The Regiment by Michael Asher

Author:Michael Asher [Asher, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: urn:isbn 9780141889436
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

60. He couldn’t believe that he’d actually survived

Bill Fraser’s A Squadron had crossed the Rhine at Wesel with Brian Franks’s Frankforce almost a fortnight earlier. Two days after the crossing they ran into a party of Canadian parachutists pinned down in a wood by a Spandau machine gun. Fraser hit dead ground, and his jeeps popped up on the machine-gunners’ left flank, only thirty yards away. The Spandau cranked towards them and blitzed Fraser in the point-jeep. A bullet smashed into his hand and his jeep somersaulted out of control. Fraser survived.

Alex Muirhead’s troop wheeled their jeeps right, Vickers Ks clattering a deadly broadside. The Spandau went silent, all the gunners dead or badly wounded. ‘We blasted hell out of them,’ Reg Seekings recalled. He spotted an arm waving and weaved up to the machine-gun nest to find a German sergeant shot in the thigh. ‘You can imagine what a mess he was in,’ he said. ‘Bone everywhere. I got him out, but he died about half an hour later.’ Before Seekings left the position, though, a fifteen-year-old boy popped up clutching a pair of potato-masher grenades. Seekings bawled at him in German to throw them down. He was just about to zap the kid, when he dropped the bombs. The German command-post surrendered moments later, and an officer told Seekings that if he had shot the boy, they would have fought to the death.

Lying up in a farmhouse at Schermbeck the following day, Harry Poat informed Ian Wellsted he’d been promoted squadron commander – Fraser had been casevaced to a field hospital. He didn’t want to go: he couldn’t accept that after surviving North Africa, Italy and France, by the skin of his teeth, he wouldn’t be in at the kill. When they set off that day, Seekings found himself saddled with a W/T operator named Perkins, who up to then had been with John Tonkin. Tonkin had asked to swap him for Seekings’s operator, Neil McMillan, because Perkins had threatened to punch him. When Perkins jumped into Seekings’s jeep, the SSM told him, ‘One squeak out of you and I’ll flatten you for bloody good.’

Seekings’s rear-gunner, Tpr. Jock McKenzie, Cameron Highlanders, was another ‘character’. In Italy he had tried it on with the daughter of an Italian family he and Seekings had been billeted with. When Seekings had warned him off, he had threatened to kill him in his sleep. The girl’s mother had asked Seekings how he dared go to bed. He told her that Mac wouldn’t risk harming him: he needed him too much.

The 1 SAS contingent of Archway, mostly Fraser’s A Squadron, and Tonkin’s D Squadron, had split up with the 2 SAS party the previous day. While 2 SAS was heading for Munster with 6 Independent Guards Armoured Brigade, the 1 SAS crew were forging ahead of 8 Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, and the Inns of Court Regiment – a light armoured unit – making for Ostrich and Rhade. They were in a convoy of a dozen jeeps led by two Dingo armoured cars.

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