Sweden.
➡ Read Part Two: Escape to Sweden
Sources & References
Images
- Application for Issue of Campaign Stars and Medals – The National Archives via Forces War Records
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Army Book 64 (AB64) Soldier’s Service and Pay Book – example copy accessed via Internet Archive:
https://ia902801.us.archive.org/0/items/british-army-book-64/British%20Army%20Book%2064.pdf -
British POW’s captured in Calais area – Rickard, J. (26 February 2008)
https://www.historyofwar.org/Pictures/pictures_calais_pows.html - British Army Casualty Lists 1939–1945 – The National Archives (WO 417/15)
- Prisoner of War Report – The National Archives (WO 208/3314/1362)
Literature
- Tute, Warren. Escape Route Green. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1971.
- Cole, Howard. NAAFI in Uniform. Aldershot: The Forces Press (NAAFI)., 1982.
Special Thanks
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British Army War Diary Copying Service via Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100057312735054
