Arthur Burkett’s Diaries by Linda Burkett

Author:Linda Burkett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brown Dog Books

Awoke on Easter Monday at 4am and after cursing everything because of the dark, cheered up when I heard that parcels were to be issued. We packed and after a brew Jerry came and told us we had to get on the road by 5am. We got on the road and as we marched off we had a parcel between two men issued. Then we were got on parade and our names and numbers were called, Brown, Lewis and Canning were called early but we had to wait for mine on the last sheet. We marched to the railway and were put 55 in an open truck and at 10am we moved off. We had breakfast of HL biscuits and meat roll and jam and settled down for a 2-hour run. We went through Nuremberg and the place is a dead city with burnt-out trucks and engines all along the line, wrecked buildings everywhere. The sirens sounded as we got on the train. We moved off at 10am and made good progress for 30 kilometres and then at 11.30am we ran into a siding where we stopped. At 4.30pm 4 planes circled around our train and then flew away. We heard MG and AA fire but the planes were out of sight by this time. A few minutes later they came back and AA near here opened up but the four planes were flying very ‘low’ and took no notice at all and started doing the victory roll. We got a bit of a ‘flap’ on and watched the planes fly away and after almost going out of sight they turned and to our dismay came back. They flew to the side of us and after passing us they turned as if they were going to come up behind us to machine-gun us but they kept straight on and went away.

Since a spearhead of Yanks was 10 miles from Würzburg yesterday we put these planes down to Army recon’ planes, no fighters were seen to intercept or get anywhere near them. The boys started lighting fires in the trucks and brewing. We waited at this spot 14 kilometres from our destination until 6pm then an engine was put on and we moved off but in the wrong direction! We thought we were going on to another line but after much starting and stopping we arrived at 11pm the same place as we had started, Stalag VIII-B.

We marched from the train into the camp and the griff (rumour) is that the Yanks are advancing at the place we were going to. We got a brew and got the bed down and grimy and dirty (we were in coal trucks) we lay down and slept, we had nothing to eat as we had eaten all the biscuits on the journey and even spooned a tin of milk with a small pudding. Gosh it’s good to be back, and roll on the Yanks.

April 3

Awoke to find Ernie had already brewed and after a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.