大象传媒

This is one of my father, Ronald Tee's reminiscences in his own words. He served with the 56th Recce Regiment, 78th Battleaxe Division:

"We pulled into a town very late one afternoon. The Germans were just leaving so we went over to the other side of the town and decided to stay there the night, because it was dark now, and we would move on in the morning.

There's a main road out of the town along side of a farmhouse that we harboured up in. Two of us at a time would sit in the open turret of a heavy armoured car that we parked alongside the road and look down towards the German positions keeping our eyes open for any movement.

Another lad and myself took our turn around midnight. The other fellow with me was very, very nervous. He kept seeing things. Finally he said, "I see something over there by the fence!", and sure enough there was.

Out of the gloom came three figures - heavily armed and we could see they were Germans because of their helmets. They slowly came toward our vehicle and they must have spotted it but I don't think they saw us in the turret. They just stood there motionless.

As they stood there, another German came from out of the ditch on the other side of the road to join them. By this time, my buddy had disappeared down inside the turret into the car. I just stood there and, remembering my little bit of German, I said, "Halt!" With that they did halt! And then I said, "Kommen see Heah"! [phonetic spelling]. Well they seemed to look a bit relieved then and all started forward. At this point I said, "Ein! Ein!", which of course means "One". It's the only way I could put it but it seemed to work. The leader started walking forward on his own. It wasn't very long before the others started coming behind him and they got very very close to my vehicle and I didn't know what I was going to do. [laughing] All of a sudden, they must have seen my steel helmet and recognized me as a British soldier. They threw up their arms, threw down their rifles and whatever and gave themselves up.

It was a very very strange feeling because it was nip and tuck whether I was going to give myself up first! [laughing]. I jumped out of the turret, grabbed the leader, shook his hand and said, "You Silly Bugger!! I nearly killed you!"

I felt good about that as the years went by. I didn't kill him - I captured him and they went back to their families eventually after the war.

Incidently, within twenty minutes or so that farmhouse we were in was being heavily shelled. We felt sure that there was at least one, or more, German soldiers in that ditch by the road who never came up, saw what happened, went back and gave information of who and where we were to their gunners."

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