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In May 1945 I was a member of a Grenadier Guards tank battalion who, with their 40 ton Churchills, were clanking towards the Baltic city of Lubeck. The air waves to which, as a radio operator, I was listening were crowded with high-pitched voices speaking a language that was certainly not German and therefore could only be Russian. It was an exciting experience because it clearly indicated that the war in Europe was coming to an end.
I don’t expect many people, even among my contemporaries, to understand the boundless sympathy I had for our eastern allies. In my youthful eyes they were all heroes, and I was convinced that had they not at Stalingrad, Kursk and in other titanic battles disposed of so many elite Nazi formations I for one would never have returned home.
But for the privilege of shaking hands with them I had to wait until I was rescued from monotonous post-war garrison duties by the son of a British newspaper tycoon who, having requisitioned a Rhineland printing works for the purpose of producing a Guards Division daily, set about recruiting staff from guardsmen with journalistic or composing room backgrounds. I had the necessary qualifications because of a gruelling reporting apprenticeship served between 1939 and 1941 with the Stratford Express in east London.
(At the height of the Luftwaffe’s onslaught on the capital’s docks, railways and other targets I travelled on dimly-lit buses and trams to evening destinations including draughty church halls - much used for meetings of all kinds and the productions of amateur dramatic societies - and trod warily through blacked-out streets with only whitewashed kerbstones to show where pavement ended and carriageway began).
In Germany the editor of the News Guardian, perhaps because he was aware of my keen interest in the Russians, sent me to Berlin. I went by rail, and as this meant crossing the Soviet-occupied zone, sat as if glued to the carriage window. But the weather seemed to be conspiring with the Kremlin to keep East Germany veiled from western eyes, and only when an all-enshrouding mist lifted a little was it possible to see that the train was passing through a necropolis dotted not with crosses but with small pyramids. Each gravestone was topped by a large red star.
I toured Berlin’s ruins on a powerful BSA motor-cycle of the type issued to Army dispatch riders. In the debris-strewn Tiergarten I hauled myself up the many steps of the Siegersaul, that monument to German military glory. From bottom to top its inner walls were covered with the words, scratched in Cyrillic characters, ‘I was here’, and each inscription was dated and signed.
Not far away the Russians had erected a crescent-shaped memorial surmounted by the bronze effigy of a Red Army man, and on either side of the concave structure was one of those illustrious, war-winning T34 tanks. Each time I passed the memorial it was guarded by a pair of steel-helmeted sentries armed with submachine-guns.
A large roadside sign in the shadow of the shrapnel-pitted Brandenburg Gate warned in English, French and Russian: ‘You are now leaving the British sector’; but one sunny afternoon I crossed that notorious demarcation line on foot and strolled along the Unter den Linden, renamed the Stalin Allee. Towards me came half-a-dozen Russians, all with pistols at their belts.
Their faces broke into smiles, revealing rows of metal teeth, when I took from my pocket a packet of Naafi cigarettes and gladly exchanged them for Red Army papirosi — pitifully small quantities of tobacco in long cardboard holders. Lots of uniformed people were moving in and out of a hotel on the opposite side of the road, and on pushing through the swing doors I found myself in a vestibule crammed with gold-epauletted officers.
The nearest of them stared at me belligerently, and I was instantly reminded of granite-faced film actor Oscar Homulka playing the part of a Soviet general with a redeeming touch of humour in a film starring Michael Caine. Slowly removing a papi rosa from his mouth, the real life Russian spat on the ground at my feet. I was unperturbed. This man and his companions, I reasoned, had known fighting unequalled for scale and ferocity since Verdun, Passchendaele and the Somme. They were entitled to believe that the lion’s share of credit for the defeat of the Nazis was due to them. Ignoring the intentional insult, I saluted and left the hotel.
Later I visited a handful of British troops guarding a station on Berlin’s celebrated S-Bahn. Nearby was a Red Army detachment, and I suggested to a Russian-speaking Cambridge graduate serving as British liaison officer that we should invite our allies to a party. He expressed doubt that the invitation would be accepted, but consented to go in search of the Soviet guard commander.
When at last he reappeared he was accompanied by two glum young men who clearly wished they were in Omsk, Tomsk — anywhere indeed but in our company. Thawing the ice was painfully slow and our guests didn’t relax until one of our squaddies removed his false teeth. The Russians reacted as if they had never before seen dentures. Try as they might, they were unable to keep a straight face.
On another occasion I was driving a small armoured vehicle along a powdery track in a devastated region resembling a brickfield when I came upon a prostrate, fully-dressed Russian officer. He was alive but in a drunken torpor. With more than an inkling of the depth of Berliners’ hatred of their conquerors I feared for his safety and decided to restore him to the Soviet sector.
It was never easy, even for a man in full possession of his senses, to get inside a Humber scout car. The drunken Russian was lean but tall, so there was a lot of him to squeeze through the hatch on the car roof. Hoisting him to his feet and dragging him to the Humber had already cost me a mighty effort.
It was dusk when I reached the Brandenburg Gate. Ahead of me torches flashed, and I slowed to a crawl and stopped. An unmistakably Mongolian face was framed with startling suddenness in the small aperture known as a revolver port beside my head. ‘Rooski affitseer,’ I said, pointing to my unconscious passenger.
The sentry glanced behind my seat, then sprang on to the top of the car and bawled what I gathered were directions. As gingerly as if I were driving over eggshells I entered the Stalin Allee, turned left as instructed, and saw a building full of light from which several men came running.
The still sleeping officer was unceremoniously prised out of the car and dragged towards the building, his jackboots trailing in the dust. My Mongolian escort shouted further instructions, and no knowledge of Russian was needed for comprehension. Far from being thanked, I was being ordered to make myself scarce.
The News Guardian subsequently carried an article under my name entitled ‘The truth about the Russians’. Alas, it was far from the truth. That, as has long been common knowledge, was very ugly. Not only did Zhukov and Koniev in storming Berlin squander the lives of the men they led, but individual Russian soldiers were allowed to behave worse than wild beasts. And yet, as Alan Clark wrote in ‘Barbarossa’, his history of the Russo-German conflict, the brutalities of the Russian armies, unlike the systematic atrocities of the Nazi SS, were ‘not so much intended as incidental’. They were the work of ‘illiterate primitives. . . . many of them with fierce personal incentives for taking vengeance on the Germans’.

An organization called the Anglo-Soviet Youth Friendship Alliance put me in touch with Irina Zhukovitskaya, a student of English in the philological faculty of Moscow University, and we became pen-friends. Her letters — fascinating principally because of their source and the large, colourful stamps on the envelopes — reached me fairly regularly throughout the campaign in the west until I committed the indiscretion of quoting imperialistic Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling. ‘Don’t mention Kipling to me,’ she replied — and I never heard from her again.
But before that happened Irina arrived, as a member of a delegation, in London. My sister, who met her in my absence — I was still in Germany — reported merely that my correspondent was ‘very small’.
Irina and her fellow-delegates were by no means London’s only wartime Russian visitors. Another was Ludmilla Pavlichenko, a sniper who claimed to have killed an impressively large number of Nazis; and when I was runner-up in an essay writing competition organized by the friendship alliance a Red Army officer came to the Guildhall to distribute the prizes — in my case a handsomely bound copy in Russian of Tolstoy’s novel Hadzhi Murat (the name of the main character, a Caucasian bandit).

My sense of indebtedness to the Red Army was all the greater because I had emerged from the campaign in north-west Europe without a scratch. I was most at risk of being killed or wounded one afternoon in Normandy, when the squadron of which I was a member suddenly came under frighteningly accurate mortar fire.
The weather was hot and dry, and in turning from an unmetalled country lane into an apple orchard where we were to laager for the night our Churchills generated clouds of tell-tale dust. We dismounted, intent on brewing tea, but were ordered to dig in before doing anything else.
Making a hole in soil hardened by days without rain was difficult, and I soon dropped my spade and concentrated on lining the bottom of a shallow trench with hay from a stack on the farther side of the orchard. That finished, I lay on my back and contemplated a cloudless sky.
There was a loud bang in the vicinity of the haystack, followed by a lot of shouting, and instinctively I spun round and buried my face in the hay, cursing myself for failing to dig more deeply. Seconds later came the roar of a much closer explosion, a shower of earth, grass and pebbles, and then from Lance-Corporal Oakley, whose tank was parked beside mine, cry after cry of pain.
Minutes earlier I had seen him calmly peeling potatoes in preparation for his supper. Now he lay writhing on the ground, eyes tightly closed. Without further thought for our own safety we stretchered him to a jeep which had appeared as if by magic. I climbed in beside the driver and we left the orchard as quickly as its uneven surface permitted and sped along the lane to a field service dressing station tent.
There I began gingerly to unzip Oakley’s tank suit, only to be pushed aside by a snarling medical orderly who ripped open the overalls with a large pair of scissors. Employing the four-letter word for greater emphasis, he ordered me to rejoin my unit. A day or two later I heard that poor Oakley had died.

He was one of the first but by no means the last of the squadron’s casualties. In the Reichswold Forest cemetery in Germany lie Lance-Corporal Lewis Winstone and Guardsman Donald Anscombe — killed, presumably, while taking part in the capture of the heavily-fortified town of Goch or during the advance through the forest itself.
For years I thought that they had lost their lives in Holland, and I was stunned to learn from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission that they died in March 1945, so shortly before all fighting stopped. A tale circulated in the squadron to the effect that Winstone perished in a hail of machine-gun bullets as he wriggled out of the turret of a disabled Honey reconnaissance tank and that Anscombe extricated himself from the hull of the same vehicle only to be cut down while running towards the enemy.
There is a terrible irony about Winstone’s fate, for he was a great admirer of Nazi weaponry. As for Anscombe, I can’t imagine a more self-effacing and amiable person. His parents had every reason to be proud of him, and it still pains me to think of the suffering they must have been caused by his death.

On enlisting in the Brigade of Guards I tried to allay my mother’s fears by assuring her that the Grenadiers, as part of the royal bodyguard, would be among the last troops to go into action. I spoke in forgetfulness of the regiment’s involvement in the desperate rearguard action at Dunkirk in 1940, but the length of time devoted at the Guards’ Depot, in those days situated at Caterham, Surrey, to teaching recruits how to ‘walk like guardsmen’ did defer by several months our readiness for combat.
Then, with infantry training more or less completed, I had a remarkable stroke of luck. Returning late one night to Victoria Barracks, Windsor, from a ‘pub crawl’ in the town I studied the orderly room notice board by the light of matches. Having acquainted myself with the next day’s duties I was on the point of turning away when I caught sight of an appeal for volunteers for the Guards Armoured Training Wing at Pirbright. After momentary reflection I added my signature to the notice board list, and as events were to show it was fortunate that my supply of matches was adequate for that purpose.
Had it not been, I might well have gone the way of a Birmingham youth who at Windsor had been allocated the bed space next to mine. He was sent as an infantryman to Italy, and in the roundabout, word of mouth manner in which news circulated in wartime I learnt that he had been killed.
At Pirbright we were subjected to tests of our suitability for tank driving and maintenance, gunnery and radio operating. Everybody was instructed in more than one of these occupations. I was classified as a driver/operator, which meant that although my primary function would be to use the radio in my tank’s turret for maintaining contact with the rest of the squadron, I would be capable in an emergency of replacing an incapacitated driver or co-driver.
At the end of the tank training course, some of us joined the famous Guards Armoured Division, equipped with speedy if thinly-armoured Shermans and so fit for the role of mechanized cavalry. Others, including me, were assigned to a less glamorous tank brigade whose lumbering Churchills were to have an infantry-supporting function.
We were quartered in Nissen huts on Salisbury Plain, transferred from there to Wensleydale, in Yorkshire, and finally moved south to participate in a gigantic dress rehearsal for the Normandy invasion. On the eve of D-Day I was selected for additional training at the Bovington, Dorset, headquarters of the Royal Tank Regiment, with the result that I reached Arromanches several weeks after the storming of the beaches.

Twenty-five years ago I was invited by a colleague at Westminster, where he and I were employed as parliamentary reporters, to be a witness at his wedding in St Petersburg. At a reception in the communal flat occupied by the bride and her mother I established a cordial relationship with the old lady, a survivor of the wartime siege of the city.
My first wife, as the wedding photos show all too plainly, was already very ill, and a year later she died, a victim of breast cancer. A telegram of condolence from St Petersburg puzzled me because it was in English — yet my colleague’s mother-in-law, from whom the message seemed to have come, knew only Russian, and the sender couldn’t have been the new bride, who was already in London.
I replied requesting that my thanks should be conveyed to the writer, and within days I received such a friendly letter signed ‘Dina’, the ophthalmologist who had been treating the bride’s parent for a cataract, that I was filled with curiosity about her.
From a study of a passport photo produced by my colleague’s wife I concluded that ‘Dina’ must be large, robust and strictly no nonsense — in other words, the average westerner’s mental image of a typical Russian female. Great therefore was my surprise when on arriving in due course at her apartment I met a petite, slim, quintessentially feminine person.
I astonished myself by immediately blurting out a proposal of marriage. Dina, eyes sparkling with amusement, answered ‘Yes’, which I interpreted as acceptance of the proposal, whereas in fact she simply meant ‘Please come in’.

On December 9th 1982 we were declared man and wife in an ornate St Petersburg ‘wedding palace’, but not until August of the following year was Dina allowed to join me in London. Together we set about liberating her daughter, Lara, unavoidably left alone in Russia by her husband and son when they received permission to emigrate.
In April 2002 we were all reunited in Holland, and there we have lived contentedly ever since.

During the last of my Russian excursions — there were fifteen of them in all — I finally fulfilled a long-cherished ambition and met a Red Army veteran. Lara, with whom I was spending three months while she awaited her exit visa, had taken me by bus to Narva, in Estonia, to visit the family of one of her girlfriends, and as we lunched in the garden of their dacha a man of about my age rose unsteadily to his feet and lurched round the table towards me. It transpired that another of the guests had told him of my service on the western front.
‘Panzerfaust,’ explained this former anti-tank gunner, tapping his broad chest after subjecting me to a bone-crushing bear hug and enveloping me in a cloud of vodka fumes.
At the end of the meal he led me to a small car parked outside the dacha and, lifting the bonnet, proudly revealed a spotless interior. Then he launched into a long monologue which our hosts’ schoolboy grandson tried vainly to stem by pointing out that I was unable to follow a word of it. I did, however, understand the veteran’s repeated assurance that he would always be happy to meet me or any of my wartime pals.
I didn’t see him again, and Lara, who is in regular touch by phone with her homeland, reports that he has died — saddening but hardly surprising news considering his all too obvious addiction to strong drink.
If we had been able to chat it’s unlikely that he would have talked freely about the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and his part in it, but in thinking of him I am reminded of words written by Soviet journalist and author Ilya Ehrenburg. He said - more than a touch rhetorically, as I now see — that much as he respected British justice, for him justice was symbolized not by a judge wearing a wig but by ‘a figure in a faded, rain-bleached tunic marching westward with our fighting men’.