One Man's Journey

[reiver]

Lord William F. Deedes, better known as Bill Deedes, is a pretty legendary British newspaperman.
He edited the Daily Telegraph for twelve years, and is still a columnist at 92 years of age.
During WW2 he was a Company commander with the 12th Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Regiment, a T.A. unit, called up for the duration.
This week, to commemorate the end of the War, he is retracing his steps through Europe, from landing in France, through Belgium and Holland and into Germany.
Each day this week his column will reflect part of that journey through Europe, using his letters home to his late wife.
The link below is to the column explaining all of this and telling briefly of his departure from England.
Since the columns themselves are only available after registration, I include the first here.
If the forum finds it of interest, I will be happy to do the same each day this week.
Please let me know your thoughts on this.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/04/ndeedes04.xml

Bill Deedes in uniform at the outbreak of the WWII

Day one: Normandy, June 15 - July 18 1944
(Filed: 04/07/2005)

Like other soldiers on the Normandy beach-head, I drew comfort and confidence from the armada we saw assembled there. How could any enemy withstand such a force, I reasoned. Protective aircraft flew over us. Balloons to discourage low-level attacks filled the sky. Gen Montgomery sounded confident, and he had not failed us yet.

The sea was choppier than one expects of mid-June, but the storm which was to break a few days later, wreck the artificial Mulberry harbour, sink ships and lose the Allies 140,000 tons of supplies was still in abeyance. It blew through June 19-21, the worst Channel summer storm for 40 years.

“Watch out for snipers,” they warned us on landing, but my mind was too occupied with my drowned vehicles and what my colonel would say about failure to waterproof them properly to worry about snipers. Half our battalion had landed in one ship at Chouain, near Bayeux, the other half at Courseulles-sur-Mer. It took us three anxious days to bring them together.

Luckily our armoured regiments were working with infantry brigades. No battle for us was in prospect, we had time to find our feet without enemy interference, dig trenches against counter-attack and for safe sleeping and learn the art of living in the field.

“The French peasantry,” I wrote to my wife, “seem apathetic, go on with their daily jobs and say ‘bon jour’ pleasantly; but I get a feeling they don’t greatly care who runs things and I feel little affection for them.” That was unfair. Many of them had suffered grievous losses in the fighting for the bridgehead.

The stench of dead bloated cows was pervasive. As Richard Luxmoore, one of my young officers, observed: “The smell of live cows is so much nicer than the smell of dead ones.” Many of the locals had left their homes, which were wrecked. The German shells which fell regularly took a toll of civilians as well as soldiers.

“A quiet day today,” I wrote on June 30, adding only in accordance with the rules, “the last two or three have been anything but quiet and not very enjoyable …” On June 25, 49th Division had launched an attack on a dark, sinister-looking forest called Tessel Wood. From there it was to attack a hamlet named Rauray. We were called in to support the attack by holding a flank, after the nightmare of a march through a pitch-dark night. Leaving our vehicles behind us, we joined the attack at first light. My first sight of battle was the fragments of trees blasted by shells which littered our way and a German soldier who had just been killed lying in the roadway.

The Germans defended Rauray tenaciously with up to 10 Tiger tanks protected by infantry. For an hour I crouched on a slope outside the wood, reckoning they all had their eye on me. All our portable wireless sets had been picked off by snipers so we had no communications. Not knowing where we were, the gunners could offer no support.

Finally they called off this confused attack, ordered us to withdraw under cover of smoke, brilliantly laid by our gunners, 147 Field Regiment, RA (Essex Yeomanry). In the circumstances our losses were light. One officer and one rifleman were killed, six officers and 18 riflemen were wounded, 13 were missing of whom nine were subsequently known to have been killed.

“It takes time for a battalion quartered in England for four years,” I wrote, “to get settled into battle but I think the chaps are getting well settled into it now. The German is fighting with great determination, and if people in England think it’s just a pushover, they are in error.”

I went on to describe the sort of country we were fighting through, for which we were ill-prepared. We had done much of our training on the North Yorks moors, sloping but open moorland. Normandy in those days was a heavily wooded land of small holdings and orchards and tiny fields divided by deep narrow lanes.

“It’s very difficult country, terribly close and woody with great high hedges. It makes defence easier than attack, and the German is no fool. The desert veterans [in tanks] find themselves on unfamiliar ground and don’t know much more than anyone else.”

Today we found all this much changed. The fields are larger and more open, the high hedges have been cut and some of the winding lanes, broken up by tank tracks in 1944 and deep in dust, have become fast dual-carriageway lanes. Unchanged is Normandy’s rich fertility, though most of it has been turned over from pasture which fed cattle productive of wonderfully rich Camembert cheese to silage and crops.

My nerves got slowly attuned to the business in hand, though a lot depended on how much sleep we managed to get. When over-tired, one tended to be a lot more nervy and jumpy. At the age of 31 and accustomed to the rackety life of Fleet Street, conditioned to spending all night in some London club and working without sleep through the next day, I had advantages over my young platoon commanders, one or two of them not long out of school. Denied a night’s sleep, they found it harder to stay awake and alert than I did.

Battle exhaustion and its consequences led to men being shot for desertion in the First World War. In this second war, it was something we had learned to accommodate. A victim of battle exhaustion caught in time and given something by the medical officer which put him to sleep for 48 hours was often able to fight on.

In Normandy, overcoming battle exhaustion was something I learned to admire in the tank commanders who became brothers in arms. During training exercises in England I had rather fancied myself in a tank. What the Sherman tanks faced in Normandy left me with an altogether different impression.

The Sherman tank which poured out of America was easily replaceable, fast and manoeuvreable. It carried a gun which could penetrate all German armour except the heaviest German Tiger tank. The Mk VI Tiger tank weighed 56 tons, carried an 88mm gun and 100mm of frontal armour.

But the Sherman when hit was inflammable, which made the crew vulnerable. The leading Sherman tank in that close country was always at risk from what lay behind the next hedge. One or two of my friends in the tanks had been “brewed up,” as the phrase went, a couple of times but had escaped. It was hard on their nerves. No, I decided. I was safer with the infantry.

We had hazards of our own in Normandy, even when out of action and resting in some quiet meadow. One of them was the German six-barrelled Nebelwerfer or “moaning Minnie,” as we called it. It fired shells that burst in the air, raining down shrapnel on the unprotected head.

After the Rauray attack, we spent a quiet fortnight at Conde-sur-Seulles, a village unscarred by war. We trained, played football, bathed and went to cinemas. The simplest of pursuits, taken for granted in England, gave pleasure.

“Fred Coleridge and I went to have a bath yesterday,” I wrote. “Big event. Gastrell [my batman] had come to ferry water in buckets … our first proper bath since coming to France.”

To this later generation, the possession of a batman or soldier servant in such circumstances calls for a line of explanation.

A company commander, responsible for the welfare of four officers and some 100 or more men in or out of battle and usually too busy to fetch and carry for himself, needed a helping hand if he was to survive. Around supper time, I was often called upon to attend the giving of orders by the commanding officer for the following day.

If someone did not keep in readiness a share of the meal after my return, I went hungry.

I seldom had time to arrange my kit, prepare my bed in a slit trench or attend to my own needs. To say that Gastrell enabled me to devote more time to other people’s needs seems to be putting it generously but is not far short of the truth. He carried a rifle and could shoot as straight as anyone in the company.

After our baths, Fred Coleridge and I visited an old friend with the rank of Lt Col who was running civil affairs.

"He lives in a sumptuous chateau somewhere near the coast. A very pleasant life. They admitted to eggs and bacon for breakfast. All their little tents in the garden had been neatly dug in … a charming set-up. Fred and I decided that civil affairs were just our mark …

“The lines of communication boys are pouring in now,” I added. "In return for the smashed villages, they are driving splendid arterial roads through the French crops. They are certainly needed. Most of the roads are like switchbacks. The armour has knocked hell out of them. If the Germans had any airplanes, they could have a fine old time; fortunately they haven’t.

"They sent 25 men to the cinema this morning which is so helpful. I used to regard morning cinema as the height of debauchery in London. But in this crazy set-up, when everyone is supposed to be fighting for their lives, apparently it isn’t. We had a splendid game of baseball yesterday between my company and battalion headquarters. Baseball is our only recreation since the field does not lend itself to cricket and we have no football.

"To see Fred Coleridge take his captaincy of a baseball team with dead seriousness, with the sounds of battle not far off, was most refreshing. Then I did a small tour with Peter Woodruffe to see old friends.

“Heavens, the destruction we passed through. Ypres and the Somme all over again. Smashed churches, whole villages shattered, equipment and litter everywhere. ‘We must be raving mad,’ said Peter, ‘mad as hatters.’ How right he is.”

At one point in late June the weather in Normandy broke up. "The mud is like November. As we sleep in slit trenches, the mud is unfunny and everyone’s clothes are caked in clay.

"Everyone has been digging like mad, so they get dry. Funny thing this digging. On exercises, the men loathed it and would never do a hand’s turn. Now they’ve had some shells near them, they dig in preference to bed, which is pretty remarkable. The Germans produce all the unpleasant explosives they can … but a nice deep hole is surprisingly effective. As our padre remarked: ‘There’s no such thing as an atheist in a slit trench.’

"One is getting a sort of rhythm and routine living permanently in a field, and it’s funny how used to it one becomes. Even sleep is getting organised, though the night is limited to four hours, with stand-to an hour before dawn.

"Some front-line chaps had a service this morning, so we were all able to attend. Couldn’t hear much for the guns, which of course opened a barrage just as the service began; still, I expect some prayers got past and upwards. On the advice of our padre - we have an ace padre - we all try to take death very seriously and not to get used to it. We found some cherries which cheered life up. I think they were wild, so it wasn’t looting.

"I’m writing this in a good old-fashioned dug-out with a roof and all and a guttering light, just like Journey’s End. We had a month’s ration of whisky today - one bottle. Also chocolate and cigarettes.

“I don’t think we deserve this rest, but the rest of the brigade that came out before us is worn out and in need of a refit. The chaps have got very tired and a few days wallowing in green fields will do no harm.”

It was nice, I wrote, to hear only the distant rumble of guns and not the whine-smack which had everyone jumping for their slits. Sometimes though, I felt, I would welcome a little more activity. There was a tendency for everyone to watch what the Russians and Americans were doing, instead of worrying about what we would do next.

Men who had fought in the desert were weary and unhappy with such unfamiliar ground. Some of them had been away from home and had known no rest for many, many months.

“For every fighting man there were at least six organising something ‘back’. Really when one sees the jobs people find for themselves I wonder there are any fighting men left …”

But this was an unworthy thought, for we were glad enough every night to see the mail and the ration packs come up.

Though resting, we were close enough to the German army to experience an occasional close encounter. “I met the last pair at dusk, face to face, luckily when I was brandishing a revolver, feeling a little lonely and not liking the atmosphere. They were, happily, unarmed, about 17 years old, said ‘Kamarad’ and whipped their hands up all in one.”

Our rest days followed a normal course with cricket and football matches. A little work in the afternoon. One football match was called off because the team had unexpectedly to join battle. The organisers of the match were furious, describing it as most inconsiderate. “What a nation we are!” I commented to my wife.

I sought permission to use some of the vegetables and fruit in a garden nearby. It seemed folly to let them go to rot when they might be doing our men’s insides a bit of good.

“Our food is excellent,” I reported to my wife, “with lots of hot canned food and a daily ration of sweets and chocolate and variable packs.”

We were fed more generously than most civilians back home; but vegetables were in short supply. “So now we are in an orgy of red currants, green peas, cabbages, gooseberries, artichokes. We shall try to leave some payment, but I am told the owner of the cottage has fled a long way.”

I tried to avoid nostalgia; it offers small comfort in war; but one episode just before we broke out of the Normandy bridgehead made it unavoidable. We were engaged in an action towards the end of July which started at 5am and finished 22 hours later.

"About midnight I was standing outside a shattered barn, listening to stuff crumping round and seeing the wounded come in. Out of the darkness an infantry Lt Col I didn’t know said reflectively to me: ‘Well, there are a lot of things I’d rather be doing than this.’ I said at once, ‘Canterbury Cricket Week, for instance.’ He went on, ‘Yes, it would have been a good day, good hard wicket and a crowd of 14,000, I dare say.’

“We reflected like this in the darkness, and he went off, and I shall never meet him again I don’t suppose, and that’s the nearest I got to Canterbury.”

Tomorrow: Liberating France

[SMLE]

Cheers for that, Reiver.

[reiver]

The way we went: Day 2 breakout
W F Deedes
(Filed: 05/07/2005)

‘We push on steadily through the most awful, heart-rending devastation. We came yesterday to what should be the loveliest part of France, a country in torment, squashed houses, wreckage everywhere, dead cattle and, I am afraid, humans and an atmosphere of utter desolation. It’s the wildest and most frightful form of war.’

July - September 1944

My letter home on July 19 signalled the Allied breakout of the Normandy bridgehead, an exciting surge through France and what we all came falsely to suppose might be the beginning of the end. “The general news seems good. Germans are going back all along the line. He must pack in soon…”

I think it was about this time that Montgomery, paradoxically, experienced one of the worst days of his war.

A call came from Gen Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London, with a complaint from Gen Eisenhower. This conveyed, Montgomery told me when I got to know him after the war, that the Americans were doing more than their fair share of the fighting and suffering more casualties than the British. We were saving lives at their expense.

My knowledge of what we called “the big picture” was limited at the time, but when, after the war, I came to know a little more about the strategy being employed, it became clear that the complaint was not a valid one.

Montgomery’s job very broadly was to apply constant pressure on the Germans from the Normandy bridgehead, so that they had constantly to be deploying armour and infantry to plug the gaps.

By nibbling away - which, as the war cemeteries remind us, caused many British casualties -he occupied considerable German strength. In a crucial battle christened Goodwood round Caen, an important hinge, where Montgomery deployed three armoured divisions, 7th, 11th and Guards simultaneously, the Germans were kept heavily engaged.

“I hear tonight Caen has fallen,” I wrote home on July 9. “What a shambles that will be. I did a small tour of the battle front yesterday. The destruction is truly awful and I pity the French. Acres of land devastated and no village stands. I don’t know where the refugees are.”

With limited knowledge of “the big picture” and from personal experience, I think we did our share. In his account of the Second World War, Martin Gilbert wrote: “On 25 July 1944, the Americans launched Operation Cobra in Normandy. Within a few days, American troops succeeded in breaking out of the Cherbourg peninsula, enabled to do so by a major British assault on the far more heavily defended positions between Caen and Falaise.”

Thus on July 28, I was writing home: "Out here speculation on the outcome of hostilities is rife. Some think it’s a long job. Some think it will end soon - perhaps in a matter of weeks. Undoubtedly, as in England, everyone is very tired indeed. People just crack into it steadily and hope to God it will finish soon. Good news this afternoon from the American flank:‘Westward, look, the land is bright.’ "

I added inconsequently: “Now here’s my brew and very good it is too. Real tea and canned milk. The compo pack for 14 men has tins of a curious grey powder which is (they tell me) tea, sugar and dried milk mixed. As long as it’s served in a dark mug so one can’t see the colour and so long as one drinks it in the dark, all is well. What it would look like in a glass on a bright sunny day I cannot imagine.”

On Aug 2, I was writing to my wife: "As doubtless radio and newspapers have told you, the Boche line has broken here and he’s on the run. The hunt is up. The chase is on. We have been and still are taking a share in it and it’s a lot more exciting than sitting on our backsides in trenches and being shelled.

“Everyone is excited and pleased and though some of the troops are dead tired, they’ll go flat out now there is a chase on. Tonight they tell me America is in Rennes and St Malo.”

After bitter fighting round Mont Pincon, we were in the region of St Jean le Blanc, some 20 miles south of Caen. It was still hard going. We were very tired and I felt moved to write bitterly about my earlier world: “The world depicted by the daily press might be another planet for all I see of it. I dare say we are winning but it seems slow where I am and rather expensive. This ‘all over in three weeks’ nonsense is poppycock. The war won’t finish in France for a long time yet.”

This misjudgment sprang from weariness and depression. All the company commanders except me had been killed, wounded or posted to other jobs. I was the only officer who had joined the battalion in 1939.

“This evening,” I told my wife on Aug 10, "our padre, a fine example of living Christianity, who spends his time under fire collecting wounded, came round. We had a short memorial service for some of B company whom we couldn’t recover the other day, and I’m pleased to say every man in the company turned up voluntarily.

“We sang Abide With Me and the padre preached a short sermon on ‘though I walk through the shadow…’ Like all simple things, it was impressive and did us good. He begged us again not to allow close contact with the dead and death breed familiarity or cease to be shocked - an appropriate request. In an effort to prevent oneself from getting unduly emotional, I fear, one treats these things as a matter of course. It’s horrid but inevitable.”

A day later, I was writing in a more mundane way about our advance. “We push on steadily through the most awful, heart-rending devastation… We came yesterday to what should be the loveliest part of France, a country in torment, squashed houses, wreckage everywhere, dead cattle and, I am afraid, humans and an atmosphere of utter desolation. It’s the wildest and most frightful form of war.”

We were approaching Falaise where a German army, ordered to stand and fight by Hitler, pounded by land and from the air, was demolished. “No subtlety or skill, just a bash, bigger and bigger guns, bigger and bigger shells. Smash, wallop and devil take the hindmost. Don’t think I’m being got down by it, but it’s no good pretending not to be shocked when one is. And thank heavens one has feelings left to be shocked.”

To one of my sisters I wrote in more forthright style: "It was a triumph but a messy triumph. And most of us felt fairly sick. Three of my crew have been sick in the last four hours, due mainly to shock and stink…

"I suppose it will make history and I’m glad to be here. These are men who have terrorised Europe and made your lives unhappy for five years. I feel no sense of pity at all. One hardly realises that the last 10 days have given us all we toiled and strove and sweated for from 1940 to 1945.

“That after Dunkirk, when our hopes seemed so slim, and you and I saw those German bombers sailing west, we should live to smash to dust a German army which has caused this awful five years. Just to treat it as inhuman and horrible and unnecessary, I feel, isn’t fair to the millions who have toiled towards this moment.”

Such was my mood at the time. I thought of it unrepentantly when we revisited the restored Falaise of 2005, saw the new villages and flourishing French agriculture. This time, I thought uncharitably of what the French must have wrung from the Common Agricultural Policy.

I also recalled the episode I had reported to my sister in 1944 but withheld from my wife. "In the farm we are occupying is a French widow - of four days. This week a young SS Nazi, 17 years old, walked into her kitchen and said ‘The so and so British are coming’, and as he spoke, shot her husband - a harmless fellow - dead on his own hearth and ran out laughing.

"I tell you this because I think it too easy at this stage, as we English tend to do, to feel that the slaughter and hunting down of these Nazi hordes is needless and brutal. We do not know what others on this continent have suffered, and we have little right to judge or criticise what is being wrought on the Germans.

“I except the Wehrmacht, probably the best of Germany, the plodding infantry, who are now packing it in in their thousands. But for the SS or panzered armoured youth, the Hitler jugend, no fate is bad enough. We shall have no peace until they are wiped out. Shed no tears for them but wish us luck.”

During August’s early days we swam along through France, horrified by what we saw in the wreckage and the carnage, but moving steadily west. German horses, which their army still used for a lot of transport, had been slaughtered or wounded in large numbers, adding to the despondency which descended on me when over-tired.

“Our main anxiety was getting enough petrol up a long line of communications in order to keep going. Ammunition, of which we used little, was of no concern. We acquired a new commanding officer, who seemed full of ideas. I think he gets more sleep than I do and sometimes find his energy disproportionate.”

It was Aug 17 before we were pulled out for 24 hours’ rest and refit. I indulged in eight hours’ sleep and awoke feeling painfully limp. “All on Paris” was now the cry. Our eyes were fixed on the Pas de Calais region rather than Paris, for that was the source of the flying bombs plaguing England.

As we moved on through thick, choking dust, inches deep, we met civilians drifting back. “Poor battered things, no food, no homes, no luggage. They all wore the tricolour and saluted us gravely. God knows where they’ll go, what they’ll do. Their cattle are dead, their farms are in ruins, their villages a pile of rubble.”

At the end of August, I had a stroke of luck, capturing a German lorry with a brand new typewriter, two crates of Martell and 600,000 francs. I kept the typewriter and brandy but tried to turn in the francs at brigade headquarters, where I found marked reluctance to take responsibility for them. “I can at last write legibly to you,” I told my wife and reported to her a more cheerful scene.

"The French are wonderful. They stand in crowds as we go by, waving, cheering and hurling fruit, flowers and presents into our half-tracks. If we stop for half a minute, they rush up with drink and food.

“The old folk look so tired and so incredibly happy it brings a lump to the throat. Flags are everywhere. They seem to have been through hell and to them, as we arrive, it’s like the end of a long prison sentence.”

Orders came to capture Doullens, which looked a stiff proposition, but 13/18 Hussars attacked from the north and we sailed in from the south. We slept the night in its magnificent town hall, and there I think I remember seeing a plaque telling us that in 1918, after the desperate but dangerous advance of Germany towards Amiens which routed our Fifth Army, Marshal Foch of France had been given overall command of the Allied armies.

Retracing our footsteps across Europe, we stopped in Doullens outside the town hall, and I thought to check if my memory of the plaque was correct. It was a sleepy Sunday in the town and the place was closed. We left reckoning it was the right sort of place in which to have promoted the great marshal.

Montgomery, who I was told had been promoted to Field Marshal, wouldn’t have liked coming under Marshal Foch, I reflected whimsically.

We were close to some of the battlefields of the first war. Arras, which was one of them, is now a green carpet of prosperous agriculture, all wounds long healed - as they are at Lens and Cambrai. Nature, I reflected, has richly compensated this part of France for the damage of 1914-18.

We were moving fast enough in 1944 to reach the outskirts of Lille by Sept 3. A squadron of tanks and my B company were ordered to undertake a reconnaissance. Three report lines were laid down, the last of which went to the centre of the city with its population of 200,000. We questioned civilians cautiously as we advanced.

One in 10 said Lille was full of Germans, four out of five “didn’t know”. A few told us that the Maquis were around and the road would be clear.

If we ran into trouble, our orders were to return without heavy casualties. None of this adventure could be reported to my wife; but I wrote a full account of it for our battalion and have it beside me now.

We had reached what in London would have been the Old Kent Road before hope of a bloodless victory suddenly became a probability.

Flags, fruit and flowers, usually a fair test of form, were coming up well. Ahead of us the streets were filled with people and what I took to be our final report line was so full of rejoicing French with flags, fruit, flowers and champagne, that my leading platoon was squeezed to a halt.

The townspeople had waited four years for this party and were not to be denied. The squadron leader called for fresh orders, but the radio had failed because so many people were clutching his aerial. We speculated gloomily on the likelihood of Germans reappearing as our soldiers sipped the champagne.

In the equivalent of Lille’s Trafalgar Square, a German doctor did suddenly appear. He had 40 German wounded in a building nearby. Could I help him?

The crowd had risen to thousands, and we could hardly move. As the afternoon wore on, I suddenly felt extremely tired and depressed. The eager crowd had plenty in reserve. We had risen early.

Suddenly, at the far end of the town, a German self-propelled gun went off. I remembered our orders. We prepared to withdraw. Enthusiasm waned a little. I found the disappointed faces heart-rending. It was dusk when we left the Le Prefecture, head to tail, for no one was sure of the route. Occasional shells were falling elsewhere. A gendarme told me confidentially that 3,000 Germans and a tank were marching towards us.

We returned to base. “I am sorry I can’t tell you about it,” I wrote later to my wife.

Tomorrow: Arnhem

[Bladensburg]

I think that should properly be “William, Lord Deedes” not “Lord William Deedes” because he’s a Peer in his own right. The “Lord John Smith” form is a courtesy title reserved for the sons of Hereditry peers who don’t have secondary titles (ie the Duke of Bedfords heir is Marquess of Tavistock because Tavistock is a junior title) or the younger sons of peers who do.

Nitpicking aside the article was very good, I found the pettyness of the dockers in Britain particularly illuminating.
It’s odd to think that Bill Deedes was once young though.

[reiver]

@Bladensburg

I think that should properly be “William, Lord Deedes” not “Lord William Deedes” because he’s a Peer in his own right. The “Lord John Smith” form is a courtesy title reserved for the sons of Hereditry peers who don’t have secondary titles (ie the Duke of Bedfords heir is Marquess of Tavistock because Tavistock is a junior title) or the younger sons of peers who do.

Nitpicking aside the article was very good, I found the pettyness of the dockers in Britain particularly illuminating.
It’s odd to think that Bill Deedes was once young though.

Absolutely correct on all points.
I’ll go stand in the corner with my copy of Burke’s Peerage immediately

[reiver]

The way we went: Day 3 Arnhem
W F Deedes
(Filed: 06/07/2005)

September - October 1944

By mid-September we were well into Belgium. The Daily Telegraph announced that “the great barracks of Bourg Leopold, converted into a strong point by the Germans, was stormed by the Belgian Army”. I felt peeved by this entry from the newspaper, for the place had been liberated by a squadron of the 13/18th Hussars and my B company, 12 KRRC.

Of the events that followed, including the ambitious Operation Market Garden, in which airborne forces were dropped at Eindhoven, Grave, Nijmegen and Arnhem, I could for reasons of security tell my wife nothing.

I recall watching part of the operation and marvelling at a sky filled with men on parachutes and gliders in an attempt to leapfrog our way forward. That phase of the war has all been recounted many times and dramatised in the film A Bridge Too Far, designed more for American than British audiences. Our 8th Armoured Brigade followed across land in the wake of the Guards Armoured Division.

The plan was that we should follow on that division’s tail as far as Arnhem. In a long night march we reached Eindhoven. German resistance was stronger than we expected. Their forces were on both sides of the road and active. We crossed the great bridge at Grave and reached a cluster of houses a few miles south of Nijmegen early in the morning of Sept 22. At Dievoort, the sound of battle ahead reached us. The brigadier commanding us, Errol Prior-Palmer, arrived at 11am to “put us in the picture”.

A new plan had been hatched to save the situation at Arnhem bridge which had become desperate. A squadron of 13/18 Hussars tanks, with the riflemen of my company riding on the outside of them, would make a dash from down the roadway and attack the Germans at the bridge from an unexpected direction.

Given the support of Typhoon and medium bombers and artillery, it would, they told us, be a “bit of cake”.

“Bit of a rum do,” said my company sergeant major, a cool customer, when he heard of the proposal. “Very rum,” I said. I did not fancy our chances. There was, however, a condition attached to the plan. Armoured cars of the Household Cavalry would secure us a start line, so that in the words of our orders, we could go “flat out from the off”.

We stood by for the rest of that day. The afternoon, during which we were to undertake this charge, passed quietly. We could have slept in our pyjamas, for no call came that night. Next morning the decision reached us: “It’s simply not on.”

German opposition had thickened up. My riflemen greeted the news of their reprieve sourly. “We’ve been buggered about,” they said. Some had written to loved ones at home, signalling farewell.

On our recent return to the scene, I measured some of the distances involved. Arnhem bridge, which has been rebuilt and renamed, is seven miles from Nijmegen bridge - a long run under fire. We were lucky, as so many were not. A study of the cemetery there shows that many of the fallen died on Sept 23, the day after our failure.

There are flowers at the foot of every grave. “Their name liveth for evermore,” the stone at the entry proclaims, and that is true in more ways than one. This was one of the great imponderables of our military history. If we had succeeded, the war would have been shorter. As we left the tree-lined cemetery, our eyes fell on the grave of a British soldier who was 17 years of age. Only 17…

Arnhem was one of the few places on our travels over which the shadow of war still hovers. Sixty years on, the older ones remember it, and even the younger ones seem to know about it. The cemetery and the museum and the bridge itself are not the only reminders of what happened there. Everything looks normal. In the restaurant of our hotel in Arnhem, we could see through the window the new bridge that crosses the Rhine in place of the old one. In that handsome, busy town, the mind is constantly drawn back to what might have been.

Our October in 1944 was spent on the defensive and in static conditions. The brigade held a 15-mile line along the Maas and the Waal. My wife wrote expressing her depression after Arnhem. “Yes,” I agreed, "it’s tragic. We came as fast as we could. I shall not forget the night drive we did to reach them, up that blessed corridor which was hardly a pencil’s width. It wasn’t dangerous but terribly tiring. Right up to the end the Boche always manages to get something to the critical point at the critical moment. He’s a fine soldier still, and a dangerous person to gamble with.

"The German doctors are very good and impartial. I know from experience, they do as much for our wounded as for their own.

"My young officers are very tired indeed and I have pulled Barry Newton right out and made him stay with me in my tent. He came back too soon after being wounded, is thin as a rake and worn out. So his sergeant has taken over and he has been ordered 12 hours a night and breakfast in bed. The medical officer is giving him knock-out drops to put him under for 20 hours or so tonight. This is a splendid way they deal with shock or exhaustion, putting the victim to sleep for 24 hours.

“Gloomily and reluctantly everyone is reconciling themselves to winter here. I always felt it likely and am not much surprised.”

We were in an area of smallholdings. “You would be amused to see how they share their houses with the pigs and cows and chickens.” At least we were living comfortably, with butter, cheese and vegetables, but in a scruffy sort of way. "Imagine the chaos with seven officers and my office and all meals, and nearly everyone’s kit plus mail and NAAFI stores in a tent 15’ x 18’ x 10.’ " Our adjutant told me that the administration was heavier than it ever was in England and I found the same.

“In Brussels, I am told, the black market is astonishing; and half the people live on pheasant and champagne, the other half on black bread in crumby bits. I was detailed to go to Brussels for 48 hours, but couldn’t face it and begged the CO to let me stay. He said that if I preferred to spend 48 hours in bed later on, he would permit it.” Failure at Arnhem had made me incurably restive.

In mid-October, we were suddenly ordered to become operational again and take over a bridge. This was in the middle of training, football, baths and cinemas and with 40 men and two officers weekending in Brussels.

“We took over at 5am this morning. Place left filthy and a shambles. We cleaned up, breakfasted, laid telephone lines and were then ordered to ‘up sticks’ and move to another outfit 30 miles away. Pitch dark, pouring rain, we wallowed in mud till next morning.”

But within a week the scene had changed again. "We’re in a nice Dutch village. Full of children and old people and nothing in between them at all. Where people of our age are, goodness knows. You ask and they shrug their shoulders. I suppose most of them have been pinched for labour service in Germany. The children look pale and ill-fed, though there is plenty of food in country districts like this. The trouble is more transport than supplies. The stuff abounds but there is no one to take it around. All railways smashed, no lorries, no petrol.

“A little more activity would be nice because people tend to get static minded. After a pause in battle, some people become far more nervous than they were when it started.”

I found the restoration of peacetime conditions trying, especially when everything had to be worked from a small tent in which six officers slept and ate. Comfortably established in the village hall, the battalion could turn out paper at an enormous rate. I got a rocket because they didn’t like the way we typed the training programme.

“Trouble is one is a bit tired to get enthusiastic about peacetime standards and the flow of paper and instructions - baths, concerts, football, training, ENSA, Naafi wagons, painting vehicles, arms inspections, seats for latrines, new stripes for NCOs and so on, when cooped up in a minute tent… It really makes one look forward to a return to war.”

The Dutch, I reported, were good value when you got to know them. The local soldiers, home guard and spies kept our hands full by behaving like a John Buchan novel. Holiday camps in Brussels and Antwerp were in full swing, the men going off with glee for 48 hours and coming back looking like death and penniless, but declaring it was well worth it. “Heaven knows what liquor they drank.”

“It’s been a gloomy month since Arnhem, and has affected everyone a good deal after the excitements of September. Reaction plays the devil. I think a general picture from someone high up might help.”

Monty told me after the war that he had wanted to bash on because we were tired and needed to finish soon. But Americans were pouring in and Eisenhower thought it best to wait until the spring.

"Brigade gave a dance last night- they laid it on well. The ladies of the dance were pleasant but not striking. They all have an agreement not to wear lipstick or powder, because there is so little. Rather, there is none. A chap brought some cosmetics in Brussels. His girl refused to wear them. She said: ‘If one of us uses this, we shall look conspicuous. We don’t want to take advantage of each other. We want you to see us just as we have been for four years, old clothes, shiny nose and all.’ "

But how the Dutch girls tucked into the brigade’s supper! Their manners were beautiful, but they were very hungry.

The local churches were crammed every Sunday and well attended for early service every day of the week. There was an absence of grumbling. Much kindness to us and courage in helping us was displayed. They spoke of the war as a trial, but never as a bore.

“I find the evening round of posts fairly trying. It’s 9pm and CSM Hooper is dressing up for our tour. We were not allowed to do it singly. I did it alone the night before last. One of those pitch black nights when you keep seeing shadows moving just in front. I ran into a horse and felt sure it was a German patrol, because of the heavy breathing. The horse lived by a hair’s breadth!”

The Dutch assured us that clogs were warmer than leather, but this was because they left clogs on the doorstep and padded round in thick socks and woollen undershoes. So they never suffered from damp boots like us. Nor did they fill their homes with mud. But clogs only lasted six weeks on average, then they needed a new pair, then costing about 10p.

“We treat the locals more reasonably than the Germans,” I wrote to my wife. "They do not hesitate to order them away in droves, regardless of where they sleep or live or go. Once or twice B company has had to occupy a village and has felt uncertain of local temper.

I realised the chances of chaps slipping through our lines into the enemy lines.

I have been tempted to clear everyone out, but one is always stopped by thoughts of young children and mothers about to have babies.

“That’s not the way to fight a war, of course, and I know we have suffered through Fifth Column agents who tell the Nazis where to shell.”

My wife sent out to me a miscellany of verse and prose published by The Daily Telegraph. It included parts of a letter that Lord Balfour had written to Lady Desborough on the death of her two sons, the talented Grenfell twins, in the First World War:

"I do not pretend to offer consolation; in one very real sense there is no consolation to offer. The blow, the double blow has fallen and the shock which threatens the very citadel of life can be softened by nothing that I or perhaps any other can do or utter. Who can measure the pain of separation? Who can deny that normally at least death means separation? It is due perhaps to an unacknowledged feeling that the separation is to be unending.

“Now if this be the settled conviction of the mourner, there is nothing more to be said. But if this is not the case, if the conviction be the other way, if the certainty or even the possibility of a future life be admitted, then we know there is something wrong if the agonies of bereavement are more than those which should follow on a severance which though complete is temporary.”

I found Lord Balfour’s thoughts consoling.

Tomorrow: Fallen comrades

[reiver]

The way we went: Day 4 Fallen Comrades
(Filed: 07/07/2005)

[i]In the early part of 1945 the Allies inched forward against determined German resistance. Then in April came a decisive battle for W F Deedes when he was ordered to form a bridgehead at the Twente canal.

In the ensuing action his brigade suffered heavy losses. He was later awarded an MC for his ‘complete disregard for personal safety’ while attempting to save his men.[/i]

October 1944 - April 1945

I had been thinking in terms of winter quarters. I was wrong. Towards the end of November we left the Rhine west of Arnhem and joined up with 8th Armoured Brigade which had been fighting hard at Geilenkirchen. Field Marshal Montgomery turned up to present to officers and men of the brigade four DSOs, seven MCs and eleven MMs. Our battalion moved on a lovely winter’s day, more like autumn, and covered 100 miles, to be within reach of Heerleheide.

I settled down with my company in the village of Birgden, an awkward village, not many yards from the Germans, our first sample of the wicked land (Germany) - and such a beastly mess; food, stores, wardrobes and private possessions strewn about.

But to the joy of the riflemen livestock abounded. Pigs, poultry, sheep, goats strayed from smashed farms and small holdings. It was not regarded as loot to slay what we wanted to eat. The battalion’s butcher, rushed up from the rear to cut them up for us, had an exciting time, never having been so close to a front line. Shells and mortar bombs fell as he worked, and I watched him cutting up a pig unhappily.

“I shot four duck today 100 yards from the Germans [I had been given a Canadian automatic to test]. Two geese eluded me and made off to the enemy, wise birds.” I thought it tactful to give three of the duck to our commanding officer.

“There seems no doubt that early in the New Year some of us will be coming back to England for seven days’ leave,” I told my wife on Dec 3. “I view this with mixed feelings. I like the idea of seeing you again, but it seems these plans pre-suppose a longer war and as if we shall be wallowing away next spring.”

At last, on Dec 23, Fred Coleridge and I made Brussels for our three-day jaunt, my first break since landing. I have but a hazy recollection of that expedition, but one item is lodged in my conscience. We began with some champagne, duty free, in our hotel, then went to a beautiful restaurant in Grande Place, ate a tender steak tartare.

In the middle of our meal a staff officer with the rank of captain rose from his table and told us everyone had been recalled to their units from Brussels. The Germans launched an attack in the Ardennes. Fred and I looked at each other, finished our steaks and wine, returned to our hotel and had a good night’s sleep.

Next morning, Fred said casually let’s look up Bobby Erskine and find out the form. Maj Gen Erskine, of our regiment, was former commander of 7th Armoured Division and a member of our regiment. He was now our Mayor of Brussels.

So we did this, and found the flap was receding, but we decided to return to our battalion a day early. We were not required. The German attack however left very little Christmas, celebrations for which were more or less cancelled. "We recce and dig all day and much of the night.

“Our padre marked the day with a service and a three-minute sermon, saying we might feel Christmas was a mockery just now; but as long as there were good things to strive for, better ways of living, we need not feel hopeless. Fearful depression yesterday when German radio from Arnhem announced all leave to England cancelled. We had rather been expecting it, but it came poorly to the chaps on Christmas Eve after a long day’s digging.”

The first fortnight of the new year was spent in much-needed training in vile weather. We were introduced to snow camouflage, a new step in our education. In mid-January the company went to their armoured regiments, mine to the 13th/18th Hussars.

We were used for protecting the tanks at night. Snow on the ground and persistently low temperatures made this irksome. It was slow, hard fighting from start to finish, with very little spectacular advance. In dreadful weather against extremely determined enemy, progress was only achieved by grinding relentless pressure which meant no relief for anyone for a long time.

I found the destruction very depressing and wrote home “the smashing of every German home by guns and the RAF is really terrible. One sees thousands and thousands of German houses wrecked, private belongings strewn everywhere. It would be a simple-minded chap who said ‘they did this to us so what does it matter?’ Such a frightful mess to be sorted out later on”.

We had been warned that ahead lay Operation Veritable, a battle through the Reichswald forest and thence towards the Rhine. In the woods, where no birds sing, Goch was won after casualties. “I do not recommend life in the Siegfried Line”, I wrote, “but it has its consolations. Living as we did in Dutch and German billets one had the distressing feeling that sooner or later a very tough German line had to be cracked. Well it has been cracked and the Germans are in a muddle again, and we move forward, albeit slowly and with difficulty and expensively at times.”

The German soldier was fighting better than ever. His line seemed to be, we have lost everything except our ability to fight bitterly, hard, skilfully to the last ditch. “And so he does. It is tragic but I have to admire it as I think secretly many do. The Germans we meet are now fighting better than any we encountered in Normandy. They give nothing away. They are desperate and determined… they know for sure that Churchill, Stalin and Co mean to destroy them utterly. And this gives them the strength usually associated with dangerous maniacs.”

Early in March where we were eating breakfast I heard snatches of a familiar voice addressing the Regimental Commanding Officer in homely terms "…must crack on, old boy… all gone away… bound to pack in… " A muffled voice on the radio rang me and said: “Lots of Yerman tanks five hundred yards to our right.” “German or Sherman, did he say?” I asked my operator, finger on the presser switch. “Sherman” bawled someone over the air from my rear. Such a relief.

Andrew Burnaby-Atkins was very quick indeed. He made a rapid simple plan based on a belief that the tanks contained Americans and not Germans. In company with a rifleman he constructed a banner of the fluorescent aircraft recognition panel, then advanced through the mist towards the faintest outline of tanks.

The Squadron Leader and I decided to walk over and see what was happening. We plodded through ploughed fields towards the sound of furious, incessant firing.

Burnaby-Atkins’s meeting had been eventful. Black American troops manning about 50 Sherman tanks drawn up along the road to our right had followed his advance suspiciously. “Boy, we certainly had you covered,” they chortled when he arrived. A German observation post in Geldern church tower, surprised to see an aircraft cerise panel moving across a field, had loosed a salvo of Nebelwerfer which flung Andrew to the ground and made his nose bleed.

The American tanks, nose to tail, were firing hard at the rooftops of Geldern. Little piles of 75mm cases and Browning empties beside each tank showed how well they were getting on. Burnaby-Atkins had contacted a staff officer of the US division who was interested in us and discussed Army boundaries. Our orders had been to take Geldern, but the 9th US Army seemed so keen that one hesitated to press the claim of the squadron and company group.

The staff officer generously allotted me a minor road for the brigade well off to the left but I suggested to Burnaby-Atkins that he should use the powerful US radio to find out whether our army commander disagreed with me. We did not discover until later that our networks failed to coincide. We ate a number of raw eggs, shook hands and the Squadron Leader and I began to trudge back.

We were not alone. Two zealous war correspondents plodded with us taking names and addresses. Nearing home, we were heavily shelled and nearly hit. The correspondents, brushing mud off their tunics, said it was all good colourful stuff.

Andrew Burnaby-Atkins and I featured reputably in the News of the World where Andrew was described as “an absolutely mad Eton boy”. His sister gave an interview saying she had known it all along. “Did anyone send you the Sunday papers about Andrew Burnaby-Atkins and B Company?” I wrote home. “We had rather a good write-up.”

On March 17 we crossed the Rhine. To listen to the BBC anyone would have thought the war was over. “This is not strictly correct,” I wrote home. “Now everyone is the right side of the river one feels much more in Germany but the atmosphere is terribly reminiscent of the September ‘swan.’ But there is a real sense that after many disappointments this thing is within our grasp.”

For B Company, however, the worst was yet to come. On April 2 we were ordered to form a bridgehead on the other side of the Twente canal at the locks. Two troops of tanks would support us and artillery would be available.

We reached the hollow below the canal embankment at a point where the canal lay between two high embankments. This made it impossible for the tanks to give cover or to observe possible enemy positions on the other side. The bridge consisted of two halves of which each connected with the locks. As soon as my leading riflemen descended over the canal embankment onto the edge of the bridge the enemy reacted with accurate crossfire from four Spandau machineguns.

My two leading platoons fought their way on to the bridge and got as far as the middle. There they got stuck. The Germans then dropped mortar bombs on my third platoon in reserve. There were so many casualties that we ceased to be a decisive force. The attack was stopped. The difficult task remained of getting our wounded off the bridge. Andrew and I went to work on this. We were handicapped by the fact that two officers, Lt Roger Green and Lt Barry Newton, had been killed; a third officer, Lt R Garner, wounded; a sergeant and a corporal killed.

I don’t think we could have done it unless the Germans had stopped firing. The best of them honoured the rules of warfare. I felt terribly depressed. I wrote to my wife "I can’t give you any news really. In fact, I’d like to say nothing about it but will tell you all about it later. Oh these damn papers which pretend the thing is over. By golly, it’s not. Lots of 16-year-olds keen to die for Hitler.

“But I don’t want to talk about it. It’s spring out here and the country is looking lovely. It’s really ineffably sad, the saddest spring I ever remember. One feels how superior nature is. Each spring everything is reborn and renewed. While man, when smitten down, goes out. Spring in the battlefield certainly gives me a lump in the throat and a stinging in the eyes.”

At 21, Roger Green with his love for birds and music and fishing was singular. His mother wrote me a wonderful letter, dignified and brave. She said “No words can describe my loss in the death of Roger who has always been a perfect son, loving, kind and thoughtful far beyond his years.” And again “There has never been a blot or stain. He was loved by all.” She was so right. He was.

The Twente canal at Hengelo today looks much the same but the bridges are new and difficult to identify. We had to search to make sure we had found the fatal bridge but knew it was the right one because it contained the locks. The approach is easier than it was to tanks, and the woods opposite where the Germans lurked are sparser than they were. It was the moment on our tour when I felt a surge of emotion and sat there for a bit thinking of the past.

We had a new commanding officer, very popular, fresh and keen. A little tiring for those who had been pushing along since last June but competent and getting along well with the Brigadier.

All the talk now was of occupation and how we should settle down in Germany. I would believe it when the shooting stopped. “Make no mistake,” I wrote, “the really brave chaps are those who risk and lose their lives now, when the end is a foregone conclusion. May they have their reward.”

In mid-April I had another shock. Lt John Peyton was killed clearing houses at dusk. That means I had lost all three starters with me from England in a fortnight. I wrote: "That all three should go after being with me nearly two years and having come through 10 months of this is very saddening and has shaken me a good deal. They were friends as well as wonderfully good officers and splendid companions. I never had to criticise them or complain. I feel they were much finer fellows than me and less easily spared. All 21 and a lifetime before them.

"However, if one believes at all I think of Richard Luxmoore, Roger, Barry and John who had been with me since we left England and were always the closest of friends are together again somewhere. I hope so.

"But it makes a dreadfully hard account to balance. I can’t help wondering if B Company has achieved enough to balance the loss to England. Sim Feversham [the Earl of Feversham commanding the 13th/18th Hussars] and his officers have been very kind and sympathetic. They all knew these boys and admired them. They have done a lot for the tanks.

“In one way one feels some sort of uplift personally about it all. Somehow those of us left to carry on feel an added responsibility for the future. I am writing to their homes and trying to get my letter in before the dreaded War Office priority telegram. Thank God Andrew Burnaby-Atkins is safe for a fortnight on leave in England.”

On May 8 I wrote to my wife: "It seems appropriate to write on VE day. One feels terrific thankfulness but quite unable to express adequate thoughts on the subject. I heard while dining with 13th/18th Hussars and felt immediate relief for we were due to undertake a tricky operation next day. Everything had to stand fast. With the elation I felt mild apprehension.

“Transition from war to peace is hard work and looks like giving one less time than I remember in the heat of battle.”

Tomorrow: Germany and the end of war

[reiver]

[b]The way we went: Day 5 Journey’s end
By W F Deedes
(Filed: 09/07/2005)

In the final extract of his memory of war, W F Deedes recalls how VE Day brought empathy with the enemy and fear for the well-being of the men he led through Europe. In Hanover 60 years later, he visited a cemetery for German civilians and lit a candle to remember the past.

October 1944 - April 1945[/b]

In post-war Germany. We were in Bremervörde, near Bremerhaven, a reasonable German village, when the ceasefire came on May 8 and it took a fortnight’s shuffling round before we reached Hanover, our final destination in Germany. There we became mobile reserve for trouble which I didn’t anticipate. The Germans were whacked. Many stayed in bed to conserve their energy on the very little food available to them.

Nonetheless we were given instructions on how to deal with insurrection. Getting on a peacetime footing, I soon found, was more strenuous than war itself. No one seemed to have time to stop for celebrations.

In Bremervörde a splendid scene was reported to me. Fifty Russians, escaped prisoners, were seen prodding a local pond. Approached, they said that five enormous casks of German schnapps - gin to us - lay within.

Assisted by one of my half-tracks and a tow rope, one of these monstrous things containing a hundred gallons was surfaced. After doling out half of it to his chums, the Russian chief called a halt and insisted on the rest going to the Englishmen. “So 50 gallons of schnapps have arrived and I have sent a bottle to the Medical Officer for analysis. We tasted a bit and it’s not too bad at all. The Russians are trying to salvage more. I think we have enough.”

The countryside was littered with hundreds of released prisoners from every country - Poles, Czechs, Belgians and Dutch. They wandered about pinching what they could. We were in a remarkable village. There didn’t seem to be a bath or water closet in any house but the population was peaceful and we were comfortable enough.

“I find getting back to the old style of life easy in some ways and a nag in others. We do a ceremonial guard of one sergeant and 20 riflemen the night after tomorrow. They have been blanco’ed up to the eyes, but haven’t done Guard Mounting drill for a year, so it’s a worry.”

Otherwise, we guarded and carried out a curfew patrol and tried to restore order and normality. Having smashed the place to bits we picked up one brick at a time and put it back.

Hanover today looks a rather drab modern city. This is because it suffered 80 bombing raids which killed half the population and destroyed 85 per cent of the city. It took 18 years to rebuild it. In 1947 they decided to make it an exhibition centre which is now one square kilometre and said to be the largest in the world.

Before the war Hanover’s population was 470,000. When the war ended it was 217,000.

Until June 1945 the city suffered from severe post-war paralysis, smashed communications and houses, swarming displaced people and little or no heart to pump the lifeblood round pulseless limbs. Before June was out we saw twitches of revival, in which our battalion played a modest part.

As summer wore on the city’s amenities became extremely good. Our Brigade contributed to the opening of four cinemas, the Herrenhausen theatre - where opera, ballet and symphony concerts came free nightly from good German companies - a theatre, cafes, pubs and a dozen minor centres of amusement.

Two enormous prisoner of war camps with 30,000 prisoners in them had to be firmly organised, guarded and prepared for disbandment. Company commanders like me found themselves commanding divisions of Germans and paraded once a week to hear something like: “400 off sick, 800 on duty, 170 cookhouse, 200 absent, 11,725 on parade, Sir.” The camps were dissolved, thank heavens, in pursuit of harvest by the end of July.

At the end of May 1945 I wrote home to my wife: "I visited one German PoW camp today. Really extraordinary. 6,000 Germans in a camp with no wire, no fences and seven sentries. They said, ‘Oh they don’t try to get away!’

“Outside about 500 girls and women waited with parcels of food and goodies. If the Germans were not getting out to receive, the women were getting in to give! Really a shocking mix-up. Burnaby-Atkins has the pleasure of sorting it out.”

I found running my PoW camp difficult and anxious work. After five years of organised destruction, it was refreshing to take on something constructive, but the camp was bad, with dysentery, bashed buildings, no decent sanitation, few rations and so on.

I wrote at the time: “When we took over from the Americans, the discipline was frightful and the German prisoners looked and behaved like animals. A little co-operation and things are beginning to look up. We have started proper saluting and tomorrow I inspect the entire camp with the German commandant.”

It was difficult to know how to act for the best. “Merely to say, ‘well, things were worse in Belsen and you can ruddy well lump it’ doesn’t achieve much. One has the urge to crack away and get things really smart and decent.”

We had also to guard an old alcohol factory in Misburg, alleged to have been at the heart of the V2 bombs. The RAF had strafed the factory, but drums of this beastly stuff were lying around and attracted dipsomaniacs. One teaspoonful, I imagined, and you’d be blotto for months. In fact, one or two DPs did get in, drank and died. I hoped it would warn riflemen not to do anything silly.

I found occupation weighed heavy. There never seemed to be a moment off duty. The “curfew patrol” began with its nightly round in Jeeps and motorcycles, picking up men and women on the streets after 9pm. "They spend the night in the cooler at our headquarters and are turned loose again at 10am. Parking the women was not easy. A multitude of complications. It makes for rather a restless night.

"My 6,000 prisoners or more are going OK, and I like to think that life has looked up since we took on. I inspected the camp yesterday with their commandant. Inspecting an army division is quite an ordeal. It’s a great worry, this occupation, if one does it conscientiously.

"My German commandant and I talk a good deal about administration and inevitably have a laugh about some things. How can it be otherwise? I respect his efforts to keep the men smart and disciplined and I think he knows I am doing my best in difficult circumstances.

“We have improved their welfare a bit, and I allow their chaps what they allow our chaps over here. They want more food, of course, and lay on little plots to get the stuff. When you think they are organising hammers and nails in Hanover, they are arranging things with the bakery. Tricky chaps.”

We heard that the battalion would soon concentrate again. I saw problems ahead. Thrown on our own a lot, the rifle companies, four to the battalion, had become very independent and able to run things for themselves. One became used to taking decisions. Soon we would cease running things ourselves. I felt a clash of personalities was likely.

"I have come to the sad conclusion that it was less hard work fighting these people than organising them. My prisoner of war camp has become a tremendous affair. The Brigadier inspected it yesterday, found one of the 5,445 with dirty feet. Said to me: ‘Why hasn’t this man washed? Hasn’t he got soap?’

" On June 1, my birthday, I got a letter from Brigadier Errol Prior-Palmer saying I had been awarded the MC for the Twente Canal affair on April 4. “You have earned it several times over.” It would be more welcome if I hadn’t lost so many men on the bloody bridge. I was dining that night with 13/18 Hussars and Andrew Burnaby-Atkins said: “You must go properly dressed, have one of mine.” He pinned the ribbon on.

"We motored 65 miles north today to see the Guards Armoured Division say farewell and become a Guards Infantry Division. It was impressive. The entire division and its armour paraded. "Hundreds of tanks, painted and polished to the nines, were there. Montgomery was present with Dempsey and all the top brass.

"The entire division marched past and then the tanks drove over the hill in great columns, while the band played Auld Lang Syne. After a pause all the crews came marching back in great long columns to represent the return to infantry.

“For precision no one can touch the Guards and they did it brilliantly. Really very moving. It was a lovely day and the German forests looked beautiful.”

Later in June, 13/18 Hussars asked me to go over and lecture regimental headquarters and A Squadron on the general election! By then, I had already formed a view during our education hours of how soldiers seemed likely to vote and was not much surprised when that election went the way it did.

In mid-June everyone polished themselves up for the King’s Birthday Parade. “How I loathe these ceremonials. Commanding officers of course love them. So the Battalion goes on parade again. All paint and polish and salutes.”

More cheeringly, Hanover’s telephones were working again. Trains were running. It was consoling in a way to see things picking up.

One tiresome duty fell to our battalion. We were called on to assist in the re-shaping of the Anglo-Russian frontier in Magdeburg Province. Our basic job was to keep Germans at bay as the Russians came forward a short distance. I have no record of the exercise, for it was not something I felt one should write home about. My unpleasant recollection of it is that some of my riflemen swapped their watches with the Russian soldiers for their revolvers.

“Company seems to be armed to the teeth, but the men can’t tell the time,” my Company Sergeant-Major reported to me sardonically next morning.

"Non fraternisation has been relaxed a bit. Everyone is playing it well, but it’s difficult. There are now 350,000 back in Hanover and the streets are crowded with girls in summer clothes, all beautifully turned out and attractive. The riflemen who in England never went 48 hours without a girlfriend have to pretend not to notice them.

“But they do behave well. The girls know it’s a struggle and loathe being ignored by so many males, and so behave provocatively. I think they are tiring of it actually. It must be hell for them. Any nonsense from a female and she goes into the guardroom on bread and water for 24 hours! So they have to keep within limits.”

On July 4 Fred Coleridge and I saw off our 17,000th German prisoner for harvesting. We agreed that in future our cure for insomnia would be counting untidy Huns being put into lorries rather than sheep over gates.

“If you are unscrupulous you can collect beautiful wristwatches, cigarette cases and rings for cigarettes, for they will do anything for cigarettes. Alas, this the riflemen do, though I think there is something demeaning about seeing a man give away a good watch for 100 cigarettes. I was offered a gold ticker the other day for 100 cigarettes.”

Called on to read the riflemen’s letters before the censor stamped them, I began to reflect that, for some of them, reunion back at home when they were finally discharged might not be nearly as easy or joyous as everyone anticipated.

I felt that a warning would be timely, and wrote to my uncle, Sir Wyndham Deedes, whom I reckoned might have the ear of the Palace, suggesting that Queen Elizabeth might consider giving a sympathetic broadcast.

The best brains in the Army, I pointed out, had spent the previous six years making the men hard, toughening their outlook, making them think without sentiment or kindness. The men, furthermore, were quite unconscious of how much they were going to miss their comrades. Home was all they thought of and all they thought they wanted. After a while back home, this yearning would wear off.

Nor would homecoming and picking up the threads of life again be as simple and jolly as a week’s leave had been. Some wives would find it painful to realise how much their man missed the associations of recent years. Great sympathy and understanding would be needed by the wives, not because they had had an easier war, but because their roots in English life had shifted less, and their reactions to peacetime normalities would be less acute.

Finally, I added, many of us felt strongly that the basis of post-war England must spring from the home and its restoration. What would all the political post-war planning profit the warrior if he were not understood by his wife or mother?

I received an encouraging reply. The Queen had decided for herself that something of the kind ought to be done. The problem was when to do it. She was glad to hear from someone “in close touch with his men”. Whether such a broadcast was made I have never known. The sad certainty is that in the following year or two the divorce rate among soldiers soared.

Back in Hanover this time I reflected, as I had done bitterly in 1945, on the consequences of “unconditional surrender”. I do not doubt that at the time it was deemed essential but the outcome, the rebuilt Hanover reminded me, had been terribly destructive.

But then again, glancing round the new city, I thought a journey of a thousand miles, which I had just accomplished in five days by car, had kept us at full stretch in 1944-45 for almost a year of battle. So might not the unconditional surrender and smashing of Germany into submission have hastened the end of an ordeal that had brought us close to the limit?

In Hanover’s now restored Marktkirche, I lit a candle for the past. As a final act, I went to the great cemetery in Hanover, the largest portion of which is reserved for German civilians who died in the bombing. It was a beautiful, quiet June evening. I looked across the parkland with its many graves. Total war does not discriminate.