Lt. Col. Tony Shaw O.B.E. WW2 Memoirs - Part 2

Part 2 of 3 parts

Continued from www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8118867

Come September I was suddenly told by the Sergeant Major, something’s come through, ”You’ve got to report to Boscombe as an Officer Cadet in early October” (1940), which I did, having had a farewell party with good fellow Corporals and other lads and friends. There was three month’s training, partly Officer Cadets and partly people who were already commissioned; Reserve Officers that needed to go to the same course. They were known as Student Princes; they didn’t dine with us, they didn’t live with us, but we didn’t treat them with any respect, they knew less than we did about the army, and they were “Student Princes”! None of them were ever made Squad Commanders, they weren’t up to that but one or two, one ex-Guardsman and I were the only others that were, and I got a distinction, which goes on your records. I thought I’d get away at Christmas but no, Christmas Day is when you have a feast here, and you’re commissioned on Boxing Day, and that’s when you’re a Second Lieutenant.

The first unit I was with was an old Territorial Division that was obviously destined just for Home Service, the 45th West Country Division, then based in Yorkshire, a bit of a rest off, they had had a bad time on the coast when facing all the bombing and the Battle of Britain in 1940. I was with the Supply Company then. Then they were sent to Suffolk in East Anglia and I was on detachment. Eventually I was made a Captain in August while we were in Colchester and then I was transferred to the Petrol Company of our Division, which was going to be a unit of the Guards Armoured Division. They were just forming in Weston-super-mare and Wiltshire.

I went down there, I was meeting new people I hadn’t met before, and new officers, and soldiered on there for some time in a defensive role partly but, of course, training to be the Guards Armoured Division ready for action when we could get “over there” again. And the particular incident that did intrigue me I must say when I was in charge of administration and I saw that there was some exercise that was on without troops, and that was a TEWT (Tactical Exercise Without Troops).

It pretended there was an invasion by the Germans coming into Devon and Cornwall, and we had to defend it. It was all without troops. Just headquarters operations, so it didn’t concern me, and my boss was away on it. In anything that started with an exercise, to make sure it was only an exercise, if the exercise was called ‘Crackers’, (I can’t remember what this one was, but say it was ‘CRACKERS’) you’d say “Blocks On”, in capitals “CRACKERS, Blocks Off”. They ended with that as well so that you didn’t think this was a genuine message. And this happened to be about the thirteenth of February. I remember it clearly because the following day I was nipping off to London with a girl friend for a weekend. That date is burned in my mind because it was on that date that the Scharnhorst and the Gnieseneau escaped from Brest, and the funny thing was that in the Legend, which is the sort of lead-up to this imaginary exercise, it said, “Scharnhorst and Gnieseneau escape from Brest on the 13th of something or other, and steamed up the Channel in support of the German invasion Forces”.

We were then posted to the North; we were with the 15th Scottish Division. Because Monty, who was coming back, didn’t like the idea of Model Divisions, that didn’t last long. What they called a Model Division was to have two Infantry Battalions and one Heavy Tank Brigade; and our Brigade was already going into heavy tanks, so they called it a Tank Brigade instead of an Armoured Brigade. Monty had given warning, and sure enough it happened and the Scottish Division although we’d practiced with them, exercises and everything else, a damned good lot of chaps, we never stayed with them because Monty arrived and said, no, I want Tank Brigades separate from these infantry Corps Troops I can use as I like when I need them. So that meant that we were an independent Tank Brigade in the 8th Armoured Corps.

Come the early January of the next year, 1944, which is when I expected things to happen, we were then down in Worksop, Derbyshire, and I was then the second-in-command, and the Brigadier for some reason or other thought there should be a change and my boss, the Officer Commanding, who’d become a friend of mine by then, was going to be made second in command of some RASC for another Division. I thought, “This was bad news” and said, “Who the hell is going to take over?” He said, “You are”.

It’s one thing to take over a unit when you’re moved, promoted, and as a new chap with a rank up already there, but here are people, there are about six Captains under me and as many Subalterns, and they’d been calling me Tony for a year or two by then, we were all pals together. But hence on, they’d got to call me Sir and stand up whenever I went into a room or into the Mess even. But they took it very well and I said, “This is not the way to do it. It needs somebody coming in fresh”. He said, “No, they were bloody relieved when I told them that. You’re very popular, you may not know it”. All except about two of the Subalterns might have been junior to me but they were older than me, much older than me. I was still only twenty-six. But anyway it worked. The only trouble is I reckoned there were going to be some crossings of the channel by the late spring or summer.

We still had a lot to do. We hadn’t got equipment or training for all our vehicles that could go under up to 4 feet 6 of water. I took over a pond and made sure we’d got a hard channel through the middle I could drive through it. It took a bit of doing, and we then built a ramp, since when you’re getting vehicles onto landing craft, there are no drive-on, drive-off situations, and you don’t want to back off, so everybody’s got to learn to back up. So that was quite a tricky operation. But it was all done. In the end it didn’t prove to be necessary because just about by the time we landed they were able to take us up close to the shore. That was the theory.

Come the March or April we were moved down into Kent. There was one incident, which I thought was rather amusing in a way; it showed the cynical use of everything including religion to defeat the enemy. I’d made one or two journeys to Canterbury when we got down in Kent and I could just lay on a bus fairly easily. I like Canterbury and had been there before. Our padre had been posted to us to stay with us for a time instead of being with the Coldstream Battalion. He said to me, “I think it’s a jolly good idea Tony if, and I’m tackling the Brigadier today, I’m going to see him, to see if we can get the Dean of Canterbury to show our troops round the Cathedral. I thought I’d better mention it to him”. The Brigadier said, “Yes, we’ll do more than that, we’ll have a service before battle”. And so he did organise a Service Before Battle, 30th May 1944, planned about a month before, but it was only a few days before D-Day. Only later did I realise that the Brigadier knew something I didn’t, and he wanted to do it.

I thought there was something strange when every soldier had one of these Printed Order of Service and the Brigadier sent a note round to us saying, “Tell your troops they can send these programmes home to their families. They might like to see it”. A bit odd that, security being as tight as it is. And then one morning I was summoned by the Brigadier to report along with other Battalion commanders, there was only about six of us, on the beach by Deal. When we got there he said, “What I’m about to say to you is absolutely Top Security and it is not to be passed in any hint or any other way. You can invent your own stories, it’s your responsibility. You don’t even tell your second-in command, but there is an operation going on at the moment to persuade (this was after the invasion had started I might add) the Germans, and Hitler in particular who had always said, “If I were doing it I’d take the shortest distance”. I could persuade him that’s what’s going on.

In theory they’d got Patten a great Tank Commander the Germans feared, they’d got him theoretically posted to Corps that were non-existent up in the East Anglia. Part of the bluff, they’d got radio communication going, exactly like the real thing. Part of the thing was that we were standing on the beach at Deal. You could see troops looking at us through binoculars from the Calais Town Hall. And that night they were bringing up Landing Craft made of rubber to blow them up and leave them blowing about on the waves. He turned to me and said, “You’ve got to do one or two things. You’ve got to get all your vehicles out and down on here with lights on as fast as you can and put notices up ‘Embarkation Point’ and so on in large letters at every occasion you can, and do it immediately. And also immediately I want you to take over the barracks”. All the troops had gone from there, and were crossing into France now you see, and the barracks, there was nobody in them and they’re all lining the road round Ashford, as it was then. “You’ve got to fill ‘em all, fill ‘em. Spread yourselves, vehicles all over the place”.

So I sucked my lucky rabbit’s foot on the way back, trying to stay in the back of the vehicle trying to think how I can explain this to a lot of hard-headed officers who expected me to tell them the truth. I told them what they’d got to do and I got the workshops people to paint notices and everything else, get lorries going, and I invented exercises. We decided to try and see how fast they could get there, keeping still safe speeds for bombing distances and so on, and then give me the times on the way back. I pretended to consult these. The Platoon commanders came up to me. They thought I was mad. “You mean lights on all the time?” I said, “Yes, but not coming back. Turn those off then. They’ve got to be only with the special lights we have. You could see the white on the axle of the one in front of you”.

Then I said, “Now, there’s the prisoner of war cage”. (That had been built by us to house German prisoners of war if they’d invaded the Kent area). “Let’s carve that up”. There were a couple of Nissen huts there, with thick barbed wire round there to a hell of a height, two towers, one on each corner for machine guns and so forth and searchlights, and naturally they’d never been used and weren’t going to be used. But they’d got two Nissen huts. Short of accommodation, I had to put a couple of platoons in there so I’d got about seventy men there.

Now we’d already had one disaster in the brigade. Quite a few of my men and certainly my head office and one or two officers were staying in an old Manor House, Surrenden Deering (it’s been demolished now) in Kent, near Pluckley.

It so happened that one day I’d just come back to have a cup of tea in my mess, which was a charming little house by a farmhouse. Some other officers had drifted in, we’d finished for the day really, and we heard a buzz-bomb going over, nothing new, and we heard it cut out and I saw this flying bomb dive and then suddenly whoosh - crump and there was a great plume of smoke going up. I said, “That’s about half a mile from here, it could be a farmhouse, we’d better go and see if anybody needs some help”. So I nipped straight across into my Command car and three officers came with me. I drove round there and as we got nearer and nearer I realised what is was. It was the prisoner of war cage that I’d put in two platoons of men, and I’d cleared them out that morning. At this time they would have just been going back shaving or sprucing up, going out with their girl friends or going to have a pint in a pub. I could have had seventy men of mine disappear like that; it didn’t bear thinking about. That was horrific.

2210 words

End of part 2 of 3 parts

For part 3 see www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8118948

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