大象传媒

A Rookie鈥檚 Tale

Page 4/6 by Jack Nicholls

We travelled through the night and arrived at the point where we were to rendezvous with a Battalion of Infantry. They had been holding a defence position, our job was to take them to their new positions. We parked on a long straight road to await their arrival. Dawn had just broken and we dismounted from the
vehicles to stretch our legs after the long drive. As we stood around ln twos and threes chatting, someone casually said 鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of planes up there.鈥� Poor lnnocents we were. We watched the planes coming towards us, when someone suddenly shouted "They're German. Take cover". We dived for the ditch as the bombs started to whistle down, exploding with terrific bangs. Fortunately the planes weren鈥檛 Stukas, it was a fairly high level attack and the bombs fell on the other side of the road from us, but there was plenty of shrapnel flying about. One young lad standing in the back of his truck and who hadn't apparently heard the warning was hit and had a large piece torn out of the top of the inside of his leg. He hobbled to the tail board, clutching his wound, shouting repeatedly 鈥淛ust missed my b鈥�---s.鈥� We patched him up with a Field Dressing and he was taken off to the nearest Aid Post. Poor lad. That was the last we heard of him. If he survived he was probably taken prisoner, as the enemy very shortly afterwards overran that area. His hadn't been a long war. After that it was chaotic. We could only move with the utmost difficulty during the daytime due to Air attacks and refugees clogging the roads,
pushing their bits of belongings along in carts, prams, in fact anything that had wheels. The M.P.'s would get them off the roads into nearby fields to allow Military traffic get through. There they presented a sitting target for the Luftwaffe and the scenes of carnage after the raids were horrific. We were under frequent attack from the air, and it became so bad that troop movements were made in the daytime only if it
was imperative and most of our journeys were at night. The worst time on convoy was just before dawn, when it was a real fight to keep from falling asleep, whilst driving along, through sheer fatigue.

Most of that time has now become blurred in my memory but one incident I particularly remember happened when we were harboured up under some trees near a French town. I think it was Arras. A flock of Stukas arrived, formed a circle above the town, then one by one peeled off, dived absolutely vertically and at the last moment released their bombs, then zoomed back up to rejoin the circle, ready for the next dive. The noise of the planes, the screech of their sirens as they dived, and the clang of the exploding bombs
was terrifying. What happened to the troops and civilians who suffered at the centre of the raid doesn鈥檛 bear thinking about. We saw one solitary R.A.F. plane arrive on the scene but he was shot down almost immediately and
crashed in a nearby field. We ran over to see if anything could be done to help the pilot but all we found was a crater in which the plane had buried itself and a single gauntlet glove in which was the Pilot's severed hand.
In the early morning, a day or so after, a German light Observation plane came over,
flying fairly low, no doubt looking for targets for the Stukas. A machine gun opened up at him and we watched the tracer reaching for the plane until it eventually sliced into it and down the plane came. Needless to say
a Ioud cheer went up. Stories were flying around about German Fifth Columnists and we heard that one had been caught, dressed in Priest's clothes, over his uniform and had been shot out of hand by the C.O. who discovered him. On one of the troop movements we were warned that German Tanks were approaching down a side road. A section of vehicles, loaded with Infantry, was detached and sent down the side road with orders to stop the tanks at any cost, if necessary, to create a road block with the vehicles. A Bridge on the side road was blown up after they had gone over and unfortunately nothing was again heard of that Section.

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