Service Record

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"We continued the advance towards Bremen. Nothing happened until we got to the outskirts of Bremen and we started getting opposition from the ruins of the town, sniper fire, machine gunfire etc. After a day we cleared our section of the city and we started to have a look around. I visited the Focke-Wulf factory there - a vast layout. in my wanderings around the place I came to a long building and went in and sitting at the front desk was a dapper little Frenchman - black moustache and smart black suit. I said who are you and he said 'I'm the chief of the entertainments', I said 'what entertainment?' and he describes how if the slave workers at the factory had done a good week's work they were given a chitty to visit this hut. I said 'what have you got here, a cinema?'. He said 'no follow me'. And down the central corridor there were all rooms leading off and when I looked into the rooms there was a maiden in each room, there were about 50 women in all these little rooms, that was their free chitty for a couple of hours sex, it was a brothel. I was joined by a couple of my comrades and we thought this was very nice and so we said to the Frenchman will be back shortly. So we ambled the back to where we had left our Armoured car and got cleaned up from our dirty clothes and had a wash. When we looked a bit respectable we hurried back to the brothel but when we got there we found that the Military Police had put it out of bounds."

"We left Bremen and had to press on to Kiel and then on to Flensburg - the last German town before you get to Denmark. Flensburg was where Admiral Doenitz, he had been nominated Chancellor after Hitler died, had his headquarters. The ceasefire came while we were on our the way up there and we came across this German naval division and we started disarming them. We stayed in their barracks for a couple of days and then an order came to issue all the weapons back to the German Division. It seems that the Russians had advanced along the coast to Rostock and they seemed to be intent on coming a bit farther then they should and someone had the bright idea of re-arming the Germans to help us keep them back. So we handed back the weapons but an hour or two later a counter order came along - take the weapons back - it seemed that they had come to an agreement with the Russians to stop."

"We then carried on to Flensburg proper and disarmed all the German sailors. They put us in this German barracks which were very comfortable and nice. They gave us a German civilian to come and clean our rooms out every morning and he did a very good job and I used to treat him to cigarettes and drinks. After a week he disappeared and I went down to the troop office and said 'Where's our cleaner?' they said he was a commandant of Auschwitz camp and he was running around disguised as a civilian, to think I'd given the bugger cigarettes and drink!."

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