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An Infantryman’s memories Part Two - Enlisting in the Infantry - late 1944 - ‘Rhine’ Landings late March 1945 and onto the Elbe and Weser.

Part Two of an oral history interview with Mr. Arthur Keech conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“I was called-up on my 18th birthday, June 1943. All the cards had come and this ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ came through with the rest of them. Mum gave it to me and I opened it, you should see the expression on her face! Anyway I went into work and said, ‘Look I’ve been called up, I’m sorry but I’ve got to go.’ That was it.

I had a train warrant, went to Midland Road Station and found four other chaps on the station from Bedford on the same journey. Never met them before in my life. We got together, we were together on the train and going up to this camp which was ‘Squires Gate Holiday Camp’ a big holiday camp at Blackpool. We had eight weeks there. We had all the inoculations, all the vaccinations and quite a reasonable bit of training but just the basic eight weeks. To make our boots fit our feet they used to march us backwards and forwards through the kid’s boating lakes on the Prom and of course they were all absolutely sodden and the leather got squalshy and they moulded to your feet. Anyway that made it quite comfortable but it was a wet affair, the trousers and everything else was wet!

It was 1944. We were in the King’s Own Regiment, they gave us a badge, it said ‘King’s Own’. After the eight weeks training we were put on another train and sent to Bury St. Edmunds. When we got to Bury St. Edmunds we changed regiment again, we went into the ‘Beds. & Herts’. We had quite a bit of extensive training there, field craft and one thing and another. Then it came to the end of this training and we were sent again to Weybourne on the Norfolk coast, this was for extensive training.

They said, ‘You are going on Special Training.’ We went and we got to this - there were four Nissen huts at the back of this big house which is there today, it’s a holiday complex now but these Nissen huts were in the field at the back. We were in there and we had all sorts of manoeuvres and all sorts of training and various training on the beach, in the dykes up there, Cley and all around there on those marshes, across those marshes.

We were sent out on a four day excursion and there was a complete Company of us which consisted of three platoons. Each platoon consisting of three sections and these three sections had ten men in it. So there were 120 men plus officers and NCO’s. On the day we were sent out it started to snow and we were marching all day through this snow and we bivouacked at night. Now the bivouacs were made up of these capes we used to wear, it was like a big sheet that wraps around you with buttons down the front. Well they were designed so that two of them buttoned up together and made a tent, what they called a bivouac, only a small thing. Anyway we’d been going for two days and we hadn’t had any sleep or rest and they decided that they would take us into the grounds of this big house, well this big house was occupied by Italian Prisoners of War. They saw the state we were in and they offered us the beds but they wouldn’t allow us to have them. We had to bivouac in the woods. Well the chappie that I was always with was Laurie Pinney, he was nearly 6’6’, a big man and he obviously couldn’t get in this thing without getting in first in this den anyway I said, ‘Laurie’ I said ‘we are not laying on all that snow. You keep guard here for a bit I’m going to nip round that farm and see if I find a bale of straw.’ Anyway I nipped round and I came back with a bale of straw and spread this bale of straw out inside, he crawled in first and I crawled in afterwards. There was a hell of a commotion that night and I said, ‘What’s going on?’ he said, ‘it’s them in the next bivouac.’ I poked my head out and they were crawling about and they were in a hell of a mess. Apparently they thought they’d have more room in their tent and they’d found a hollow, a depression in the ground, and they’d put their tent over the top of it and it was the place they used to empty the latrines. Well it had a solid crust on the top and the heat of their bodies had thawed it and you should have seen the state they were in! Anyway we got over it in the finish. It was so cold they used to give us naval rum in the tops off of grenades, these were phosphgene (?) grenades, the 77s, they had little caps on and they used to give us a tot of that throughout the night to keep the cold out. We eventually did get back to camp and we left there and we went on leave on from there.

It was eight weeks at Blackpool, I think it was another six or eight weeks at Bury St. Edmunds and another six or eight weeks at Weybourne. We had leave and we went back and they sent us to Ramsgate. We were there in a big Girl’s School, we were there for a couple or three weeks, nothing seemed to happen, they gave us nothing to do, we were killing time.

Eventually we got orders to go and we got down to the docks and we were all put into these, well we called them ‘coffins’ but they were long tanks. They were boats actually but they were like a box type tank with a little conning tower with two sailors on it and they put 200 of us in these things and off we went, across the Channel! We went across the Channel we got across there. It was claustrophobic in there and the heat was terrible. We got across to the other side and we were put on trains. We went up then from there to a place in Belgium, I don’t know the name of the place because half of us didn’t know where we were going and what we were doing. We went there and we stayed in a very large Cavalry barracks. We stayed there about two days and then they put on some more trains with straw. They were cattle trucks actually, with straw on the base and we went right the way back across France and that’s when we went to Pont d’Aire just outside Amiens, this was the Belgian Embassy Chateau, obviously not at that time. We were stationed there and we had quite a few days there and it was very, very frosty and very, very cold. We had to shave in the mornings there was no hot water! But at the bottom of this field, it was like an estate like Woburn, but at the bottom was a little river than ran through, we all had to go down there break the ice and shave with that ice cold water, it wasn’t very good! We didn’t do much else until the time came that we were all moving out and we all moved into trucks and various things. They took us over the Rhine up to just past the DZ which is the dropping zone for the 6th Airborne. We then learnt that we were reinforcements for the 6th Air Landing Brigade which was the ‘Ox. & Bucks’. There were three Regiments in that, there was the ‘Devons’, the ‘RURs’, and the ‘Ox. & Bucks’. We were to replace the casualties they’d had on landing.

This was the ‘Rhine’ landing. We went on from there. From then on it was sort of fighting and moving up on the line all the way through. We were lightly armed, we had very early light weapons, Bren guns, rifles, Sten guns, the heaviest anti-tank gun we’d got was a ‘Piet’ (?) which was a thing that fired a small bomb but it only fired it about 120 yards. The only other anti-tank weapon we had was a ‘six pounder’. We had jeeps, we had little tiny trailers that went behind the jeeps that carried things, oh and we also had 3” mortars and 2” mortars. A 2” mortar was a little tiny barrelled thing that the ordinary infantry man could carry, with a couple or three bombs which he could put in and you could fire them wherever you liked they fired with a little trigger at the bottom. But the 3” mortar was a much different thing. This was a big one and they could put about 30 in the air before the first one dropped and they were more destructive, they were bombs about that length and they were three inches in diameter.

They would be carried on a carrier but then taken off and placed, they had to level them. They had to put a base plate down, they come in two or three parts and there was a crew with them. They’d put the base plate down, put the barrel on and the tripod bit on the front and they’d got a little gauge which plumbed the sights in so they knew exactly how many hundred yards they were firing. Then they’d take the lid off, which is a leather cap, drop it in and that automatically fires out, put the lid back and the next one comes and it’s on like that and so on until all they’d all gone.

Anyway we moved forward like to this until we came to a place were they said, ‘We are going to give you a few days rest.’ Showers came up and all sorts of things and in the mean time to take our place the 15th Scottish came up, the 15th Scottish Armoured Division and it took them quite a long time to go through. Tanks and guns and goodness knows what, all big heavy armour, all went through. Well about three days later they were coming round, ‘Sorry boys, but you’ve got to go back in the line again.’ The 15th Scottish had been knocked out!

We said, ‘Christ! What is up in front?’ Anyway, we moved up. After some time we came across the 15th Scottish Armour and there it lay in the fields completely burnt out, blown to pieces, absolutely mangled, goodness knows what they did, we couldn’t make head nor tail of it. We went on through them and kept going and we never met any opposition. We kept going on and things were moving quite fast and then we sort of came across a little bit of opposition before we came to the River Elbe which was a very, very fast running river, very wide. And the engineers came up and they managed to get a pontoon bridge across it that we crossed and we moved on from there. It was a case of skirmishes and fighting all the way through and bypassed, being light armoured, we bypassed all the big towns and only went through and left pockets for the people behind us to come and dig out. We went on from there, we were heading up towards the River Weser this was another swift flowing river but not quite as big as the Elbe.

On the approaches to this and there was a battery of 88 ml. self propelled guns on the far side, they are a big gun and the Weser is in a valley. We were up on this side and they were up on the other side, we couldn’t see them but we were advancing across this field and they opened fire. Well, the shells of the 88s burst before you heard the report of the gun and before you knew were you were there was a like a cool box over the top. It was like a burst of black smoke and the stuff hitting the ground, dropping lumps of red hot steel. That knocked a few of us out and we moved on to the river edge and somebody somehow got a rope across from one side to the other, how that was done I don’t know, and there was a raft and where that came from I don’t know! On this raft they’d placed a ‘six pounder’ anti-tank gun. Well, five of us got on it and we were supposed to pull this thing across to the opposite with the rope. Well as we did so these guns opened up again and we hadn’t hardly left the bank but the raft was fixed to the main pulling rope with pulleys so anyway, I got down behind the gun plate and said, ‘Oh, I don’t think much to this!’ I was chattering away to these people, turned round and found nobody there, they’d all gone! They’d left me on this thing. I thought, I’m not stopping on so I went through the wood up the valley and I came to a little house, I found them, they were in the cellar of this house! After the shelling had stopped we did go down and we got across and we eventually silenced these guns and moved on. Once they got across they put bigger stuff on, once they’d got across and got those guns out of the way they’d got more time and more equipment came up.

This was at night while I was on this raft thing. Having got across there we moved on and we had some heavy armour come up and from then on the going was pretty easy and we used to ride on the tanks and we were doing as much as 30 miles a day. On occasions we were getting blasted from various places and we just moved on and pushed through and we found that the Germans were coming back the other way and giving themselves up. At one time we had over 10,000 German prisoners in fields. Well that night it poured with rain and in the morning they’d used all their coats and things and made like one continuous tent across the whole lot.”

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