LITMIR.BIZ

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studied each other dispassionately and not a word was spoken. Then the column moved on, so did they and that was the last we saw of each other.

      On 2 May 1945, after an incredible 80-mile dash in one day, the Royal Scots Greys reached Wismar to become the first unit of the British Army to link up with the Russians – in the form of a captured German BMW motor cycle and sidecar carrying an officer on the pillion and a woman soldier in the sidecar, accompanied by a couple of American White scout cars and another mixed bunch of soldiery. The war was over.

      The Greys did not stay in Wismar long. At the end of May 1945 we moved to Rotenburg, between Bremen and Luneburg, where I was given a special job to go to the Philips factory in Eindhoven, Holland to collect a load of radios for the Regiment. I was to be allocated a truck and to find my own way. But I wasn’t exactly overjoyed when I found the truck was a Morris-Commercial 15cwt that the Germans had captured from us at Dunkirk in 1940 and had been using all through the war.

      It was in running order but not in the best of shape, to put it mildly. However, off I set with Trooper Doug Taylor (my personal servent in the army) to lumber back through Hamburg, Bremen, Osnabruck and Munster, retracing our steps amid refugees, columns of troops, tanks and B (wheeled) vehicles as Europe started to reorient itself after over five years of bloody conflict. The gallant old Morris did a fine job and didn’t let us down, although it certainly took its wheezy time getting there. But when we got to Eindhoven the news was not good.

      ‘The radios are not ready,’ we were told. ‘Please come back in three days.’

      Well, there wasn’t much to occupy us for three days in war-torn Eindhoven so we decided to go to Brussels – plenty going on there. I had a Belgian girlfriend in Brussels from my time at Villevoorde earlier in the campaign, so we fired up the willing old Morris again, and headed off. This was strictly forbidden, of course, for I had no authority to go there and very nearly ended my army career by doing so. We left the Morris in a military park and three days later, after a great time in the big city, Doug and I returned – but there was no sight of the Morris. Eventually, in desperation, we asked the Sergeant in charge if he could help us. ‘Ah, yes, Sir,’ he said when he saw the receipt. ‘We were a bit suspicious about this vehicle in view of its age and when we checked we found it wasn’t on the Army records so it has been impounded.’

      Oh my God. Stark panic. I was in Brussels where I wasn’t supposed to be, I’d been there for three days without authority, my truck had been impounded, I hadn’t got the radios and I had no way of getting back to the Regiment in far off Rotenburg. I could see the court martial looming. There was only one thing to do then: find the Town Major, make a clean breast of it and cast myself on his mercy. ‘You’ve been a bloody fool, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘Well, we’re all human and it is going no further. Off you go and the best of luck.’ And that, thankfully, was the end of that.

      During our time at Rotenburg any fleeting thoughts I may have had about signing on with the Army as a regular soldier evaporated and I decided that the life was not for me. Things became more routine with the fighting over. Now a Lieutenant, I was promoted to Mechanical Transport Officer, which meant that I was in charge of all the Regiment’s B (wheeled) vehicles and answerable to the Technical Adjutant who was responsible for all the Regiment’s vehicles. This, of course, was right up my street.

      During this time a friend of mine, Peter Johnson, returned briefly to the UK, sharing a cabin with a couple of British Infantry officers. They were discussing what loot they’d brought back with them. Peter mentioned he’d a German officer’s revolver and a Nazi flag.

      ‘Look at this then,’ they said, opening a suitcase full of jewellery and gold ornaments.

      ‘God almighty!’ says Peter. ‘Where the hell did you get all that lot?’

      ‘Well, we’re first in anywhere and we go straight to the jewellers’ shops.’

      It was thieving of course but anything was fair game in those times. For the record I came out with my binoculars, which I still have, a P38 revolver, which I handed in during the arms amnesty, an enormous Swastika flag and a German officer’s knife with ‘Gott mit uns’ engraved on its blade. Funny that. We thought he was with us.

      I was again promoted, in February 1946, to become the Technical Adjutant and to start a running battle that could have ruined my life. It’s a long story so a bit of background might be helpful. The Regiment was reverting to its normal peacetime ways, which were totally foreign to me as mine were to them. For instance, I started a motor-cycle club for the whole of the 4th Armoured Brigade and spent a great deal of time organizing trials and scrambles, sourcing machines to be used for competitions and even working with the Regimental Fitters building bikes, none of which were usual activities for a Greys officer and they were undoubtedly regarded as unacceptable behaviour.

      Amid this increasingly fraught situation, I should have been promoted long before to the War Substantive rank of Captain. It wasn’t happening, though, and I was getting fractious. I am hard to rouse but was outraged that I was not being given the rank, income and status that went with the job. Eventually I was grudgingly given the rank of Local Captain but not the money that went with it or any promise of permanency, which, if anything, made me even angrier. To top that, they tried to cancel the home leave that I’d previously been granted, and which I’d applied for months in advance so that I could attend the first post-war motor-cycle race meeting in the fabled Isle of Man, the Manx Grand Prix. They claimed it was cancelled for disciplinary reasons.

      Now the battle was well and truly on. Thanks in part to my father’s influence I got my leave and had a wonderful time in the Isle of Man, but when I reported back to the Regiment in Luneburg it was to find that an adverse report on me had been submitted which recommended that I be reduced to the ranks because I was ‘unreliable, unsuitable, untrustworthy and a bad example’. My back was up against the wall now for if the recommendation was accepted, the Dunlop Rubber Company (for whom I’d recently had an interview for a job after I left the army) would certainly have thought it a bit odd that the Captain they had interviewed next appeared as a Lance Corporal, quite apart from the loss of self-respect the demotion would have caused me. Fortunately though, army rules being what they are, I was allowed to submit a written response. Knowing that my future literally depended on it, I sat down and gave it my very best shot – five closely typed foolscap pages.

      For most of my time with the Regiment it had been part of the famous 4th Armoured Brigade, commanded by one of the most outstanding men it has ever been my privilege to meet: Brigadier R M P Carver CBE, DSO, MC. He was young – in his very early thirties – had a wonderful personality, and was a superb example of all that was the very best in the British Army. He was the sort who would suddenly appear on the back of your tank in the middle of some very unpleasant action and ask you why the hell you weren’t further ahead. And now he was to rescue me from this situation that could well have blighted the rest of my life. He came to the Regiment to interview me and told me that my response had been accepted but that it was clearly impossible for me to continue with the Greys. I could not disagree with him for had I stayed the atmosphere would have been intolerable. So you can imagine the relief and pleasure I felt when he went on to say that I was being transferred to become Technical Adjutant of the recently formed British Army of the Rhine Royal Armoured Corps Training Centre at Belsen, with the full rank of Captain. So I had won without a stain on my character, but it is a battle I would far rather not had to have fought. I was and still am mighty proud to have been able to serve in and fight with such a wonderful regiment as the Greys, but only sorry it ended the way it did.

      So to the BAOR RAC Training Centre at Belsen. Not the Belsen of concentration camp notoriety? Yes indeed, but very different by the time I got there in October 1946. The hideous installations of the Nazi death camp had been destroyed, the bodies buried and the thousands of displaced persons moved to other locations. Belsen became Caen Barracks, which had a driving and maintenance wing, gunnery and wireless wings, a tactical wing and its own AFV ranges to provide short-term courses of just about every conceivable type. ‘Officers,’ says the brochure which I still have, ‘should bring their own sheets and pillowslips and may bring their own batmen [personal assistant] with them if they wish but German civilian servants can be provided

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