St Mary Redcliffe Church Parish Magazine - September 2018

forgotten voices WWI September 1918
“a12-inch Howitzer ready for action”
Captain Montague Cleeve, Royal Garrison Artillery
“out in the open country”
IHAD A PHONE CALL ONE MORNING from General Alexander on August
the 8th. He said, “You’re going to be inspected by a VIP this afternoon. Go
into action on the Spur Maroeuil and be prepared to shoot at 2.30.” We
thought it might have been the army commander or someone from GHQ.
Anyway, I got the men all tidy, we put on our best clothes and all like that
and got the gun into action, everything all perfectly ready, a model of how it
should be done. Come 2.30 and a whole cloud of dust arrived as a motorcade
drew up. Out of the first car stepped His Majesty King George V and all his staff,
including General Alexander VC.
His Majesty came round and he was terribly interersted in the gun, which
was then depressed. He walked all over the mounting with me, asking all sorts
of questions, and then he asked if he could see the gun loaded. So, of course,
we said yes. All the VIPs by that time had climbed up onto the mounting and
were standing on the load platforms. I said, “I’m awfully sorry, Sir,” to the King,
“but I’m afraid nobody’s allowed to stand on the platform while the gun is fired.”
So very reluctantly the King agreed.
The gun was loaded by twelve men, six either side of the rammer, and
they had to squash up together at the far end of the platform. A little carriage
carried the shell, weighing about 2,500 lb, into the breech. It was terribly
important to ram it home otherwise it would have slipped back at high elevation.
So on the word ‘go’ from the number one, the twelve men pushed with all their
might and rammed the shell into the bore. The King was very thrilled with that.
When the gun was loaded it had to be laid.
When all was ready, I saluted the King. “Gun ready, Sir.” His Majesty
turned round to me and said, “Fire the gun, please.” The Navy always says
please, so I immediately ordered fire. Many of his surrounding staff cupped
their ears and turned away from the gun because they were frightened of the
shock. His Majesty stood as still as a statue and seeing all these cowed heads
turned round and said in quite a loud voice, “I consider it makes no noise at all,
no noise at all.” His staff all looked awfully sheepish after that. But it did make
an enormous bang. It was a gentle bang, but a very gigantic one.
The King then said, “May I look at the map?” So we took him into the
command post wagon and he pored over the railway map of the front line. He
turned round to his staff and he said, “You know, gentlemen, I’ve just come from
the launch of the Fourth Army attack at Amiens, down south. I see from the railway
system that the Germans will have to rush there with their reinforcements,
now at Ypres, to resist the attack of the Fourth Army. And I see from the railway
line system that they’ll have to go through Douai station to get there. Why not
keep Douai station under harassing fire from now on?”
Later I went into Douai and spoke to a local woman. She said, “Well
really, Douai was a very peaceful place until early in August. Then all of a
sudden one afternoon there was a terrific explosion in the station and nobody
knew what it was. We thought we were being bombed. Well, it so happened
that there was a German troop train in the station at the time and a shell fell
right on top of it. The people of Douai were delighted.” That first round, the first
of anything that happened at Douai, was the King’s shot. So his idea worked
extremely well, but unfortunately he never knew about it.
Sergeant-Major Richard Tobin, Hood Battalion, Royal Naval Division
I
N THE SUMMER OF 1918 came the
breakthrough. We had left the trenches
far behind, those mud-sodden trenches
that we had hated for so many years.
We were out in the open country. We
almost felt victory in the air. Admittedly
the Germans were standing and fighting
here and there, but they were going back
and we were following them. The breakthrough
had come. It was open warfare.
We were in green fields once again.
However, open warfare brought its difficulties. This was the test of a trained
soldier and junior officer leadership. The battalion commander had to watch
his flanks, wondering when to stop, when to dig in, when to go on We also had
our ration problems. But it looked like the end and the peace we had longed for.
Voices compiled by Lester Clements, for September 2108