大象传媒

This story has been transcribed and submitted to the site by Jemma Bellingham on behalf of Burt Price. Burt understand the terms and conditions of the site.

"We were moving up through Holland and while we were moving up, we came to a junction in the road and the company commander said there's a machine gun, a German machine gun that had been firing at us and he wanted this machine gun put out of action. I was number one section corporal and he said to me "do you think you could, being as you're the leading section, go and do something about this machine gun?" I said "Yes, we'll go and do our best anyway". So I loaded myself up with four grenades and I took two chaps with me from the leading section. We got down and of course, we were already behind cover while all this was going on because of the machine gun firing, and we crawled forward across the other part of the road and we came to a field.

When we got to this field, you could feel and you could see in the moonlight, it was quite bright moonlight, it was a ploughed field. So I said to the 2 lads "keep a distance of about two yards from each other and we'll crawl across, if you want to speak, crawl in and touch the other one you want to speak to." So anyway, we crawled across this ploughed field and when we got to the other side we could see the machine gun post, so we threw our grenades at this machine gun post and silenced it. We never heard anymore from it, so we moved across, our instructions were to move across and take cover at the other side. So we moved across and came to what looked like a farmyard.

We went round the farm building and came out beside an orchard at the back of the farm. So I said to the 2 lads "I think we'd be sensible if we dug in somewhere along the side of that hedge" So they dug a trench. While they were digging, I heard somebody coming through the orchard towards us. So I waited, I hung about behind one of these fruit trees. When I heard them getting nearer, I shouted "stand still, I鈥檓 a British Soldier, stand still." Whoever it was stopped. I said "who are you" and she said "please don't shoot, I鈥檓 a Dutch civilian". I asked her who she was and she told me she lived at the farm and all of her family were underground in a shelter. I told her to take me to them to let me she who they were. We went down some steps into this shelter made from wood. It had been dug out of the soil and the roof propped up. All of the family were sitting round, so we went to see them and stayed there overnight.
The next morning, when we saw the company commander again, he told us we'd done a good job overnight. He also told us about a Flail Tank. A Flail Tank is a tank that has an arm on the front of it and in the middle is a roller; on this roller are chains with weights on the end. As the tank goes along, the chains go round and it spins and these things hit the ground. The idea is to set off any grenades or mines. They were going off all over the place on that field that we crawled across just the night before and we didn't know anything about them being there. We were very lucky"

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