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My father, Henry Sayers(Harry)was a young man of 24 during D-day and the subsequent battles of conquest. He has told me many things about the war, of the places he was, the people he met and the things he saw and experienced. One thing stands out for me about all this; he has never once said that he hated people or nationalities, but rather that it was a battle of good against evil. I recently asked him about D-day and he wrote(he is now 84 years old):

‘I was put ashore some time during the early evening and the boat ran up to the firm sand so I didn’t even get my feet wet! At the top of the beach there were a dozen or so German prisoners crouching behind the sand dunes. They looked very sorry for themselves and were obviously glad the war was over for them. I was 24 at the time of D-Day but the Germans were very young — I should say about 17 or 18 at the most. They were escorted back to the landing craft we had arrived in, which left fairly smartly as the odd shell was still landing on the beach. I didn’t feel afraid as I had been through it before in Algeria and Salerno in Italy. The remarkable thing was that I didn’t think we could lose the war, despite all the reverses we suffered. There was no arrogance there; just a quiet confidence that things would come right in the end’.

In fact my father pushed on with his unit through to Holland in an attempt to join up with the parachutists who had been dropped at Arnheim. He stayed on in Germany for 18 months after the war, helping the returning German soldiers to find employment and relocate their families. He stayed in German families himself and found the people to be very welcoming and hospitable. He shared a love of music with them and was far from unhappy there. So it is not very surprising that after his return to England, his marriage to an English girl and my own birth that he told me about Germany and the good things about the nation as well as the facts of the war. He encouraged me to learn German at school thinking that with better communication we would have a greater chance to understand how foreigners thought. I, in fact, took to the language so well that I went on to get my degree in German and now I am married to a German, have three children and teach English to adults here. I have been here for 26 years.

One of my older pupils is 77 year old Bruno. He was one of those 17 year old boys on D-day and was captured on the bridge at Arnheim about the same time my father was at Remargen. Bruno was taken to Devises, England to a POW camp and for the first time heard about the real atrocities that had been going on in Germany. I hear from many of my pupils how ignorant the majority of the population was of the atrocities going on in the concentration camps. A couple of years ago during a visit to Germany my father met up with Bruno and compared notes on those years. Needless to say it was an emotional time for them both.

My father still has numerous postcards and photos of the time but the diaries which he kept during the war are exhibited in his Corps Museum in Surrey. They document a time which is now history but one which will never be forgotten.

Margaret Moldenhauer
(nee Sayers)

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