1944–1947

I went through the same army experience as thousands of others – base camp, training in the desert outside Cairo and on to a regiment on the Italian front. There were good moments and bad, none of them memorable or relevant enough to be recounted here.

A few years on: Spring 1945. The 6th South African Armoured Division ground to a halt for the winter south of Bologna, at the foot of the Appenines in what Churchill had once described as ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’. Our 25-pounder guns stood in deep snow, black as sentinels in a leafless apple orchard. On the farm where we spent the whole winter we lived together like troglodytes, hibernating in dugouts under a deep cover of earth and snow. Each morning one of my gun crew would crawl out to collect breakfast for the rest of us, who clung to our sleeping bags until it was time for lunch. Then we would emerge into the weak sun and eat an alfresco meal on a bank overlooking a deep valley below.

We were like the front-row audience to a war. A German 88mm gun was tucked away in the mouth of a disused railway tunnel on the mountainside high above. As regular as the lunch bell, its black muzzle would poke out from its lair like an animal nosing the air and wait for a vehicle to appear on the valley road below, where there was a low-level bridge across a frozen stream. For fifty yards it would have to run the gauntlet in sight of the German gunners before it disappeared from our sight and from theirs.

We knew, as did our divisional drivers, that at midday every day that stretch of road would be under fire. It had become a ritual. German ammunition must have been as strictly rationed as ours because of supply difficulties across snow-bound mountain roads. We were limited to irregular firing of eight to ten rounds per day. The orderly Germans used theirs only at midday.

We would watch the trucks emerge on to that stretch of road and make a dash for safety across the bridge. From where we sat we could see the muzzle flash from the 88 and hear a shell tearing by above our heads.