James Holland - An Englishman at War

Contents

From the outbreak of war in September 1939 all the way to the smouldering ruins of Berlin in 1945, via Palestine, Tobruk, El Alamein, D-Day, Nijmegen and the crossing of the Rhine, An Englishman at War is a unique first-person account of the Second World War.

The Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, Stanley Christophersons regiment, went to war as amateurs, equipped with courage but very little else, and ended up one of the most experienced, highly trained and most valued armoured units in the British Army. Their journey through the war, learning through mistakes and tragedy as well as from a determined desire to improve, can, in many ways, be seen to reflect the experience of the British Army as a whole. From Alamein onwards, the Sherwood Rangers were in the vanguard of almost every action in which they took part, and over the course of the conflict, they amassed an astonishing thirty battle honours.

Christopherson himself was to rise from a junior subaltern to become the commanding officer of the regiment soon after the D-Day landings. He took part in all thirty battle honours, and collected a Distinguished Service Order, two Military Crosses and an American Silver Star, as well as being Mentioned in Despatches four times. His is an extraordinary story.

Also by James Holland

Non-fiction

FORTRESS MALTA

TOGETHER WE STAND

HEROES

ITALYS SORROW

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN

DAM BUSTERS

Fiction

THE BURNING BLUE

A PAIR OF SILVER WINGS

THE ODIN MISSION

DARKEST HOUR

BLOOD OF HONOUR

HELLFIRE

DEVILS PACT

For more information on James Holland and his books, see his website at www.griffonmerlin.com

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First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Stanley Christopherson 2014
Introduction, postscript, appendices and additional text James Holland Map by Tom Coulson at Encompass Graphics

Stanley Christopherson and James Holland have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

) on behalf of the Estate of Myles Hildyard.

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I N EARLY J UNE 2004, I was in Normandy with a small group of friends, one of whom was David Christopherson; of our group, his was the only father who had both fought in the war and landed on D-Day, and David was understandably keen to see some of the places where his father, Stanley, had been in action. Knowing my particular interest in the war, he shared with me some of the passages of his fathers wartime diaries, which he had brought along. It seemed the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry had got through D-Day itself without suffering too many casualties, but then had been involved in a particularly tough fight near a village called Tilly-sur-Seules, to the south of Bayeux. By chance we were staying very close by so, together, David and I found our way to Point 103, a hill overlooking the village of St Pierre, where the Sherwood Rangers and Stanley had been sent on 8 June 1944.

They had moved into positions on this piece of high ground using trees as cover. Sixty years on, David and I found the spot easily: a thick line of trees ran off the road to St Pierre and Tilly along a slightly sunken track. From here, along that ridgeline, it required little imagination to picture the tanks and men of the Sherwood Rangers, positioned along there, the hulls of the Sherman tanks on the track, the barrels of their guns hidden by the foliage and branches of the beeches. And from between the trees, there was a clear view down to the villages and the rolling Normandy countryside beyond.

David was both excited and wistful about the discovery. Hed been to Normandy with his father, but only once, some years before, and hed not asked enough questions. Stanley had passed away 14 years earlier, in 1990, and during his lifetime had not talked to his son much about his war. Now, as we walked the old battleground, it was too late to ask Stanley about his memories of what hed experienced all those years before.

Walking along Point 103 fired our interest. David explained that his father had served throughout the war, and that he wished he now knew more. The pages of the diary hed brought with him were just a fragment there was a mass of it, from 1940 until the end, and mostly transcribed too: Palestine, Tobruk, Alamein, Tunisia, Normandy, Operation MARKET GARDEN, the crossing of the Rhine. David vowed to reread it; I urged him to send me a copy. He was as good as his word.

Together, the diaries amount to more than three hundred thousand words: one of the most astonishing war records I have ever read by a British soldier in the Second World War.

Stanley Christopherson was born in 1912 into a comfortable middle-class family. A large part of his childhood was spent in South Africa, where his father became managing director of Consolidated Goldfields. Father and son were close, and Stanley once wrote, I would rather be alone with my father for company than any other man. From his father he inherited the charming, humorous and optimistic outlook that exudes from his diaries.

Like most boys of his age and class, he was educated in England, first at Lockers Park preparatory school, where one of his many uncles was headmaster, and then Winchester College. By this time, the Christophersons had returned from South Africa Consolidated Goldfields had an office in London, although Stanleys father was often based in South Africa for long periods.

With the family in England, however, holidays were now spent at their home at Belmont Paddocks, near Faversham. Stanley adored it. Here he was surrounded by family and friends; they played golf, cricket and tennis; they had dogs and horses so there was hunting and shooting, and weekend parties with croquet, after-dinner cards and other games. The Christophersons were nothing if not sociable, and the impression from his early letters and diaries is of an idyllic time that offered no hint of what was to come in the war.

Although Stanley won a place at Oxford, he decided to sail to South Africa instead, to be with his beloved father. He spent a year out there before returning to England, and in 1935, aged 23, he took up a post with Rowe Swann & Co, stockbrokers with links to South Africa. It was during this time that he joined the Inns of Court, a Territorial Army regiment that recruited not only barristers, but solicitors, stockbrokers and former public-school and Oxbridge men living and working in the City. A cavalry unit, it aimed to train these young men at weekends and at an annual summer camp so that, in the event of war, they should have some military experience.