Same Address
Tuesday
My Darling,
Many thanks for your letter. Was very glad to hear that you enjoyed your leave and were lucky enough to get the same time as Mary*.
Still, I expect you’re glad to be back …..I was home myself this weekend but felt so wretchedly ill, I did not really enjoy it. I started on a pint at the Beach on Saturday and hadn’t the heart to finish it.
Been very busy lately on schemes and will be on them nearly all the next month. They’re not too bad in the summer but it’s getting just a wee bit nippy these days. On top of this I’m Troop Sgt. for the week which all means added work.
Found time to read D.L.Murray’s ‘Tale of Three Cities’ which I’ve always meant to read, and enjoyed immensely. Have read virtually nothing else. Saw ‘Gentle Sex’ and Col. Blimp** during past few weeks – I believe I told you. Enjoyed Blimp but found Howard’s influence on ‘Gentle Sex’ just a little too much. He always was hammy.
Sorry to hear about your indisposition – hope it’s better by now.
Everyone seems to be having a competition as to who can produce the most offspring. News from HB < Herne Bay***. Gives lurid details of further progress in this direction. There are times when I think the world’s gone mad. They’re no sooner married than the poor girl’s tied down for life, and in most cases before she’s even started to live! I hope there’s enough money in circulation after this war to feed them all.
Had a letter from Brinner with yours. Full of his customary appalling language. He’s met a soprano of ‘Tosca’**** fame. It won’t last long. Apparently the Austrian refugee affaire has closed down for good this time.
I’d send you some denarii if I had any – but at the moment I’m bankrupt.
Did you hear the Beethoven on Sunday pm? Pouishnoff*****.
I must close here for dinner – not that I shall eat any, but I have to attend anyhow.
love & kisses
Dicker
This letter was addressed to:
W/242328 Pte Chalkley BE.
‘B’ Tp. ATS OF.C. 462 Hy (M) AA Bty RA
Markham, Easton in Gordano
Bristol
Maybe Chotie was back at Markham Camp when Dick sent her the postcard addressed to Portishead on 7th September, or maybe she’d moved the short distance to Easton-in-Gordano since then.
*Chotie’s best friend Mary Dakin, who later married Geoffrey Thomas, gentleman.
**’Gentle Sex’ - a romantic comedy film about the ATS, directed and narrated by Leslie Howard, who had been killed in June 1943 and narrated by Leslie Howard. ’The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’ - a comedy film derived from the satirical Colonel Blimp comic strip.
***Monica, Dick’s ex-girlfriend and Diller’s best friend, lived at Herne Bay.
****Giacomo Puccini’s opera ‘Tosca’ - the lead soprano has the eponymous title role, so Brinner’s new girl was presumably quite a singer.
*****Leff Pouishnoff, a Ukrainian pianist and composer.
© Chotie Darling
28th September 1943 – Chotie visited the dentist at Bristol.
Copy of Record
Dental Treatment Card – 28/9/43 Bristol
28th September 1943 – two years after the shooting of nearly 34,000 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev a number of the concentration camp prisoners now tasked with covering up evidence of the massacres there manage to escape. By the autumn of 1943 at least 100,000 Jews, Roma and Communists had been murdered by the Nazis at Babi Yar.
29th September 1943 – Marshal Badoglio, the new Italian leader meets General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allies Expeditionary Force to sign the armistice agreement aboard HMS Nelson in Valetta Harbour, Malta. (From Chronology of World War II.)
After Exercise Link in mid-September 1943 61st Division, including 61st Recce, was relegated to a static role in home defence (Lower Establishment status – Higher Establishment Divisions were intended for employment overseas and combat.) The Division was also a training formation and was intended to find suitable replacements for fighting formations: “when the 61st Division was relegated to Home Forces…we had to draft many of our best men away”. (Lt-Colonel P.H.A. Brownrigg’s account of ’A Reconnaissance Regiment in the B.L.A.’ in ‘Beaten Paths are Safest’ by Ron Howard, Brewin Books 2004)
By October the 61st Division had been assigned to anti-invasion duties in Kent.
Eric Postles writes:
“The regiment was responsible for patrolling the coast from New Romney to Battle. Our squadron was stationed in Lympne Castle next to an RAF airfield. We did day and night mobile patrols into Folkestone and Romney. On a clear day you could see France from the castle tower and at night flashes from the German guns shelling the Dover area. One night we watched as a night fighter shot down a German bomber in flames. Our fighter planes took off and returned from France very low over the castle often returning damaged and sometimes with their rockets hanging down from the wings. On our patrols we reported to the coastguards and coastal gun sites. We often got a welcome cup of tea.” (Extract from ‘My War Years’ by John Eric Postles ISO used by kind permission of the author.)
1st October 1943 – the Allies enter Naples. Much of the city had been wrecked by the Germans, including its historic aqueducts, in revenge for the Neapolitan resistance begun on 27th September.
Britain’s 8th Army on the Adriatic coast of Italy seizes the Foggia plain with its airfields vital for bombing southern Germany, Austria and the Ploesti oilfields.
1st October 1943 – the Germans begin to round up Jews in Denmark. However, their plans have been revealed in advance by a German naval attaché, Ferdinand Duckwitz, and most of the 7,500 Danish Jews were helped into hiding and then ferried to safety in Sweden by Danish citizens and the Resistance. 470 Danish Jews were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia but relatively few Danish Jews (120) died during the Holocaust for a German occupied country. (From United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)
2nd October 1943 – heavy RAF raid on Munich, deep inside Germany. Germany’s third largest city was an important industrial centre and suffered 71 bombing attacks during the war. (From WW2-net Timelines.)
3rd October 1943 – the Battle of Termoli commences the Allies’ attack on the Volturno line. This was a German defensive position stretching across Italy from Termoli on the Adriatic coast to the mouth of the Volturno River, north of Naples, on the Tyrrhenian Sea. The line was breached by the British 8th Army at Termoli on 6th October and the US 5th Army crossing the Volturno a week later. The Germans retreated back to the Barbara line. Both lines had been established to delay the Allied advance to the main German defensive position (known as ‘the Winter line’) protecting the access route to Rome at Cassino.
4th October 1943 – Corsica is liberated when the last of the Germans are evacuated from Bastia.
6th October 1943 – at a conference with high ranking Reich officials at Posen in Poland, Heinrich Himmler is frank about the Jewish ‘Final Solution’ for the first time, admitting that women and children as well as men were being killed so that “this people disappear from this earth”. (From ‘The Second World War’ by Antony Beevor, published by Weidenfield and Nicolson 2012)
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