Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

On Friday, Andrew and I set off to retrace the footsteps of my late father, Eric, through the WW2 battlefields of Normandy, Belgium, Holland and Germany. Our trip (in an iconic British car, it has to be said) is going to take 2 weeks, rather than the 11 months it took Eric to fight his way from D+11 to the surrender of German forces in May 1945.

It was never planned that this journey should take place 75 years after last week’s commemorations of the opening of the Second Front, but it’s all the more meaningful that it should take place now.

The idea of the trip grew out of my writing of my father’s wartime biography, ‘Eric: A Welshman in the Glasgow Highlanders’. Having researched and uncovered where the 2nd Battalion were and what they did, provided the inspiration for me to want to see the places for myself and to commemorate his compatriots who did not return.

So we are anticipating this journey to be an informative but poignant experience at times.

It all started here. My Dad, like so many of his generation, didn’t talk about his wartime experience. I owed it to him and to myself to write his wartime story. He died at the age of 52 when I was 23 so we never got to talk about it – and he may never have opened up about that time anyway.

So working out what he did was a jigsaw puzzle but without a finished picture to work towards. The pieces of the jigsaw comprised the few comments he made that I recall, personal military documents and photographs handed down, the official 15th Scottish Divisional history and the war diaries of the 2nd Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry (The Glasgow Highlanders). At the end of the research, the jigsaw puzzle picture was complete – I could at last say, ‘so Dad, that’s what you did‘.

If you’re interested in the detailed story, the paperback book and the Kindle version are available from Amazon (£5.25 for paperback and £2.50 for the Kindle). The maps work better on the Kindle version.

Almost 75 years to the very day that Eric embarked on a Landing Ship at Newhaven to set off for Normandy, Andrew and I got on a very pleasant Brittany Ferries ship at Portsmouth. Not for us being tossed about on the English Channel waiting with trepidation for what might await from German forces, but a nice breakfast and coffee relaxed and ready to drive off at Cherbourg.

Our objective was to get to Arromanches and the D-Day museum and memorial and to find the section of Juno Beach where the 2nd Battalion of the Glasgow Highlanders disembarked on D+11 – which was either Courseulles or La Riviere at the western end of Juno (see later).

Reaching our objective was never in doubt after I foolishly handed the responsibilities of driving the DB9 over to Andrew!!

On the way, we stop at St Mere Eglise to see the first town to be liberated by US paratroops in their sector (not sure we will get to Ranville and Pegasus bridge to see what our airborne troops achieved on the same date.)

We arrive at Gold Beach and see the amazing remains of the Mulberry harbours which remain at Arromanches. The museum tells an excellent story of the building and placement of the artificial harbour which allowed the Allies to build up and reinforce their supplies before a major port could be captured. I was pleased to be able to give a copy of my Dad’s biography to the museum library.

As we leave to find the landing place of Eric and the Battalion at Juno we come across the new memorial of The D-Day 75 Garden – a moving tribute to British troops and the veteran Bill Pendell.

We arrive at Juno. The issue that has been bothering me is ‘Did Dad and the Battalion disembark at Courselles (as I know he said) or did the Battalion disembark at La Riviere as the war diary says’? Answer: ‘Ask some French locals’. First port of call is two Frenchmen sitting on a wall drinking beer. They’d not even heard of La Riviere though they did offer for us to join them in a beer.

On we push. We ask a French family who are out for a walk. They too had not heard of La Riviere but the kind gentleman gets his map from the car and finds it marked…it’s a ‘parish’ rather than an actual place. I conclude that my Courseulles or La Rivière dilemma was not worth worrying about – they are are about 2.5kms apart and we have narrowed the landing place down to a pretty narrow section of beach. We take a photo.

On our way to our hotel in Bayeux we find ourselves on a road that takes us through Vienne-en-Bassin which was the concentration area of The Glasgow Highlanders whilst they waited for the rest of the 15th Scottish Division to arrive. It’s a nice bonus.

Heads down now for what will be an emotional day tomorrow.

Day 2 begins with a step back 900 years. We visit the 70m long tapestry at the museum in Bayeux . How appropriate that our conquerors in 1066 became France’s liberators in 1944…

Andrew and I have a good giggle saying ‘Bayeux’ in Caaardiff accents leading to the inevitable banter. This follows yesterday’s repeated non-French pronunciations of ‘Arromanches’ (think ‘Comanche’ as in Red Indians) and today’s English pronunciation of Cheux as ‘Chooks’ – though this was what Eric and the troops involved in the battle called it for serious reasons: (i) they couldn’t pronounce it the French way (‘Sher’), and (ii) it might have been confused in radio communications.

Our aim today is to walk the first battle that Eric and his Battalion fought, a week after disembarking. Cheux was the single biggest battle the Glasgow Highlanders fought in the NorthWest Europe campaign and led to high casualties. So we start by paying our respects to the war dead of that battle and other battles of the Odon River, south west of Caen.

The St Manvieu War cemetery near Cheux contains 2,183 burials of which 1,623 are British. As expected, we find many graves of Glasgow Highlanders, Highland Light Infantry, Cameronians, Seaforths and many others and wonder how many Dad would have known. I know that two of Eric’s best pals were killed near him but don’t know their names. We pay our respects to all of them and to one in particular. So many young men who paid the ultimate sacrifice. The Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries are kept in superb condition. St Manvieu is no exception.

I have had a suspicion that I had been to this cemetery before in 1964 when I was a boy and this was probably Eric’s ‘laying to rest of the ghosts’ 20 years after the Normandy campaign. Andrew confirms that by finding the very graves that are in the 1964 photo. We take another photo 55 years on.

We leave the beautiful resting place of our brave war dead, remembering what war means.

France closes on Sundays and as we know Andrew needs food so before starting to walk the Cheux battlefield we eventually find a boulangerie in Caen which is open.

We set off for Cheux and find the Battalion’s start line on 26 June 1944 at Le Mesnil Patry. We eventually park at the crossroads of the D9 and start walking south to Cheux. As we are retracing the steps at exactly the same time of year, the fields are the same as they would have been in 1944 – 3 foot high corn – great places for enemy soldiers to hide in. Eric would have set off at 07.30 in fog in unfamiliar, featureless territory (it’s very flat). We get lost, so what it would have been like for soldiers carrying kit and under constant enemy fire is only to be imagined.

Arriving in Cheux, which has been completely rebuilt since the destruction of the war, we find the church and are delighted to find outside the Mairie that proper prominence is given to the 2nd Battalion Glasgow Highlanders as the liberators of Cheux. We spend some time reading the memorials and stories of the fire-fight that occurred involving infantry and tanks on the very place we are standing.

For us, it’s back to Caen for a rest in our hotel. For the 19 year old Eric in 1944, it was relief for one day before he resumed the battle at Mondrainville and Colleville the next day.

Today could be summarised as us taking photos standing next to signs of various unknown Normandy villages. We certainly stopped next to a lot of them – Eterville, Esquay, Le Bon Repos, Hervieux, La Morichesse les Mares, St Martin des Besaces, La Bruyere (this last one was only a metre long and part hidden in a hedge). But that wouldn’t be the whole story – we were looking for these because they were the confirmation that we were in the very places that my Dad trod in the first two months of the Normandy campaign. My book was our travel guide and it worked.

These unknown Normandy villages though would have been deeply imprinted on the minds and memories of Eric and his fellow Glasgow Highlanders because they were some of the places where they fought pitched battles against enemy infantry and tanks.

Today we squashed some of Eric’s experiences in mid-July and the first couple of weeks of August 1944 into a morning and an afternoon. We had the advantage of a speedy AM to get round (speedier when Andrew was driving it), whereas my father had to route march it most of the time.

Our morning consisted of a walk around Eterville trying to locate a wood behind the village church where a ferocious battle took place resulting in 85 Glasgow Highlander casualties. My book describes the spirited defensive action by an officer with a PIAT (a British bazooka) and a bayonet charge led by a Cameronian corporal. We read the account as we stood near the church. (Get the book…!)

Even better, we drove on from there to Esquay to find the site of a battle at Le Bon Repos. Seeing this area for myself greatly helped make sense of decisions and responses of the soldiers who were there. Esquay village and the Guigne valley was in a saucer of low-lying land overlooked by Hill 112. Le Bon Repos consisted of a crossroads with a few assorted houses.

We were able to identify the very spot at Le Bon Repos where German troops were cleared from their roadside trenches by flame-throwers and the heroic actions of a Glasgow Highlanders’ sergeant who destroyed two enemy tanks at point blank range. (My book tells a really good story…! 😉

We visit Hill 112 and the memorials to the 7000 men (yes, 7000) who died there in the course of a month fighting for control of it. It was said, “Whoever controls Hill 112, controls Normandy.’ Maybe a bit of an exaggeration but certainly whoever did, would dominate the whole of the flat land west and south west of Caen. There were other hills which dominated in the area and were more directly relevant to Eric’s war and we visited two in the afternoon (see below).

Lunch beckons as someone’s stomach was rumbling but we find the monument to the 15th Scottish Division at Tourville first. All the main WW2 battles fought by the Division and the Glasgow Highlanders are listed here. A proud, beautifully kept monument to ‘Scotland the Brave’.

And so to lunch – which we decide to take at Caumont where the big breakout of the British forces in Normandy began. But true to French form, it’s 2pm and nowhere is open apart from a bar / betting shop / ‘restaurant’. There’s no one eating in the ‘restaurant’ apart for the owner, his wife and mother. I say in French, ‘we would like to eat and drink something’. The response is pretty Gallic: ‘I’ll see what we’ve got left’. Nothing like honesty. He returns. He can do boiled eggs for starter (with mayo) and some grilled chicken (with mayo) (‘avec frites’). That satisfies us mainly as the bill only comes to 20 euros in total (with coffee too). It’s nutritional inadequacy though forces us to find a patisserie for a custard flan and an eclair (Andrew’s diet has certainly gone out the window today).

And so on to retracing Dad’s steps in Caumont. We are in very different Bocage country where it was easy for tanks and infantry to conceal themselves. We drive the 5 miles south and up Quarry Hill, a journey that Eric would have part-made riding on a tank but the rest on foot. Another dominant position the result of high ground – but it had to be fought for. More details in the book!

From there we drive on again to Eric’s final defensive position near the Bois des Monts – more high ground. The sat nav eventually returns us to the main road via a gravel farm path that gets the DB9 ‘speeding’ along at a whopping 3mph!

The Normandy stage of our war footsteps journey is complete. The Allied breakout is in full swing by the second half of August 1944 and as they drive on to Belgium, so will we tomorrow.

After a 340 mile drive from Caen to Coutrai in Belgium, we arrive in a James Bond-style villain’s lair of a hotel. It looks like a cross between Dr No’s underground facility -dark corridors, access down a slope from reception and bedroom doors that open inwards (baffled Andrew when the key card didn’t work and he ended up at reception before Dad worked it out) and a naturist facility – it has a full size traditional windmill on top of the hotel. All it needs tonight is for the top of the windmill to open up to reveal a gleaming space age weapon and men in white coats shout ‘Fire the Laser beam‘ in repeated succession.

We set off from Normandy after the boy completes his second day of training. It’s good watching someone working hard from the comfort of your hotel bed…

Today’s objective was to get to Belgium but we were going to carry on retracing Dad’s footsteps on the way. Our exploration was to find the place where he and the Glasgow Highlanders crossed the Seine (cue for Dad joke: ‘all the French are mad only the river’s sane’). We knew that he crossed the river unopposed by enemy fire at the small town of Muids where the Seine takes a large ‘S’ bend. We find a place on the west bank which gives us a view across the river to that town and take some photos.

But food beckons again and I have been reminded a few times by readers of this blog to feed Andrew for fear he should waste away. Little chance of that, but we do find a lovely place in Les Andelys next to the Seine where we eat charcuterie, cheese and have a couple of beers.

We set off again to find the site of a particular photograph of the Seaforth Highlanders having crossed nearby in the village of Ande. We are unsuccessful but we do hit the jackpot on the way. We pass through the town of Muids on the east bank this time. We stop at the church that Andrew had spotted on the map showing the manouvres of the 15th Scottish Division. Next to the church is a short path which is named ‘Voie de la Liberation’ which leads down to the river! There was no doubt in my mind that we have found the very spot where Eric and the Glasgow Highlanders stepped off their storm boats and set foot on the east bank of the Seine. I have an odd sensation of closeness to him as my mind envisages him disembarking.

We drive on for a few kilometres northwards to the small village of Grand Roncherolles, the site of a night time encounter between the Glasgow Highlanders and German forces. This was the last encounter that my father had with the enemy in France. Over the next 3 days the battalion was transported 115 miles to arrive in Belgium.

Tomorrow Andrew and I meet up with our Belgian and Welsh cousins living in Brussels. No blog tomorrow!

Shakespeare’s Henry V relates the role of the ‘men of Gwent‘ and the Welsh bowmen in defeating the French in Agincourt in 1415 ( sorry, history teacher peeping out there…). In his play, Fluellen (Llewellyn, as William obviously couldn’t get his tongue around the Welsh letter ‘ll’) says that they wore ‘leeks in their Monmouth caps’.

Today, we were in the town of Ghent in Belgium, not celebrating 15th century Welsh soldiers in Monmouth caps but 20th century Scottish soldiers who wore Tam o’Shanters. The 2nd Battalion of the Glasgow Highlanders are my ‘men of Ghent’ because they fought for that major Belgian town. More about that later.

Yesterday was a day of reunion with our Belgian side of the family.

(To the uninitiated, my late mother, was born in Brussels to a Belgian father and English mother. Hence the United Nations ref claimed his grandmother’s original nationality to play scrum half for Belgium!)

Anyway, driving from Dr No’s lair in Courtrai, we arrived on time to Brussels to enjoy a top class lunch with my two Belgian cousins. Following that we take a short walk only to be told quite casually by them that the Maison Communale in Boitsfort which was more or less adjacent to the restaurant, was where Dad and Mum had got married post-war. The town hall is identical to their marriage photo. It hasn’t changed. So it has to be done – we pose in the same place for a photo – though the evidence shows that we weren’t looking longingly into each other other’s eyes in quite the same way!

Late afternoon, we catch up with my Welsh cousins living and working in Brussels (for the EU – BRAVO!). We are taken on a guided tour of the ‘Floreal’ garden city where Mum was brought up and find her exact house in Rue des Passiflores. Cue -more photos. My mind is taken back to the many stories she told of Nazi war-time occupation and the joy of liberation on 5th Sept 1944 when the armour and troops of the Irish Guards rolled into the boulevard at the bottom of her road. I have now seen this place with my own eyes and can envisage it so much better now.

More food with our extended Belgian family follows at an Indian restaurant overlooking that boulevard.

We stay in the apartment of one of my cousins. Andrew is given a box of gaufres. I am given a box of beer. We are both in our element.

Back to today and Ghent. In our footsteps journey, we have jumped to early September 1944 and my Dad’s battalion had been tasked with fighting to take Ghent. This was a battle of a different nature. Unlike the open rural countryside that Eric had experienced in Normandy – this was street fighting and house clearing surrounded by panicked civilians that they were trying to avoid.

We hope to find a memorial to a Private Albert Evans, one of the Glasgow Highlanders who, though mortally wounded, used a Bren gun to cover two approach roads to the town square to cover his comrades’ backs. When he was found, there were 10 dead and many wounded around his post. A Belgian eye witness wrote, ‘Never in my life will I forget the bravery of that fine British soldier whom I saw fighting and dying as a hero’. Very sobering stuff. We don’t find a plaque but that’s not to say it’s not there. The battle waged back and fore for 2 days before the Polish Armoured Division relieved my Dad’s battalion. I think about the positions and hiding places he as as sniper would have taken up. More details in the book.

Ghent is a big city. It’s impossible to find the military landmarks, so we really see only the historic centre. I have to say that the Allied troops obviously did an excellent job protecting the cultural and religious architecture of the town. We take a nice tourist boat trip on the canal – and eat again!

Our plan was to get to Best in Holland this afternoon as there will be a lot of military action to retrace over the next two days. Unfortunately, our one and half hour journey takes nearly four hours due to a traffic jam that makes the M25 look like a F1 racetrack. So what is there to do? Yes, go out for a meal to make sure Andrew doesn’t start fainting.

On our return to the hotel, ‘we’ remove the copious amount of guano and dead insects that the Aston has acquired over the past 900 miles… I’ve taught the boy well!

A day when our objective to retrace my Dad’s progress in Holland in September and October 1944 was a success.

It began with locating the sites of a disastrous battle from 22-24 September in the town of Best. Things went badly wrong from the outset there for the Glasgow Highlanders and it stayed that way for 3 days. (So bad was it, that by the time the battalion was withdrawn into reserve, and bearing in mind that a full company’s strength was about 90 men, they only had left 54 men in A Company, 6 in B Company, 51 in C Company and 43 in D Company.). I return to these deaths near the end of today’s blog.

We locate the church and the railway station in Best which were both key places for fire-fights between Scots and Germans. As we are about to leave, our car attracts a comment from a local Dutchman and we begin a conversation. He describes a grave in a nearby wooded area of a young soldier – an American, he thinks – who sacrificed himself by diving onto a grenade to save his comrades. 5 minutes later Piet is back and offers to lead us there. We follow. It is exactly what he says. The young man was a US paratrooper of the ‘Screaming Eagles’. We thank him and give him a copy of the book and point out the account of the battle in his home town.

We move on some 12 kilometres in distance but nearly 4 weeks in Dad’s wartime experience (the battalion had been put into rest after their severe mauling at Best). Now we aim to retrace their successful journey and battles in Moergestel, Oisterwijk and Tilburg.

As we approach Moergestel, my eye is taken to a farmhouse in the distance next to the road and I think it is the same scene as a 1944 photo of tanks and infantry in the book. We take a photo. Judge for yourself but we think it is.

Jackpot Number 2: in Moergestel we seek to identify the same place of a 1944 photo of a bridge-laying tank laying a crossing across the river. We walk in the right direction and find a statue to Lt Gen ‘Tiny’ Barber, the 6’6″ commanding officer of the 15th Scottish Division – right next to a bridge over a river! Then we accost a passer-by walking his dog and show him the photo asking him whether we are standing in the same spot. He confirms we are. The building has changed but the position is the same. Another ‘then and now’ photo.

Onto Oisterwijk. We read about the Glasgow Highlanders’ attack on Oisterwijk , clearing the slit trenches with flamethrowers and finding the convent building (possibly rebuilt) that had become a stronghold for German troops before it was successfully cleared. When the Germans left, there was apparently a massive celebration with the Dutch population emerging from their houses with huge pots of tea for their liberators. Dad would have loved that – he was always a big tea drinker.

An even bigger welcome befell my Dad and the men of the 15th Scottish Division at Tilburg, our next port of call. Apparently the festivities of liberation went on for 3 days there. My mind is taken to what that must have felt like for Dad and his fellow liberators – hopefully, that all the sacrifices had been worthwhile, although the job was not yet complete. After much wandering around to find the statue of a Scottish piper in Tilburg – a statue which commemorates the 15th Scottish Division – we discover that it has been removed (and presumably put in storage) whilst building work is going on outside the 1970’s Soviet-style town hall building. I think the Tilburgians are trying to find a more auspicious site for it.

Our day ended with thinking about the men who died at Best and throughout the autumn months of 1944 in Holland. We visited the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery at Mierlo. Many were graves of Glasgow Highlanders, most of whom were men of Eric’s age. We are looking for one in particular – another Welshman from Carmarthen who was in the Glasgow Highlanders and pay our respects at his grave. I wonder whether Dad and he knew each other? Were they both nicknamed ‘Taff’?

Both of us find the war cemetery a moving experience and it leaves us with even greater admiration for the bravery of our military then (and now) but also reinforces in us the pointlessness of war, a feeling of young lives left unfulfilled and families left emotionally damaged. This desire for peace was a sentiment shared by many of the veterans we all heard interviewed as part of the recent D-Day commemorations.

Before I finish, I’ll clarify today’s title. After numerous promptings from me during the morning as to whether food was required by the boy, I got the response ‘No food until Tilburg’ from Andrew. He wanted to press on. What a hero! He obviously regretted it, because by the time we sat down at 3pm to eat, he was famished and said it was the latest he’d ever gone without food…

We have been enjoying superb weather on our journey so far and it’s heading towards 30 degrees+ in the next few days. On the other hand, this part of Eric’s journey 75 years ago was taking place in the autumn and winter where there was drenching rain, snow and temperatures dropping to below zero. But we are, of course, repeating all of Eric’s 11 month journey in a 2 week period in June.

It’s not just the weather that is different but the landscape. The ‘Peel’ area of south-eastern Holland was described at the time as a ‘desolate peat bog of canals, dykes, heather and occasional vast woodlands’. I don’t know whether the area has been drained or because we are doing this trip in the summer, but it’s a very productive, rich rural landscape inhabited, it would seem, by pretty well-off people today. As for the infrastructure in Holland, we are impressed by the quality of roads, the pristine cleanliness and orderliness of everything (Messrs Johnson and Hunt might want to visit here to see what the UK could be like if they had the genuine commitment to make it so. Bit of politics there – and I haven’t mentioned the ‘B’ word yet…;))

Anyway, we begin the day with a little episode of ‘Where’s Andrew?’ (for those that know the children’s book with a similar title). He drives off to the local gym to train as I take my time getting up. I get the phone call saying, ‘See you downstairs for breakfast. I’ll only be 2 minutes’. I duly oblige. Cereal and coffee consumed. Phone call: ‘Err, I’ve lost my bearings. Where am I?’. Reply: ‘What can you see?’. ‘Well I’m near the Volvo garage and I’ve got no data on my phone to use google maps.’ ‘Let me have a look’, I say. ‘Is the garage on your right or left?’. ‘Right’ . ‘OK, you need to turn left at the next junction.’ I move on to a bowl of fruit and yoghurt. He’ll be here soon…. No sign…. OK, move on to toast and croissant and second cup of coffee. 30 minutes later he arrives a little sheepish. ‘The Volvo garage on my right was behind me not in front of me…‘ And I let him drive a DB9…?!! 🤔😳

Today’s objective: to relive Eric and the Battalion’s months of stalemate, defensive duties and fighting in the Peel area – bounded first by the Deurne canal and then the Maas river. This period – which we covered in one day – spanned three months for Eric from the end of October 1944 to early February 1945.

We began in the Leensel Woods where the Glasgow Highlanders were diverted towards villages near the Deurne canal after US forces had been overrun there. They had taken up position in a very large wood where a major firefight broke out and where the Highlanders became very exposed on 30th October when all four Companies were pinned down. It was only when a tank squadron and other Scottish infantry arrived that control was restored .

We easily identify the wood and I think that if we wander around, we are bound to find some wartime artefacts or remnants of battle or shell holes. Andrew reminds me that the metal detectorists have probably found everything that there is to find by now and that there is no way of knowing where the soldiers were deployed in such a large wood. We do find a large hole which could be a shell hole but more likely to be a double tree stump recently excavated…

As a sniper, Eric would have been very good at concealment as well as being a marksman so I imagine he would have been very good in those woods. I recount the story of playing ‘hide and seek’ with him when I was 10 years old. He managed to conceal himself in front of a tree trunk just 15 metres away by hugging its contours. He then slowly appeared in plain sight. He had obviously not forgotten his sniper concealment training 30 years after it was needed.

I am also struck by the very different types of landscape that we have been in and in which the soldiers had fought – open countryside, Bocage, built-up towns and wooded areas.

We next find the Hoogebrug bridge over the Deurne canal. For my father and the rest of the battalion, the Seaforths and Cameronians (all of 46 Brigade), this was where they ‘dug in’ and defended the canal bank for 2 weeks whilst other troops tried to take Meijel. We are astounded at how small the canal and the bridge are, yet how significant a crossing this was.

The Battalion War Diary describes the Glasgow Highlanders’ position: “This was by a canal bank the other side of which – some 45 yards- was enemy positions. We were at the edge of a wood.” 45 yards away! For 2 weeks!!

On we press. Over the bridge at Helenaveen onto Horst, driving past the woods that the Battalion was involved in clearing (‘S’ mines were the great danger in that area – S mines would project 3 feet into the air and explode 350 steel balls of shrapnel three or four seconds later).

We drive on to Blerick to locate another place in a wartime photo. We think we’ve found it, but after having lunch, the cafe owner directs us to the shoe shop on the other side of the road. ‘Ask for Arno because he knows a lot about the history of the area’. We go into the shop, clarify that we’re not after a new pair of ladies’ shoes but whether Arno can help us identify the place in the photo. He can – we are only 250 metres away. We walk there and try to recreate the photo.

The photo is not of the Glasgow Highlanders in Blerick because they were involved in an interesting ‘deception’ in the north to allow the town to be taken from the west. The ruse that Eric and the battalion used involved making a lot of noise – including broadcasting tank noises, making tank tracks and active patrolling. Clever military stuff!

From here on, my Dad would have been defending the Maas. which must have been frustrating for him and his comrades after the more rapid movements earlier on in the war. Another soldier penned a limerick which summarised their feelings:

As I sit on then banks of the Maas; I reflect it is truly a farce; At my time of life; And miles from my wife; To be stuck in the mud on my arse”

I guess the humour of the soldier never changes.

Tomorrow we begin retracing the invasion of Germany itself when Eric and the Glasgow Highlanders were the first troops to enter the Rhineland.