The first thing we noticed the next morning was a wood a short distance away, we knew there was no houses on the road where we had ditched the column and we were deciding whether to walk through the wood and look for a farmhouse. The decision was taken from us, I was shaving with water I had taken from a sheep trough, when I saw through the mirror that we had company coming.
On each side of the field, half running and half walking alongside of the hedgerow, were three German soldiers coming towards us with automatic weapons and there was no doubt what their intentions were.
I said to Charlie "We have company", and it wasn't long before we heard the words "Achtung". We stood still and let them approach us. They could see we had no weapons and we told them that we were Krieg geffangenun and that we had dropped out of the column that had passed the day before: we also told them that we had been POWs for five years and that we had started the march over two months ago from Danzig in Poland. They were flabbergasted. They allowed us to finish shaving, then they took us to their officer.
The huge parachute motif on my jacket had been seen and they had been detailed to investigate. We went with them and we were told that if we saw any planes we must hide. When we came to the wood we could understand why they wanted us to hide if we saw any aircraft: for just inside the wood were huge self propelled artillery pieces, we could see about six of them and they were very well camouflaged and there was probably more scattered around.
Charlie thought that they looked even bigger than our 105s. They looked menacing and these were more likely the reason for all the air activity that we had experienced earlier.
The officers asked many questions about the Russians. They were astonished at the route we had taken from Danzig. When we mentioned Swinemunde, it was obvious that we had taken a very round about way to get to this area and they wanted to know why! But we couldn't tell them.
They noticed the state of my shoes and one of them actually got a soldier to hand sew a piece of leather right across the sole and heel of both of my bedroom bootees and he made quite a good job of them.
We had our meals with them that day and we were kept under observation and held inside a certain area under cover. We heard strafing a few hundred yards away and we kept our heads down.
The German soldiers suggested that the pilots did this strafing hoping that the Germans would retaliate and so give away their position. If they did return fire, then a much more concentrated attack would follow.
The soldiers wanted to know quite a lot about the Russians, they seemed rather perturbed at their rate of advancement.
I gave the soldier, who had sewed the soles onto my bootees, a packet of twenty cigarettes and I could see by how he accepted them and lit up straight away, that he and his mates had been a long while without and we tipped up another twenty cigs in exchange for German army loaf.
Before light next morning the soldiers were away and before they went they told us to keep on walking into Germany. We took off in the opposite direction as fast as we could, we didn't want to be around if they were spotted by the aircraft: distance is the best cover in any situation.
April 14th we had come to the end of our first day after dropping out of the column. The loaf of bread we had bargained for with the cigarettes would last us another couple of days.
The German armoured unit we had just left was going into action and this proved we were close to the war zone.
Two kilos down the road we stopped at Danstorf, here we came to a stretch of water and we stayed here for the rest of the day; keeping well out of the way.
Continuing on our journey we came to a little village called Gustborn. We didn't see anyone working in the fields or in the lane since we left Danstorf, it seemed as if the whole area was deserted and waiting for something to happen.
We asked for water at a small farm and spoke to the young Frau who lived there. She told us that her husband was in the army and she was having to manage the best way she could without any help. We offered to work for her and she gladly accepted.
There were a few German soldiers in this village and nobody seemed to be in charge of them, it could be that they were billeted here, or, like us they were waiting for the war to end.
There was about twelve houses in this area and every house had a white flag hanging from the bedroom window. It seemed so quiet here, it was not what we had been used to.
Many people had gone from this village, there was no one around and nobody at work in the fields.
Our work for the Frau was hoeing the potatoes and covering them with soil, the field where we were working was a few minutes walk from the house.
The Frau came back later, scrutinised our work and was satisfied and this was great for us. We had a dry clean place in the barn and we could get water to wash or mash whenever we wanted and after ten weeks on the road scrambling for somewhere to sleep and scrounging for something to eat; this place was a haven and we worked steadily in the field, so we could keep it that way. We never saw anyone else working in the fields whilst we were there.
On the second night at the Fraus, as we slept in the barn, we heard the sound of battle in the distance. We went up the ladder to the top part of the barn, opened the shutters and looked out, we could hear the rumble of action and see tracer fire in the sky.
The next two days and nights were uneventful. When we went onto the fields on the third day we met four German soldiers and on the ground near to them was about twenty Red Cross parcels and in a spinney close by was what looked like an anti tank gun. They had a milk churn full of wine and they were smoking English cigarettes.
When we told them that we were English Tommies and that we had been prisoners of war for five years they invited us to have a drink and gave us a smoke.
We were curious about the Red Cross parcels and we asked how they had come by them. They told us they had been taken off a ship that had been sunk in one of one of the ports. And here we were more than two hundred miles inland!!.
But then, we got a drink of wine and a fag out of it. Each morning for the next few days, we walked down the road through the village, round the tree lined corner and over the main road and we would pass the time of day with the German soldiers who had their tank gun in the spinney now and were watching the road through binoculars all of the time
The silence and the waiting was getting at both Charlie and me.
We knew from the conversation of these German soldiers and the sound of battle, that we could be in the middle of a right bloody ding dong and there was not much that we could do about it.
These spinneys could be full of German soldiers with artillery pieces, we were working between the spinney and the road that they were watching.
On this day April 24th Charlie had gone to tell the young Frau that we had nearly finished the potatoes and I went on alone. I had my hoe on my shoulder and my thoughts were miles away and I could hear noise on the main road, although I couldn't see anything because of the trees.
As I rounded the corner, the first thing I saw was a German soldier with his back towards me and his hands in the air. Twenty yards away from him was a jeep with three American soldiers in it. One was the driver and the other was behind a vicious looking automatic gun attached to the jeep, the other soldier, who seemed to be in charge, was shouting orders in German to the soldier with his hands in the air. Behind this jeep the road was full of Jeeps guns and tanks.
I turned and began to run back to inform Charlie, but before I had covered five yards the words "Achtung" stopped me dead in my tracks.
I turned round again putting my hands above my head, still clutching the hoe. I shouted "I am a British Prisoner of War". The Yank shouted back to me "Walk man, dammit walk you nearly got your damned head shot off!"
Looking down the road I could see what he meant.
Everything seemed to be pointing at me, even the bloody tank guns.
He told me to "Get rid of that damned hoe. Go back to where I had come from in the village and to stay there out in the open."
I went back very slowly, walking towards the farmhouse where we had been sleeping. I told Charlie and the Frau that the Americans were on the main road. She didn't show any surprise, it was what she had expected.
We just sat around in the open listening to the short bursts of fighting coming from the main road.
After a while we were fed up Charlie and I decided to take a walk down the lane in the direction we had first approached the village.
Less than two hundred yards down the lane we heard voices and the words "Achtung" once again: we were in contact with the American troops on foot. We told them that there were a few German soldiers in the village and they instructed us to keep behind out of the way so that they could deal with them if they had to.
We could understand why we had not heard much of the battle, in this village there was not a lot of action and hardly any resistance. Even so I heard of the death of the young German feldwebel, the one we had met in the field, he was with the soldiers who had the Red Cross Parcels. I saw the rest of them being taken prisoner of war by the Americans.
Later in the afternoon we were questioned by a senior officer in one of the houses and he told us that we would soon be passed down the line.
I was sorry to see one of the American foot soldiers with whom we had been in contact; he came in with a head wound, he was strapped to a stretcher which was fastened onto the front of a jeep. This young soldier had a very grey pallor he looked poorly, he was unconscious and after a quick examination by a medic he was taken away at speed. His friend who was with him was overcome with emotion, they had come through the campaign together and were buddies.
April 25th we were awake early and ready to go and when the jeep arrived we wasted no time. As we clambered aboard we were told it would be a rough ride with no stops and the four wheels of the jeep never seemed to be touching the ground at the same time. In places where we passed wooded areas we were told to keep our heads down.
From time to time the young soldier manning the automatic gun fired bursts of machine gun fire at the trees as we whizzed by. He told us that the woods still had snipers in them. I didn't know whether we were fired at or not, I was too busy hanging on. We sped on for another one hundred kilos and reached our destination Hildesheim and here we had a meal and a powder delouse. The procedure for this being to hold ones clothes tightly around the neck, then with a soldier either side, compressed air and delousing powder is blown up the sleeve of ones coat until you are blown out like a balloon. We were then given a shaver and soap to wash and clean up.
There were soldiers of all nationalities, walking about in this town and all of whom seemed to be intent on some business or other; it reminded me of a busy town in England.
April 25th 1945 this was the first time I had felt free in five years.
The next day Dakotas arrived to take us to Brussels and here we joined more soldiers who had been prisoners of war, having been picked up at different stages of the battle.
We were segregated from the troops who were fighting and even in the NAAFI, where we had our meals, we were kept separate and were not allowed to mix. This might well have been because we were still lousy.
It was here that I rewrote my route from Danzig along the coast to Swienmunde and inland to Celle and beyond. The paper that I had written upon to log my daily route during the three months march was in tatters, so I rewrote it in the NAAFI , on YMCA writing paper.
We had all of us been given different items of army kit, to make us more presentable, our POW numbers were checked and we were ready for England.
The next day we were still sitting around huge fires in a field in Brussels, out of touch with all that was going on, isolated and fed up to the teeth.
For some reason or other there was no flying that day and so another day regrettably away from England. Nothing was mentioned the next day at breakfast, until suddenly without warning, we were loaded into lorries, each one of us being given a brown paper bag and we were on our way to the airfield; here we were put into Lancaster bombers for our flight to England.
I still wonder if the people who plotted our route wanted us to see what force had been needed on the campaign to overcome the German Armed Forces.
In many places on the outskirts of Germany it was devastation for mile upon mile.
The only bricks above ground level were the chimneys of the houses that had been flattened by either bomb or shell and they stood out like giant tombstones. It was an awesome sight.
It was evident that the troops in this area had to fight house by house and street by street. I was thankful that the fighting was not so ferocious at the time we were liberated.
After alighting from the bombers in England, we were taken in lorries to a reception camp and taken in hand by the doctors, dentists and psychologists who were actually a team of ranking officers and we were told that because of our condition, we would not be going home right away as we had expected.
We had yet another delouse and after a shower we were examined thoroughly by a doctor, with an orderly taking down details.
I was as lousy as a hedgehog, because of my being on the road such a long while and after a good clean up we were put into huge dormitories, the only furniture in which were beds, lockers, table and chairs and here we were to stay for a while.
We were allowed to phone to the local police in our hometown, who would inform our relatives that we were back in England and safe. We were given money to spend in the NAAFI and that was the end of our first day in England. As a long time prisoner of war I soon realised that I was one of the last to be allowed to go home.
I was moved to another camp and there I was pleasantly surprised to see some of my own regiment the 8th Sherwood Foresters, who were in the Norwegian Campaign. They had been there a few days I was told and to me they looked bored stiff.
It soon became evident that nobody knew just what was to be done with quite a few soldiers, who had been soldiers for six years, but with only eight months under orders and these eight months was back in 1939. At heart and at the time they were just slacky arsed colliers. We had been five years without army discipline and we wanted to go home. It was established that many of us would no longer be fit enough for HMS and we were soon downgraded so that we could be sent home out of the way: we were given six months leave, which was due to us and then demobbed.
The doctor that examined me decided that I had chronic stomach trouble and that I needed more treatment. After a day or so with a shrink I proved to them that my brain was still working reasonably and that I knew the difference between squares, rings, oblongs and triangles etc. and a few sums that I could do when I was eight years old.
Two dentists examined my teeth, one of whom said that my teeth were reasonable and adequate, whilst the other diagnosed slight pyorrhoea.
I don't know what status they reached in their profession in civvy street after the war; for I lost all of my bloody teeth within five years of being demobbed.
I was downgraded to C2 and I was no further use to HMS.
I will end my story of soldier and POW and as I look at my final settlement for five years as a POW which was �260: I ponder wistfully, that I could have just bought myself out with this; six years ago. THE END