Authors: Sean Longden
We had a turnover of four or five a month. They would come in to the RAP for the first week, then go out to the companies. I would tell them what to do and what to watch out for. And I was just a pimply nosed kid! The new chaps were turning to me for advice. I was just eighteen – younger than any of them – but I was already hardened. I should have just been called up. If I’d have waited, I wouldn’t have gone over as a reinforcement until the very end.
In the final months of war, Stan Whitehouse somehow managed to survive both the battle against the enemy and his own battle to remain sane. Every time he saw the twisted corpses of his friends, it seemed to subvert the remnants of his morale. Just eighteen years old, he was a veteran of seemingly endless battles, yet was younger than the reinforcements who came to replace his dead and wounded mates. He grew nervous and irritable, yet managed to control himself even when others deserted or gave themselves self-inflicted wounds as an excuse to get to hospital. As he later wrote of his mental state, he was ‘hanging on by the slenderest of threads’.
2
Somehow he held on. In early 1945 Stan was luckily given leave in Brussels. It was the perfect opportunity to relax, do his best to forget war and recharge his batteries. Overstaying his leave, he was sentenced to twenty-eight days detention, resulting in him missing the crossing of the Rhine and the battles that followed. In one incident following the Rhine crossing most of Stan’s platoon was wiped out. It was awful for him to later learn the fate of his comrades, but he had survived.
Another underage volunteer who survived was Fred Walker. He had seen plenty of action since D-Day, been wounded and sent home for treatment once already, seen other boys die alongside him and spent winter patrolling in the snow-covered wasteland of the Netherlands. Having grown used to war, Fred coped well with the pressure. He allowed himself the luxury of being positive about the weather. As he later recalled, he had occupied a slit trench with the frozen corpse of a German soldier. Rather than worry about living alongside a corpse, he simply acknowledged that the freezing cold meant the body was not rotten and did not stink – unlike all the corpses he had seen in Sicily, Italy and Normandy.
His war ended when a jeep came towards him on an icy road. Skidding on the ice, the jeep slid towards him: ‘I was lucky. I tried to get out of the way but it hit my knee and fractured it. I had to walk back for a mile using my rifle as a crutch. It was lucky – a “Blighty wound”. That was my war finished.’ Despite the injury meaning he would miss the final advance into Germany, Fred was eager to get back to his unit. He was sent to a rehabilitation unit and worked hard to get his injured leg back to full strength, in the hope of rejoining No. 3 Commando. He despaired at the men around him, who had no intention of getting fit and were just hoping the war would be over before they recovered. It made Fred realize the difference between an all-volunteer unit and one comprised almost entirely of conscripts: ‘We were volunteers. We wanted to do it.’
Whilst war took an increasing physical and mental toll on many soldiers, some managed to remain calm. For Geoff Pulzer, who back in 1940 had defied the Blitz to carry out his Home Guard duties as a seventeen-year-old volunteer, even the hellish conditions in Normandy had not fazed him:
I was never frightened in the Blitz – I was never frightened in the war. That’s why governments always recruit youngsters. I was young – I wasn’t going to get hurt. I wasn’t going to get killed. It concerned me when I saw people being bombed out in the Blitz. It was awful, but it wasn’t me. When people were killed it was very sad, I was very sorry – but life goes on. It was their bad luck. I never thought it was going to be me.
It was only in Germany in spring 1945 that he was suddenly struck by the idea that he might be mortal: ‘I was lying there sunbathing – the guns were firing – and a piece of shrapnel landed six inches from my head. That woke me up to the danger.’
It was a good time to be gripped by a sense of mortality. With war fast approaching its end, attitudes began to change. Many units reported their soldiers taking increasing care, avoiding any senseless risks and relying on fire power to solve all their problems. Why assault a defended position, when they could call down artillery fire, air support or flame throwers? As a member of the medical staff, Bill Edwardes noticed the overwhelming desire among his battalion not to be the last casualty:
There was a definite reluctance to put one’s head above the parapet. Our officers must have seen what was going on. The medical officer could see the change. Men were coming to us with trivial things, claiming to have pneumonia and asking to be sent home. This one chap came in, claiming he was having an attack of malaria. He asked us to give him bed rest for a couple of weeks, by which time it would all be over.
As the war approached its seemingly inevitable conclusion, the situation for prisoners of war became increasingly uncertain. With the Reich ever shrinking, the deliveries of Red Cross parcels to POW camps became even more irregular and rations plummeted. Then, with the prisoners facing starvation, many thousands were removed from their camps and sent on forced marches into the heart of Germany. Those in camps far in the east were the first to be evacuated, with men leaving the work camps and beginning the long journey towards home. In January 1945, in the midst of winter, John Norman, who had been
captured aged just sixteen, was finally released from the Silesian mine that had been his home for five years and marched for hundreds of miles back into the heart of Germany. As they marched through the snow, in long straggling columns, he witnessed the murder of fellow prisoners who were unable to keep up. He watched as older, weaker men – wracked by sickness, hunger and exhaustion – collapsed and died by the roadside. It was one of the times he was pleased to be young. After five years of heavy work, he was strong and able to endure much hardship. Spending his teenage years as a miner, living in conditions of virtual slavery, had also given him the mental strength to push him forward, never succumbing to hunger and exhaustion.
Eventually the column of increasingly desperate prisoners came face to face with advancing American troops who threw food to them and arranged for them to be transported to the rear. Within days, John Norman was back home in England. He later described how shocked he was by the scenes of devastation in London and how he faced an uncertain future in a country that seemed to be ‘on its knees’. Released from the Army, he also faced the uncertainty of finding work: having spent five years as a prisoner, and having no education, he was qualified for nothing other than manual work. However, only one thing really mattered: he was home and alive.
In the final days of the war one teenage soldier had an encounter with a German prisoner of war that brought home the reality of how far war had taken him. By spring 1945 Reg Fraser was an
eighteen-year-
old infantryman with the 5th Battalion of the Wiltshire Regiment. For six months he had been in the front line, fighting in Belgium, the Netherlands and now Germany. In his very first day of battle he had seen his friend’s head blown off. Since that point he had realized he was lucky to be alive. Yet with the end of war approaching, he could see how far he had come in the last five years. In 1939 he had been evacuated from London with the children’s home he lived in. In 1940 he had joined the Army Cadets, a year later he had joined the Air Training Corps, then the Home Guard, until finally he had been conscripted into the Army. One war, four uniforms – and the obligatory evacuee’s paper label. Somehow, boys like him had progressed to a stage where they were able to defeat the once dreaded German Army. The absurdity of this became apparent when he was
dealing with a batch of prisoners. He fell into conversation with a German prisoner who spoke perfect English, a conversation that reminded Reg of the dark days of 1940 when, as an unarmed cadet, he had trained to repel any invaders:
He told me he had trained for the invasion of England. I said I thought it was a good job they didn’t come. And I told him, I was only fourteen at the time, but I had been waiting for him armed with a broom handle. He just said, ‘You English have a strange sense of humour.’
In early April 1945 Stan Scott was shocked by the intensity of the fighting in northern Germany and wondered to himself what the Germans were fighting so hard to defend:
I was in the leading patrol. We were in a position off the side of the road. All of a sudden we heard marching feet. Down, quiet. Along the road comes this column of Germans, marching in threes. They didn’t have a clue we were there. I had the Bren, and Ossie had a Thompson. Blimey! We let them get close then he gets up and shouts, ‘Halt!’ The leading ones opened fire on him. He fired. I opened fire, and emptied the magazine. There was no more marching column.
As the Germans scattered, the commandos took positions in a wooden area where they were counterattacked by German marines. Attack after attack hit their positions as the Germans attempted to drive them out of the woods. Stan watched as men who had survived the hell of Normandy were killed and wounded around him, all of the time using his Bren gun to hold back the enemy. He was soon down to just half a magazine for the Bren gun and two magazines for his Colt pistol. After that he would have nothing left but his commando knife:
We watched through the trees as the Germans formed up for the final attack. Suddenly we heard an almighty wail, like a banshee. There were splintered trees and flying bodies. Christ, what a noise! Then the Vickers machine-guns opened up and we watched as No. 6 Commando carried out a bayonet charge on the Germans.
He soon learned why the Germans had been fighting so hard. As his patrol advanced, Stan and his mates turned to each other: ‘What’s that bloody smell?’ They soon found out the source of the smell: ‘We could see the barbed wire. We saw this little kid – a girl in a tattered dress – walking down the road. Then we reached the gate and saw a camp. We didn’t know it, but it was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.’ The commandos were ordered not to enter the camp, instead moving on to their main objectives and leaving the guards and inmates to be dealt with by other units.
Having landed in France aged just seventeen, Roy Finch had got through the campaign relatively unscathed. He had taken part in many actions, yet had experienced few close shaves and never felt himself to be in particular danger. He was simply one of the lucky ones. The enemy had been encountered as distant movements that he fired at but never knew if he had hit them, or had been corpses left behind as the battle moved on. The first time he ever got a close look at the enemy was in the final weeks of the war when they had begun surrendering en masse.
With Belsen under British control, Roy had an experience he – and the rest of the world – would never forget:
We were in northern Germany. The company commander said, ‘I want thirty men.’ They just picked us out and put us in a truck. They said we were going to help the medical orderlies at a repatriation camp. The lorry took us to Belsen concentration camp. That was horrifying. To see those people, and the piles of dead bodies being shovelled up by bulldozers. You realized there was hatred for the Germans. We were told, ‘If you see any of the German soldiers not doing their work, just shoot them.’ I was eighteen years old, that was my education. I can’t tell you what emotions I went through. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. OK, you see a dead soldier on the battlefield whose head has been squashed by a tank, you take that as part of war. But to see all these emaciated people begging you for food, and you can’t touch them because of concerns about disease, was awful. To see what the Germans had done to all sorts of ordinary people. It’s still in my mind. The engineers had masks on just shovelling human beings into pits. I can’t forget it, even now I find it horrifying.
This was not war as he had trained to fight it:
If you went into action you had your mates beside you. You watched each other’s backs, but if someone copped it, you walked by. You just carried on. You’d say, ‘Bill’s caught it. What rations did he leave behind?’ War was not like that in Belsen, where there were so many people. It took a lot of believing. The hostility we had for the Germans grew. We would have shot anybody who stepped out of line. I didn’t do it, but some of the others did. They just chucked their bodies into the pits with the rest of them. We were merciless and we felt hatred for them. It was the first time we felt like that. There was a great resentment. We didn’t know what was going on until we went there. To see the bodies and the rats, that were feeding on them, was horrible.
For the witnesses to the horrors of Belsen, there was a sense that nothing could be the same after this. Most changed, became harder and perhaps more cynical. Stan Scott recalled how one of his mates told him: ‘At that time the war was a big adventure, but after Belsen – anything German I wanted to smash it.’ German prisoners had to be careful to avoid the attentions of their captors, who became increasingly willing to swing a rifle butt at surrendering soldiers. At the end of April, Stan and his comrades took control of a slave labour camp, contained within a Germany military base. The slave labourers were immediately released and their guards were forced into one of the labourers’ filthy, cramped huts. A German officer dared to complain about their treatment. He was told, in no uncertain terms, that his complaints were falling on deaf ears: ‘If you don’t shut up, we’ll get some petrol and burn down the hut with you in it!’
For Roy Finch, Belsen was an education that also made him look at himself:
Our attitude towards the Germans was, ‘You made this shit, get on and clear it up.’ If it was a question of hitting them in the guts with a rifle butt, you did it. I can’t explain, it wasn’t anger, it was unbelievable to see it. It made ordinary human beings turn nasty. It made you think about yourself. What type of people were these German guards? Could I have done it?