大象传媒

This story is in my father's own words. He served with the 56th Recce Regiment, 78th Battleaxe Division:

"We eventually went through the straits of Gibraltar and knew by this time that we were heading for a landing. It turned out to be the landing at Algiers, the biggest of the war at that time for American and British soldiers. We landed on the beaches with our weapons held high, - ready to do or die. There was nobody there, ...so we made tea.
We very quickly received our vehicles from the port where our boats had pulled in and headed for Tunisia with the rest of the army behind. The idea was to beat the Germans to the port of Tunis, but they made it first and we ran into them about 30 miles from the capital.

It was on this drive that we first experienced the Stuka dive-bomber, which of course was German. This plane would come dead-straight down, very fast from a great height and not release it's bombs 'til it was almost to the ground and then zoom up and away. Attached to the plane somewhere or other was a gizmo that caused a terrible, terrible screaming sound as the wind went through it. I'm sure there was many a soldier who filled his pants on first hearing this noise.

Anyway the Germans were there, and in considerable strength, including tanks. We had to back off, but not before we lost 3 men and a car that day. It would be many weeks before both sides drew up their battle lines so now we came into our own for what we had been trained.

Every day we would take off in our cars in different directions and the Germans would do the same. So, in the countryside, we'd be in a village one day and they'd be in the village the next. Very often we clashed and since they had tanks and we didn't, we were the ones, usually, who retreated.

I remember one day in particular. Out in the country, as the lead car, .... there were about 5 other cars behind me, I took a right hand turn and started to go up this big hill. All of a sudden, at the brow of the hill appeared a German tank coming in our direction. He stopped, .... obviously he had seen us, and the first thing we saw was this big gun coming slowly down. I screamed at my driver to "Get the heck out of here!". Unfortunately it was a very narrow road and he had to make three forwards and three backs before we finally got ourselves turned around. In the meantime they were firing at us. Finally we turned the corner and since we were faster than them, we had no problem getting away.

I thanked God afterwards that the gunner was not very good at his job!"

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