Maddocks The West at War 1939-45

1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5433-4
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

The West at War, due to accompany a major 6-part series for ITV1 West of England, produced by Testimony Films and to be broadcast across May/June 2005, commemorates the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II and features the stories of servicemen and women from Bristol and the South West.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Maddocks, Nick

Leseproben

ONE

Last Man, Last Round

The Glosters and the Battle of France

When war broke out on 3 September 1939 two battalions of the Gloucestershire Regiment were selected to go to France with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). The 2nd Battalion, based at Seaton Barracks in Plymouth, was made up of regular soldiers like Jim Loftus and Bill Lacey and because they were already trained for battle, they set sail for France in early October. Officers like Julian Fane whose training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, had been cut short by the outbreak of war joined the battalion in France. The 5th Battalion was formed from a combination of Territorial soldiers and recently conscripted ‘Belisha Boys’, the first militia men called up by Secretary of State Leslie Hore-Belisha. New recruits like Joe Trinder and Len Llewellyn served alongside trained soldiers including Bill Stanton and young officer Frank Henn, who were drafted in to bolster the strength of the battalion. Having undertaken a period of further training in England, the 5th Battalion sailed for France in January 1940.

The first few months in France marked the period known as the Phoney War. The Glosters passed the time training and digging trenches in the frozen fields, wondering if and when they would see action. The harsh conditions they faced were evocatively captured by a newsreel photographer when he filmed the 5th Battalion on exercise in the village of Thumeries at the end of January 1940. Both battalions were then posted in front of the Maginot Line, the supposedly impenetrable fortified defences built by the French to keep the Germans out, and it was here that many men had their first encounters with the German Army. One particularly fierce exchange occurred on 3 March in the town of Grindorff, where Sergeant Bill Adlam became the first TA soldier of the war to receive the Military Medal after he recovered a Bren gun while under fire.

On 10 May 1940 the Phoney War was brought to a swift conclusion as German forces began their lightning assault on the Low Countries: German Panzers and paratroopers began to sweep across Western Europe. In response the British Army was sent into Belgium, which had previously been out of bounds because of its neutrality, and on 14 May the Glosters made their way up to the plains of Waterloo, where they hoped to settle in for battle. Initially this choice of location brought some comfort to the men because the Glosters had acquitted themselves admirably against French forces on that famous battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars. But within hours, news arrived that the Germans had broken through the French ranks and the Glosters were forced to withdraw. It was a frustrating time for both battalions because the men were keen to stand and hold the line, but such was the speed of the German advance that they were in danger of being cut off. Six days and nights were spent in a constant cycle of withdrawing, stopping, digging in, then withdrawing again and at one point the 5th Battalion marched an incredible 95 miles in just 83 hours, a feat all the more admirable considering there was little in the way of food or rest. The difficulties were exacerbated by the constant threat of aerial bombardment from the dreaded Stuka dive-bombers and the fact that many roads were clogged with refugees. In the circumstances, it was perhaps not surprising that men like Len Llewellyn were separated from the rest of their battalion and forced to make their own way to the coast.

On 19 May the 5th Glosters were eventually able to hold a defensive position on the banks of the River Escault and it was here that gunner Bill Stanton was particularly successful in preventing the Germans from crossing in rubber boats. Just 4 miles away the 2nd Battalion was passing through the town of Tournai in a truck convoy when it became bogged down in heavy traffic. For the Luftwaffe it was too good an opportunity to miss, and Julian Fane, Jim Loftus and Bill Lacey all have vivid memories of the ensuing aerial bombardment which cost the lives of 194 men of the battalion. By 22 May German Panzer divisions had reached the outskirts of Boulogne and the decision was made to evacuate the BEF from Dunkirk. But if this plan was to be successful, selected divisions of the British Army would have to defend a perimeter around the French port to allow the exhausted troops time to escape. The Glosters were among those chosen for the role.

On 23 May, the 5th Battalion was instructed to hold the small villages of Arneke and Ledringhem, which lie some 10 miles south of Dunkirk. The following day, the depleted 2nd Battalion was ordered to take up positions in the strategically important hillside town of Cassel, which lies on the main road to Dunkirk and commands spectacular views all the way to the coast. Indeed Cassel had been used as a headquarters by Marshal Foch who commanded Allied forces during the First World War and was also the hill upon which the Grand Old Duke of York, of nursery rhyme fame, famously marched his 10,000 men in 1793.

In the days that followed, both Glosters battalions were subjected to fierce German attack from tanks, artillery, infantry and, of course, from the air, but their defence was nothing less than resolute. Their orders had been to hold the line at all costs and if that meant to the last man, last round, then so be it.

JULIAN FANE

I’d intended to go into the Army, so I went to Sandhurst and we were there when war was declared. They immediately cut short our course and so we completed only six months. But still, we were excited by the thought of war and quite frankly we couldn’t wait to join our regiments. We couldn’t think otherwise, that’s what we wanted to do. I went to the Glosters, the regiment of my selection, a very fine regiment who had a very interesting and excellent history and who actually had been commanded by my uncle. My father commanded the 12th Lancers, so it was a question of one or the other. I arrived in France near Lille, where I joined the 2nd Battalion at the age of 19 and was posted to B Company. The thing that impressed me about the 2nd Battalion was that there were a lot of long-service non-commissioned officers and sergeants, which was an enormous help to a 19-year-old 2nd lieutenant, and they more or less took charge of us, rather than us taking charge of them, in the initial stages of the war. I was always grateful for that. The immediate reaction that I had when I arrived in France was they were busy teaching us to dig trenches and build barbed-wire fences, which I rather thought was not the kind of training I had expected for a modern war. It seemed to be to be based on the old 1914–18 war. I also noticed that a lot of the tactical side seemed not to consider the possibility of a mechanised attack. We were still marching on our feet and using not very up-to-date weapons.

Julian Fane’s training at Sandhurst was cut short when war broke out in 1939.

We started moving on 14 May and made our way slowly in transport or on Shanks’s pony to end up on the plains of Waterloo. I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is a good start for a battle.’ Then we deployed and we waited. After that we were overwhelmed because the flanks were never secured, in my opinion. The French had trained to fight in the Maginot Line and I don’t think they were as prepared as we might be to fight in the open. People fell back on both sides of us and we really had what I would like to call a fighting withdrawal. Some people had the temerity to call it a retreat, but a retreat indicates a sort of disorderly arrangement, whereas our withdrawal was very closely co-ordinated. We were standing to fight all the time and preparing to hold a line. And it infuriated us because we were lacking in sleep and we were moving an awful lot. You’d dig a hole, a defensive line, and sometimes you’d get a bullet or two whistle in your direction, but there was no attack in front of you. You were then told to fall back to another line and you didn’t know what the hell was happening. All the troops were getting browned off. They didn’t want to keep going back. They wanted to get settled and have a fight. All the Glosters, including myself, felt very despondent and disappointed that we should be withdrawing so often. It’s not what we’d joined the Army to do.

On 19 May we were in a convoy of trucks leading out of Belgium when we came to the town of Tournai. The roads were clogged with refugees and cars and carts with mattresses on top, all fleeing down the same road that we were motoring down. The Germans then started bombing the convoy and about three trucks behind me they hit our ammunition truck. Things were exploding in every direction. My platoon was walking section by section down the road and I jumped into a ditch. The aeroplanes then started strafing the road, the refugees, everybody in sight. You could hear the bullets whistling over your head, and of course they killed innumerable people – women, children, babies, as well as soldiers. There’s nothing you can do except keep your head down and hope. That’s all you could do. Once it had finished you had to get up and survey the scene and rally the troops and get moving. There was no emotion other than fear. There was nothing else you could do.

We continued on for several days and arrived eventually at a place called Cassel. On entering the town we found that it had been very severely bombed, that there were many French corpses and lots of animals had been killed, lots of the horses used for towing guns. And so we had a horrible and unpleasant job of clearing all the mess up before we could deploy. Unfortunately, a lot of the people were still living in their houses and had to be kicked out, which was unsatisfactory,...