Life’s lessons learned during WWII

I AM just a bloke.

Five simple words 101 years old Jack Bell opened with as the guest speaker at the launch of the Airforce Association of Victoria’s Ballarat branch’s rooms in the recently restored airport hut 48. The site of the former RAAF Ballarat Officers’ Mess, at the Ballarat Aerodrome.

Mr Bell shared his story of how the then 22-year-old boy, at the outbreak of the World War II, became the man he is today and who’s has lived by a simple credo based on three words – compassion, tolerance and respect.

An enlisted airman, Mr Bell completed the No 1 Wireless Air Gunners School at the RAAF Air Base at Ballarat before posting to RAF 216 Squadron in El Adem in Libya.

In January 1942 Mr Bell was involved in an aircraft crash landing, after being hit by an enemy 88mm shell, resulting in severe burns to his head and arms, a lacerated scalp and significant abdominal wounds with a bowel perforation.

He had never spoken about what happened next until last year’s anniversary of VE Day in May.

“I was badly injured but I survived,” he said.

The German doctor who attended to his wounds had been an abdominal surgery specialist in Harley Street London between the wars.

Mr Bell said the compassion shown to me by that man was incredible.

“He personally bandaged me and dressed my wounds for seven days,” he said.

When as a captured prisoner of war Mr Bell was transferred to the control of the Italian Army in Tripoli, the German surgeon said it would take four days and gave him eight ampules of morphine to help with the pain during the journey.

In the Italian POW hospital Mr Bell again experienced unexpected compassion.

An Italian nurse took an hour to undress the dried blood and the torn stitches from Mr Bell’s injury.

The next day off the intravenous drip the nurse said you will have to eat or you will die.

“She went out into the garden where there was a quince tree, she picked a couple of quinces, boiled, peeled and sweetened them and fed me herself,” Mr Bell said.

Her compassion demonstrated that she wasn’t a fascist or a Nazi she was just a person like anyone else Mr Bell knew.

When he was shipped from Tripoli to mainland Italy along with other POW’s, Countess Edda Mussolini Ciano, Mussolini’s daughter was the matron on the ship.

Mr Bell said she came into the lower decks and spoke to every prisoner held in the bowels of the vessel.

“I’ll never forget how the compassion shown to me was so remarkable,” he said.

Tolerance and respect came to Mr Bell via the prison camps. As an inmate in a POW camp in Italy he was starving.

Mr Bell said without the Red Cross parcels he knew he would have not survived.

“The parcels arrived infrequently but often enough to keep the us prisoners alive,” he said.

From Italy he was taken in a cattle truck to Stalag 4B, 70 miles south of Berlin.

27,000 prisoners were in the camp living under canvas, with six prisoners to a four-man tent for four months until he was given a berth in a wooden hut.

Mr Bell said there were prisoners from 33 different nationalities in the compound, some of whom were getting parcels from their families as well as Red Cross.

He remembers the Danes being the ones that received the most food, they had so much they traded it.

“Each of the nations in the camp had worked out that to survive you had to get on with fellow nationalities so if you had too much food, you’d pass it on,” Mr Bell said.

“We had to respect each other.”

Mr Bell said the respect and tolerance paid by those prisoners was outstanding.

60,000 Russians died in that camp from 1941 to 1943.

“When you consider that the Russians were getting half the rations that we were, yet at the same time they would do anything for you,” Mr Bell said.

“They would bring smuggled food in, procure cigarettes, it was something I didn’t quite understand.”

He said unfortunately, what happed in a prison camp didn’t continue in private life as we see today.

“I leave this message with you, compassion tolerance and respect, please remember that,” he said in closing his speech.

Before and after the war Mr Bell said he was in the rag trade.

He started at North Western Woollen Mills in Stawell then moved onto fabric supplier Charles Parsons in 1949 where he worked for over 20 years, finishing up as warehouse manager.

In 1954 he married Dolores, they have one daughter, three grand children and two great grandchildren.

“We bought our girl up on compassion, tolerance and respect, and she has passed that on to her three, we are all one big happy family,” he said.