February 1945 “Stay alive. It’s almost over.”

Today's excerpt, from Harry Leslie Smith's The Green & Pleasant Land is from February 1945. Harry Leslie Smith and his RAF unit have been transferred into war-torn Second World War Europe. My father turned 22 that month and knew the war was almost over. On the horizon for him and his generation was peace. But he knew it wasn't going to be like the peace his dad's generation got in 1918. The peace of 1945 was about to create a new social contract between the working class and capitalism. My father sensed at the beginning of 1945, that if he survived the war, the world awaiting his generation after Hitler was dead was to be the best the working class had ever know in the Western World.

For the last 18 months, I've been piecing together my Dad's Green and Pleasant Land, which was unfinished at the time of his death. It covers his life from 1923 to July 1945 concluding with Labour winning the General election. The book at least in its beta form will be ready on May 8th to coincide with the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe. Let me know if you want a copy.

Rent day approaches quickly and unfortunately due to the bad economy, I've lost some paying subscribers this month.. So, I have also included a tip jar for those, who are inclined to assist me in this project.

Chapter 40 - Europe

In February 1945, Germany’s front lines had collapsed in both the West and the East. Within its diminishing empire of occupation, populations were terrorised and murdered by the Nazis whilst a famine flourished. World War Two’s final months ended with pointless ferocity and brutality.

At the start of that month, I was deployed to the European theatre of war. On a bitterly cold day, two years after Sergeant Green had threatened us with hellfire in the desert war fighting Rommel, my unit left for the port of Harwich.

As we travelled to the coast in the grey light of a winter’s morning, my mates and I smoked cigarettes, sang dirty songs, and took the piss out of the RAF.

Each was gripped with excitement and trepidation about what awaited us in Europe. When we arrived at the port, we joined an enormous queue of military transports, and men being shipped abroad.

It was bedlam at the port. Whistles blasted, winches screeched, and an army of stevedores cursed their jobs.

Ships in their moorings were fed a cargo of guns, ammunition, petrol, and food rations by a symphony of cranes that lowered the stowage onto their decks.

We queued for hours. Nightfall came and we still hadn’t boarded our ship. It wasn’t until well past midnight that we marched up a gangplank onto an ageing freighter that had probably seen service in the First World War.

The Royal Navy packed us below the main deck like steerage immigrants on their way to the new world. An hour later, the ship left port. Our compartment was damp and smelled of diesel fumes mixed with stale seawater. Huddled in a greatcoat, I sat and felt underneath me the vibration from the ship screws as it sailed into the channel.

That night the crossing was rough and the ship pitched upwards and downwards and I spent a good deal of time retching into a bucket.

Being from a poor Yorkshire working-class family, I was never taught to swim. So I worried about being torpedoed by one of Hiter’s few remaining U Boats.

Robbie said not to worry because we were stowed underneath the waterline. “We are as good as drowned rats if attacked.”

Before sunrise, the freighter reached Ostend in Belgium. My unit disembarked from the ship like pack animals walking down a narrow mountain pass.

We marched towards a WAAF refreshment hut at the port’s entrance. There, a young woman from Glasgow served strong tea and Belgian doughnuts packed with jam. As I left, she waved goodbye and said. “Stay alive. It’s almost over.”

After that, NCOs marshalled my unit onto an American truck that drove onto a dual carriageway packed with vehicles heading towards the front.

The further we drove, the more I saw how the war had scarred the Flemish countryside. Villages were heaps of rubble from artillery and tank battles fought during the Christmas season.

By midday, we arrived at our destination, an abandoned Luftwaffe Aerodrome on the North Sea coast. At its front gate were two burnt-out panzer tanks covered in newly fallen snow.

Before they left the Germans had smashed much of the electronic and telephone equipment. The Royal Engineers had cleared the airfield of mines and booby traps but we were told to be mindful of walking in areas that looked unkempt.

Our job was to rebuild a communication link with the RAF and ensure the runway was operational within 72 hours.

On the fourth day, during that night we came under German attack because the front was less than 100 miles away.

I was in the air traffic watchtower and spotted the two german aircraft approaching our base. I recognized them as Stukas. I set off an alarm to scramble the men to the air raid trenches the Luftwaffe had dug when they occupied the base and now we used. A unit in a machine gun nest fired at the Stukas but missed them. However, the machine gun fire from the ground had rattled the pilots enough that their bombs failed to hit the runway or the control tower, where I was stationed. Instead, the bombs destroyed our storage sheds.

On the night of my 22nd birthday, the base was hit by a V2 rocket. That attack obliterated the runway and three aircraft parked on the tarmac. A mechanic was killed in the explosion caused by the V2. The blast lit up the darkness around the base like daylight before it was extinguished by water bowsers.

The following day I was sent to Antwerp to pick up supplies to replace those we had lost in the raid. The city was also attacked on the same night as us by V2 rockets. It was more heavily damaged than our airfield, despite the city being ringed by anti-aircraft batteries.

When I arrived, areas around the port still smouldered from the fires created by the V2 raids. Houses had collapsed in on themselves. Rescue crews were frantically tried to dig survivors out from the wreckage. There was a dead horse on the side of the road killed by fright or shrapnel, I couldn’t say. But the locals had begun to cut shanks of meat from the dead animal to supplement their food rations.

It’s a bit of an SOS with 3 days left before rent day. 7 new subscribers will put it over the line.

Your support keeps me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. Your subscriptions are crucial to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it is all good too because we are in the same boat. Take Care, John