World War Two: Voices From Wales

On May 8, 1945, 20-year-old sniper Syd Daw, from Cardiff, was in the northern Germany city of Bremen. Even though in Berlin German officials were signing their surrender, Syd’s unit – the 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division – remained in the heat of battle.

“They were still firing bullets and God knows what, shells and all sorts of things,” Syd said when sharing his memories of VE Day decades later. “And we captured some young lads, some Hitler Youth who still wanted to go on killing people. None of them would say anything. And there was one tall lad who had a Hitler Youth knife with a swastika on it and Blut und Ehre: ‘blood and honour’. He was a big lad and the Sergeant Major gave him a little smack – only a little slap across the face, you know – and had him crying. So the others opened their mouths then; they were ready to talk then, when they saw this big lad wasn’t as clever as he thought he was. Sad.”

Nannerch’s Nick Archdale, of the 7th (Light Infantry) Parachute Battalion, had spent D-Day defending a key road leading to Pegasus Bridge in Normandy.

By VE Day, he had reached Germany’s Baltic coast and met with soldiers of the Red Army.

“I was with my boys and a Russian officer arrived, inviting us to go and drink with him, so two other officers and I went off that evening,” remembered Mr Archdale, who died in 2020, aged 96. “And that was very difficult, because the Russian officers were living in grand style, while the men were just in ditches and things: you know, just the opposite of what you’d expect. We were all given little vodka cups and somebody made a toast to something or other – in Russian mostly – and then you had to drink the whole lot in one gulp. And, of course, I remember getting completely plastered because you weren’t used to this sort of thing. But they seemed to be able to drink anything.” Nick was the “only officer in the battalion who was unwounded and alive right through”.

It may seem odd to us now, but VE Day came with mixed feelings for many young men who had spent key years of their lives at war.

Mr Archdale stated: “It wasn’t a feeling of rejoicing at all, because, funnily enough, everything we’d trained for – our lives – had been devoted to what we were doing, and suddenly it was all over. And it was a feeling of slight deflation, in a way. You know, there was no sort of whooping and bonfires and things at all.”

The men’s memories have been collected as part of a 30-year project to record the stories of the last Welsh veterans of World War Two in time for the 80th anniversary of VE Day this year.

Authors Hugh Morgan and GJ Lewis have interviewed Welsh airmen, sailors, soldiers, members of the special forces, and women from the Land Army, the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens), and the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, as well as children who witnessed the horror caused by bombing raids on south Wales.

“As a child growing up during the mid-50s and swinging Sixties, I was accustomed to living in a society of men and women, including several close relatives still only in their early forties, who had been through the hell of World War Two just 20 years earlier,” said Mr Morgan. “They inspired me and my young friends to pretend we were in Spitfires shooting Messerschmitts out of the sky, hiding behind trees and walls to avoid being taken out by a sniper, or depth-charging a U-Boat in the bath. Sadly, the veterans I knew back then are now almost all gone. But the joy and immense privilege of interviewing so many over the years has always stayed with me, their jaw-dropping memories so vivid and powerful.”

The authors met more than 50 Welsh veterans with incredible stories to tell: Richard Pelzer, the Llansamlet-born Royal Engineer who swam ashore in the early hours of June 6, 1944, to clear ‘Gold Beach’ of obstacles; Ted Owens, the Royal Marines Commando from Pembroke Dock who survived being badly injured by a shell; and Elaine Kidwell, a teenager who disguised her age and became an air raid warden, digging out the casualties of the Swansea Blitz.

The project also tracked down Kinmel Bay’s Glyn James, of the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), who, in 1945, was one of the first Allied soldiers into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He found starving prisoners begging for water and help.

“I’d never seen or heard of anything like it,” he told the authors. “There was some mention about camps, but I certainly didn’t expect anything like I saw, because I didn’t think, to be honest, that someone could be so cruel to someone else. What had they done? They didn’t deserve that.”

Royal Engineer Vernon Parry was in Germany when the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.

He and his friends ventured into a barber shop to get a haircut from someone who had recently been their enemy. “When he finished, he had a sense of humour and he wanted to give me a shave with a cut-throat razor! I said, ‘Nein, nein!’"

Saundersfoot-born Duncan Hilling’s memories include the nine months he spent in Japan with the Welch Regiment after the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“In the first few days of arriving, I drove six of us into Hiroshima to see the damage there,” said Mr Hilling, now aged 99. “It’s indescribable, really. We went into a hospital, where people were just lying on beds. A lot of them, their skin had peeled off their faces and arms. It was a hideous sight.

“Lots of them were blind: the bomb had blinded them when they heard this plane overhead and looked up, which was absolutely fatal because they saw this bomb explode in mid-air right above them.”

In a foreword to the book, ‘World War Two: Voices from Wales’, esteemed Welsh actress Dame Siân Phillips writes: “This book brings us the words of people who were at the places and battles which have gone down in history. The Battle of Britain. Dunkirk. El Alamein. D-Day. Arnhem. Nagasaki.

“The power of their words allows us to look afresh at these momentous events and to reconsider them from the point of view of the ordinary person thrown into extraordinary circumstances.”

World War Two: Voices from Wales by Hugh Morgan & G J Lewis (£12.99, Y Lolfa) is published on 8th May.