For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II. Dr. Campbell-Begg Richard

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СКАЧАТЬ aware of where we were, and that’s not surprising – I mentioned the recce planes – and we were very severely damaged at that time. There were quite a few casualties, but that was the way it was – it was war, and also, what was so astonishing, almost immediately the roads were chock-a-block with farmers and people coming in from the war areas and retreating towards Rheims, Epernay and the south. It was the audacity of these German aeroplanes – there was little opposition, and also remember that at that time a gaggle of 50 bombers seemed enormous. I know it was nothing like the enormous numbers towards the end of the war, but 50 bombers on the way to bomb. . . And you must remember that, as far as I was concerned, they were coming to me, little Willie. Obviously they were covering an area and they seemed to move towards the south-east, towards Rheims, and there was bombing all the way round there. And then they would come back and they would do this hedge-hopping, coming very low, and the rear gunners on these bombers having a grand old time just shooting up everything in sight. Once again it included me, and I wasn’t a very good soldier – I was quite happy to keep my head down.

      Unfortunately, because of the easy way we’d been living, we’d been a bit careless and one of the bombs destroyed all our GTVs – that’s Gun Towing Vehicles – all in one swipe. We had no way of moving our guns. Also, an interesting part about this question of transport was, because of the very heavy winter that we’d passed through – and remember we weren’t accustomed to such things as freeze-ups in big motor vehicles – many were damaged with iced-up engine blocks and so on. They’d been sent back to the Service Corps people for repairs so that at that time there was a huge shortage of vehicles available to move people and things about – they were still being repaired – and I was told that this was a general situation throughout the BEF. In our case we were just one troop of four guns, and we lost their mobility in one swipe. Once again it was panic stations; nobody knew just exactly what was happening. We had certain targets at which we fired, but it was all a bit half-hearted; I suppose it was just a show of strength. After two or three days of this odd situation, news came around that we were going to retreat, we were going to retreat south of the River Aisne, which was in our area. That was fair enough; we seemed to think that would be a good idea, soldiers being what we were – we weren’t all that good. But, unfortunately, we couldn’t take our guns with us, so we just took the blocks and ammunition that was available, we blew that and off we went. We left fairly early in the day, crossed the river and continued till the evening, and there we stopped and there we were, a half battery of the Royal Artillery with no guns. We were a bit stupid.

      This is rather an interesting one. They issued us with Boys rifles, and whenever I mention Boys rifles people just simply don’t know there was such a thing, but these things were called Boys rifles. I don’t mean “boys and girls” – it was just the initials of this particular rifle and it fired a .5 bullet. In other words it wasn’t like an ordinary rifle and the recoil was pretty severe, so it was necessary to get on your stomach and use it in that way. These Boys rifles were considered to be anti-tank and, when you think about it, the whole thing was once again, at that particular time of the war, pretty pathetic.

      We were given a silhouette of these various German tanks and there were crosses marked on them to tell us that was the place to fire at to put them out of action. There was no question of destroying them, but we could stop them – but you needed to be a brave man. Well I know that the very thought of just waiting around for a tank to turn up so you could get a shot at it didn’t appeal to us very much. We were split up into small groups and we were told to lie around and destroy these tanks when they arrived, which they didn’t, which was just as well.

      As I mentioned early on, in the first stage of retreat, we stopped and bivouacked and got ourselves comfortable and then somebody suggested – the other half of the Battery were in the area – we should borrow their GTVs and get back and retrieve these guns. Well, of course, that seemed to be a very good, bright, very dashing thing to do, and then of course the question was volunteers – “You, you and you”, the usual drill – and I found myself one of the people on the way back to where we’d just come from.

      By this time, when we re-crossed the Aisne towards Guinecourt, the French had moved in with anti-tank weapons on the south side of the Aisne and were waiting for the Germans, who were close by, to arrive at the river. So our Officer decided we couldn’t hope to pick up the guns, so we backtracked and eventually rejoined our unit.’

      For John Campion, manning the guns outside Lille, events following the abrupt ending of the ‘Phoney War’ were equally memorable:

      ‘Then on 10 May the Germans invaded the Low Countries and all was feverish activity. Infantry, light tanks were ordered up immediately to beyond the frontier. We didn’t move until three days later when we were ordered up to a place overlooking Louvain. It was intended to be part of the defensive line of the River Dyle. We got the guns into position but immediately we were ordered back; we kept going backwards with various stops until we reached the town of Templeuve, just outside Lille, so we were practically back in our old country.

      There was one little incident which interested me when we were moving back from Louvain to Templeuve. We were passing through Brussels and saw a most unlikely sight: there were cavalrymen, like our own Horse Guards, but with blue cloaks, blue uniforms, plumed helmets and with beautiful black horses, and not a flicker of emotion on their faces. I couldn’t decide whether they were waiting to surrender to the Germans or just waiting to see what would happen, but anyway we carried on and eventually reached our next gun position in Templeuve. It was there we had our first casualties, not very severe, but it reminded us that this was a war. We had our Command Post in what should have been a wonderful place – it was a winery with a well-stocked cellar with all of the shelves filled with all kinds of drinks, but, not being much of a drinker, I wasn’t able to take much advantage of it.

      During our three days in Templeuve, I think we managed to at least frighten the Germans. From the LP [look-out post] Germans were seen digging what appeared to be gun pits. Because of the situation, ammunition was rationed and we had to get permission to fire on the Germans, but when we did we couldn’t tell whether we killed or injured any, but we do know we sent them flying.

      We stayed only a few days and then we had to start moving again. This time we moved to Flers, which, again, was only a short distance from Lille. After leaving Flers we started meeting the refugees. We also benefited from two factories which had been completely abandoned and full of cigarettes and chocolate, which we didn’t feel too guilty about taking. It was on this move that the refugees and the Army were hopelessly mixed, and a British ambulance driver stopped us to find out if we could tell him where the nearest aid post was because he had a load of wounded. We couldn’t, so he just had to drive on.

      We pressed on and eventually went into “harbour” [rest and recuperation] for a day, and then later that day our CO was given orders to destroy the guns and vehicles and send the men down to the beach. He was a Territorial Army Officer and not a Regular, so he had no hesitation in refusing. So he took himself off to Headquarters, probably Corps Headquarters, and said, “I’ve got a good regiment, well trained and good morale – give me something to do.” So he was ordered to take a position on the defensive line around Dunkirk, so we were ordered back to Dunkirk and eventually arrived. There again it was complete pandemonium – soldiers, some officers, French and Belgian, who had no further interest in the war, looting our vehicles; one of them stole my trousers, which had my personal diary in the pocket.

      Eventually we got our orders and dug our guns in, did the necessary survey, set up the Command Post and then we just had to sit and wait, but the few days that were left had a certain interest. A French colonial cavalry troop had decided to abandon their horses in a field next to our guns. They took all their bridles, etc, unsaddled them and went off on foot. Soon as our chaps saw this, as many as could grabbed a horse, re-saddled them and rode up and down the village going to collect their meals, etc. However, I couldn’t get a horse so I got someone to teach me to ride an abandoned motorcycle. We’d been living on preserved rations until then, then our cooks СКАЧАТЬ