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Early Years

My name is Denis John Hockman. I lived in South East London before the start of the war. When the air bombings in London started I was evacuated to Buckinghamshire to continue schooling.

When I finished school I had a stint serving in the Home Front. I got my first feel of the rocket batteries in the home front. I was still only 16 but I gained invaluable experience.

I moved on to the British army reserves, travelling to Calais and Glasgow on military exercise. I then went on to join the Fourth regiment in Wiltshire.

D-day

On D-day, even with the amount of training behind me, I still felt nervous as the other soldiers and I made our way to Normandy by boat carriers. The weather was gusty and the waves incessant, not good for navigation or controlling the boats. Later on, the weather however lightened.

Trail of a bullet.

On the 6th of August, German soldiers shot me in the leg. I was taken back to a hospital in Wales to recover. The hospital staff were extremely welcoming, any soldier was a hero.

I soon quickly recovered from my injuries with recognition going to staff care and also an intake of penicillin.

Discipline, discipline and discipline.

When I came out of the hospital I enrolled to enter the 9th parachute regiment, whose base was in Hardwick Hall, Chesterfield. The team trained at the Ringway Airport in Manchester.

Our regiment was taught to jump from moving dackotas working against the current of a slipstream. In the early lessons we also had first hand experience on the disadvantage of dropping like bricks.

The physical training was also exerting; none of the men was ever to be seen walking.

Try again

It was not too positive getting the news back from Arnhem. A number of good soldiers had lost their lives. On the 23rd March 1944, our division was assigned to make a drop in the lowlands of Europe - Germany. We walked 300 mile in 5 weeks past Reichswald forest in Germany. This set us up for our final operation was in Wismar, Poland on the Baltic coast.

An avalanche of British soldiers continued to push through Poland. I was one of the British soldiers.

The Third Reich was vanishing.

I remember a shocking capture of the German surrender — I was in a convoy of Freighter trucks, there was a horde of British Soldiers making our way to Wismar; still fresh in our minds that we had fought the Germans spiritedly.

To our surprise, as we passed a long stretch we could see German trucks at both sides of the road. All their tiger tanks with the power heads were faced the other way, the Germans soldiers looked motionless.

It was checkmate.

It happened that the Germans had reached an agreement with our high command so that the British could capture them rather than the Russians fighting them.

The Russians were terribly efficient fighters; they had seen the Germans take areas of their land in the early stages of the war, and were in no act of bargaining.

In the informal pact between the British and the Germans, i believe it was also decided to release prisoners of war to the British.

Many times, I witnessed deaths, even as we captured Germany — our equipment was sometimes needed for justification. I remember viewing the distinct use of a Gammon bomb on a German soldier, near the end of the war.

The End of the war

At the end of the war we celebrated with the Russian soldiers, it was also somewhat confounding to see the successes of women serving in their army. These women had fought just as well as the men.

Large groups of British soldiers ended up sharing a gulp of the Russian culture- vodka. The sweeping fluid motion of the vodka calmed my nerves as it made its way through to my veins, and tiring muscles.

I soon returned to Britain. On VJ day our crew made a trip to Bournemouth in a truck. At Bournemouth we revelled further, later returning to our camp in Bulford. At the camp, we began checking our weapons - no time for rest, and were soon despatched to Palestine.

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