June 2004
"I was too young to have a rifle. I had a brush stick instead..!" | |
|  | | Peter Strachan and Gerry Briscoe in 2004...Sixty years after they landed on the D-Day beaches |
| | Sixty years ago Bradford's Gerry Briscoe and Peter Strachan (left) were young, fresh-faced...and about to go to war in the biggest land battle ever seen in the history of the world. Sixty years on, they tell us what it was like to be a teenager going into war. |
| | | Be warned, some of this will make for uncomfortable reading...
 | "THAT WAS THE END OF HIM" |
The D-day beaches were just the start...
PETER: There was this Canadian lad with us. When the Germans found out they were on to us they started throwing mortars at us. We were lying in this trench and this Canadian bloke says to me: "Have you got a match?"
I said: "You're not lighting a match up in here!"
"It's all right. I'll put it under my blazer."
I say: "No, I haven't got one."'
So he says: 'B****r you!"
Then he gets out and he walks past my vehicle and over to his own. Now, the vehicle I had had no glass in it, a completely open thing, but his had glass in and he went across to get his fags out. He opened the door. The glass was reflecting and the Germans with their three inch mortar just lob one straight on to the top of his vehicle, straight through his back and that was the end of him.
When I eventually got back to the Canadian boys they said: "Where's whatever-his-name-was?"
I said: "He got killed back yonder."
"Didn't you bring him home?"
I answered: "No, why would I bother doing that?"
These six Canadians get into this truck and they tear on back. The Germans are just as brainy as us, so they're waiting. When they got back, there were six of them with a three-inch mortar straight under them.
| "IT WAS A LOVELY SUNNY DAY" |
After the D-Day landings, Peter and Gerry continued to move into Europe. Eventually a summer's day took a dark turn...
 | | Concentration camps were discovered all over occupied Europe |
PETER: "I was at a hamlet just outside Hanover and I got a message to go to this six-figure map reference and it happened to be a T-junction. I goes up there and there's this little bloke, only about 5 foot 2. He just gets in the truck with me and he says: "Left, right" and so on. We went about 15 miles and then he told me to turn right and I turned into this place. There were trees at each side and as I went up I was looking in the trees and it was a lovely sunny day, but I saw this white stuff and I thought it must be frost.
We go three or four miles further up and we come to this wire about five or six feet high and he says: "Turn in here" and I turned in.
The first thing I saw was three baker's ovens - what I thought were bakers' ovens, you know the old-fashioned ones, you've seen them. I thought: "Oh, that's just to feed people." But then it started dawning on me: the women were there with their hair and dirty faces, their bones, their legs were about as thick as my thumb. They had no clothes on, they were absolutely filthy. When I went in to where they were living there were no toilets, they just messed on the floor, peed on the floor. They did everything on the floor, and where they slept was grass. It was absolutely riddled with fleas. They were riddled with fleas.
 | | Ovens: "Then it starts dawning on me..." |
The blokes, some of their brains weren't quite with us and in all that time I hadn't time to think which ones were women and which ones were blokes; so it came to the time when we took them to this SS camp. We got DDT [pesticide] with one of those pumps and we took the women, blokes, everything and we stripped them all down no matter who they were and sprayed them with DDT and all that sort of thing. They were left at this SS camp and they were fed with one potato one day and half a potato the next day.
Going back to when I saw this white stuff in the field, I realised it was that quicklime they put on bodies to get rid of them. When we went in to the camp, there was typhoid and one or two of the blokes got typhoid - but luck was on my side and that was it for me.
It didn't register until later on in my life what it actually was that I'd seen and, I shouldn't really say this, but there were some people who were so ill from typhoid they couldn't repair them so they got two volunteers - and you know what the volunteers had to do and they went round and that was the end of that, you know...
| | |
| | | |
|
| | | | | | | | | | | What's on across West Yorkshire? From gigs to the top ten films, from clubbing to the theatre - it's all here!
| | | | | | |
  
|
|
