Memoirs of Major Douglas Goddard

To: BBC Archives Department

From: Major Douglas George Goddard, MBE, FCIS, RA
Quinnells, 38 Ridgeway, Wargrave, Berkshire RG10 8AS

Date: 1st September 2005

I am responding to the request on your BBC2 ‘After the War’ series for WW2 experiences. The following summarises my service which includes the campaigns from the Normandy beaches to the occupation of Germany.

I joined the Territorial Army on my 18th birthday in 1938. Served throughout the war and converted to a regular army Royal Artillery Officer commission; resigning my commission in 1958. The first year of war was spent defending the Romney Marsh beaches (Hitler’s Operation Sealion invasion objective) and having an anti aircraft role in the Battle of Britain. After a period controlling six coastal defence radar stations along the Kent/Sussex Coast I returned in 1942 to being a Field Artillery Officer in 112th (Wessex) Field Regiment RA of the 43rd Wessex Division preparing for the D-Day invasion as part of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. Tough, harsh battle training, mainly on South Downs and in Kent. We were a D-Day follow up Division due to land on D+ about 6 but were caught in the worst storm for forty years and our landing ship tossed and pitched (with hundreds of others) for four days a mile off the landing beaches as all landings became impossible. The part assembled American Mulberry Harbour was wrecked and never came into use and many of the smaller landing craft broke moorings and were battered to pieces on rocks and shorelines. We were bombed at night, shelled and straffed by day and German sea mines broke loose, one blowing up the ship next to us with the loss of our Recce Regiment’s men and equipment before it even got to the beaches. It was not a good start and we prayed to get ashore, get rid of ghastly sea sickness and face up to the alternative of the German weaponry. We eventually splashed ashore on Juno Beach at 1.30 a.m. on a pitch black night and went into action next day. Until the end of August we fought continuously; firstly in the definitive battles for the strategic height of Hill 112; the key to Caen which was the pivot of the German defence and controlled their lateral road communications. We were opposed by no less than eight SS Panzer Divisions including the 21 SS Panzer, Hitler Jugend Division, 2 SS Pz Division and 9 and 10 SS Pz Divisions transferred by Hitler from the Russian front. It was Montogomery’s strategy to attract and engage the German armour on the British/Canadian east front to free the Americans to capture Cherbourg and then break out south on the west front. It worked since the Americans were faced with a number of ordinary Divisions and only one Armoured Division. They eventually broke south from St Lo on 25 July into virtually undefended country. But the result was that we suffered an appallingly high rate of casualties in a series of ferocious battles.

Caen eventually fell on 9 July after we watched from our front line a mile or so away it being tragically and unnecessarily destroyed and many hundreds of French civilians killed in an Allied strategic bomber raid which was counter productive in falling behind the German troops and cratering the ground, obstructing our advance. The battle for Hill 112 continued unabated and it was not until the middle of July that the Germans finally withdrew. Shortly after that we came under command of the brilliant General Brian Horrocks’ 30th Corps with the Guards Armoured and 50th Northumberland Divisions and on 27 July we started to break-out south through the difficult Normandy bocage country; capturing the vital hill range of Mont Pincon, which dominated Normandy, before fighting our way to the Falaise Gap. On 6 August Hitler made one of his many fatal strategical mistakes — against the advice of his Generals (he was in constant conflict with his experienced Generals to the Allies’ Great advantage) — by ordering the German 7th Army to drive west at Mortain against the American western flank when we British from the north and the Americans from the south were forming a pincer move to close the escape of the 7th and 15th German Armies to and across the River Seine. The German attack was aborted and by that time the two jaws of the pincer were closing and the remnants of the two enemy armies were caught in killing ground and virtually eliminated by our artillery fire and air attack. Only about 20,000 Germans escaped the net. The carnage of tens of thousands of dead Germans, their horses (they used a lot of horse drawn equipment to save fuel), vehicles and weapons went on for miles and it was a ghastly experience to witness that level of death and destruction even of one’s enemy. The Germans were estimated to have lost 450,000, killed, wounded and POWs, against the Allies’ losses of just over 209,000.

The Battle of Normandy was won on 16 August. Montgomery had been severely criticised by the American and British higher command for the slowness of our progress on the British/Canadian front in the bridgehead, after D-Day but in the event the battle was won and we reached the R Seine on D + 75 when the original Operation Overlord plan set the time at D + 90.

My Wessex Division was immediately ordered to Vernon where we mounted an opposed assault crossing of the R Seine and bridged it against stiff opposition (80 of sappers were killed while building the two bridges) for the 21st AG armoured divisions to break out and overrun the 1st World War battlefields in four days and liberate Brussels and Antwerp. Since landing, my Division had lost over 6,500 out of 11,000 fighting troops.

Within ten days we were ordered up to take part in Operation Market Garden — more popularly known as the Battle of Arnhem through the film ‘A Bridge too Far’. Another traumatic series of battles

After a month defending the German border opposite the Reichswald Forest south of Nijmegen against enemy counter attacks we were sent down to attack through the Siegfried Line at Geilenkirchen in appalling weather conditions of flood and mud since the Germans had opened the sluices of the R Roer and it was constantly raining. We hardly every dried out and sometimes never got supplies through. We had made some progress in breaching the Line when at Christmas the German Ardennes offensive started with the aim of driving north to recapture Antwerp and cut off the British Army to the east. My Division was sent down to assist in stopping this northern thrust; spending that Christmas wallowing in four inches of snow. The Americans, with our help, having seen off that offensive we went back to finish the Siegfried Line battle during January 1945.

Back to the Reichswald front for the mammoth Operation Veritable with nine British and Canadian Divisions ( and the addition of 9th US Army under command). The objective was to capture the Reichsland through the great Forest, Cleave, Goch and Zanten and join up with the American 9th Army to line up for the assault crossing of the formidable R Rhine. The attack opened at dawn on 8 February with a thousand gun barrage and fireplan. We were opposed by the German Parachute Army and the Roer flooding meant fighting through a virtual sea with the odd island of high ground and town along elevated roads covered by fire, again in constant rain and freezing temperatures. It took until mid-March to clear the enemy from the west bank. Casualties were distressingly high once more.

On 23 March 1945 — again with the aid of a thousand guns and parachute landings on the east bank — the R Rhine was crossed against stiff opposition from the German Para Army and we started the last phase of the campaign to liberate northern Holland and strike into north Germany. Opposition was fanatical but patchy and uncoordinated. Our reception by the Dutch as we freed them from four years of tyranny was ecstatic. Into Germany and a fairly rapid advance capturing towns and villages until we arrived at Bremen which was heavily defended and tragically the German Commander refused General Horrock’s offer of surrender to save life and property. We had to assault it and our artillery completed the years of Allied bombing devastation leaving in 90% destroyed and its population decimated.

It was now the beginning of May and we moved on towards the port of Cuxhaven on the north coast where we were opposed mainly by the German navy which, apart from forming fighting units, had dug in sea mines under the roads which were lethal — blowing tanks, vehicles and men twenty feet in the air and tragically causing many last minute casualties right up to 8 May when the surrender took place.

I have been asked how we celebrated VE day. The answer is we didn’t. Because all German military communications had broken down our Wehrmacht and Naval opponents did not know of the cease fire and we had to find and persuade the commanders to surrender. This took days.

In eleven months of continuous action our Division had fought over 800 miles from the beaches. It had lost 12,482 men — over 100% of its original fighting unit establishment — killed, wounded and missing. My Battery of 8 x 25 pounder guns had fire just over 118,000 shells and of the ten Battery Officers, there were four killed and four wounded (two with mental breakdowns — now known as either battle fatigue or combat stress).

We could reasonably have expected a relaxing and peaceful period in Germany, but not a bit. My Battery was sent down to a village called Fallingbostel (two or three miles from the notorious Belsen Concentration Camp) where we took over an ex-SS barracks with over 20,000 Russian ex-POWs and slave labour families and across from there was a Stalag (ex-POW camp) in which there were now some 4,000 Polish and Baltic State ex-POWs and slave labour families. Our task was to administer, feed and logistically support all this lot and in the case of the Russians send them to the R Elbe for repatriation. It was harrowing because each nationality hated the others and apart from battles between them they went out into German villages murdering, raping, looting and pillaging. We found ourselves garrisoning villages to defend our old enemy against our erstwhile allies. Russian Commissars were brought in to re-indoctrinate their people contaminated by western culture. There was later evidence that many Russians went back to extermination although this was not known by us at the time. This task lasted for about three months until a Military Government body took over and we then relaxed while the non-regulars started to be demobbed from the Regiment. One point of interest was that I attended part of the trial of the Belsen Camp SS guards including Kramer-the Beast of Belsen. Their defence was that they had no gas chambers, they simply obeyed orders and that for the last six months of the war supplies had broken down because of failure of civic administration and government. Although most of this was true they were nevertheless condemned to either execution or imprisonment.

I was then promoted to Adjutant of the Regiment and in that capacity I had custody of the three Battery War Diaries which I transcribed before sending them to War Office Records. I had been responsible anyway for writing up my own Battery War Diary daily throughout the campaign. I had also (surreptitiously) kept a little personal diary and many operational orders and other documents. All these documents are still with me having been security cleared by the Ministry of Defence and have formed the material for the Regimental History I wrote and had published and for the presentations and battlefield tours at which I still speak — which include the Joint Services Command & Staff College Advanced Course. My WW2 generation is becoming pretty thin on the ground now and we are in ever greater demand to record experiences for posterity before the record is lost. My war-time story has been taped by the Imperial War Museum and at their request my archives and memorabilia are bequeathed to that Museum.

My post —war service included — Adjutant of 40th Field Regiment RA in Germany; Staff Officer at Anti-Aircraft Command; Service in Egypt and Jordan during the Suez Canal abrogation crisis and finally four years as an Instructor at the Royal School of Artillery. I resigned my commission in 1958.

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