大象传媒

Lt. Sedgewick lay dead, pole-axed by a shell fragment straight to the heart, Jimmy Hewitt had been blown over backwards with a massive abdominal wound, Ginger had a big gash in his thigh, and Wally had chest wounds from shrapnel. At first I thought I had miraculously escaped injury and, after a brief pause to regain my breath, started the standard drill for dealing with wounded still under threat from attack (as shells were still landing all around and causing casualties - 14 all told - amongst other crews). This entailed dragging the less seriously wounded Ginger and Wally under the tank for some protection and giving them field dressings from the first-aid kit housed in a box at the back of the tank's hull, to apply themselves while I went to the aid of critically wounded Jimmy. He was conscious and by now in agony, bleeding extensively with his hands over the hole in his belly. I could see that field dressings were not going to be much use and that morphia was the first essential. Somehow, with trembling hands, I managed to insert the ampoule's needle and even remembered to mark his forehead with an "M鈥� to alert others and avoid an overdose. Then, glorious sight, an armoured half-track ambulance came trundling up, with stretcher bearers and medical orderlies; one of these called out 鈥淗ey, mate, the back of your shirt is covered in blood - let's have a look鈥�. This was the first intimation that I had not, in fact, escaped scot-free but had a gash in my head over the left ear (1 hadn't noticed that my beret was missing, later found in tatters), a small, deep wound between my shoulder blade and spine, and tiny splinters of shrapnel in one leg behind the knee. Roughly bandaged I was helped into the half-track with Wally (who was also "walking wounded鈥�) to find Jimmy and Ginger already installed on stretchers, and off we set for the emergency aid post for examination by the MO. Despite the morphia Jimmy was still in great pain, not improved by the rough ride; I held his hand which he clenched so tightly that his fingernails all but broke the skin of my palm, and during that short trip he died - no more to keep us cheerful with his Cockney humour such as ribbing me whenever I did something stupid or otherwise worthy of comment - such as misjudging the width of a ditch and shaking the crew up with a heavy landing. To me Jimmy was a true friend who had shown me the ropes from Day I back at Felton and the cruel ending of his young life was a sad, sad loss.

Back at the regimental aid post in St. Pol my own wounds were re-dressed after a brief examination by the MO and off I was sent to the nearest casualty clearing station near Arras - sitting on the back of a tank with
a few other less severely wounded men, since ambulances were still in great demand for stretcher cases. I still felt very little pain, probably because I was still fairly numb with shock. At the CCS antibiotics were
pumped into me together, I suspect, with a sedative as I was shown a camp bed in a tented ward and woke up some 12 hours later. Then followed a journey back to Amiens in an Army field ambulance in company with a civilian member of the French Resistance (the Maquis) who chattered and smoked Gallouises the whole way, despite having received several bullet wounds from a machinegun burst - my schoolboy French was quite inadequate but the odd V-sign and thumbs up seemed to satisfy him in response. After 48 hours under observation in the British Advance Hospital - the RAMC had taken over the civilian hospital at Amiens 鈥� and more injections and examinations (the whole ward being ordered to 鈥榣ie to attention鈥� for the MO鈥檚 rounds, accompanied by a formidable female nursing officer) it was decided that I shold be evacuated with others to a base hospital in England and ambulances took us to an airstrip .. where a US Army Air Force Dakota ambulance 'plane was warming up its engines for the Channel crossing. We were all secured in stretchers on racks along each side of the fuselage, eagerly contemplating our return to Blighty, when the captain and crew came aboard looking very shamefaced and clearly the bearers of bad news! "Sorry you guys, thick fog in the Channel, we have orders to stay this side of the water and land you at Bayeux - tough luck". Faces fell all around and a dejected silence reigned - as if to console us for our bitter disappointment, the Yankee crew showered us with goodies from their generous rations chocolate, Camel fags, canned beer and bourbon, probably all against good medical practice but very welcome none the less.
Base hospital at Bayeux was run by the Canadians, and the contrast with Amiens was astounding: formality was minimal, the food was tremendous and nursing sisters actually came and sat upon patients' beds when not busy. However, it was under canvas and a prolonged stay might not have been very
pleasant as the Autumn weather grew colder.
As it happened, after x-rays and consultations, the surgeons decided not to operate to extract the shrapnel from my back, I think because the risks of surgery in that area were considered to be greater than the possibility that the foreign body would penetrate deeper rather than work its way to the surface (which eventually it did, and the pea-sized piece of German shell remains with me to this day).

So, after about 10 days further under observation until my wounds bagan to heal cleanly I was packed off to a nearby convalescent camp 鈥� this time under British Army control - which turned out to be more of a toughening-up centre, reminiscent of initial training at Bovington, to prepare us for return to the front line. Two weeks of PT, etc., and I was declared fit again - just as well as transport back to the front (by then approaching the River Maas in Holland) was by very slow train in cattle trucks (shades of World War I "40 hommes ou 8 chevaux") which, when combined with short halts in transit camps and frequent shunting into sidings, took more than a week. I finally got back to the Squadron early in October, and back into 3rd. Troop as Lt. Fitzgerald's driver once again. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the Military Cross for a particularly hairy action in the village of Geffen which, together with a Rifle Brigade company, ,we succeeded in defending against a night-time attack by a strong force of the Wehrmacht, said by intelligence to be of battalion strength. To make matters especially difficult, Fitz's short range wireless set went on the blink so that, in order to keep in contact with the Rifle Brigade company commander and the other Troop crew commanders he had to keep dismounting, often under heavy fire, and dashing from one to another. So his gong was very well deserved but, sad to say, glory was shortlived for him as later in the campaign, about a month before ceasefire, he was killed by a sniper's bullet to the head. Like me he was a tall, slightly stooping, unsoldierly-looking character, with a quiet manner and a habitually lugubrious expression, but his courage and concern for those he led were never in doubt.

Winter, 1944, was fast approaching, and a bitterly cold one it was, too. For the rest of that year "holding the line" was generally the order of the day and, much against our dignity, we even spent some time in an infantry role dismounted and armed with rifles, shivering in slit trenches waiting for trip-flares to light up the night and warn of the stealthy approach of the enemy - or possibly a straying herd of sheep or cows who didn't know how to play the game and usually suffered premature slaughter for their ignorance. Part of the time was spent in Maastricht and Sittard in the Limburg province of Holland - a narrow tongue of land sandwiched between

Belgium and Germany - and from there we made occasional forays over the German border to mostly abandoned villages, running the gauntlet of enemy fire as we belted across the open terrain before gaining cover from the village buildings, and then having our heads kept down by mortar fire until the time came to return to base after a few days. Apart from "showing the flag' the purpose of those cat and mouse games was not clear to any of us!

In mid-December a draw was held for a few available places on a leave party to Brussels over Christmas and once again I struck lucky. Some kind soul in high command had ordered the taking over for five days of several top-class hotels to serve as leave centres and I was a guest at the Hotel Albert, right in the City centre. Due to my hospitalisation I had missed out on the ecstatic welcome bestowed by the Belgians upon their brave liberators (although I had listened to many soldiers' tales related with passionate nostalgia whilst manning those frozen fox-holes) but I am pleased to say that the people of Brussels still retained a generous ration of gratitude that Christmas, and a fabulous time was had by all - Christmas dinner was served in the hotel dining room on tables dressed in linen and silver by waiters in tails: the lap of luxury.

What an anticlimax to return in draughty 3-tonners to our units, and prepare for the last major obstacle en route (as we then thought, in our political innocence) to Berlin - the crossing of the Rhine. The German high command obviously also realised the significance of this barrier, and mustered enough crack troops to put up very stiff resistance in a rearguard action. The bitter cold hampered both sides and for most of January the ground was covered in thick snow and frozen too hard to dig our customary shallow pit to sleep in, so most nights we snatched what sleep we could inside the tank, sometimes waking to find our boots frozen to the armour-plating. Often I chose to sleep outside, perhaps in a rut cleared of snow, wrapped in blankets supplemented by a looted eiderdown, all cocooned in a tarpaulin; fortified with a rum ration I could work up quite a head of steam, and sleep comparatively well. In similar fashion, on January 24, I celebrated my 21st. birthday outside Montfort where the squadron was pinned down by heavy fire. To stave off the cold we were wearing many layers of clothes, including our onepiece tank suits, or "zoot suits" as they were nicknamed, topped with a bulky leather jerkin around which was buckled a webbing belt carrying a holster with a .38 Smith &Wesson revolver attached to a lanyard looped under one shoulder epaulette. An urgent call of nature had forced me to leave the tank via the driver's hatch and I was just zipping and buckling myself back into all that clobber when Jerry decided to have another go at us.

Recalling an earlier incident when dismounted under shellfire, I lost no time in returning to the sanctuary of the Cromwell, the exterior of which was slippery with icy patches. Despite all the obstacles I probably broke a record for scrabbling up the tracks and mudguards, then winkling myself through the narrow hatch, on which all the sticking-out~bits like my revolver seemed to catch, and down into relative security in the driver鈥檚 seat.

I think we were all sorry to leave Holland behind, having found the people generally very much like ourselves - not so excitable as the
Belgians nor so morose as the Norman French - with an ability to withstand great deprivation whilst under German occupation with stoicism but a high level of civil disobedience. Many boot-shod feet found their way comfortably under many Dutch tables, and some lasting friendships and liaisons came about as a result.

February and most of March were spent in the slow, painful push into Germany towards the Rhine. Records show that there were 5,000 Allied tanks and only 500 German tanks deployed in that operation, but this numerical superiority takes no account of the advantages of fighting a rearguard action in familiar territory, together with tremendous superiority of firepower and effective range the Panzer units possessed in the now dominant Tigers and Panthers, which we could only destroy by outflanking and aiming at the thinner side armourplating of the hull, making use of the greater speed and manoeuvrability of our Cromwells. The Sherman Fireflies armed with long-barrelled 11 pounders came nearest to parity with German tanks, but they were slow and, with a high profile, presented an easy target so their uses were limited and, in any event, our armoured regiments were only equipped with one per troop of four tanks. In many cases, especially where the Panzer crews had time to dig-in their vehicles in defensive position~, the only effective weapon against them was the rocket firing Typhoon and the RAF squadrons acting in support of XII Corps did sterling work.

With the thaw came floods and boggy ground, which made matters worse. Somewhere along the line our Cromwell shed a track - not an uncommon occurrence, especially on soft ground, but a hazardous one when under attack as the tank immediately became immobilised, losing drive and steering power. There was a well practised drill for dealing with such an emergency which usually involved the whole Troop: two tanks would provide as much cover as possible while the third would get into position first to drag the loose track out straight on the nearest firm, level ground and then to tow the trackless tank until the big Christie bogey wheels engaged in the laid-out track plate flanges - a ticklish operation which involved two crew members manhandling a heavy steel-hawser tow rope often while under fire, then others dismounting to assist in dragging the track over the rear toothed drive sprocket, guiding it over the bogies and the front idler wheel, inserting a link-pin to join the two track ends, belting the pin with a sledgehammer to rivet it over and finally tensioning the refitted track with a long steel lever fitted into an eccentric cam on the idler wheel (a task needing all the muscle of two or three men).
All pretty heavy work but, in the heat of battle with adrenalin running, performed with an expertise and will seldom encountered in ordinary life.

We eventually crossed the Rhine at the end of March, 1945, on a temporary pontoon bridge assembled under fire by the Royal Engineers, between the towns of Xanten and Wesel. Driving a 30 ton tank on a floating bridge is a weird experience as the weight of the vehicle partly submerges the 'pontoons and the flexible "road鈥� surface in front tends to billow up and reduce visibility; as the bridge width was often only a foot or so more than the tank keeping a straight course needed intense concentration. After the crossing there was more fierce fighting to hold the narrow bridgehead and, when we broke out, we found that Jerry had liberally sown the roads and verges with heavy Teller mines, quite capable of disabling a tank. Once again the RE mine-clearing squads and the odd-looking Sherman flail tanks of the 79th Armoured Division were indispensable.

At about this time I was promoted "in the field" to full Corporal and put in command of my own tank and crew.

Losses of crew commanders had been heavy, often due to sniper fire as, with heads and shoulders projecting from the turret hatch, they formed a vulnerable target. In each troop of four tanks there were generally a full lieutenant as troop leader, two sergeants (or sometimes one and a second lieutenant 鈥渓earning the trade") and one corporal acting as crew commanders. My new crew consisted of Wally Gent (like me, recovered from his wounds and returned to duty), Terry Saunders, "Bin" Binfield and Bill Lambe, who, as wireless operator, stood beside me in the turret with his head out of a separate hatch and often acted as a second pair of eyes when things got busy - Bin, the gunner, had a very restricted field of view through the sighting telescope mounted coaxially with the 75 mm and the Besa machinegun, and had to be guided on to any target by orders through the intercom., using the variable speed power traverse to rotate the turret.

By now we knew that we were heading not for Berlin but for Hamburg and our route took us through Osnabruck, south of Bremen to Soltau on Luneburg Heath, meeting stiff opposition most of the way from some fairly fanatical 鈥渓ast ditch鈥� forces, including young cadets, and arriving finally at Harburg (on the opposite bank of the River Elbe from Hamburg) early in May. On May 8, the ceasefire was declared and the Regiment moved through Hamburg (once again marvelling at the devastation caused by bombing, as well as the resilience of the population many of whom were already clambering over the piles of rubble selecting and cleaning bricks for early rebuilding) up into Schleswig Holstein to the Kiel Canal.

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