"Rounding up the prisoners"

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"After the Arnhem battle in September, things became pretty quiet up that part of Holland and the army shifted its attention over to the right flank, the Reichwald, prior to moving up to the Rhine. The battles there were more important than where we were, and things became a little bit stagnant round there." 

"The main thing was a logistic problem. Supplies coming up from the Normandy beaches were running out and they hadn't got Antwerp into operation. Anyway, we were hanging on round the Nijmegen area. We called it the cowboy country because everybody seemed to have lost interest round there after the battle of Arnhem, and it was between the rivers of the Upper and Lower Rhine, and all it consisted of was patrolling up there just to keep an eye on things. The Germans were patrolling as well as us, mostly footwork between the rivers. We used to go out with a patrol of about a dozen men, ten or a dozen, just to keep an eye on things. One day we went out and after crossing some dykes and ditches and woods, we finished up at a nice little farmhouse. We made it our little HQ there prior to going out from there for further patrols. We tried to make ourselves comfortable but the problem was there was a dead Jerry lying on a mattress in the house and he stunk to hell. He’d been lying there for weeks. Well, we had to get him out but he was rotten. We all tried lifted him up on this mattress, carried him downstairs, and tried to squeeze him through the back door, and he was rolling about on the mattress. Anyway, we managed to get him out and sling him out in the back courtyard, and after we’d cleaned the place up a bit and set up our positions, I decided to take a little stroll. There was a little outhouse about fifty yards away, and I ambled over there just to see what was in there, and as I went round the corner of this little outhouse I came face to face with a German just walking towards me. He had his rifle slung over his shoulder and we both just stopped and looked at one another, and I put my hand on the butt of my revolver but I didn’t draw it and he just looked at me, and I looked at him for, I suppose, ten or twelve seconds, but in the end he just let his rifle slip off his shoulder on to the ground, and I beckoned to him to come over to the house."

"He was quite a decent chap, about forty years old, I suppose he was. Anyway, we questioned him, gave him some food - he was pretty hungry - and he was smoking like a trooper. We asked him where he’d come from and he said he was with a little troop in the woods about three-quarters of a mile in front of us, a member of a mortar team, and he said his men were pretty fed up. He said he’d just come out to have a walk round and see if he could find some food and what-have-you, in this house we were in. Anyway, we asked him if he’d like to go back and have a chat with his mate, try and bring them over, and he agreed, so off he went. While he’d gone we deployed ourselves just in case they decided to make a bit of a show of it, and we lay there for about an hour, hour and a half, and after a while we saw the five of them walking back towards us through the woods and only too glad to give themselves up. They came in, started digging into the cigarettes and the grub and oh, everything turned out lovely. So on the way back to our squadron HQ we all went back together and we handed them over, and we were considered heroes. We had a good laugh over it!"

"People have asked what were my views about Germans during the war. I suppose, like most people before I went in the army I cursed them up hill and down dale, but once I was out there I wasn’t bitter in any sense of the word. I just took it as it comes. I did find that the feeling on the home front in England was pretty grim. On my leaves back home the language used, especially by my father and mother, was a bit heavy to say the least, and most of the population that I met was the same. But I wasn’t a very hateful person, I don’t think I was cut out to be hateful, somehow. I was a poor soldier in that respect, but it got me into trouble once."

"We was up round Breskins pocket in northern Holland there, and we’d had a little bit of a fire fight on a platoon level and troop level, and anyway, my wagon was out of commission - the front wheel was smashed out - and after the action we had a few casualties and we took three prisoners, and while I was hanging about, my Lieutenant Evans, he asked me to run these these prisoners back down the lanes to a military police compound a couple of miles down the lane. So we ambled down there, it was pouring with rain, and as we were walking along we had a cigarette. I gave them cigarettes, had a chat in general, and one of them, showed me a chitty that an English officer had written out saying in effect ‘Show this man a bit of respect, he helped our wounded’. So I said to him, ‘When you get back to this compound, show it to the Police Sergeant, and you’ll be all right.’ So when we got there the Police Sergeant Major was there, he met me, and he said ‘What you got - another three of the bastards?’ So I said ‘Yes’ and I said to this Jerry, ‘Show him your chitty’, and he read it, the sergeant did, and then flung it away in the mud. So I picked it up and I said, ' What the bloody hell’s eating you?’ He said, ‘Well, these bastards have been killing our blokes up there, we’re not going to show no respect to them.’ I said, ‘Well, it didn’t worry me, it shouldn’t worry you back here. You ain’t going to get shot.’ And one thing led to another and anyway, he put me under arrest for insubordination."

"So after he’d slung these Germans in their compound to join about a hundred in there already - he chucked me in this other little wired compound in a field. Pouring with rain and I was sitting there on me tod. But I give the old Jerry his due, one of them slung over a waterproof cape, and I slung that over me.  I was sitting there for a couple of hours, and then a jeep turned up, it was Lieutenant Evans and his driver, and he looked at me and he said, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing there?’. I told him ‘I’m under arrest, so he went into the house, and I could hear him arguing with the military police. They came out and opened the gate and said, ‘Come on, get in the jeep and bugger off, anyway before we went I went over to the driver of the jeep, old Taffy, and I said, ‘Got any cigarettes, Taffy?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I’ve got three tins of Capstan’, so he gave me the three tins of Capstan and I went over to the German compound and I threw them over the wire, and they all scrambled for them. The look on that Sergeant Major’s face! I think he could have scalped me.  That’s the way I was - they’ve had their day today, it might be my day tomorrow. I never robbed a German, I didn’t see any ill-treatment by my comrades against them. We may have given them a kick up the backside but there was nothing really serious and that’s how I liked it."

"There’s a sequel to this little story. About a week after that, my troop sergeant come over to me and said, ’You’re on squadron orders’ - this meant you’d committed some misdemeanor. I thought, well I’ve done nothing - and he said, ‘Well, you’re on squadron orders, in front of the Major’. So I went over there and he marched me in, saluted, blah, blah, blah - the Major read the charge out and it was about insubordination to a superior officer, a military police officer. The buggers had sent the charge on. So the old Major looked at me, and he said, ‘This is a very serious case, very serious’ he said. ‘I’ve got to punish you severely.’ So I said, ‘Yes sir, three bags full, sir’, and all that sort of thing, and he studied his old desk, drumming his finger on the desk. I thought, I wonder what’s coming now. Anyway, he looked up, had a nice smile on his face, and said ‘Well, how does one day’s pay suit you?’, and I said, ‘Very nice, sir, very nice’, considering we hadn't seen no pay for months. so he said, ‘Right, dismiss’. That was it, so I got away with it bloody light."

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