大象传媒

It is July 1944 and the Normandy bridgehead is now continuous and secure. The build up of men and arms has been immense and the whole area is packed with tanks, vehicles and supplies. It is fortuitous that we have air superiority and that German planes are seldom seen. Sixty years after these momentous days, memories tend to fade but cameo pictures remain.

As a wireless operator (Royal Signals) with the 141 Regiment RAC, a Battalion of the 79th Armoured Division, my job was to man the wireless communication between our tactical HQ and Brigade. Our tanks were Churchills fitted with flame throwers and were used largely in support of other units faced with strongly held defences.

The capture of Caen was hard and costly. There was total destruction, not only of the town but all the surrounding villages & countryside. It looked like the pictures I had seen of Ypres and the Somme in the First World War.

After Caen, it was onto Falaise where the German Army was trapped in a pocket between the Americans who had advanced rapidly from the Cherbourg Peninsular to St.Lo, plus the British. Vast numbers of Germans surrendered and I can recall how ashen-faced they looked after weeks of bombardment, as they were taken to prison cages hastily constructed.

After Falaise and our breakout from the bridgehead, we turned north to free the six channel ports of Le Havre, Boulogne and Calais, all heavily defended and necessitating the use of specialised equipment such as our tanks.

En route I can remember the elegantly dressed French women in Lisieux, but walking bare foot through rubble strewn streets and the cart carrying piles of radio sets in Bernay, obviously having been previously confiscated by the Germans.

Then it was onto Brussels where the shops were full of goods like ours pre-war. But Holland was different, the Germans had stripped it, the people were in dire straits.

At Nijmegen the failure of the Arnhem airbourne attack was all too apparent as our troops had to withdraw. We were told that we had to winter there and take the port of Antwerp so that we could get our necessary supplies, which at the present had to come overland from Normandy.

So it was that the Canadians & the British took Antwerp and opened up the Schelde estuary. But there was life in the wounded foe even then, for in December Rundstedt launched his attack through the Ardennes, and we were rushed down to help stem the attack.

In February 1945 we crossed the Rhine and progressed through North Germany to Bremen. My lasting memory is of the many victims of Nazi persecution still clad in their concentration camp garb, staggering along the road, that we picked up and took to reception centres. If any justification for our War was needed it was surely written on the faces of those poor people.

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