2/Lt RK Williams
61st Recce Regt RAC
Whittlesford
Cambs
Saturday
Chotie Darling,
Many thanks for your very prompt letter, which I received just before I left home. By the time you get this letter I hope to be in Scotland (where I hope to meet Lady Macbeth…). As I’ll only be there for a week I’ve put my usual address.
Never having been there before I expect to have quite a good time. At any rate it will be a change from this wretched place, where just about everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.
I read your letter in bed on Friday morning. It was very welcome, Darling.
I can’t pretend I wasn’t hurt by your actions – although I did try to make light of it. As far as I’m concerned, everything you do should be of your own free choice. I make no attempt whatsoever to exercise any ‘hold’ over you*.
I think I know, as well as most, the state you can get into, in the services. It is in this state, of being so completely fed-up that you don’t give a damn what happens, that these things happen. God knows, I’m no moralist, but I do possess some slight knowledge of physiology, and because of this I urge you at least be careful.
You don’t need to ask me to forgive you, Chotie. I shall always be prepared to forgive you anything – except leaving me entirely.
I wasn’t worried about your actions in themselves – I just thought you must have had enough of me.
All my love, Darling
Dicker
P.S. Got that baritone** teed-up yet….?
*Oh dear – this sounds like Chotie has strayed again. Was it the handsome officer in the Bristol photographs or someone else? George Bainbridge perhaps? And who’s the baritone**?
© Chotie Darling
19th March 1944 – Hungary is occupied by the German Army following the arrest in Germany of the Hungarian Regent, Miklos Horthy, who had been secretly negotiating with the British and US. The SS begin rounding up Hungarian Jews and sending them to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.
24th March 1944 – ‘the Great Escape’ of 76 Allied airmen from Stalag Luft III near Sagan in SE Germany (now Żagań in Poland). 73 are later recaptured and 50 executed. Stalag Luft III was also the location of the ‘wooden horse’ escape of three airmen on 29th October 1943.
Orde Wingate, the Commander of the Chindits, when his plane crashes in the jungle.
In the Ardeatine Caves, near Rome, Germany executes 336 Italians in reprisal for partisan killing of 35 German soldiers the previous day.
Bomber Command carries out a thousand plane raid against Berlin, the heaviest raid of the war and the end of the Battle of Berlin. RAF and USAAF bombers were now to be diverted to supporting Operation Overlord despite the reluctance of their commanders who were at last beginning to see success with the Pointblank Strategy. By the end of March the Luftwaffe were losing over 2,000 planes per month to their fighters. The loss of experienced pilots also lowered the air threat to the Allies’ invasion of Normandy. (From ‘Overlord’ by Max Hastings, Macmillan 2016 edition)
End of significant Japanese resistance on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. (From Chronology of World War II and WW2-net Timelines.)
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