Chapter 2 My Friend Wally Cooper, The Battle of the Rhine

I met a smashing chap; I’d met him before we went to Southampton, named Wally Cooper. We were posted and packed up together. He came from Cambridge and as came from Coventry, we could understand what each other said more easily than the Welsh.

At night in the forest, we had what is known as Monty’s Moonlight. There were search lights on stilts behind the lines, they lit up the lines to enable us to see the enemy if they moved around. One night we settled down having a cigarette, I always kept a look-out. All of a sudden, you could hear a rumble, and there was the enemy, we thought coming in on our right. It was rapid fire. We moved on and heard that the Oxford and Buckinghamshire, the Highland Light Infantry and the 1st and 5th Welsh Regiment were moving all around us. The rustling started again and rapid fire. We were firing at each other for about 20 minutes. The officers shouted “Stop Firing! Its not the enemy but our own regiment who have moved too far.” There were lost of mistakes made in the war, a lot of men were hurt and killed by mistake.

One day, we were going along a country lane approaching a village we were to attack. We didn’t bother with fields; we used the lanes so that the tanks could follow us along the lane and fire their guns on the enemy’s position first. A tank firing sounds like a shell coming out of a tin “Dong”, you never forget it. There was a German sharp shooter, a sniper; he was trying to pick off the men’s heads showing above the tanks. The tank commander must have had an idea where he was, so he ordered his gunner to place and H.E. shell into the gun and shoot straight over our heads, but one of the shells happened to hit one of the telephone cables alongside the road. I was one side of the road with half a section, while Wally was on the other with the other half of the section. This shell came down right behind the other half section. It killed Wally outright and seriously injured several others, but oh how it did upset me to see Wally laying there dead, your best mate, of all things. I thought “God, what am I going to do now? I’ve lost Wally.” We all hit the ground. Someone shouted at the tank commander, “Stop firing”, he didn’t know at the time he’d killed my best friend. Then all quiet, no one crying or shouting. I broke down straight away; I didn’t get over it for a long time. He and Ellis had caught the full force. It must have filled them with shrapnel. That night we had to go to a Dutch farm where there were haystacks where we stayed the night. The army thought they’d give us a rest. We had this rest, then the officers sent a message over to me Fusilier Wright, to go over to his friend Wally Cooper, (it should have been the officer’s job really, not mine, to get Wally’s tag off his chest.) You had 2 tags round your neck on a string, so if you were killed, 1 tag went back to the war office, the other tag stayed with your body. That tag had your name and army number on it, so they could identify you. Then I had to move him, to collect his pay book out of his pocket and it was horrible. The1st big casualty I had encountered. Poor Wally, I still remember him from that day to this. I never had his address and I haven’t a photo of him, yet I still remember Wally.

After I was then L.O.B., Left Out of Battle, the excuse was that they wanted to choose some men to go on leave, I found this was untrue, I just went back for a rest into what they call isalon, where office workers and clerks try to do their work planning their next attack. All they saw now and again was an old shell coming over.
We often prayed for a Blighty so we could return home, sometimes someone had one and they were wounded, others were killed.

Holland.
We had a rest in Heijthuzen in Holland, some miles from Nijmegen. We stayed with a family, they had no food, there were 9 of us in a family house so we took our food from a lorry, into this house and gave it to the lady who lived there. She added a bit of this and a bit of that and a few extra potatoes then mixed it all up and we had enough food for the section and enough for her family as well. She had a lovely daughter where called Netty, whom I liked very much. She was very young, about 15 years of age; she was very helpful. After about a week, the Battle at Nijmegen had started and had gone wrong, so they wanted the rest of the army to move on, and to push up and do the work the Airborne should have done. By the time we got there is was “All hell let loose”. The artillery, the Air force, they were all fighting together. The next day we were marching over the bridge, The Nijmegen Bridge, there was little left of Nijmegen. We crossed to the other side to assemble ourselves for a final assault on Germany. This is when many thousands of soldiers crossed the bridge. We marched over the bridge, over the River Maas to the border, to the Siegfried Line, this divided France form Germany, which was very heavily fortified. This was the Reichswald Forest. This is where the Siegfried line was, which German border for many miles!” The armistice had been signed. Loud speakers announced this and leafletsd were thrown about les, with almighty big guns to halt the advancing French and British entering Germany. That didn’t seem to work. Many of these guns were underground, then emerged, fired, then returned underground. We decided to have a wash and brush up. We stripped down to the waist and all of a sudden this German chap appeared from no where, he was a Gestapo officer, dressed up like a Lord in his Gestapo uniform with his arm band on, his Lugar on his side, his iron cross around his neck, we couldn’t run to grab our rifles quickly enough. All I could shout was “He’s mine!” He had his hands up in the air; he couldn’t get his hands any higher if he’d tried. I removed his Lugar as I was leader, that went straight into my blouse pocket, and took the iron cross. He could have killed us all if he had wanted to, catching us shaving unawares like that! While this happened the rest of the enemy disappeared and in the morning we looked for a any wounded soldiers, to see if we needed stretcher-bearers, but there weren’t any. The Germans had been around in the night and had taken their wounded soldiers away.

The Forest was about 15 miles long and 9 miles wide. The tanks ploughed the trees down as they went along; they did their best to support their regiment. The officer giving us our orders had warned us that at 5.30 in the morning, we would be woken up and we’d hear a barrage of shells, such as we’d never heard before in our life. We all had a part to play. We were told there would be a thousand guns and a thousand shells, and they’d all open up at the same time. This they did, and it was like all hell was let loose. You can’t imagine what the sound was like, as if there were ten express trains racing through a tunnel, all at the same time, what a roar!

The Canadians had developed rocket-firing shells. Sixty barrels fired from the back of a large lorry, which was like a trailer. We had not expected this. We’ heard the early morning barrage, the thousand guns and the shells raining down on the enemy’s positions. The Canadians were often with us, they fired them over our heads. We scattered all over the place, little did we know they were from our own side at the time. This continued for some time. We rallied together and were on the march again, we didn’t know we were in the Reichswald Forest. We settled down, had a meal but the enemy was getting closer. We were on German ground. We settled down for the night and started again the next day attacking more German targets. Now we were on German ground.
So then it was all quiet for the next day until we had some food brought along. We hadn’t eaten properly for days. The next night again the enemy counter-attacked. If you needed to go to the toilet, you had to dig a hole in the trench and while one of you went, the other had to be on guard. If you wanted to get rid of the smell, you could either throw it out of the trench, or you could bury it then and there, that is if you were going to stay there a few hours, which we did. It wasn’t long before we were on the move again in the Reichswald Forest. It seemed to be ages before we got through; I think it must have taken us over a week to get through the forest.

On one occasion we were assigned an officer straight from England whom we nicknamed “Daffodil”. He was a nice chap but very inexperienced. He had us all lined up and he shouted “Attack, forward men”. Well, we hadn’t gone many yards and he became injured. A German sniper picked him off straight away. He had his 45 held up like you do in training, instead of holding it properly. He would have been spotted a mile away, he went down like a shot and he only got wounded. Then the next thing, the sergeant shouted to move forward, to go in and attack. All of a sudden he went down like a light, he had a bullet that went straight through his bottom, oh, and didn’t he squeal and roll on the ground? He was on the ground and we couldn’t stop laughing, it served him right! I don’t think he’d been in action before. That was the last we saw of him. After that I was blamed for shooting the sergeant major up the bum and I kept assuring the men it I hadn’t done it, I wasn’t near him, I wasn’t close enough. As I had threatened to do this, they all thought I had. It was one of our lads who’d shot him, not a German. It was one of ours, they put it down to an accidental shot, “an accident in war”. You’re in attack, you’re all lined up, you’re going in, you never go into an attack in arrow formation, that was WW1 antics, and they were mown down like flies. We always used to go in single file and when we got close we used to run for it and blast our guns like bloody Billyo. We used to let everything fly at once, if you had a mortar gun in your hand and it had a shell down the barrel, you let that fly as well. Once the artillery had stopped you were on your own, the enemy could see you and they let fly. Those who were left. I remember one time we went into this wood and this chap’s name was Botwood. We went in with kangaroos. I was just one of the lucky ones. The Germans were dug in, but they were all wounded, they were all nearly cut in half with bullets and all sorts. There was one German there, he was groaning in the bottom of the trench and this Welshman, Botwood, wanted to finish him off, and I wouldn’t let him. By this time we’d stopped that, we didn’t allow it. If a soldier had been wounded he was wounded, you didn’t kill him off, he had a chance, like our men did. All Botwood wanted to do was to kill him. His mates managed to knock his rifle up in the air so he couldn’t kill him, and he was that bloody mad! I didn’t see him again after that, I reckon he was killed.

Every day you would settled down, you take a place, you’d dig in, you had the enemy positions ahead of you, you would have a meal, soup or something sent up by the cooks, you had tea slops in the mess tin, before long you were on the move again and it was attack, attack, attack, that is why the war, once moving fast, ended quicker than first thought. Thank goodness for that!

One evening, a Welsh officer came up to me and Ronnie, (Ronnie was our section leader), and told us to go on a rekky patrol deep into the forest. Why he asked us both I don’t know. We had a Bren gun and several magazines of ammunition. We had to follow a precise path and look for enemy positions to assess how strong they were. After a bit of grumbling we both went off. Little did we realise what a dangerous situation we were in, we could have been killed at any time. We walked for about half an hour, just searching, until a certain time when we had to return on our trail. The officer told us we’d done our part upon our return, it was now time for a fighting patrol. So then 9 men set out over the same route. Eventually they were ambushed and they had to fight their way out of the situation. It turned out to be a blood-bath. We had carried out our orders, but we shouldn’t have been sent out, as we were sitting targets, our enemies could see us, but we couldn’t see them. They knew there would be a heavy patrol after a rekky patrol. That was another of our lucky days!

We returned to our section, we moved on the following day. It was black and deadly with enemy posts everywhere. We went in firing.

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