Frizzell.biz

By mid May the German armies were advancing towards France. Invading Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, Countries who had relied overlong on the hope that international law and their neutrality would be sufficient defence against attack. While we of the British Expeditionary Force, part of the First Army Group under the command of the French General Billotte, were an army stretched in the task of closing the gap from where the Belgian frontier began at the sea southwards to where the Maginot Line began near Longwy. We knew little of the disposition of any of the armies of either side. Our daily concern was simply to move in convoy as and when we were told and all that we knew of our position was by reference to the daily route instructions and the maps we carried. It was just as well for our peace of mind that the maps were not marked with the German positions. Our lorries each carried three tons of one sort of ammunition or another. Norman and I were still on the 6-wheeled Karrier that we had when we landed at Le Havre and our load of 25-pounder shells was packed in wooden boxes. Others carried rifle ammunition. Hand grenades and mortar bombs and the necessity of always travelling 100 yards apart became more and more apparent as we advanced into Belgium, as any one vehicle hit by Stuka dive-bombers would have had a devastating effect on vehicles travelling close together.

Because of the constant danger of bombing attacks on our ammunition convoy we invariably travelled at night and slept as best we could during the day in makeshift beds in the back of our lorries in a recess behind the drivers cab formed from stacked boxes of ammunition.

We were now headed for Halle, a small town about 15 kilometres south west of Brussels and still at that time, travelling in full convoy of some 20 or 30 vehicles. At the first stop after leaving Plouvain, we based ourselves on an abandoned farm some way off the main roads where we parked our lorries randomly dispersed and well camouflaged against the curious eyes of a German reconnaissance Storch that flew over very early each morning with the regularity of a railway timetable. We had a small sand bagged Bren gun pit as our only air defence and there was a scramble to man it whenever the Storch was heard approaching.

Whether we were hopeless shots, or he was armour plated we never knew but he always flew off unharmed. It was just our luck a few days later that the Bren gun was stripped for cleaning and lying dismantled on some bales of straw in the farmyard, when with a paralysing roar four German heavy bombers followed each other in single file across the open field less than 100 feet up and a hundred yards from where we sat frozen with shock. As we struggled furiously to reassemble the Bren gun, in case there were other planes following, the pilots gave us a cheeky grin and a wave as they passed.

The German Luftwaffe greatly outnumbered the few British squadrons based in France and their superiority began to show, as they seemed to cruise nonchalantly overhead, holding formation against desultory anti-aircraft fire from the ground, with little or no interception in the air. Our immediate and direct personal experience of this growing impudent nonchalance occurred when Fred and I sat on a grass bank in the sun one afternoon leaning against an outer wall of the farm and at peace with the world. In the distance there were three tiny specks in the sky that grew larger as we watched and in a matter of seconds the specks became three Stuka dive bombers heading in a direct line for us but fairly high. So far we had remained interested spectators of someone else's war but when the leading Stuka broke off from the rest and started a steep dive towards us we realised that we were no longer spectators but targets! Not just targets of two mere soldiers basking in the warm sunshine but two mere soldiers basking in the sun with their backs against a wall behind which was parked a camouflaged group of five lorries loaded with a total of 15 tons of high explosive. It took very little time for this realisation to sink into our petrified consciousness and we froze in absolute shock. The familiar high-pitched scream of the Stuka's dive increased as it became closer and larger, diving straight at us until we could clearly see the pilot's grinning face. He waved and was over our heads and gone. We sat very still, leaning against the wall for a long and silent time, hardly breathing and hearts beating faster. No bomb, no strafing, nothing but a pilot's idea of a joke. Probably returning empty from an earlier raid. I think that while we were always aware of the danger of the explosive load we carried and when we were bombed our one aim was to distance ourselves as far away as possible from the lorry and preferably find something solid like a farm roller to hide behind but we had got so used to regarding our cargo as so many wooden boxes that we had long since ceased to let it worry us.

The apparent vulnerability of our farmhouse to bombing resulted in a division of the Company into sub-sections where each group of five lorries was dispersed over the countryside. Our sub-section hid up in a wood by day on the outskirts of a very small town and we slept in our usual way on the hard and uncomfortable ammunition boxes in the back of the lorry. Nearby was a deserted farmhouse, and we decided, after investigation, that the bare bed frames, the mattresses having disappeared with their owners, would make for a more comfortable rest, so we climbed through a ground floor window and moved in. We felt like intruders on someone's privacy. I used a small bedroom that had belonged to a young girl called Olga. Who clearly was a music lover from the bust of Beethoven on the dressing table and the many concert programmes in a drawer and all the time we were there, we seemed to feel unease as though the original occupants would walk in at any time. For the first day or so we laboriously entered and left the building by the window, until someone tried the front door handle and found it unlocked! With the lorries now well hidden in the small wood, we settled into the farmhouse and began to wonder if we had been totally forgotten, as we had no communication with our unit and no food at all.

By the second day in the farmhouse we were becoming extremely hungry and as we were not far from a small and totally deserted town with looted shops we decided to go and find anything that was eatable.

Our first find was a bar with pressurised beer taps still working. Dirty glasses were everywhere, so fastidiously we used our tin mugs. Every trace of food seemed to have disappeared from the town with the exception of great mounds of dried peas and beans spilled across the floor of a grocers shop. On the shelves were the unwanted leftovers from the looting; a large tin of the thin vanilla flavoured biscuits used for ice-cream wafers and some small cartons of strawberry jam and these, in layers of three or four wafers at a time with strawberry jam in between was breakfast, dinner, tea and supper for the next two days.

We continued to search for food the following day without any success. The eerie feeling of intrusion was always with us as we went into houses in our search. Here and there were pans still on the stove and dishes on the table, so hurried had been the departure of the frightened owners. In the cellar of one house we found several dozen bottles of some Tarragona Wine, which we used to supplement our strawberry wafers, which were extremely difficult to swallow in the dry state. Some measure of desperation began to set in. We had to remain where we were otherwise our unit would never find us and we in turn didn't know where they were. One driver in the sub-section was a butcher from Wolverhampton, Ralph Draper and he had noticed that in a distant field a number of cattle had been turned loose by the farmers to fend for themselves. So began the great round up! Before long we had a herd of eight milk-bound cows and a calf. Within an hour we had only eight cows and veal roasting on a fire. Some foolhardy chickens appeared, and were duly chased and despatched with bayonets, the first and last time our side arms were used in battle. Our hunger assuaged, we settled down to the bucolic life, the milk-bound cows were relieved of their suffering by those of us able to milk and on the second days milking we had some splendid bowls of cream cooling on the slab in the dairy and after visiting another better equipped farm and borrowing a separator and churn, we soon had more butter than we needed. It was here that Fred gave us a moment of light relief by discovering that by taking a short cut that the midden In the centre of the farmyard and the storage pit for all the manure raked out from the cow byres was not solid but merely a thin crust over a fluid sea. We cheered as he sank, then helped him out and held our noses as we swilled him down.

The war woke up with the arrival of a Company despatch rider with the news that we were to move on the next morning towards Halle. That night we slept aboard our lorries back on the hard boards. At dawn I awoke to find the lorry moving along a country road and sleepily thought that Norman had got up to make an early start. I turned over, only to meet his startled face alongside. We both sat up, "I reckon we've been captured by a German patrol" said Norman, there was nothing left to do, but wait in apprehension for the outcome. Eventually the lorry stopped and after a moments delay, the grinning face of one of the unit's corporals appeared at the parted canvas curtain at the tailboard. "They sent me to fetch you," he said. "But I thought I'd let you sleep on. And drive it myself"

So we rejoined the unit, and went on towards Halle. Our 6-wheeled Karrier was a large forward drive lorry, with an open plan design of cab. That is, the driver and co-driver were completely exposed to the elements, as there was no windscreen, only a canvas apron that came UP to the chin. A heavy canvas pram-like hood pulled forward over our heads when required. The side 'doors' were canvas sheets that clipped across the door opening on springs.

Stuka attacks had taught us to adapt the cab to circumstances, with the hood folded right back to allow maximum visibility skywards and the 'doors' rolled back to give a clear emergency exit. At the first alarm, the gear lever was put into neutral, the ignition switched off, the handbrake pulled on and before the lorry had slowed to 15 miles an hour we had leapt through the side gaps and were running fast for the open fields. There we lay as flat as we could short of burrowing into the ground and I recall the dreadful feeling of nakedness there was on the nape of my neck as the attack went on, quite sure that the bristling hairs were full in the Stuka pilot's Sights, and then they would go away and we would walk back to the truck only to find some 10 or 15 refugees crouching under it for shelter!

Refugees caused many problems, preventing free movement on the roads. One of our leaders, losing his temper at our slow progress at one stage, ordered us to "drive on regardless and run them over if you have to."

We realised why the farmhouse mattresses had gone, when the refugee's cars came along the road towards us, each with a mattress on the roof to act as some slight protection against the strafing of the roads by low flying German aircraft. Others were escaping on foot, pushing handcarts laden with a few household goods and often with an elderly relative as a passenger.

We were now in full convoy and heading towards Brussels. Our route so far had taken us from Arras north eastwards skirting Tournai and then east through Enghien heading for Halle. The flow of refugees towards us increased to the point that made forward movement almost impossible and any German aircraft flying low over the roads was enough in itself to start a scrambling panic without the need for a shot to be fired. Carts and cars were abandoned as people fled into the fields and we were left to make our way as best we could through the chaotic melee left on the road. Our final point in the advance into Belgium was a small wood a few kilometres from Halle where the density of the trees was enough to give us protective cover in daylight. It seemed that this was going to be a battle line as we were told to start digging slit trenches and prepare for a stay. We were still living a mobile life eating when we could and sleeping in our makeshift beds in the backs of the lorries. It was at dawn on our second day beneath the trees that a speculative German bomber decided to flush out the wood on the off chance of there being a worthwhile target in hiding. Our usual nightwear was a singlet and underpants and we were torn between modesty and self-preservation as we scrambled in near panic over the tailboard of our lorries to dash for the nearest slit trench as the bombs started to explode around us. In the first trench I came to, I looked down with a sense of shock at one of our drivers who was crouching in a curled up ball and sobbing with fright. In embarrassment I went away to find another trench but the bombing ceased as quickly as it had begun and we returned to the lorries to get dressed. No one had been injured and all the lorries undamaged but we walked around and looked with awe at the massive holes that large pieces of shrapnel had torn through thick tree trunks and realised that a similar piece would have made a mess of our heads. The convoy re-formed and as we continued east to Halle the oncoming stream of refugees was joined by more and more of our own BEF vehicles heading west. Gradually the sheer crush of traffic caused a massive jam and as we sat and exchanged news and rumour with the occupants of the lorries going westwards it became clear that the whole of the mobile BEF was being turned back on it's route. Ah! We thought, back behind the Maginot line. "Ils ne passeront pas!" The jam started to clear, and we came to a Military Police staging point where a solitary redcap on point duty was directing the convoys to turn around and go back! A slow and tortuous business but finally, we turned and headed west with the others. The retreat to Dunkirk had begun.