Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20: WINTER IN HOLLAND

After our brief stay in Neeroteren, we returned to the south of Holland, engaging in a series of skirmishes. The Germans were gradually retreating to the frontiers of the Fatherland. Between the skirmishes we launched a couple of set-piece attacks with full scale barrages aimed at enemy strong points. The German defenders now varied a good deal in quality. They included youngsters straight from school, and older soldiers released from hospital after being wounded. However there was still skilled and strong leadership from experienced — and sometimes fanatical — officers and NCO's. Through the winter there were hard battles in which we suffered severe losses of men and tanks, but there was also a steady stream of prisoners and deserters.

The countryside was ill-suited for armoured manoeuvre, being sandy and boggy with numerous dykes and canals. It was better suited for my survey work, of which I was now doing a great deal in preparation for predicted fire and barrages. As you might guess from a typical Dutch landscape painting, there were usually three churches in view from any point in open country — ideal for triangulation. Where the view was obstructed by hedgerows, I could gain just enough height for observation by balancing the director tripod on top of a potato clamp. Care was needed to prevent the whole heap from collapse before my measurements were completed.

During the winter there were more changes in the senior command. Colonel Peter left us for a home job, being replaced by Paddy Moore, a gentle Irishman with steel grey eyes. The regiment was saddened by Peter Gregson's departure. Although I had spent many days and nights by his side, I felt I hardly knew the man. Perhaps there was nothing to know except for his life as a professional soldier. He had brilliant intuitive gifts, notably an instinct for being in the right place of battle at the right time.

The divisional and brigade commanders were changed at the same time. I assumed that Monty had come to share my low opinion of Verney and Mackeson. The Division was taken over by General Lou Lyne the tough-looking commander of 50th Division. 22nd Armoured Brigade was handed over to Toby Wingfield, who had desert experience — so he was all right!

Our Padre retired at last; Padre Synott, who had served in 19 14/18 and had claimed to be the oldest man in the Eighth Army. He was replaced by an engaging young Roman Catholic with projecting ears, Padre Spunner. He was fairly broad-minded, but inclined to reprove the troops when, later on, in Germany they would acquire civilian luxuries by right of conquest without due payment. He himself, as he pointed out, always paid cash. We wondered where he got the money from, as his purchases, especially of alcoholic beverages, were on a lavish scale. We assumed he had access to some special fund from the Vatican. One evening he confided to me that he had personally captured a German Field Cashier who had been ready to distribute the pay of an entire regiment.

We were often assisted by members of the Dutch resistance who were attached to us as interpreters or intelligence officers. The Padre adopted a young man called Hans who travelled with him in the ecclesiastical jeep. Together they were adept at acquiring creature comforts to blunt the rigours of war.

Another change in the regiment was the arrival of Major Geoffrey Armitage to replace one of the Battery Commanders. He had been my bete noire when I was first commissioned so I awaited our next encounter with some misgivings. However, he seemed a good deal less conceited now, and more relaxed, and almost went out of his way to show friendliness to me. In a way, though I was a lot junior to him, our roles were now reversed as he was a new boy in the regiment.

Captain Robert Armitage, cousin to Geoffrey, joined us as a Troop Commander. It was rumoured that he took unnecessary risks in action in the hope of winning a decoration for gallantry. After a few weeks he was invalided home with a minor wound, and — it was believed — some kind of mental breakdown. Like myself he had been an undergraduate before the war at Trinity College, Cambridge, to which we both returned in 1946. One evening he invited me to his college rooms for a drink. He confided to me that in one battle he had brought down artillery fire too close to our own troops, causing casualties to the leading infantry. Bravely but unwisely he went forward to investigate.

“I found myself apologising to two dead man. And to a third who said to me ‘You've killed my mates.’ And so I had.”

New regiments joined the Division. The three infantry battalions of the Queen's had by now lost hundreds of men. One battalion was made up to strength and retained, and two new regiments, the Devonshires and the Durham Light Infantry, made up the rest of the Infantry Brigade. Fifty years later, during my first visit to the splendour of Durham Cathedral, I saw the DLI War Memorial in a side chapel. The list of their battle honours brought back vivid memories of battles where we had supported that gallant regiment.

We enjoyed a few days out of action in December. Some of us visited a coal mine in Geleen, owned by Dutch State Mines. Everything was impressively clean. There were spotless changing rooms and showers. Another time, with Captain ‘Lofty' Slinn, I drove to Louvain in a small civilian car he had acquired. It poured with rain, we could find nowhere to stay, and we spent an uncomfortable night in the car outside a convent. Lofty, six inches taller than I, was almost doubled up in his seat. A few days later, I accompanied a lorry load of soldiers to a nearby town for a day's ‘rest and recreation’. On the way, the side of our lorry was ripped off by a collision with a tank on a transporter. Five soldiers were injured and one killed. The letter to his widow was more difficult than usual to write.

I was summoned to sit on a court-martial. Two sergeants from a field artillery regiment were charged with cowardice in the face of the enemy — potentially, a capital charge. They were accused of abandoning their 25-pounders as they took to their heels. The evidence was conflicting, hardly surprising considering the confusion of battle. Clearly, the sergeants had not behaved with conspicuous gallantry but I did not think that the charge had been proved beyond reasonable doubt. As the junior member of the court, I was the first to be asked for my verdict. “Not guilty”, I said. The presiding colonel glared fiercely at me, and even more fiercely at the captain who was the third member when he agreed with me. The sergeants were acquitted of the major charge but reduced to the ranks on some lesser count. In the First World War they would probably have been shot.

Back in action, one of our tasks was helping to locate the sites from which the Germans were launching their V2 rockets. The V1 launching sites had all been overrun by now. The V2's (fuelled by the rocket propellant devised by Werner von Braun, later to play a prominent role in the American Space Programme) had a longer range and could be launched from any hard surface such as a metalled road. They were being set off from southern and western Holland, and aimed at London, with a few earmarked for Antwerp (where a direct hit on a crowded cinema killed a thousand people). The RAF wanted to locate, as accurately as possible, the launching areas of the V2's, so they could bomb the roads and railways leading to them. We could see the wiggly smoke trails rising from ground level to high in the sky: minutes later the rocket would land in London with no warning sound. We had to take a compass bearing to the smoke trail and pass it instantly to headquarters together with our own map reference.

THE ARDENNES OFFENSIVE

December brought snow and ice. It was bitterly cold, the coldest winter the Dutch could remember. In occupied Holland they were freezing and starving, eating tulip bulbs to keep alive. We were better clothed than the unfortunate civilians and were issued with special heavy clothing called tropal coats. It was hard work even to walk in them; rapid movement was very difficult.

On 16th December the Germans launched the Ardennes offensive, their last great attack of the war on the western front. They concentrated all their available armour in a desperate attempt to divide the British and American armies and drive through to the coast at Antwerp. Bad weather had prevented air reconnaissance for several days. The Allies were taken by surprise. The German tanks punched a great hole through the American lines. The ‘Battle of the Bulge’ raged for three weeks. The 82nd American Airborne Division, holding out with great gallantry at Bastogne, played a major part in slowing down the advance. Eventually it was brought to a halt early in January. The skies cleared, and the Allied air forces pounded the German armour as they withdrew.

CHRISTMAS IN THE SCHOOLROOM

A number of British Divisions were moved round, ready to counterattack if the German advance continued but we continued to hold a thin line overlooking the river Maas. At Christmas, our regimental headquarters was in a school in the small Dutch village of Guttekoven.

Our guns remained in action, shelling enemy positions across the Maas. On Christmas Eve an infantry patrol reported that they overheard a German platoon singing carols. Whatever the truth about First World War troops fraternising over Christmas, we were in no mood to follow their example. The infantry called for shell fire on the carol singers. We duly obliged. The carol singers stopped.

During the Ardennes offensive, we were warned of possible landings behind the lines by enemy paratroopers. We kept our regimental guard on high alert, day and night. On Christmas Eve, I suggested that we should give our troops a break, and mount an RHQ guard consisting of the Adjutant (Paddy Victory), the RSM (Dusty Millard) and myself Despite our tropal coats, the cold seemed to enter our bones as we patrolled the village in turn, our Sten sub-machine guns at the ready.

After my second tour of duty, I went into the schoolroom at 5 a.m. to call Paddy to relieve me for the next two hours. He was an exceptionally sound sleeper: he looked uncommonly peaceful on his camp bed under several layers of blankets. As I bent down to shake him, the trigger of the Sten gun caught in the sleeve of my tropal coat, discharging the twenty bullets into the schoolroom floor about a yard from Paddy's left ear. He leaped out of bed with unaccustomed alacrity. As the RSM said, there might have been a nasty accident.

SHORT LEAVE AND LONG CAMPAIGN

From 1st January we were granted, a few men at a time, our first home leave since D-day. The 800 names of the regiment were put into a hat for balloting. The RSM drew out the first name and found, to a chorus of universal groans, that it was his own! My turn for a week's leave came later in the month.

I can remember nothing of my leave but vividly recall my return to the front line. I had thumbed a lift in an armoured car. As I was extricating myself from the turret, I heard a strange and very loud noise just above my head. I hastily ducked back again. It was my first encounter with the newly developed jet aircraft. The Germans had jet planes in action before we did. They were not very effective, because of a lack of trained pilots.

In mid-January, 7th Armoured joined with a Commando Brigade in operation ‘Blackcock’. This was a full scale attack to clear the land between the Maas and the Roer (another of those damned rivers), the last obstacle before the Rhine. The ground was heavily mined and held by two German divisions, well dug in, and supported by 160 guns. For our success we depended on the ground remaining frozen hard. A thaw would have bogged down our tanks, which were painted a ghostly white as camouflage against the snow. The freezing weather held.

The Germans fought back hard from village to village and from house to house. With our infantry were ‘Mine Flailers’ - converted Shermans which rotated heavy chains in front of them to explode land mines; and ‘Crocodiles’ - Churchill tanks converted into lethal flamethrowers. Heavy shelling from our artillery helped to dislodge the enemy.

The surviving battalion of the Queen's distinguished themselves in the bitter fighting and won several awards for bravery. A Military Cross was won by a young subaltern who had escaped from Czechoslovakia and taken the name ‘Robert Maxwell’. This was one of the more creditable episodes in a colourful life that kept Maxwell in the headlines many years later.

During February 1945 we fought a series of small battles on the Dutch/German frontier. Usually we were firing in support of the Commandos. On other sectors of the front, heavier battles were raging. To our north, the Canadians fought their way through the Reichswald Forest against fierce German opposition in ideal defensive terrain. To the south, the Americans crossed the flooded Roer to split in two the forces defending Cologne. Still further south, another American Army under the formidable General Patton advanced to the Rhine thirty miles above Cologne, and rushed the bridge at Remagen before the enemy could demolish it.

In these operations the Germans lost 120,000 prisoners. In the same month they lost far more on the eastern front where the Russians had reached the Oder. The German defensive strategy was now in ruins, but we did not know this as we slogged away against determined opposition. We fought on with little respite, as we had been doing since the previous June.

Next: Chapter 21: Into Germany