We thought that the time had now come for a leisurely move forward into whatever place we were going to settle down for good. We thought there was nothing more to do. We thought the days of sudden moves and quick ‘O’ Groups were a thing of the past. We were wrong.
We discovered that that the German Army Group South East, opposite to the Yugoslavs and the Russians, had not played on the general surrender in Europe, which had occurred in the meantime. Everyone in Europe, it seemed, was laying down their arms with the exception of those “Krauts”, who happened to be disposed just about the very place we were wanting to go to.
There were other complications too.
There was a Cossack Corps milling about on its own somewhere on our front and the Yugoslavs were not taking too kindly to our having reached Trieste and a few other places to the north of it before them. All in the garden was not a bed of roses.
At 8 o’clock on 4th of May, we were warned to concentrate in the area of Pordenone some 20 miles west of Udine. Advance parties left that morning and the Brigade was to start the next day. It was a long journey and it would take some time to get through. Just the right length of time, I thought, for a couple of nights in Venice en route. One CO was to bring the brigade along while the rest of us would just join up with it two days hence. The 2nd Armoured Brigade was, unfortunately, not due to move with us – it was to stay behind in Italy – which was a great disappointment to us all.
When the Brigade reached Pordenone at about 0600 hours on the 6th, they were told to go on to Udine and arrived there complete by 1200 hours. The Skins were in the town itself, the London Irish were near Brigade Headquarters about 4 miles to the north and the Faughs a couple of miles to the east of the town. We also collected up the 17 Field Regiment, 254 Anti Tank Battery, ‘D’ Support Group and 152 Field Ambulance in the Udine area.
We at once found ourselves involved with the Yugoslavs, who were bent on removing food dumps from anywhere they could find them. Our predecessors had been a bit slow in realising the form and the “Jugs” had got away with quite a good deal already. The technique was that whatever we found a Yugoslav post in the area, we greeted it with effusion and established one of our posts beside it. These Allied posts managed to keep things running more or less straight. We also had to hunt about for any more food and ammunition dumps and put our guards on them.
It got very hot in Udine about this time – far hotter than it is as I now write in Austria at the end of June. This pause in Udine enabled us to collect our bits and pieces, horses and so forth, some of which were proceeding “on hoof” from the Po. Unofficial convoys of horses, both on foot and on wheels were not an uncommon sight at this time. Our Brigade HQ horse arrived intact in a 3 tonner but we lost a pony, which we had asked someone else to bring and were told that it had jumped out of the 3 tonner en route and made off – no mean feat!
We met a new outfit in this part of the world – the real Italian partisans. Their chief characteristic was their war like appearance. They all came from the Osoppo Partisan Division, divided into two factions, who distinguished themselves by red and green scarves. Apart from a few conflicts among themselves and occasionally with the Jugs, they were not nearly as troublesome as they looked. It was a little disconcerting, however, to drive down a narrow road and find a heavy load of these scallywags coming at you from the opposite direction with Bren guns mounted on the roof pointed at you with rather a doubtful finger on the trigger. No doubt, there was a round up the spout as well! The green scarf merchants seemed the more biddable of the two. Some of these fellows had undoubtedly made a scourge of themselves to the Germans with their guerrilla activities in the more out of the way places but exactly how much they had achieved, it was impossible to find out. Their stories were always colourful.
On the morning of the 7th, I was ordered by 5 Corps to send troops to the Cividale–Caporetto area. The Faughs moved to Cividale on the morning of the 8th and two companies of the London Irish went to Caporetto and Plezzo in order to relieve 6th Armoured Division in their move forward into Austria.
The rest of the Division, in the meanwhile, had gone surging off into Austria and left us behind. They had gone into the Western corner of Carinthia. It was all too bad. We had visions of finding nothing when we get there and we were afraid that all the best mansions would have been taken by someone else. We were anxious to get moving into our final area but in this desire, we were still very premature.
On this day, the 8th May, at 1500 hours, Winston Churchill announced the end of the War in Europe at midnight that night.
This was splendid but we were all too busy to do anything about it.
We had had our moment of inward thanksgiving that night on the Po.
The Jugs in the meantime were doing all they knew to get into Carinthia ahead of us and our job at Capotetto and Plezzo was to try and deflect them back into their own country or, at any rate, to keep them off any road, which the 8th Army had to use. All this was achieved in quite a friendly spirit – but they were very persistent.
At 2000 hours on the 9th, I got an order from 5 Corps for the Brigade, less the Skins, to move as soon as possible tomorrow morning to Klagenfurt, the capital of Carinthia, where we were to come under command of 6th Armoured Division. I went off to Headquarters, 6th Armoured Division first thing in the morning to find out what the form was. It was all a bit vague. The general theme was that 6th Armoured Division had now established themselves in the Klagenfurt area, where there was a good deal of Yugoslav friction going on and it would be much quicker for us to bound through them and take over the next chunk of country instead of relieving them to go forward and do it. This was sound enough as 46th Division were eventually to go to the eastern end and we would hold the ball there until they arrived. General Murray, commanding 6th Armoured Division, told me that he thought I would do well if I could get my Brigade nicely concentrated all round Wolfsburg by the following evening.
We did not get everyone in until it was getting dark that evening as it was a long drive and, even using two roads, the congestion was considerable.
I spent the rest of that day with Adrian Gore, Commander of 61 Rifle Brigade, seeing what the local form was. It was certainly a pretty good “pig’s breakfast”. The problems we had to handle were legion. There was Jug trouble; German Corps Commanders coming to surrender; German troops all over the country, sometimes being stopped by the Jugs after they had already surrendered to us; attempts to get some form of civil administration functioning – and all with far too few troops for the job in hand. The road to the east of Klagenfurt was alleged to be blocked by the Jugs, apparently to impede further progress. I told Adrian that I had hoped he would have this one sorted by the morning, unless he wanted to have us on his hands too! After that, we issued orders for the move tomorrow to Wolfsburg, had an excellent dinner and went to bed.
Our Mess staff had been absolute adept at producing a meal in the minimum of time – and a good meal at that. For the last year, they had never failed to produce an excellent meal at the normal hour if it was humanly possible to do so. They really seemed to take pride in keeping their record unbroken and, in this, they succeeded most admirably.
Setting Frontiers – To Klagenfurt/Wolfsberg.
The only people east of us at present were 27 Lancers under Andrew Parker. Their RHQ was at Wolfsberg and they had squadrons reaching out towards Graz. They had contacted the Russians. Our job was to come in behind them and stabilise the situation. To do this, we would obviously have to push out quickly in all directions in order to contact the Russians on all likely lines of approach. At the same time, we would set up some form of civil administration and try to ease the Jugs out if they were there. It had become quite obvious to me as soon as I got to 6th Armoured Division’s Headquarters that I was in very urgent need of two things. A squadron of a Reconnaissance Regiment and a Russian interpreter. I never got either until the need for them had passed.
The main stumbling block to the advance of the Eighth Army was the German column retreating from the Russians, which effectively blocked most of the roads. Added to this were parties of Yugoslavs doing all sorts of funny things. As far as we could make out, the Jugs had decided that, as well as Trieste and a certain number of other places in Italy east of the River Isonzo, they had territorial designs on Carinthia also. They were trying to set up a sort of dual control with us. Any direct dealings with the Jugs were most correct and punctillious on both sides but they were not exactly doing all they could to help us on through Austria. Any parties of Germans they came across were lucky to get away with their trousers. They also did a certain amount of rough handling of the local inhabitants – usually with the object of forcing them to subscribe to the idea of Yugoslav rule and eventual incorporation into that country.
All this I had found out during my day’s pause at Klagenfurt with Adrian Gore. When we started to Wolfsburg next morning those, as far I knew, were the main problems.
To recapitulate, our task was to make contact with the Russians, a problem we did not know much about, to get some order out of the chaos ensuing from the retreating Army Group South East and Army Group East and to disarm its assorted membership and to deal with the Jugs.
I got to Wolfsberg between 10 and 11 o’clock in the morning and got as much form as I could from the 27th Lancers. At once, it appeared obvious that concentrating the whole Brigade Group in Wolfsberg was not the right answer. I accordingly sent back word to stop the Faughs at St Andre about 10 miles south at Wolfsberg. The London Irish took over the responsibility for the Wolfsberg area. The 17 Field Regiment came initially to Wolfsberg. 26 Battery joined the Faughs the next day but, by that evening, I found it necessary to send the whole Regiment to the area of Volkemarkt and eventually as far south as Bleiburg. 254 A/Tk Battery came up to Wolfsberg to start with and that evening I sent them off to Preitonegg and then east to St Oswald to contact the Russians. The contacting of Russians had already been successfully done in the Koflach area by 27 Lancers and it was merely a question of extending contact to the south of that place. We never had a moment’s difficulty in our dealings with the Russians; everything was done most correctly and with the minimum waste of time.
As soon as the Faughs got to St Andre, they collected up 1,200 SS troops. These were the only sort we really bothered much about. All other types were just more or less shuffled backwards under their own steam but the SS were given a special form of treatment all for themselves. They were the one type that we were definitely not prepared to have running spare about the country, either now or in the future. The SS were to be eliminated for all time.
When I got to my new Headquarters, which was an imposing looking building in the middle of the town, several deputations were already waiting there. There was a German Corps Commander, a Hungarian Divisional Commander and a number of other erstwhile centurians. I did not know about the Hungarian Army – apparently, that was in our midst too.
While I was dealing with these people, I got word that the Bulgarian Army was bearing down on us. There was word of a Croatian Army doing something somewhere and there were a lot of Cossacks alleged to be running wild to the south-east. Which side all these people belonged to, I had some difficulty in determining. The Bulgarians turned out to be Allies, and the Croats and Hungarians were enemies, as of course were the Cossacks who had changed sides when things had looked bad for Russia.
I told the Hungarians to stay where they were and look after themselves which they seemed quite willing to do. I told the Germans to push off to the west and then devoted my attention to the Bulgarians.
The 1st Bulgarian Army had established a Divisional Headquarters in Lavamund about 25 miles to the south east and were apparently surging along in a westerly and north westerly direction. Murphy Palmer had heard about the Bulgarians too and very wisely sent off a platoon of Faughs to try and hold the fort at Lavamund. Shortly after, I picked him up and we went off there together to see what was going on. The whole village was seething with Bulgarians, who were terrifying the local populace. We found the Bulgarian Corps Commander and a Divisional Commander in a village inn.
In the village, too, were about a hundred British Prisoners of War who had been in a Prison Camp there. As soon as the Germans had gone, these fellows, under command of three of their Sergeants, had organised themselves into a company in the most businesslike and efficient way and had promptly proclaimed the town to be British. Those lads were worth their weight in gold. They knew the local form and several of them were first class interpreters. I got a rough picture of what was going on from them and then took one of them to the inn in the hope that the Bulgarian would talk some known language.
Eventually, the Bulgars produced somebody to speak German. Taking through two interpreters can be a very slow and irksome business, especially if a large part of the time has to be spent in exchanging windy compliments on the magnificence of each other’s Army. The trouble was that the last thing they wanted was to meet other people. They wanted to get as far as possible and collect up as much loot as possible before they met anyone likely to stem their tide.
Fortunately, we persuaded them that the only thing to do was for both sides to halt until our respective commanders had had an opportunity of giving “we poor soldiers” some fresh orders.
I thought it might be a good idea to try the mixed road post technique that was so popular with the Yugoslavs but the only answer I got to this proposal was something like: “Bulgaria is a small country and, unfortunately, had not had an opportunity of studying the culture of the great nations like England and America but now that we have met them, they hoped they would be able to repair this omission.” Such remarks, of course, necessitated a digression in admiration of the fine efforts of the Bulgarian Army, which we had always studied with great interest.
All this was a little far-fetched as none of us had even heard of them two hours before and, if we had, we would probably have mistaken which side on which they fought.
It was quite obvious that nothing more could be achieved and anyway stopping them going any further was my main object at that time. So, I packed them off in a car to go and see our Corps Commander in order to ratify the rather vague agreement that we had reached. This, I gather was successfully done but it still remained pretty vague. A number of photographs of the first British and Bulgarians forces to meet were taken and then the highlights departed for Klagenfurt.
As soon as they had gone, I was set upon by all sorts of people in the street; Hungarians wanting to be taken away by us; civilians who had been experiencing some of the fruits of victory at the hands of the Bulgarians; Germans, who were begging to be removed; Yugoslavs, who were trying to get through and were being stopped by the Bulgarians; Bulgarians who complained that they were about to be attacked by 5,000 Cossacks; and our own Prisoners of War, who had the Cossacks all round their camp. There was the father and mother of a “party” going on.