Hills Stuart - By tank into Normandy

So it is; yet let us sing

Honour to the old bow string!

Honour to the bugle-horn!

Honour to the woods unshorn!

Honour to the Lincoln green!

Honour to the archer keen!

Honour to tight Little John,

And the horse he rode upon!

Honour to bold Robin Hood,

Sleeping in the underwood;

Honour to Maid Marian,

And to all the Sherwood clan!

JOHN KEATS

BY TANK INTO
NORMANDY

A MEMOIR OF THE CAMPAIGN IN NORTH-WEST EUROPE FROM D-DAY TO VE DAY

STUART HILLS MC

CASSELL

FOR MY GRANDCHILDREN

Sophie Katie Emmy Charlotte Nicholas

Lucy & Marcus

May they always live in peace

CONTENTS

PHOTOGRAPHS

Major Chris Sedgewick and Lt Col Stanley Christopherson

MAPS

T he author gratefully acknowledges the help he has received from Helen Burra-Robinson, Ken Ewing, Peter Hills, Bert Jenkins, Richard Lane, Ernie Leppard, Willy Lieber, Jimmy McWilliam, Peter Mellowes MC, Tim Olphert, Hans Pol, David Render, John Semken CB MC and Harry Wijchersen.

The extract from The Aristocrats by Keith Douglas is from his Collected Poems, and other extracts by Keith Douglas are from his From Alamein to Zem Zem; reprinted by permission of the publishers Faber and Faber Ltd.

The extract from The Wilderness by Sidney Keyes is from Collected Poems (Routledge, 1945).

The extracts from To War with Whitaker by the Countess of Ranfurly, published by Heinemann, are reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd.

The extracts from Normandy 1944 From the Hull of a Sherman by Arthur Reddish are reprinted by kind permission of Ken Ewing Publications.

The extracts from The Man who Worked on Sundays are reprinted by kind permission of the author the Reverend Leslie Skinner.

W ar memoirs, like wine, do well to be kept in store for a while. Stuart Hillss account of that extraordinary year between June 1944 and May 1945 comes more than half a century after the experience, and in my judgement is all the better for it. That is partly because, as we grow older, we see such events in better perspective; partly because there are now so many folk who have no recollection at all of how, against all the odds, the Second World War was won. I think some of us may have bored our children with stories of what we did in those years for while they were growing up, we were still suffering from that wars consequences.

Our grandchildren form a different audience. Many of them are genuinely eager to know what happened and why it happened. The history of those times puzzles them. Why did we have to go to war again so soon after 191418? Why did the French, who had fought so tenaciously in that war, collapse in 1940?

That last question takes us towards the heart of Stuart Hillss story. As all of us who were soldiers in the late summer of 1940 knew in our hearts, to win that war we would somehow have to storm our way back across the English Channel and into a Europe heavily fortified by Germany. There were many heroic battles between 1940 and 1945. But as a feat of arms, the invasion of France by the Allied Armies in June 1944 stands by itself.

The 8th Armoured Brigade to which Stuart Hills and I belonged was often at the sharp end of that invasion. His was the more gallant part, I must hasten to add, because, as you will read, the tanks of his regiment played a crucial role on D-Day itself. The motor battalion, to which I belonged, was crowded out on that day. We landed a few days later. But essentially those of us who belonged to that brigade were colleagues in arms during the Battle for Europe. I look back on it all now, as I am sure Stuart does, with a profound sense of gratitude.

We survived, for one thing! And we survived partly because we were in the hands of capable senior officers. The casualties of the First World War led to a torrent of criticism of the higher command not all of it altogether fair. We simply could not afford to have casualties on that scale barely a generation later. Even so, my own records show that between June 6 1944 and May 5 1945 8th Armoured Brigade lost 54 officers and 372 other ranks killed, another 10 officers and 163 other ranks missing, and 175 officers and 1,226 other ranks wounded. So, although By Tank into Normandy may sound a fairly safe way to go, it was not all that safe!

By any measurement of history the conquest of Europe was a military triumph, something of which to be justly proud, a story to remember and to tell. Nobody is better qualified to tell it than a man who fought from start to finish with the Sherwood Rangers.

Lord Deedes KBE MC PC DL

F or far too many years I was too lazy to set in some sort of order the mass of papers which I accumulated in connection with my, and my regiments, activities in North-West Europe during the war. Apart from my own war diary, much of which was written at the time and contained photos, sketch-maps, press cuttings and obituaries, I also had most of the letters I had written to family and friends during the campaign.

It was only recently, while watching cricket with David Walsh, a housemaster and historian at Tonbridge School, that he persuaded me to hand these papers over for scrutiny. To my surprise, he considered it worthwhile to set them all in order, so that they would provide a fitting chronicle for others to read.

Having given me a mass of prep to do, David then went ahead with this hefty assignment. Once the pattern was set and further research completed, we combined our efforts in composing a narrative which my family enjoyed.

I hope the reader will too.

Stuart Hills

I t was 6.45 a.m. on Sunday June 4 1944 in a wood near Calshot, on the western shore of Southampton Water, and the Brigadier was casting a disapproving eye in my direction. I was stripped to the waist in the early morning sunshine outside a tent I shared with Tim Olphert, one of my fellow troop leaders in C Squadron, and I was writing a letter to my brother Peter. The Brigadier obviously thought I should be more formally occupied, but he said nothing and I resumed my letter, saying that I was working hard but, for security reasons, could say little more. Later that afternoon, in weather that still seemed favourable, we drove our tanks down to the nearby quay, just where Southampton Water meets the Solent, and boarded Landing Craft Tanks (LCTs) belonging to 15 and 40 LCT Flotillas. Ours was numbered 442. We moved out into the Solent, taking care to avoid the myriad vessels plying back and forth, and slowly headed out towards the sea. We had little idea that General Eisenhower, in his SHAEF Headquarters at Southwick Park near Portsmouth, had already taken the decision to postpone Operation Overlord for twenty-four hours because of worsening weather conditions.

My confidence was lifted by the presence around me of men who were already familiar with the horrors and excitement that war can bring. I was a twenty-year-old newcomer and unblooded, while they were veterans of the successful campaign in the North African desert. It had been in January 1944 that I had joined the Nottinghamshire Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry fresh from 100 OCTU (Officer Cadet Training Unit) at Sandhurst. The Regiment had only then recently returned from three years in the Middle East, a period during which it had been involved in every major engagement of the desert war, including El Alamein and the breaking of the Mareth Line before Tunis. Tim Olphert never spoke about the desert or the heavy casualties the Regiment had suffered, although his tank had been knocked out there. I was therefore unaware how he and the others felt about what lay ahead. All I knew was that I must not let them down.