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Chapter 12 — ‘Austria and L.I.A.P’

The 53rd Field marched on into Austria and my Battery finished up in a pretty little village called Althofen some twenty miles north of Klagenfurt which lies at the eastern extremity of the lake called the ‘Worther See’. Here for the next few months we were to lead an idyllic life amongst the most beautiful countryside imaginable, with vast stretches of green pasture interspersed with clumps of pine and numerous small streams. The rivers abounded with trout and although I didn’t experience it myself it was said that after tossing a hand grenade into the river the whole Battery could be fed with trout for breakfast. Hardly sporting but there were plenty of ‘townies’ as well as country boys in the Army and they weren’t too fussy about sporting protocol. There were plenty of roebuck in the surrounding countryside and as all civilian firearms had been impounded some chaps found an opportunity to go hunting with a local guide and I recall that on one occasion the Austrian housewife in the building that we had commandeered as our Mess spent the whole day preparing two or three dishes of venison for our dinner that night. Somehow we had acquired from the Germans about twenty horses with their grooms ,who were of course Prisoners of War and every morning before breakfast a number of us went riding. This was new experience to me but not difficult because there were such long stretches of verdant turf that all one had to do was sit on its back and let the horse go.

We were billeted in houses in the village and even slept in the civilians’ beds with their bedding, because the Austrians were so clean and it can truly be said that you could eat off the floor in their houses. Not so I fear in the houses of Italian peasants in those days. And, until the Austrians became aware of new monetary values things were so cheap whilst we were there. For example, you could, and I did, get a pair of leather shoes hand made for the equivalent of fifteen shillings (75p)!

I was given the job of acting as liaison officer to an entire Hungarian Corps, which I believe numbered some thirty thousand troops although I only saw their headquarters. I understood that the Hungarians had been reluctant to fight with the Axis forces so were not regarded as prisoners of war. Once a week I set off with a Jeep and a driver and made my way down country lanes and a final long farm track to a very remote farm house where obviously forewarned of my coming the General and his staff were lined up and greeted me with solemn salutes and enormous courtesy. As I recall the visits didn’t involve more than a few words with their English speaking staff officer and after lunch I was on my way back to Althofen.

Soon after our arrival in Austria an Army Order was issued calling for volunteers to be trained in winter warfare and as I couldn’t imagine any better way of spending a winter in Austria, learning to ski and getting really fit, my name was on top of the list. Sadly it was not to be because the autumn saw the Regiment posted back to Italy. Not, however, before I was to experience what was meant by the cryptic letters, LIAP, at the head of this chapter.

Many of the troops in Italy, and of course elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East and Burma, had been abroad for some years and some, indeed, since before the war began. We old soldiers smile when we hear nowadays through the media that some of our troops have been abroad for no less than six months without seeing their families. So, a short while before the war ended a scheme was devised, with the code name PYTHON, to give home leave to those who had been overseas for more than four years. In Italy this meant that those granted leave had to make their way to Naples and they were then taken by troop ship back to Britain. Because there was a shortage of troopships this meant that many had a frustrating wait, sometimes of months, before their turn came to start their leave. When the war in Europe finished a back up scheme was introduced taking troops home overland and this very popular move was named ‘Leave In Addition to Python’ (LIAP).

By the autumn of 1945 I had been abroad for nearly four years and was one of the lucky ones to be given this leave. It involved a journey right across Europe to Calais and thence by the normal ferry to Dover and the means of transport was by Troop Carrying Vehicles. These were canvas covered three ton lorries that had been furnished with a plank down each side and two down the middle each with a thin padding on top. The journey took five whole days so we were a bit sore by the time we got to Calais, but we were still young and were going HOME so we didn’t grumble, except on the return journey when we were going back to our units.

The five day journey meant four overnight stops and someone at Army HQ had the bright idea of making a different Division of the 8th Army responsible for setting up and organising a transit camp for each night’s stop and as this introduced a degree of competition we were well looked after indeed.

Starting at Villach, which lies at the other end of the Worther See from Klagenfurt, near where I was stationed, we journeyed back over the Dolomite Mountains into Italy, then over the Brenner Pass into the Inn valley and through the southern Tyrol and Bavaria to Ulm. Turning North West we went on to Karlsruhe and up the Rhine valley to Mainz, then through Luxembourg, Sedan, Arras and finally reached up at Calais; a total distance of some eight hundred miles.

Not long after my leave and my return to Althofen the order came through for our Regiment to return to Italy but I can’t for the life of me remember exactly where it was other than it was in Venezia Giulia and somewhere near Udine. What I do recall is that it was from here that I had the opportunity to visit Venice and, most memorably, to have my first lessons in skiing during a weeks leave at Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites. This was a wonderful experience and it is a matter of lasting regret that I didn’t follow it up by further winter holidays after the War. But then, going abroad, even to Europe was exceptional in those days as was even the thought of having a winter holiday as well as a summer holiday.

Also during this period I had the interesting experience of being detailed to build a steeple chase course for the Army on the outskirts of Udine. The Italians were not into steeple chasing at that time but they did have a lot of pony-trotting tracks. Pony trotting by the way, is a horse harnessed to a very light weight chaise and racing round a dirt track. The horse is trained not to gallop, or even canter, at the risk of disqualification, (rather like the track walker in athletics not being allowed to break into a run) but they certainly move at a very brisk speed. The steeple chase was to be built round the outside of one of these tracks and, of course I didn’t build it alone. I had about ten of my own gunners, there was a subaltern from the Royal Engineers with about the same number of his men and we also had some twenty German prisoners of war together with about three hundred so called Italian army ‘co-belligerents’ who were just about useless. Our guide and mentor was a prisoner of war Austrian Colonel who had been an Olympic show jumper before the War.

The jumps were constructed by stuffing stiff pine branches upright between parallel telegraph poles, balanced on short upright poles to a height of about two feet. This structure was bound with flexible spruce boughs, sloped up on the take off side, bent over the top of the pine and tucked behind the front telegraph pole the whole to a height of some four and a half to five feet. This entailed a number of lorry trips into the beautiful Dolomite Mountains to cut the pine and spruce and we all very much enjoyed these outings.

Then we had to build a tower near the finish for the judges who were all very senior army officers and who also functioned as the ‘Stewards’ to the racecourse. We also constructed a building to house the Totalisator, or Tote as it was (is?) known in the vernacular. This is where the punters place their bets and where the odds are calculated by reference to the volume of money placed on each horse, so that the greater the amount bet the shorter the odds.

Came the day of the first meeting and as the horses and their jockeys were quite unknown to the crowd there were some extraordinary odds and the prize of all was when a lowly ranked soldier won £700, an absolute fortune. Sensibly the stewards wouldn’t pay it all to him at once; to do so would probably have resulted in he and his comrades getting gloriously drunk, so instead they released a modest but healthy sum to him and sent the rest back to England to be paid into a savings account so that he had a nice nest egg to add to his demob grant when he got home. Quite enough to start a business with at that time.

Soon after this experience we were advised that the 8th Indian Division was to return to India and that the 53rd Field was to go with it, probably to join in further action against the Japanese except that this never happened because before they got to India the war in the Far East was over following the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, all personnel who had been overseas for four years or more were relieved of this posting and instead were moved to units that were soon to return to Britain. So it was that I became Assistant Adjutant to the 2nd Regiment Royal Horse Artillery.

This posting was quite fortuitous but nevertheless membership of this illustrious Regiment was a matter of considerable pride steeped as it was in centuries of military history. There were a number of RHA regiments and the 2nd comprised Bull’s Troop, a survival of the Peninsula Wars, Nery Battery, famous for having five posthumous Victoria Crosses awarded to it at the battle of that name during the first World War and I Battery, whose claim to fame does I fear escape me!

The commanding officer was one, Colonel David Welch, who after his return to England was appointed to be the first Commandant of King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery which had just been formed by King George VI to carry out ceremonial duties, such as drawing the gun carriage bearing the coffin at State Funerals and firing royal salutes in Hyde Park. When Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952 she insisted that the Troop be not renamed Queen’s Troop but should perpetuate as King’s Troop in honour of her father.

When I joined the Regiment late in 1945 it was stationed at Abano Termi not far from Padua and as it’s name suggests a watering spa where before the War people had come to be cured of all sorts of ailments either by ‘taking the waters ’or by allowing themselves to be smothered from head to foot in hot sulphurous mud, to be followed alternately by plunging in to near scalding hot spring water and a near freezing bath. (I speak with feeling having tried the treatment whilst I was there and retiring to my bed immediately after)! The reason for choosing Abano Termi as a resting place for the Regiment to mark time for the rest of its stay in Italy was the abundance of hotels to be requisitioned as accommodation and very nice it was too after the holes in the ground and tents that we had become accustomed to.

Just before I joined them the Regiment had captured a German Field Cashier together with his money chest crammed full of Italian Liras and before the Colonel got to hear of it a considerable sum had been spent by some soldiers on luxury goods in Venice. The rest was of course impounded and handed over to the authorities but on my first night with the unit an officer confessed to the second in command that he had some thousands of Liras in his room. The 2 i/c, a Major, told him to go and get it and when he returned, the money was promptly set fire to in one of the bedroom wash basins. Several of us sat and watched as that lovely money went up in smoke.

Quite a lot of this sort of thing went on at this time and a month or two earlier one of my sergeants came to tell me that an Italian was at the gate offering the equivalent of ten thousand pounds for a ten ton Lancia lorry that we had captured. We didn’t succumb and the lorry went into a pound that had been set up for captured vehicles and, we understood, become a target for motor thieves because it became so large it was impracticable to guard it adequately. One of the tricks that the thieves got up to was to steal in at night with blocks of wood that they would put under a vehicle’s axles, let the air out of the tires and make off with the wheels.

Officers in the Royal Horse Artillery are privileged to wear certain badges to mark the distinction of this famous regiment. These include wearing the royal cipher (the sovereign’s monogram, in silver, surrounded by the Garter bearing the motto ‘Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense’) on their tunic collar together with ‘ball’ buttons (the standard button is flattened brass with a gun as motif, whereas ball buttons, as their name implies, are completely spherical). These distinctive emblems were worn with great pride but not until the officer’s name had been published in Regimental Orders as ‘Appointed RHA’.

And so we saw out the winter of 1945/46 in quite a pleasant fashion and with desultory attention to military affairs. The colonel was keen to get back to observing peace time traditions and I remember once scouring the countryside trying to buy Marsala, as a substitute to Port so that we could pass the decanter after dinner.

After a while we moved out of the hotel in Abano Termi and took over a villa some five kilometres from the town as an Officers’ Mess and sleeping quarters and I recall having to go into Venice one day to make peace with the landowner because our chaps had been burning some of his peoples’ winter store of wood. This was interesting because I was met at Mestre, on the mainland, by a private gondola and taken through a maze of small canals until we came to an extremely scruffy looking door in an equally scruffy looking wall. But once through the door ones feet sank into luxurious carpet and entered a splendidly furnished house.

One other vivid memory of this time is when we ran a Regimental Ball to which were invited the officers of the 6th Armoured Division of which we were now a part. Of course we had to get partners for our guests and to this end every available staff car and jeep was sent to bring eligible young ladies to the party. We had two bands that played non-stop from around eight pm until carriages at dawn and the Ball not only finished with breakfast but the Colonel stood at the door to say farewell to departing guests flanked by the mess servants bearing trays of champagne cocktails. This at about six o’clock in the morning.

Came the date of my return to England and after a farewell party that I don’t remember in any sort of detail, followed next morning by a dreadful hangover and a bumpy ride across northern Italy to Milan, I caught a train to Calais and so to Dover. My overseas service was at an end.

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