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Harry Rossney was one of over 10,000 refugees from Nazi oppression who took the unprecedented step of swearing allegiance to King George VI and served in the British Army during the Second World War. Theirs is an extraordinary story, and one that is unique in British military history. Like fellow refugees, Harry had seen too much in Germany, the country of his birth, to sit back and do nothing. He had witnessed firsthand the brutality of the Nazis and the massive military force that was being built up to use against Europe. Harry escaped to England in March 1939, as he himself often says, in a one in a million chance. He was initially amongst two hundred refugee craftsmen from Germany and Austria engaged in the reconstruction of a derelict First World War camp called Kitchener Camp, near Sandwich on the Kent coast. The camp was being rebuilt to accommodate 3,500 refugees from Nazi oppression from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. At the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939, along with other refugees from Nazism he became technically an ‘enemy alien’. In early 1940, whilst he was still in Kitchener Camp, he volunteered to join the British Army.

He enlisted in the only unit open to enemy aliens at that time: the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps. Six alien Pioneer companies were formed in Kitchener Camp that Spring, five of which were sent to France to join the British Expeditionary Force. They were all later evacuated after Dunkirk. Harry was not amongst those who went to France but remained in Kitchener Camp. When France, Holland and Belgium fell to Hitler’s forces in May 1940, the remaining refugees in Kitchener camp, including Harry, were moved immediately away from the Kent coast in case they were infiltrated by Nazi spies parachuting into the country. They were moved overnight to the damp, wet moors of Dartmoor in the heart of Devon. After nine weeks, the Pioneers in training were moved once again – this time to Westward Ho! on the North Devon coast. Some of Harry’s poems reflect his time in the Pioneer Corps, most specifically his duties in khaki guarding the coast around Bideford Bay and Westward Ho! Being a refugee with thick German accent was fraught with dangers for him, in a country that feared an imminent invasion by Hitler.