from BBC 'WW2 People's War'..
…, because Belsen was relieved on the 15th of April '45, and because the local German general noted it and he gave safe passage for our troops to go through the front line and have a look and see if they could help, and so they sent out all these chaps who had signed up to go to the Low Countries, and suddenly phoned up and "can you be at British Red Cross Headquarters in Grosvenor Crescent by 2 o'clock this afternoon"? And I got this message, and I got on my motorbike with a pal I was playing golf with who was also one of the batch, dropped him at Guildford to collect a few things where he lived, and he managed to get up and I drove on round, and we found ourselves kitted out; we didn't know what we were going to do at all. And I think it was Lady Limerick, I can't …, I always thought it was Lady Reading, but they tell me at Red Cross now that it was Lady Limerick who was there, and told us we were going to Belsen, and we thought …, oh, we didn't know much about it except by that time we had heard of concentration camps, and so we were shoved on a train, got on at Kemble Station in the Cotswolds here, and went to Rover Camp for the night, and I was trying to find out …, the War Office and I was on to them during this week, they can't tell me where Rover Camp was, it was near Cirencester, and I want to go back and look at the actual site. And we were there for a night, and going to be flown from Northfleet or "Bagwash" … or one of the aerodromes, and believe it or not, that was on the 26th/27th of April, oh 25th I think of April, and believe it or not there was an enormous snow storm that night out there, one of the latest they have ever had, and the flying was stopped so we spent 3 nights on a concrete floor with greatcoats in the snow, but at that age what does it matter to you, you know.
And then we got off and we flew with a drunken Canadian crew, by that time been waiting for the …, to fly because of the snow, terrifying actually they really were quite tight, and anyhow we took off alright, and they had sobered up by the time we got over Germany, thank goodness, because we landed at Celle, Lutfwaffe aerodrome, Lutwaffe still in charge, and they had dug trenches across the landing strip to stop us landing, but they hadn't had time to fill in, because …, they had filled some of them in, but the Dakota in front of us with about, what do they carry 18 I think students, went nose up into one of these things, they were all alive, and we just stopped in time, of course our chap saw what happened, and it was quite bizarre really because they knew the war was over, you know and everything was finished, and we were taken up to the camp in Luftwaffe trucks all arranged, and got there and most of them had gone of course, the SS had gone and everything, and there were …, had been (they had been clearing it up, our chaps very, very well), and there had been about 15,000 unburied bodies when we got there originally, and there were still, I don't know, a lot, and our job was to take a hut or two each, and sort of sort it out, get the poor people out through … Good old Brits you know, I mean, improvisation, the engineers fitted up what we called the human laundry in no time, with spray jets and soap and everything, and all the ones who could walk at all, clothes off, shaved of course, lice where all over them, typhus was raging, and through the laundry clean clothes into what had been the SS barracks, which was used as a sort of hospital there. |