Today we invaded the Rhineland just as my Dad and the 15th Scottish Division did in February 1945. Except our invasion was peaceful and involved enjoying an oompah band playing in a village market, beer and pizza in the town of Cleve and a memorable (for all the wrong reasons) wander in some woods. More about our ‘wander’ later.

We begin the day with a trip to the Airborne museum at Arnhem. Dad was close by -defending the route that the ground forces would take to catch up with the airborne troops dropped to take the bridge. (We have been reliving his role in Holland in the past few days – see earlier blogs). This was an excellent museum which tells the story vividly from the perspective of the British and Polish airborne troops, the Dutch resistance and German defenders, telling it through film, audio reminiscences and well-chosen artefacts. I am particularly touched by the plaque outside the museum with the troops’ apology for having brought destruction to the town yet also the strong bonds between them and the Dutch population. 

We are staying in a lovely hotel by a lake fed by the River Rhine near Nijmegen. This was the concentration point for Operation Veritable that the British and Canadians launched into Germany. One Corps alone (I believe it was Dad’s VIII Corps) had built up a force in the Nijmegen area equivalent to that of the D-Day operation – 200,000 men, 15,000 armoured vehicles and 13,000 artillery. It was going to be big. I am very proud to think that Dad and the Glasgow Highlanders were one of the first battalions to lead the attack and set foot in German territory. 

Back to following in Dad’s footsteps. From Groesbeek we move on to see the Battalion’s objectives – first Boersteeg and then Heetsteg which was in front of the German defensive Siegfried Line of minefields, tank traps and concrete emplacements. None of this is visible today. We just observe a lovely sunny day in the western part of a peaceful Germany. In February 1945, it was raining incessantly and the fields were boggy, made worse by the enemy having opened floodgates to make the route even more impassable. Cue for my groan-worthy comment: ‘I don’t think my Dad would have been hanging out his washing on the Siegfried Line’. (Look it up!)

We move on to Cleve where we drink (and Andrew eats) and then set off to ‘wander in the Moyland Woods’ as I have described it in my itinerary . This was a large wooded area south of Cleve and I am determined to find the key places in the wood described in what turned out to be a  murderous battle for Dad and the Glasgow Highlanders and other battalions of the Brigade. It seems to be fairly straight forward – before we get there. The description of the battle talks about a central ‘ride’ through the wood, two knolls, a sunken path and a small village. Surely, these would be easy to identify.

Unfortunately, the wartime map in my book didn’t account for the golf course now constructed at its southern end, the absence of a central route (well, not one that we could find), a multitude of cycle paths criss-crossing the wood and my mobile phone which dies (Andrew can’t use my hotspot and he has no data left, of course). 

Never mind, ever the teacher, I confidently stride off in a central-ish direction towards where the knolls and the small village of Tellemanskath should be. I stride off the path and into undergrowth and think I have found at least one knoll. ‘So the village must be over there‘. I stride off again into the undergrowth in its assumed direction. No sign of a village. I start wandering along small tracks and start to lose my sense of direction though I believe we are walking generally north. Then signs of habitation – hallelujah! But best to confirm, so I strike up a conversation with an elderly German couple sitting in their back garden. They speak no English and my German is of the comic-book variety (you know, ‘Achtung Spitfire’, ‘Donner und Blitzen’, Englander schweinhund’and the like) – not likely to be useful in this situation. ‘Is this village Tellemanskath?’, I ask. Puzzled looks and conversation between them. I am getting negative vibes. I think they are telling me the village isn’t there any more. Moment of inspiration: ‘Tellemanskath kaput??’, I say inquisitively. Agreement from them in sign language. Damn! No village to confirm our position. 

Ah well, let’s get ourselves back to the car that we have parked somewhere south of the golf course. But in which direction? Mmm?! Andrew decides to take control and we stride off again in some direction. Lo and behold after what seems like an age, we see Schloss Moyland – but it is almost in the opposite corner of the map to where we would like to be. It would have been a ‘nice to see’ but not at that precise time when we were at near melting point and gasping for water! We accost two elderly German cyclists to check our bearings. They being German, unlike us, are of course fully equipped and prepared with maps, garmins, phones and tell us what we should do. (Bit like Brexi… oops, nearly said it there.)

I am grateful to be back in the car, thanks to Andrew’s gallant offer to run back and get it and pick me up. Good man!

Time to debrief today’s catastrophe over a well deserved beer. We cross the Rhine tomorrow.

“The scene at the river was like Henley or the Thames at Oxford in ‘Eights Week’ . The banks were crowded with men and vehicles…The storm boats, rafts and Buffaloes plied backwards and forwards with their loads…” (I think the writer of the 44 Brigade history was a rower!)

Operation Plunder – the crossing of the Rhine – in March 1945 was to be the culminating major operation of the whole campaign in NW Europe. We were going to find the place where Dad and the rest of 46 Brigade crossed the river.

With Andrew at the wheel, we take the 30 mile route from Nijmegen to the crossing point on the west bank. As we travel, I read out loud the preparations for the crossing, the crossing itself and the subsequent battles on the eastern bank.

I wondered when the emotion of this trip was going to catch up with me. It did in the car. I got completely choked up when I got to the following words that Churchill spoke to Eisenhower a few days after the Rhine crossing and battles: “My dear General, the German is whipped. We’ve got him. He is all through“. I couldn’t speak those words. I don’t know what it was about them that affected me, but they did – probably the finality that, to all intents and purposes, the campaign in NW Europe and the 5 long years of war were nearly over. I suppose over the last 9 days, I had been reliving the Glasgow Highlanders’ successes and tragedies of the campaign – and this was but the culmination of many years of living the Second World War through my father’s military career and the centrality of the war in the life of my family and mother, in particular.

Having regained my composure, we arrive at Vynen near to where Dad crossed. In retrospect, I think we are slightly too far north. The Rhine is flowing very fast. It’s a major artery with a huge number of barges plying up and down. We both commented how fast the flow was and realise why the account says only ‘after several attempts’, the Glasgow Highlanders crossed successfully. As a rower myself, I realise how hard it would be to control a small ‘storm boat’ in fast-flowing conditions (Dad didn’t cross in an amphibious Buffalo). Dad and the 46 Brigade battalions were in the ‘ferry wave’ that drove through the middle of the 2 assault brigades that led the crossing.

The crossing had been an incredible undertaking and I am in awe of its scale. It involved the 51st Highland Division to the North, Dad’s 15th Scottish Division in the centre and 1 Commando Brigade to the south as well as the 6th Airborne Division and the 17th US Airborne Division brought by 1700 aircraft and 1400 gliders. This and the logistical support and massive build-up of supplies and ammunition in the 2 weeks before the crossing all covered by a massive smoke screen.

We listen to a video recording of some veteran Glasgow Highlanders standing on the bank and recalling the events of March 1945. It brings the crossing to life again especially as it ends with the pipes and drums playing the ’10 HLI Crossing of the Rhine’, written in celebration of the momentous event. I am also very pleased to receive some emailed maps of Operation Plunder from a contact in the Highland Light Infantry Association. Thank you, James Garven.

We move to the east bank via the town of Rees to see the bridge crossing between the two lakes that the Glasgow Highlanders were tasked to take, an even tinier bridge than the one at Hoogebrug in Holland. From there we drive through the area of Mehroo and note the position of the Wittenhorst Woods. All these were places of fierce fire-fights for the Glasgow Highlanders until white flags started to appear on German-held positions. It was the first time that the Germans had given up without a fight and led to Churchill’s comment quoted above. The game was nearly up – but not quite.

We then hit the road for a 180 mile drive to Hanover. Seventy five years ago, having crossed the Rhine, the route was clear for my father to drive on east and north eastwards through Germany. It must have been reminiscent of the dash from the Seine to Belgium except that Dad and the troops were probably not welcomed as liberators but as conquerors and occupiers by the German population.

We eventually arrive at our destination after a mix of very fast and completely static autobahn traffic!

I’m dividing this blog into two parts so that the focus of this one is only on our visit to the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp memorial. We spent 3 hours on the memorial site and the exhibition.

My father and the Glasgow Highlanders were at Celle, north east of Hanover for one night as they drove north east into Germany. Near the town, the troops had came across a small concentration camp of a few hundred dying inmates. The Division’s Colonel Richardson was so incensed that he got the local population, who claimed ignorance of the events in the camp, to see for themselves what Nazism had wrought. He required them to move corpses, provide medical attention and supplies for the survivors. I don’t know whether my father saw any of this but a collection of blankets was made from the troops for the survivors.

Just 30 kms from Celle was the infamous Belsen concentration camp. It was liberated on 15 April 1945 by British troops. With them was an army photographic unit who had been charged with accompanying front line troops to cover the war. They were able to capture at first hand the horrors of the concentration camp where thousands of bodies lay unburied around the camp and some 60,000 starving and mortally-ill people were packed together without food, water or sanitation. It is largely from their photographic record that we know about the concentration camps. Many of their photographs were on display in the exhibition as well as numerous written accounts and video & audio recollections of survivors. The story of the young Dutch girl, Anne Frank, who died at Belsen a few days before it was liberated is also covered in the exhibition.

There were rumours that camps such as these existed, but this was the first incontrovertible evidence of the atrocities that the Nazis were carrying out. Soon the scale of the industrialised murder mechanism came to light and places such as Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau and others entered our vocabulary.

We began our visit by a quiet walk in beautiful sunshine around the area once the scene of this horror and now an open space for contemplation. But we are reminded of what went on by the simplicity of the large mounds with phrases carved in stone on the surrounding wall, numbering the dead in each mass grave – 1000, 2000, 5000. Unbelievable. Elsewhere around the site, we saw large memorials to the Jewish and Polish victims of the holocaust as well as to political prisoners, homosexuals, Roma and other groups that the Nazis considered inferior or a danger to Aryan purity. We are stunned by the scale of it. 

Andrew and I come away from that place in silence – a mixture of sadness and anger that this could happen in the 20th century. My mind was taken back to the war cemeteries of our war dead and my earlier comment in this blog about the pointlessness of war – yet though the Second World War was fought for a variety of national reasons and personal motivations, it was quite the reverse of pointless. Had Nazism not been defeated, then the mass murder of increasing numbers would have continued. We owe it to our brave war dead and our war veterans not to forget Bergen-Belsen and we are pledged to oppose intolerance and racism wherever they raise their ugly heads.

We retrace my father’s journey in the last month of the war. He spent a night in billets at Garssen near Celle as part of the rapid 120 mile advance north eastwards (he was not very far from the concentration camps I mentioned yesterday in Part 1).

Anyway, we are not just replicating the dash from the Rhine to the Elbe but the weather too. Eric experienced excellent weather in April/May 1945 and we too are steaming in our transport with temperatures well over 30 degrees, not helped by discovering that the Aston’s air conditioning is ineffective. So we drive with windows down, drinking bottle after bottle of water but sweating like you wouldn’t believe… I even took a clean polo shirt out of my case and I swear it was perspiring in there too!

We have been puzzled throughout our journey by the location of the only two photos we have of my Dad on active service. In them, he is standing next to and sitting on top of a knocked-out German half-track in front of a barn or farmhouse. We have been keeping an eye out for these places. My caption to the photo in my book says, ‘Probably somewhere in Normandy’. It’s wrong because as we turn a corner in a village near Celle, Andrew spots exactly the same sort of architecture – the same shaped houses, roofs and brickwork within a wooden structure. We look around a bit and whilst it is difficult to find an exact match, the photo opportunity is good. Unfortunately, Andrew doesn’t have a WW2 German half-track to sit on. But we can certainly say now that the caption should read, ‘Somewhere near Celle in Germany’. Andrew was right to say that it would have been unlikely to find a smiling, confident Eric at the start of the Normandy campaign (and it would have been unlikely for a photograph to have been taken there anyway) and more likely to be nearer the end of the war as the Allies were nearing victory… mystery solved!

Our next stop was to find the small village of Stadensen, south of Uelzen. It is a very small village indeed. On 14th April, Eric and the Glasgow Highlanders, plus their armour and artillery were in a perimeter camp when they faced a sudden attack and an overnight battle with a German Battle Group, the description of which is so vivid that I include an extract about it from the Battalion War Diary here:

“At 03.55 a heavy attack came into the Battalion and enemy infantry on half-tracks supported by many self-propelled guns broke into the defences. A hand to hand battle ensued which lasted until dawn, infantry fighting infantry, tackling self-propelled guns and half tracks with PIATs – artillery firing over open sights – tanks seeking out enemy self-propelled guns and our own self-propelled anti-tank guns fighting magnificently in the breaking light. The CO, Lt Col Baker-Baker, decided to stand fast and fight it out in the now blazing ruins of a village. Battalion headquarters had been burned to the ground, an enemy self-propelled gun had blown away the signal office at point blank range.”

The Glasgow Highlanders nevertheless turned matters around and were in control by the morning. To me, this event gives a real sense of what Dad and the Battalion went through in battle. (You can read the full account in my book 😉 – available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle!)

From there, we go to the nearby town of Uelzen, a major communication centre for the Germans and a key objective. The Divisional history says that “In both 44th and the 46th Brigades, snipers were active and had many successes.” It was quite a ruthless street fighting situation and it is sobering to think of my father doing what he was trained to do here. We have another motivation – to find another photo in the book of a soldier with a Bren gun firing from behind a monument in the town. After wandering unsuccessfully again, we show a local the photo in the book (sensitively, I keep my finger over the British Bren gunner and show her the monument only). She obliges and tells us it’s in front of the Rat Haus. We duly find it. Andrew lies on the floor at my request and the job is done. We work out that the original photo is actually from the other side, but as there was a group of young people enjoying a drink on the steps of the monument, it seemed a bit much to ask them to move so that he could lie in the right place. ‘What are these mad Brits doing…?!’

We press on to the last physical barrier that Dad and the men of the 15th Scottish Division were to cross – the River Elbe. The Division was christened ‘The Crossing Sweepers’ by the war correspondents because they had been at the forefront of the crossings of the Seine, the Rhine and the Elbe. And we had done all three also. What might we be called? ‘The Forest Wanderers’ maybe? Answers on a postcard to…

We find the spot where Dad and the Glasgow Highlanders crossed the Elbe by storm boat from the village of Hohnstorf to Lauenberg on the other side. It was an unopposed crossing as the opposite bank had been pulverised for hours by artillery and heavy bombers. The river is wide but it wasn’t flowing like the Rhine when we were there. We drive on through the villages of Kruzen and Lutau and see the twin hills that the Battalion captured.

As we chewed up the miles over the last days, we have been getting a real sense of things speeding up as we approach the end of our journey. It must have been the same for Dad and his comrades as the war neared its end and the final natural obstacle was overcome.

We arrive for our overnight stay in Hamburg. My father and the Battalion’s last days of war were north east of the great city which had been utterly devastated by bombing. German resistance seeped away as news of Hitler’s suicide emerged. The final act of the Glasgow Highlanders was to sweep the Sachsenwald Forest where they took 85 prisoners. We drove to the forest to finish off our adventure.

At nearby Lunaberg Heath, Montgomery had received the surrender of all the German forces and my Dad’s war was over on 5th May 1945. I think he would have felt a mix of emotions but mainly relief and thankfulness. He had survived.

We now begin our long trip back from Hamburg to Calais (800km!). We will continue to blog over our last remaining couple of days as we plan to see and do a few more things in Belgium and France before we leave.

This blog comes from Calais. The last few days have seen us travel from Hamburg to stay overnight in Nijmegen, thereby getting the bulk of our journey under our belt. Then on to the war grave cemetery at Bergen op Zoom, a visit to Antwerp and from there to Ypres. A short journey to Dunkirk and the 1940 Operation Dynamo museum took us back to Britain’s darkest hours of the war. We return home tomorrow on Le Shuttle so just a couple of highlights to end with:

The visit to the Bergen op Zoom Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery was once again a moving experience. I had been asked by a member of Highland Light Infantry Association web group if I could seek out the grave of a friend of his father who was killed on the first day of operations on the Scheldt estuary. Being about the 5th Battalion of the Glasgow Highlanders, I didn’t know much about the campaign to capture the port of Antwerp but it was as fierce a battle as any that my Dad’s 2nd Battalion had been involved in elsewhere. We found the grave, together with the last resting places of many other Scottish soldiers from the Glasgow, Seaforth and Cameronian Highlanders and many other regiments. There were also many RAF aircrew buried in the beautifully kept cemetery. I was pleased to be able to say a heartfelt thank you to a gardener who was responsible for their upkeep. So many short individual life stories which need to be told and which may never be. We will be for ever grateful for their sacrifice. We will never forget.

Lunch followed (the boy was getting famished) and a walk round Antwerp town centre, currently undergoing extensive renovation, but still looking impressive. We drove on towards Calais but had decided to take advantage of being in the Flanders region to go to Ypres. We arrive late afternoon, in time to see the Cloth Hall which was the backdrop to last year’s moving commemorations of the centenary of the end of WW1. We then join the many hundreds gathered at the Menin Gate to hear the ‘Last Post’ sounded as it has been every day since 1928. The names of the war dead of 1914-18 that ‘have no known grave’ are recorded on every wall of the Gate. The scale and the reach that the war had on the British Empire is enormous. Soldiers of Canadian, Australian, Indian and South African regiments are named alongside British soldiers, including Highland Light Infantry. It was an appropriate link between the sacrifice of Dad’s father’s generation with the sacrifice of the WW2 generation we have been retracing.

Postscript

The journey could not have happened without having first researched what Eric and the 2nd Battalion of the Glasgow Highlanders did. It led me to write up and self-publish his war story. Dad did not recount these events to me. Like so many of that war generation, he did not speak about what he did in wartime.

This journey has been very meaningful and is one I shall never forget. I have a far better understanding of the realities, landscapes and conditions of the campaign which Dad and the Glasgow Highlanders fought through Normandy, Belgium, Holland and Germany, 75 years ago.

It has been a great privilege and joy to share this also with Andrew, a grandson that Eric never knew but a grandfather that he certainly knows a lot more about now.

We hope that by reliving Eric’s journey with us, you too have paid tribute to the Glasgow Highlanders and all the soldiers whose wartime bravery brought us the freedom we enjoy today.

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them“