Mills, Ernest G
Private Ernest Goldstone Mills
From David Bishop. 05/04/2024
Ernest’s date of death is given as 8th March 1945 on the official death certificate. This may not be the actual date of his death but the date that it was officially recorded.
The cause of death given – dysentery. His POW camp had been evacuated shortly before the given date of death. He was buried locally (Teschen) but his body was reinterred two years later on 18th July 1947 at the Berlin War Cemetery (plot 11.B.10).
I do have a lot more information but, regrettably, no photograph of Ernest.
From David Bishop 19/08/2024
I have recently come across the following report in a local newspaper ‘The Clevedon Mercury and Courier’, dated 30th June 1945, headed: PORTISHEAD ROLL OF HONOUR
‘The relatives of Private Ernest Goldstone Mills of 2 Orchard Villas, Roath Road, Portishead, who had not received news of him as a prisoner of war since last January, have now learnt of his death from a fellow prisoner just returned, who is himself ill in hospital in Scotland.
He says he was a prisoner in Eastern Germany, and in February went with others on a forced march away from the Russian advance. After six weeks he fell ill and was put in a theatre converted into a hospital where there were about 20 British ‘boys’, one of whom was called “Ernie Mills” who was very ill and eventually died on March 8th.
He procured Ernie’s address from a parcel receipt and now writes to say that he and three other British boys acted as pall bearers, and, in the absence of any minister, he said the Lord’s Prayer over the grave as the only tribute he could pay to a gallant comrade. This was in a small town called Tauchern in Saxony [sic].
Private Mills was in the regular army in the 2nd Glos. Regiment before the war. In May 1940 he was driving his Commanding Officer, the Hon. Nigel Somerset, in Belgium when they were both wounded and taken prisoner’
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