"Quite a sight"
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"Another quite interesting
day once, just to the west of Nijmegen up in Holland. it become quite a
quiet area, the Army was mostly engaged over to the east going towards the Rhine
and the Canadians were on our far left some miles away, and the area in front of
us was quite desolate - winter time, marshy, cut across with canals, ditches,
but it was very quiet and the old Colonel, he wanted to know what was going
on up ahead of us, towards the German side, so he decided to send out a
reconnaissance patrol. It consisted of Lieutenant Marsh, myself, and three other
chaps, the machine gun section.
"So off we set and it was quite interesting. It was good to get out of the bloody tanks and Armoured cars, out of the turret, sitting in there for bloody hours, and getting fed up. It was good to get on your feet and have a look round so I was quite chuffed about it, so we set off and we went about five miles, didn’t see a bugger we didn’t, didn’t see no signs of life, no civilians, no Germans or anybody but we pushed on and then we started seeing the odd German knocking around in the hamlets and villages, just walking about. We kept out of their way, we just kept our head down and watched what was going on, but they were quite at ease, some were walking about with no weapons. They obviously didn’t expect any trouble but as we were going further forward we gradually met more and more of them in the villages and we decided to drop the machine gun section, and myself and Lieutenant Marsh decided to go on ahead as far as this canal, which was about another mile and a half further forward, so off we crawled through the wood and ditches and what-have-you, and come to this canal - it was too wide to cross - and we just lay there observing this other side looking through our binoculars and we were scouting round there looking through, peering, and in the distance, I suppose about three miles away, there rose a bloody great cloud of white smoke and I nudged the Lieutenant and he started looking at it as well, and there was a long slender thing in the middle of the smoke, and it gradually rose into the air like a long pencil. It gradually gathered speed and disappeared into the clouds and I said ‘What was that?’, and he looked at me and said ‘I don’t know, something went up in the air then’, and we were trying to decide what it was. Obviously it was a bloody great explosion to send it up there because the smoke it created, so we couldn’t quite make out what it was, but we thought we’d gone far enough so we, decided to start crawling back to the machine gun section and met them and they said there’d been quite a lot of activity."
| Alf and the boys come back from foot patrol - Arnhem 1944 |
"They
were lying near a lane in the ditch and there were Germans going up and down
this lane and, bodies lying there. We saw four Germans coming towards us,
one was riding a bike and the other three were just walking along beside him and there was a discussion going on whether to take ‘em out, this
Corporal with the machine gun section, he thought it’d be a bloody good idea
to, but I thought it was a bit unsporting really, poor sods, three of them
didn’t have no guns on them and you know. The Lieutenant said, ‘Well, I
don’t think we’d better, we’re not a fighting patrol, we’re just here to
observe’, and he said we might stir up a bleeding hornet’s nest if we shoot
this lot so we just let them- they walked right by us, about fifteen feet
away and the chaps were chatting away, smoking, but anyway we managed - we went
back to the regiment and we were de-briefed and in the de-briefing I told them
what we’d seen on the map, these German units, and also mentioned about this
big explosion, white smoke, and this thing shooting up in the air. So he said
‘What was it?’ And I said ‘I don’t know’, but I said ‘It was just a
big cloud of smoke and this long slender thing rose
"Anyway,
he went out but that evening there was a staff officer came down and he wanted
to interview us again and he sat us down and we explained what we’d seen
and we tried, we couldn’t, we had no idea what it was but he smiled and he
said, ‘That was a rocket.’ I said ‘What do you mean, a rocket?’ He
said ‘V2’. Course, up to then we hadn’t heard about any V2s. We’d heard
about the flying bombs but we’d never heard of V2's. Well, that was when they
just started sending them over to Antwerp and to London and of course it was a
completely new thing to us. ‘So’, he said, ‘what you saw was a rocket
being sent up.’ And he said, ‘That’s very interesting.’ We told him, we
gave him the background of it and that was quite an interesting operation,
that was. First time I heard or saw a rocket going up but nobody saw ‘em
coming down.
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