Chotie was in Whitby in Yorkshire when Dick wrote to her on 9th October to plan his November leave. On 13th October he filled in a preference form for the Recce Corps and staked a claim to the 61st Recce (based on family or ‘territory’), possibly because they were by then in his home county of Kent, or maybe because they were not far from his family at Pagham in Sussex
In mid-October he had a “glorious time on exercise in the Cotswolds. Went to Cheltenham, Gloucester, etc.” – from letter to Chotie back in Easton-on-Gordano on 23rd October. By 26th October his plans for leave with Chotie were definitely shaping up, mainly based on the Pagham pubs.
On 30th October 1943 Dick received his commission as an officer in the Reconnaissance Corps and was appointed to the 61st Reconnaissance Regiment. He had already served in the Recce Corps: from April to July 1942 he was in 1st Air Landing Reconnaisssance Squadron; then moved to the 43rd Reconnaissance Regiment and trained as a Driver/Mechanic before beginning officer training in March 1943
We have been following 61st Recce through the lives of Eric Postles, Eric Brewer and Anthony Rampling, who were now troopers with the Regiment on anti-invasion duties. Eric Postles writes:
“61 Division was downgraded to home defence and moved to Kent. 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.” (Extracts from ‘My War Years’ by John Eric Postles ISO used by kind permission of the author.)
By October 1943 the threat of German invasion was low. The Allies were advancing on east and west fronts.
After the loss of Kursk and Kharkov in July and August Hitler had at last authorised a retreat to the River Dnepr in central Ukraine, defending a line from Smolensk to Kiev and the Black Sea. Smolensk had been taken by the Soviet Army at the end of September and on 24th October they broke through the southern end of the line near the Sea of Azov, threatening to isolate the German Army left on the Crimean Peninsula.
Pressed by the Allies, Franco ordered the Spanish volunteers of the Blue Division, fighting with Germany on the eastern front, to return to Spain.
Meanwhile the Allied forces in Italy broke through the German’s Volturno line of defence at Termoli at the beginning of the month and by the end of October had also broken the Barbara line to the north. However, these had only been holding positions while the German’s built major defences along their so called ‘Winter line’ across the mountains protecting the route to Rome and to the Adriatic coast at Ortona.
Badoglio’s Italian government declared war on Germany on 13th October. Three days later the Nazis began to round up the Jews in Rome – 1,800 were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and murdered. Jews had generally been safe in Italy or the Italian-occupied territory until the September Armistice and Italian people under German occupation continued to protect many. However, almost 10,000 of the 46,000 Italian Jews had been deported by the end of the war.
On 1st October Germany had also begun to deport Jews from Denmark but thanks to the Danish people and a German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, most were already safe in Sweden – 500 Danish Jews were deported during the Holocaust and 120 of these were killed.
At a conference of high ranking Reich officials on 6th October Heinrich Himmler spoke frankly for the first the time of the Nazis aspiration for the ‘Final Solution’, for the Jewish people to ‘disappear from the earth’ and admitted women and children were being killed as well as the men. Four days later there was an uprising at Sobibor death camp in eastern Poland - of the 300 prisoners who escaped only 47 survived. 250,000 Jews are believed to have been killed at Sobibor from 1942 to 43.
Another barbarous act of the war was coming to its culmination on the other side of the world – on 17th October the Bangkok (Thailand) to Rangoon (Burma) railway was completed, built by Asian forced labour and Allied Prisoners of War. The cruelty of the Japanese and Korean overseers was so horrific that more than 70,000 of the enslaved workers died during the construction.
The United Nations War Crimes Commission, which was to prosecute many of the perpetrators of these atrocities, was established on 20th October 1943.
Britain continued with the night bombing of German cities – Munich on 2nd October and Kassel on 22nd, where more than 10,000 people died in the explosions and fires. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s determination to destroy German cities was seen by many in Britain as just revenge for the Blitz although others have viewed it as a potential war crime. Harris seemed to believe he could bring the war to an end with bombing, avoiding the need for an Allied invasion of France. Aerial bombardment by Axis or Allied powers, was never prosecuted as a war crime, apparently because it lay outside the scope of international conventions.
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