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THE REICHSWALD FOREST

During the ”Battle of the Bulge”, our Division, which was part of Montgomery’s Second British Army, had been put under the command of the US First and then US Ninth Army in the battle to repel the invaders from the Ardennes. When that affair came to an end, we were moved back up to Holland to prepare to invade Germany through the Reichswald Forest which contained a section of the Siegfried Line which was that country’s main line of defence. To our surprise, we found that we would come under the command of yet another Army, in this case the 1st Canadian one! You can imagine that in later years, I took pride in being able to tell people that I had served in the British, American and Canadian Armies - and that in a space of only two months!

We didn’t like the Reichswald; it was a thick forest, mainly of pine trees mostly close together and there was an eerie silence all the time — except, that is, when we weren’t being subjected to heavy artillery fire in which the shells tended to explode in the trees over our heads and causing heavy casualties. Once, having spent the night in my slit trench, I found that the tree beside it, which had formerly been a very high one, had been reduced to a stump only about three feet high.

Sometimes, however, you just had to laugh. On one occasion I had leapt into a ditch when I thought I was being shot at and I felt a sharp pain in my left buttock and thought “My God, I’ve been hit!” I put my hand down to the injured place and found that it warm and sticky . “I’m bleeding all right” I thought and started to wonder:-

a) Where’s the man who shot me?
b) How badly am I wounded?
c) Where’s the Platoon Sergeant to take over command?
d) How can I possibly explain where I am wounded?
e) Why is there a strong smell of rum in this ditch?

RUM? Then I remembered that my Father had given me a hip flask as a “going away” present and it had been in my hip pocket full of rum. I had obviously landed on it and the neck had broken off! No blood; no wound; no cushy time in a military hospital being crooned over by admiring nurses; no sickleave. Oh well, better get on with it and capture Germany instead!

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