|
|
 |
| |
March 1943: ‘A watchful group of warriors on standby one Saturday afternoon in Hounslow barracks, west London, ready to spring into action if the need arose’ |
Explosive truths of the war
Peter Richards was more interested in staying alive than liberating France, but a trip to the cinema convinced the soldier he had to fight the Nazis,
writes Dan Carrier
Bombs, Bullshit and Bullets .
By Peter Richards. Athena Press £6.99.
order this book
FOR Peter Richards, then a 20-year-old Kentish Town lad, the moment the bomb hit him is as clear in his mind as if it happened yesterday.
“It was like someone had hit me with a red-hot hammer,” he recalls.
He knows the date and the time – July 11, 1944 at 2.45pm. He was in northern France, fighting with his unit against a crack brigade of German infantry.
“As soon as the bombs started coming in I jumped off my bike and hugged mother Earth for all I was worth,” Peter recalls. “Then I counted the salvo – they would throw them over in sixes – and I thought I’d got away with it. I thought I’d heard six land. But I hadn’t – it was five. And then the last one got me in the leg.”
He says this was lucky: “it meant there was a lull in the bombing and stretcher-bearers could come and pick me up. There was a first-aid station very close by. I was fortunate like that.”
Peter, who lives in Parliament Hill Fields, has published his memoirs. He has blended the story of his time fighting through France in 1944 with a wider historical perspective in an attempt to understand his own role in the Second World War.
Peter was a dispatch rider and, the day he suffered a serious leg injury, he had delivered a message to the company headquarters from his platoon. The previous week he had been almost paralysed with fear, ducking at every blast. His unit was in a crucial sector of the front – the Germans were determined to hold out, and were counter attacking to retake lost ground.
“I had been really, really scared the week before, but that day I had begun to get cocky,” he recalls. “I had been told they were sending mortars up the road, but I thought I’d be OK, so I went to rejoin my comrades when the bombs started coming in.”
With his downbeat observations of life during the war, he has created a story that is reminiscent of Erich Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front.
He says he wants to recall the minor details that are often overlooked by accounts of the period.
Before being called up, Peter worked for the Post Office. He would go out on his rounds during the Blitz, going to streets with letters to post, only to discover the homes had been blown up during the night.
He then graduated to telegram delivery boy – a job that came with the perk of riding a motorbike – but was not an envied position as he would often be delivering the telegram to families to inform them of the death of a loved one.
But it is the day-to-day life of Kentish Town at war that he has found fascinating.
“Things like cigarettes were in short supply,” he says. “People would buy oddly-named packets no one had seen before and comment on how disgusting they were.
“I remember going to dances where girls had painted their legs and drawn a stocking line down the back because there were none to be had. Certain things became short, like Brylcreem. We all wore Brylcreem and you just could not get hold of the stuff.”
He remembers with glee the absurd sight of the Home Guard’s Captain Mainwarings and Private Pikes marching over Hampstead Heath armed with broomsticks, and the day Camden School for Girls was hit by a bomb.
He recalls the feeling of being on board a ship heading for France. “I was seasick during the crossing,” he says.
“I did not think of liberating France. I wasn’t awash with heroism. My priorities were not vomiting. Then, when I got there, I thought about staying warm and food. Of course, we were trying to defeat the enemy, but there were immediate things of staying safe, warm and fed.”
Peter was helped through the experience by his own political beliefs. A Communist, he knew Nazism was a vile doctrine that needed to be beaten.
He says: “We were hearing stories of the persecution of the Jews and the other terrible crimes of the Nazi regime. These sorts of things spurred us on.”
He recalls watching a newsreel at the Paramount cinema in Tottenham Court Road that brought the horrors of Belsen to the public’s attention.
“That really shocked everybody,” says Peter.
And he recalls the feeling among the soldiers he served with. “Everyone realised they had a job to do, even if they were not political. A lot of them were there because they were called up. They would have much rather have been anywhere but the army. This was a common sentiment. They just wanted to get the war done with.”
But this did not mean they lacked the stomach for the fight.
“Some of my comrades were very brave, while others not so,” says Peter. “And every one was scared, but it was how you dealt with that which mattered.”
After the war, he returned to the Post Office and from there he went to Ruskin College. He worked for St Pancras public libraries, combining it with part-time study at the London School of Economics. This eventually led to a doctorate in international history.
“My friends said I should write down the anecdotes I told them,” he reveals. “With my knowledge of history I was able to relate where I was at certain times with what was going on in the larger scene.”
The result is a both micro and macrocosmic look at the war years.
“It is not meant to be just a biography, it is an account of the war from one man’s perspective,” he says.
And the marriage of the large and small issues – from the price of a pint to the battle of Leningrad – makes Peter Richards’s personal story a valuable insight into the period. |
| |
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
