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Thread: On this Day |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Wednesday, 30th August 1944
We were up at dawn, woken by the smell of porridge, washed and shaved with water running from a tap. We breakfasted on hot, salty Scottish porridge and hot sweet tea, then washed mess tins and mugs under the tap. We loaded the trucks and we were off. No idea where we stayed for each of the next few nights, but progress was slow, as we had to keep stopping to avoid catching up with the tanks, and they had to avoid going too far for the ration trucks to catch up with us. Sometimes there were more prisoners than the ration trucks could take back with them and they had to be marched back with a soldier , followed by a despatch rider who brought the soldier his relief, and then took him forward again to his unit. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Thursday, 31st August 1944
General Montgomery received his promotion to Field Marshal. We crossed the Somme between Amiens and Villers Bretonneux. Nobody seemed to be able to identify the river that saw so much prolonged trench warfare. Our fathers and uncles would have been astonished 28 to 27 years before. They would certainly have noticed Armentieres - we did not. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Friday, 1st September 1944
We did not even notice Mons, Bapaume or Cambrai, so we must have gone through that district like a dose of salts. We just went on and on along dead straight roads, along the sides of which were deep little circular pits, each marked with a short stake, with its tip wrapped in straw. These were Gerry's defence against Typhoon rockets. The land was now flat, and interspersed with rivers and canals, including the river Sambre that gave another generation so much trouble, so we kept going off the road and stopping to let the bridge builders pass until we reached the southern outskirts of Lille. Those defence pits and the numerous demolished bridges indicated that this was Gerry's retreat route. We could have advanced a lot faster on secondary roads - but there was none wide enough for the wheeled vehicles, even if the tracked vehicles could carry on cutting across country. There must have been a whole Armoured Brigade and a whole battalion of Royal Scots ahead of the R.A.P. and we were advancing so slowly that we were making hardly any dust and we could read the road signs. In the UK there were no road signs, as they had been taken down to confuse the enemy in case of invasion. Jerry had taken no such precaution, so he was caught by Murphy's Law - "If it can happen, it will" P.O.W.s were coming in droves, escorted by armed civilians, some of whom were wearing armbands to identify them as members of various irregular formations - mostly Maquis. We had to wait for the ration trucks to arrive and take them back, so we stopped for the night, had a meal and bedded down. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Saturday, 2nd September 1944
I am not sure where we stopped for the night, but it must have been somewhere south of Lille, probably somewhere south of the Arras cross roads, nor could I figure out how a whole battalion was quartered in an area where there were no large fields and very few unoccupied buildings. After breakfast, we moved off. We were forced to slow down to a crawl, partly presumably because there were no fields where the tanks could get off the road and take short cuts, and partly, as before, because of the necessity for moving P.O.W.s. Mostly, and most appreciably, the hold-up was due to civilians boarding our vehicles. They mobbed us at the crossroads east of Arras. I, an ex-trooper wondered how the Armour was faring. It would be very dangerous to rotate the turrets with unofficial passengers clinging to them. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Sunday, 3rd September 1944
----------------------------------------We did not notice Armentieres because we had not passed it. It is on the Belgian border, west of the Menin Gate. In much of the Pas de Calais, French is a second language to Flemish – which makes sense of the words “Mademoiselle from Armentieres, parlez vous?” Now we were at a standstill, consolidating the gains of the last six days’ mad dash (the “Great Swan”) from Normandy, with small detachments swanning around by day to pick up P.O.W.s, liberated political prisoners and the occasional casualty or perhaps the occasional traitor. Simple collaborators we could leave to the civil authorities. Some of them had been collaborating in order to gain information for passing on to Colonel Buckmaster of SOE. [Edit 2 times, last edit by Former Member at Sep 3, 2008 10:57:44 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Monday, 4th September 1944
11th Armoured Division relieved of these responsibilities, which were more suited to infantry than tanks, were forging ahead towards Lille, Antwerp and Brussels, which we later discovered that they took that day – or did the Guards Armd. Division do that? We badly needed a port of our own, as we could no longer depend on the supplies landing at Cherbourg in the American sector, if we ever could. Ration trucks landing at Gooseberry (Lion-sur Mer), Mulberry (Arromanches & Courseulles) and Jumbo (Rhino Ferry) kept us fed most of the time but we needed shiploads of military supplies,much of which which we could only land at a seaport, though liquid supplies were flowing across the Channel via P.L.U.T.O. (Pipe Line Under The Ocean). |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Tuesday, 5th September 1944
A strange - very strange - formation was now passing through our sector. It was the "79th Armoured Division", but we just called it "Hobo's Funnies". They had no turrets on their tanks,so could not fire on the move; in fact, only a few of them could fire at all. These were the self-propelled guns of the mobile Artillery. “Hobo” was Major-General Percy Hobart. His collection of odd vehicles had been building up since the North African desert campaigns, when they used flail tanks, known as "Scorpions" to explode enemy mines. The bulldozer tanks also dated back to those campaigns and there were Bailey bridging units, which they had used in Italy. The Bailey was a Class 70, semi-permanent bridge: I saw many of them on revisiting the battlefields in 1948. The Belgians diverted interurban tram routes over some of them and a more recent model is still in use in the 21st century. I used them in the '60s on T.A.exercises with the R.E., and to cross the Yarkon river; and again in the '90s to cross the upper reaches of the Jordan. Now this formation was going side by side with, or ahead of the 11th to restore the many river and other crossings hastily demolished by the Germans. For immediate use, they had fascines and Ark Royals. The fascine was a giant roll of chestnut paling which could either be dropped intact into a narrow river or wide ditch to create an immediate temporary crossing or unrolled on flattened ground to make the base of a new road, such as the Bayeux bypass. The Ark Royal was a longer lasting, prefabricated, rolled steel bridge, folded in two and carried on a Churchill chassis. Its crew could lay it in a few minutes and later pick it up and relay it wherever required. Now the results of this rapid bridge building were creating astonishment among the local population. In 1940, they said, it took the Germans many months to rebuild these bridges. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Wednesday, 6th September 1944
Now we carried on along the main road east and north of Lille, through satellite towns like Tourcoing, Roubaix and Halluin. Until now, it had been our practice at every stop to dismount and water the wheels of our vehicles to cool them down, but our method of performing this was not suitable for the mixed company that now began to welcome us. As the cheering crowd thickened, and the convoy came to one of its many halts, I noticed a narrow unoccupied ginnel and made use of it while there seemed to be nobody about. Just as I started readjusting my uniform, two smart young women appeared and brushed past me, giggling . . . When I got back to the convoy, it had hardly moved, so I took the opportunity to obtain tobacco and a newspaper. This turned out to be a local one, headed: “Nord Éclair - Organe de Libération Française 1e. Année. - No. 2. BUREAUX : LILLE. . 27 rue Faidherbe MERCREDI, 6 SEPTEMBRE, 1944 1-FRANC” I still have enough of the front page of this to fill two pages of my scrapbook. According to items on this page, Belgium was practically liberated and the Allies were in the suburbs of Strasburg, Aix-la-Chapelle and Sarrebruck. Other pages had articles on Roubaix and Tourcoing. The crowd impeding our approach to Menin included gendarmerie, Maquis and douanes, but these became police, Brigade Blanche and doganes on the other side of the frontier, where we left the conurbation and stopped for the night near Waereghem, in Belgian Flanders. Somewhere near here was the famous Menin Gate, a lasting memorial to many of our previous generation. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Thursday, 7th September 1944
This day we moved on again - Lord knows where - I had no time to explore, because soon after our arrival Cpl. Farrier arrived to take me back to 194 Field Ambulance on the pillion of his bike. We know where we were going, but had no idea of the route; my French was no help in the country districts. My meagre German was not a lot of help either, although Flemish is a Teutonic language, not unlike German. The local people, we found out later, thought we were Belgian (Walloon presumably, since we spoke no Flemish at this stage), because the rampant lion of Scotland on our flashes resembled that of Belgium, except for the colour. Maybe that was why an elderly country gentleman took us in and took down from the rafters a well smoked ham, which he immediately sliced expertly and shared with us. He seemed to understand my description of Waereghem, if not our pronunciation of the name, which should sound more like “Vairekhem”, and gave us adequate directions in simple Flemish, combined with sign language, and we were soon on our way and spent another night in almost the same place as my previous night. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Friday, 8th September 1944
From Waereghem to Kortryk is only a short drive, but we then had a river to cross, so we stayed the night under the stands at Courtrai (Kortryk) racecourse. Here we adopted - or rather were adopted by, a little, brown, smooth haired dog with a loose skin, especially round its scraggy neck. I had recently been conversing with civilians in Meenen, Waereghem and other places up to here, and having Flemish lessons from a local hairdresser (whose card is in my scrapbook). By this time I knew the Flemish for "rubberneck", which is "rubernek", so from then on we had a live company mascot named "Rubernek". From the same hairdresser we now had an inkling of what the people of Hitler's empire had been using for soap - a small, expensive, greenish tablet, labelled "Palmolive", which felt gritty and only worked if rubbed long and hard. Now that things were quiet otherwise, Capt. Kilpack decided to deal with an application from Ptes. "Nobby" Clark and "Brigadier" Banks for transfer to a unit less likely to meet the enemy, as both of them were ex-P.O.W, having been exchanged with German P.O.W.s after the Tunisia campaign. Banks received his nickname on acquiring a red piping circle round the wrist of his battle blouse. This was not a badge of rank but the mobilisation badge of an N.O.1 (Nursing Orderly, Class 1). They, and other prisoners, had been released as non-combatants, and would not be treated as ordinary P.O.W. if recaptured. |
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