Peoples story: Bell Family Genealogy

Source Information

Short Title	Peoples story
Author	H G Bell
Source ID	S8
Text	I joined the Regular Army in 1938. I took and passed the entrance exam and came tenth in the U.K. I was awarded a Scholarship to the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, London, and received my commission as 2/Lieutenant on the 1st of July 1939, two months prior to the start of the war. 1944 was a momentous year on account of all that happened during that year and for me it was one of the most exacting and interesting periods of my whole career. In January 1944 I was just 24 years of age, my rank was Captain and I was an instructor at a bridging school that had been moved from North Africa to Capua, thirty odd kilometres north of Naples. We had landed at Taranto and moved by train to Naples. The journey took 36 hours. I don't know what we fed on,but I do know we drank tea made with boiling water drawn from the boiler of the steam locomotive. I started to learn Italian from a 16 year old girl who lived next to where I was billeted. She spoke a little French but no English and so I learned Italian in French, as well as a little bit of Neapolitan which the northern Italians regarded as quite ghastly. In February 1944 we went out one night to see and listen to what we thought was an air raid on the shipping in Naples harbour, but the next day we realised that Vesuvius was having a major eruption - it has proved to be the last major one to this day. A few days later a visit to Pompeii was organised by the Army Education Corps and it was quite startling to be there with ash from Vesuvius falling on us, wondering all the time if the events of AD79 were going to be repeated. Soon after that i was posted as Adjutant to the Bengal Sappers and Miners of 8th Indian Division in the middle of the Battle of Cassino. Very practically the men dug a slit trench for my camp bed saying "Sahib, this is for your charpoy so that you do not get hit by shell splinters, but if you do, then we shall already have dug your grave". After the breakthrough at Cassino the Division moved rapidly northwards. I think we advanced about 250 miles in one month. The work of the engineers was primarily mine clearance and bridging, both of which are dangerous tasks. One field company lost all its junior officers in one week from booby-trapped mines and from shellfire. Demolished bridges were generally under enemy observation so that bridging work could only be done at night, but they could (and did) shell the site as soon as they heard us working. Many bridges were demolished and so my unit often averaged about 500 tons of Bailey Bridge equipment every week. A Bailey Bridge is built on rollers with a skeleton launching nose so that the centre of gravity remains on the near side of the the gap until the launching nose has reached the far bank. This takes up a lot of room and so when one particular demolished bridge had a very restricted access the reconnaissance report said that it was impossible to replace it with a Bailey. Undaunted, the men of the Field Company waded through the river carrying all the bits needed and then built the bridge from the far bank. On completion, they proudly put a name board on the bridge. "THE IMPOSSIBLE BRIDGE" Rome was declared to be an open city, the Germans withdew and the Allies entered on June 4th, two day before the allied landings in Normandy. Two or three days later I was fortunate to be selected as one of a small group of Catholic officers to attend a private audience with His Holiness Pope Pius XII. We advanced up the centre of Italy through Orvieto and Poggibonsi to Florence. Poggibonsi was completely destroyed. Bulldozers levelled out a roadway through the rubble so that we were driving at about the level of where the first floor windows had been. One Sunday morning I found myself near Assisi and was able to nip in there to hear Mass in the crypt of the cathedral . During the summer His Majesty King George VI came to Italy to visit the troops and I was present at a parade in a field somewhere in Italy when the King presented the VC and other medals to some of the Ghurka and Indian troops. As it was only three years later that Indian Independence took place,I doubt if ever again was heard what the Divisional Commander called out at the end of the parade:- "Three cheers for His Majesty the King Emperor" In Florence the Germans had demolished all the bridges over the River Arno except for the Ponte Vecchio. There they had demolished a street of houses on the approach to the bridge and my unit was clearing this away. Although the Germans had had sentries on the Ponte Vecchio they had not realised that it was a two storey bridge and so the partisans had been using the upper storey, even, so I was told, laying a telephone line there to the nearest British HQ ! My Division was moved further to the West so that by Christmas 1944 I was up in the Appenines at a small place called Casola Val Senio where we had built a bridge eighty feet or more above the gorge of the river Senio. On Christmas day I spent fifteen hours driving a staff car in convoy as my unit moved further west to Bagni di Lucca. I was awarded the MBE for my work with the 8th Indian Division. In January 1945 I was promoted to Major as a Staff Officer at HQ Eighth Army and a few months later was surprised to see several German staff cars parked outside the HQ. They belonged to the delegation that had come to negotiate the surrender of the German Army in Italy. So, this year 2005, we are celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Italy and so we should all remember the cost of that liberation in human lives. There are 44,000 allied service people buried in Italy. British, New Zealanders, Canadian, South Africans, Poles, Indians etc. During the campaign in North Africa, the troops came to like the song Lili Marlene being played by German radio and when in June 1944 Lady Astor speaking in the House of Commons accused soldiers in Italy of "dodging D-Day" they made up words to fit the tune on the lines of "We are the D Day dodgers who fight in Italy". It was a disgraceful insult to battle-hardened troops who had fought their way from El Alemein, defeated the German Army in North Africa, occupied Sicily and won a bloody foothold in Italy. The last verse is more sombre and goes like this:- Look around the mountains In the mud and rain You'll find scattered crosses Some which bear no name Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone The boys beneath them slumber on For they're the D Day Dodgers Who stayed in Italy