Escape from Norway

This is about my father George William Dilksand is taken from a article in the Leicester Mercury newspaper
Missing Barrow Mans escape from Norway
Hiding from german warplanes in the daylight and scrambling over rough moountain tracks at night a young Barrow on Soar Loughbrough private compleated a 140 mile trek lasting 16 days to the Norwegian coast and escaped fron the Nazis in a tiny fishing boat
he is Private George Dilks whose recent return home after a nerve racking exploit bought an end to a long wait to his parents who had given up hope of seeing him alive agian he was posted missing on April 27th
he described to the leicester mercury some of the adventures that followed the order to retreat when the Licesters with other troops were at Lillehammer
with 26 regular and other territorials i was left behind to cover the retreat of the other lads we had a terrible time before the the order came we had no mercy from the nazi planes we just prayed to see a British fighter with orders to hold off the Germans as long as possible we stuck it out for over 4 hours before we survivirs decided to take cover and retreat oursleves
i dont know how many of the 26 got away with there lives i but i with 3 others got into a forest where we lay for a time before setting off on our attempt to escape to England there were Germans all around us we were in the midst of them yet we managed to escape we had only a vague idea of our position and being in a strange crountry had no knowledge of the way to Aandalenes where we had decided to make for any way we agreed to keep heading north for most of the journey we were in the mountains and this was tough going there were no roads but only narrow tracks with plenty of ice and snow nazi planes were with us all along and we could only make way in the nights which were not very long in the day time we got under what ever cover we could mostly old barns and stuck there it was not long before we discarded most of our kit as we could get along better with out it by the end of the journey i had only my uniform to my name fortunatly we managed to escape the germans completly and you can imagine our releif when we approached the coast and reconised that we were nearing Aandalsnes but we were soon in for a shock there was no Aandalsnes left the germans had blown it up moreover we learn't that the rest of our unit had embarked days before we creapt round the coast and persuaded a fisherman who was about to set dail for England to take us with him his boat was small and could have sailed up the river and dropped me right off at Barrow Private Dilks does not know how meny of the 26 made it back to England

this is about my father he sadly died 10 yrs ago aged 84

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