Robert Waller - My Grandfather

[Wolster]

My grandfather died when i was 10 but did tell me a little about his war.
He was regular army during the 1930's and was due to leave the army on the 1st September 1939. Hitler, in a plan obviously conceived to annoy my granddad, chose this day to invade Poland!
He spent some time in the desert and one thing i remember him telling me, tongue in cheek, was that whenever the Luftwaffe flew over everybody just looked up. When the USAAF flew over they all dived for cover. He also told me about a time he went for his 'morning ablutions' and just as he had pulled his shorts down a stuka came out of nowhere and started to strafe him.
After the desert war ended he returned to Blighty and became a machine gun instructor in the run up to D-Day.

He did return to action though and landed in Normandy on D+1 and fought all the way to the end. When he landed in France, out of his squad there was only him and one other man who had seen action before. The rest of his old squad had been sent into Italy after the North African campaign when he returned to be an instructor. This of course meant he missed Monte Cassino, something he was not unhappy about!

One story my Dad told me was that him and his squad were sheltering in a trench on the front line when my Grandad sent one of the men forward to see if he could spot the enemy. The man went forward and called to my Grandad to join him. He crawled forward on his belly and as he reached the man a shell or mortar fell into the trench he had just left killing everybody in it. He always considered that by calling him to him the man had saved his life.

As a strange addition to this story, he swore to his dieing day that as he was marching with his (new) squad through a Dutch village a couple of months later, that one of the men that had been killed in the trench was sitting on a fence and waved to him and shouted 'hello Bob'.

After the war he was in Berlin as part of the army of occupation. One day him and his squad came across a German women and her family stood outside their apartment crying. When he asked them what had happened they replied that a SS officer had told them to leave the flat as it was now his. As being a member of the SS was illegal they went up to see if it was true. When they entered the flat there was a man in full SS uniform including a sword. They arrested the man and did the honourable thing, stripped him of his uniform for souvenirs. My granddad, being the Sargent, got the sword. He kept this until the late fifties when my nan caught my uncle trying to cut off my dads head with it. Not best pleased she told him to get rid of it so he took it to the local landfill and threw it in!

After my Nan died my father found a certificate stating my ganddad had been mentioned in dispatches but nobody knows what for. I mean to try to find out but not even sure which regiment he was in and on the rare occasions i manage to speak to my Father always forget to ask!!

[Panzermacher]

Awesome story Wolls!

[Jim O]

Thanks for sharing that. That was a lot of fighting to have survived.

[cyberia]

Great story, Wolster. To your Grandfather. Prosit!

[TRDG]

Thank you Wolster!! I really loved those stories your grandfather told you about his time in WW II, I deeply respect what he went through.

Tom Young