My father’s journey from soldier to spy

British troops in battle in the second world war. Mike Davis’s father was captured in 1940 after not making it back to Dunkirk, and learned German and Polish while at a PoW camp in Poland. Photograph: CSU Archives/Everett Collect/Rex

I may be able to answer Susan Tomes’ letter (15 December) about why fluency in German inevitably brought the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service. My father was captured in 1940 after not making it back to Dunkirk, and, along with 40,000 other British troops left in France, he spent the next five years in a PoW camp in Poland. While a prisoner, he learned German and Polish. After the war, he joined the civil service and was working in the war department in Leeds, from which he was posted to Cologne to spend his time translating intercepted letters and telephone calls from known Nazis, who were left in place in the West German national and local government, despite the formal ending of the denazification programme in 1951.

Any items of interest that emerged from this would inevitably be sent to the intelligence services, so he was, we always supposed, a British spy.
Dr Mike Davis
Blackpool