Service Record

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"At Arnhem the Guards Armoured Division was detailed to do the advance up the single road from our front line to the paratroopers holding Arnhem bridge. It was about 65 miles, the trouble was they had to keep to the main road because of the Polder each side couldn't take tanks. The Polder was softer marshy ground and you cannot deploy tanks on it. The Germans put up blockages along the road, knock out the first couple of tanks and nobody could get by. The Germans were also attacking the road from the right flank, they were coming out of the Reichwald forest. We were operating on this right flank, because of our light vehicles we could get across the Polder and we were engaging the Germans as they were coming out of the forest and trying to stop them cutting the road. Unfortunately the relief column of the Guards Division could not reach Arnhem in time and the Arnhem operation came into a sticky end. The Germans had a good strong position there and they hung on to it. Around Arnhem we called it the island because it was between two rivers, the upper and lower Rhine, it became a sort of cowboy country, we used to patrol around there and the Germans were also patrolling and there were several ding-dongs in the villages. After the operation for Arnhem fizzled out we pulled out of battle again, refitted rested and then moved on to the Reichwald battle. We had to clear the West Bank of the Rhine so that the army could close up with the Americans. The Germans were holding the Reichwald Forest and our orders were to clear them out so we could move right up to the banks of the Rhine. That battle took place in November and it was very wet and the Germans had also opened the sluice gates and the flood barriers. We did a lot of foot patrol work because even our vehicles couldn't get through the mud. Eventually we cleared all the Germans and then waited for the next operation which was the crossing of the Rhine."

  "After we crossed the Rhine we carried on with our role scouting and contact patrolling, trying to keep them on the run. We went up through Munster and then on to Luneberg Heath. We had already found a couple of prisoner of war camps - British prisoners of war and opened them up and we had a joyous party and laughs. Then one morning, on the edge of Luneberg Heath, we had an orders group and they said there was a camp up ahead. We were under the impression it was a another prisoner of war camp - didn't think much of it, so off we went. It was a nice sunny day I remember, and we got about a couple of miles from this big heavy wooded area in front and smelled a terrible stink, I kept looking around wondering what it was. The other Armoured car came up beside me and he said 'what's that stink?' I said 'I don't know, the breeze is coming from that wood', the officer said 'I think that's where the camp is', so we sent one troop to the left and one to right and we met round the front and that was the entrance to Belsen."  

"We couldn't quite puzzle out what it was, all the people in stripes, bodies on  the floor , and we're looking through the wire at it, we didn't know what a concentration camp was. We just didn't know what to do about it. There were thousands of people in there. The Guards were still there, they stood looking at us. We went up to at the gate and opened it and Colonel Kramer, the camp commandant, was there. He was a big man, about 6 ft 4  and he came over his hand extended to shake hands, which we refused to do because we couldn't take our eyes off all the corpses lying around and we withdrew out of the gate because it was too much for us to handle. I think I smoked about half a dozen cigarettes in 10 minutes. My stomach was rolling over and the officer was radioing back what he found, he said that reinforcements were coming to help us out. We stayed there and as the relief personnel gradually came in we carried on with our patrol work."

"About three days later we had another orders group and were told that there was another concentration camp ahead, I thought 'O this is all I want'. They asked us to get there quick because there was a dozen SAS prisoners in there. As we approached the camp, this was at Sandbostel it was a satellite camp of Belsen, the first thing we saw was all these people walking and crawling across the fields with striped pajamas on. They were going into local farms pinching chickens, cattle, sheep and terrorizing the German civilians, in some cases killing. We got about 500 yards from the camp and we saw one of the Guards run out from the gates and try to make it to a little wood. The commander said 'bring him down, bring him down' and I swung the turret round and fired a burst. As I did so there was a poor old horse standing in the field in my line of fire, the horse dropped and I brought the SS bloke down and we carried on into the camp. We entered the camp and made for the main administration block and rounded up some SS men and asked them where the blockhouse was where they kept the important prisoners We found some civilian prisoners there but the SAS had been murdered a couple of days before, they had hung them, so we were too late."