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Recently I’ve visited the graves of two of my uncles who died during the war.

My Mother’s brother, John Hadnutt, was a Royal Marine who died just before the end of the War on St. George’s Day (April 23rd)1945, aged 22.

In 2003 I went over to Holland to see the place where he was killed. Alem, near Zalt Bommel, is a little village about an hour from Amsterdam. We’d been told that John had been buried near a Mr. Hannegraffe’s house, killed by a sniper, according to his friend and fellow Marine, ‘Dodger’ Davis, but later his body was moved to the War Cemetery at Bergen Op Zoom, about 2 hours from Amsterdam.

I went there not expecting much, but after enquiries, I found out that Mr. Hannegraffe’s son was still alive and living in Alem. Straight away, Mr. Hannegraffe — the original owner’s son, who’d been 17 at the time — pointed to an unmarked area by the house, where my Uncle John had been buried, and to where two Germans had been buried behind him. It was in a lane, with nothing to indicate that people had been buried there, but Mr. Hannegraffe remembered exactly.

The other Uncle was my Dad’s stepbrother, Harry Dye, a Royal Fusilier killed in Italy in 1943, when he was 25 years old. The Sangro River War Cemetery, near Pascara, is a beautiful place about 4 hours from Rome, and holds the bodies of Servicemen from a number of the Allied countries.

The cemeteries are both kept in immaculate condition and it was really interesting to visit the two graves.

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