by Hugh Purcell
Then the 131st Brigade advanced to Liverot. The village was already in the hands of the Maquis (the resistance fighters of the Free French forces), so the brigade was welcomed with flowers and wine. Capturing Lisieux was far more difficult. Freeman writes that ‘an ill-advised attack by 30 Infantry of 12 SS was dashed by the annihilation of the enemy and the “brewing up” of supporting tanks’. This was followed by ‘heavy fighting, strong pockets of German resistance and stubborn German defence round Lisieux’ led by Tiger tanks of the 12th SS Panzer Division. However, ‘aided by the Free French forces, Lisieux was captured the next day [24 August].’
The cathedral history relates it was only the intervention of a major of the 6th Queen’s Battalion that prevented the famous Basilica of St Thérèse from being bombed flat. For the next three days, the 7th Armoured Division pushed on across rolling, wooded countryside, reaching the Seine on 28 August. Freeman reported that the 131st spent the afternoon ‘bathing in the sunshine’.27
In January 1945, Freeman was awarded the Croix de guerre (a French military decoration), receiving a palme en vermeil (vermillion palm) for his part in the events of August. Presumably this was for the combined operations with the Free French forces. The citation reads:
Throughout this period (June–August) the brigade was fighting continuously, and the success it achieved was due in no small measure to the hard work, efficiency and drive of Major Freeman, the brigade major. His cheerfulness and confidence at all times was an inspiration to the staff who worked under him, but also to the many officers and men whom he visited in the heat of battle.28
In 1947, Freeman went to Buckingham Palace, with a former girl friend from Oxford, Sally Chilver, who had been a civil servant working with the Free French in the war, and collected his Croix de guerre.
For the whole of November through to the end of March 1945, the 131st Brigade was bogged down in the Limburg province of south Holland near the German border, north-west of Cologne. It just missed the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ – the German offensive through the Ardennes at the end of the year. The rush across France and Belgium had stopped. The supply routes stretched back over 200 miles to the beaches. Petrol and ammunition, hauled by truck from Normandy, were in short supply. The weather had broken too. At the front it rained a fine, cold drizzle so that fields turned to mud. Soon it began to snow, so Freeman ordered another pint of tea a day (‘carried in any form of container available, e.g. cigarette tins’) and half a cup of rum. Chains were fitted to all vehicles. The Queen’s regiments settled down to the routine of the infantryman’s life – a mixture of violent action (at Isenbruch, Bakenhoven, Susteren, Schilberg, Dieteren, Melick and Posterholt, for instance), hours of footslogging, or simply waiting for something to happen. They ate ‘armoured cow’ (spam and corned beef ) and soya sausages bedded in fat. They yearned for ‘zig-zag’ (getting drunk) and ‘jig-jig’ (having sex) with local women. Morale was low; combat fatigue had set in. Losses were so high that each Queen’s regiment had fewer than 100 men left, out of the 450 who had landed in Normandy. ‘There’s only one way out of the infantry, lads, and that’s feet first’ went the fatalistic refrain. That was not quite true because the 6th and 7th battalions were withdrawn on 3 December and replaced with the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshires and the 9th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry.
The 131st Brigade knew it was in ‘the most exclusive club in the world’ – the front-line infantry. The squaddies were contemptuous of the men in the rear echelons – the clerks, cooks and ‘admin wallahs’ – whose lives were more comfortable and in less danger. Freeman was the brigade major, but presumably he too was an ‘admin wallah’. He was billeted at brigade HQ behind the front at Diergaarde and then at Altweert. Perhaps this accounts for his self-deprecating remark to Driberg about his ‘completely undistinguished war’. It wasn’t undistinguished, of course, but he was obviously aware that he was behind those who were doing the fighting. The American war historian Paul Fussell, who was wounded in France as an infantryman, described the gap between the two:
Those who actually fought in the line during the war, especially if they were wounded, constitute an in-group separate from those who did not. Praise or blame does not attach; rather there is the accidental possession of a special empirical knowledge, a feeling of shared ironic awareness manifesting itself in an instinctive scepticism about pretension, publicly enunciated truths and the pomp of authority. Those who fought know a secret about themselves.29
Between 10 and 24 February 1945, Freeman was on leave in England. Encouraged by Captain Blackburn, Freeman agreed to put his name forward for the Labour nomination as MP for Watford. ‘I only did it because I was sure I had no chance of election,’ he said later – the sort of casual understatement that would have gone down well in the Rifle Brigade mess. His pessimism is understandable, however. Watford was a safe Tory seat and nobody expected a Labour landslide. His other reason for standing was more self-serving: if elected, he would get out of the army early. This was the first time his wife Elizabeth had heard of his political ambition: ‘The first time I knew anything of this was on John’s leave in the middle of February. We spent the week rushing round Watford seeing important people. Then John went back to the war and I started having tonsillitis.’30
On 28 March, the 131st Brigade crossed the Rhine opposite Bislich, north of Dusseldorf, with Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. Then it drove north-east towards Hamburg. The further it advanced into Germany, the more desperate the fighting became. Freeman’s brigade war diary recalls it vividly:
1 April. Next target Ibbenburen. Enemy consisted of cadets and student NCOs in bn [battalion] strength, who had been ordered to defend to the last. Their tenacity was outstanding. They would stay in blazing houses firing weapons until they themselves were lost in the holocaust.
10 April. First task to clear Wildeshausen. Progress made but pockets of resistance with bazookas. Enemy a mixed bag with elites of 12 SS and bazooka teams forcing caution in our leading troops.
On 14 April, Freeman signed Operation Instruction No. 1, titled ‘Security Measures in Forward Areas Inside Germany’:
On arrival of the bde in a new area, a 24-hr curfew without exception will be enforced. Farmers will be instructed that cattle will not be turned out to grass. All civs will be instructed that:
— They will exhibit within ONE hour on the outside of their street door a list containing full name, d.o.b, sex and employment of each person on the premises.
— They will hand over at an appointed place within ONE hour all arms and bicycles.
— They will infm the mil authority IMMEDIATELY of the presence of any member of the GERMAN armed forces in the area.
The min penalty for any disobedience will be removal immediately as pw [prisoner of war]; the max penalty death. In the event of disobedience by the populace as a whole, the able-bodied male population will be evacuated as pws and the houses burned down. All persons found in occupied territories are potential enemies. Obedience to any order must be enforced ruthlessly.31
The iron had entered Freeman’s soul. About this time he entered Belsen concentration camp because it was in the way of the line of advance. After he returned home the following month, he told a reporter:
As far as I could see, all the guards at the camp were either perverts or insane. The women had heavy moustaches. The medical officer of the place, one Dr Klein, complained bitterly to us that he did not have adequate facilities for killing people. He said that it was unsatisfactory having to inject petrol into their veins, and he wanted more gas chambers.32
The advance continued at a rush, the infantry shocked and enraged by what they saw. Freeman wrote:
24 April. The bns [battalions] now started a policy of vigorous patrolling and aggressive action by day and night. The 2 Devons contacted the enemy in area 40413 and, after a fierce fight with brens [machine guns] engaged them with flame-throwers, destroying all enemy in sight.
A Nazi ‘Hall of Fame’ at Buc
hholz 4328 was burned down by flame-thrower on orders of bde comd. 500 civilians were ordered to be present at the ‘ceremony’ and the Burgermeister made a short speech explaining the symbolic act.33
Freeman told the reporter back home:
The civilians behave correctly and servilely towards us, but they are still cocky, you can see that. There is a lot of distress in the towns but the countryside seems prosperous enough. Usually we would find a farmer and his wife on 100 acres or so of farm. Nearby you find a barbed-wire cage for the thirty or forty slave workers whom the Nazis put at the disposal of each farmer.34
A world away, in the dormitory town of Watford, Elizabeth was fighting John’s other battle. It was 19 April and a reporter from the West Herts & Watford Observer was covering it:
The Place – Watford, Herts.
The Candidate – Major John Freeman, one of the Desert Rats. He fought at Alamein, Tripoli, Salerno and Caen.
The Battle – Nomination of the Labour candidate.
‘Last Saturday was zero hour and no sign of John,’ said his wife Elizabeth Allen Freeman. ‘Two days before nomination day, I had a letter from the Labour Party saying that in John’s absence they supposed I would be speaking, would I turn up at three o’clock and that twenty minutes was the maximum time. At the meeting everything was a bit blurred. I got to the end of my speech and then I had to stand up for questions. Oh dear! After that I had to wait forty minutes while the other candidates spoke and then there was a tea interval.’
Freeman may have regarded his marriage as ‘a joke’ but his wife came to the rescue on this occasion. She was coached by Raymond Blackburn who encouraged her from the back of the hall: ‘Then she was called back onto the platform and told, roughly speaking, that she could now go and have her tonsils out in peace, because her Major John had been adopted.’
About ten years before his death, John Freeman surprised his old friend Norman MacKenzie with a question so out of the blue that, coming from Freeman, he could not dismiss it: ‘Did I ever tell you that I was the conducting officer who took the German generals to surrender to Monty at Luneberg Heath?’
MacKenzie told me: ‘John may have refrained from telling the truth, but I don’t think he told an outright lie in his life. That phrase “conducting officer” is such a precise, John-like phrase.’
The war diaries reveal that Freeman’s statement was based on an actual incident, although the claim was much exaggerated. Freeman was not at Luneberg Heath on 4 May, when the German armies of the Netherlands, Denmark and north Germany surrendered to Field Marshal Montgomery, but he was in Hamburg on 29 April, when General Wolz (the Kamp Kommandant in Hamburg) sent a medical staff officer and a junior staff officer to Freeman’s headquarters with a letter offering surrender, subject to negotiations. The envoys were ‘conducted by 131st Brigade to HQ’. As brigade major at HQ, Freeman may well have received or conducted them himself. However, it was not until 3 May that General Wolz, with two staff officers, came through the lines of the 9th Durham Light Infantry to discussed unconditional surrender.
That evening in the Hamburg Rathaus (town hall), the conditions of surrender of the German Army of Hamburg were ratified – but Freeman was not there. Brigade records state: ‘On 30 April, the brigade major went to England as candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Watford, Herts.’ All orders from the brigade major from 30 April onwards were signed by his deputy. On 23 May, the return states categorically: ‘Major R. Sellers, Middlesex Regt, arrived at bde HQ as BM to replace Major J. Freeman MBE, who had proceeded to England as election candidate in April.’35
On 8 May, VE Day was celebrated by the 131st Brigade with a double issue of rum. But Freeman was already back home. His ‘completely undistinguished’ war had ended.
Notes
1 Driberg, 1968, op. cit.
2 Sisyphus and Reilly by Peter Luke, Andre Deutsch, London, 1972, p.
3 In possession of the author
4 Luke, op. cit., p. 59
5 The Rifle Brigade 1939–1945 by Major R. H. W. S. Hastings, Gale & Polden Ltd., 1950, p. 104
6 Hellfire Tonight by Albert Martin, Book Guild, Lewes, 1996, pp. 142–2
7 The Poor Bloody Infantry by Charles Whiting, Stanley Paul, London, 1987, p. 126
8 Luke, op. cit., p. 59
9 Ibid., pp. 83–4
10 Whiting, op. cit., p. 126
11 Luke, op. cit., p. 83–4
12 Letter from the Luke family in possession of the author
13 Luke, op. cit., p. 63
14 Ibid.
15 History of the Second World War by B. H. Liddell Hart, Pan Books, London, 1970, p. 306
16 African Trilogy, Alan Moorehead, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, new edition 2000, p. 525
17 WO 373/77/374
18 Hastings, op. cit., p. 233
19 WO 169/4251
20 Macmillan by Alistair Horne, Macmillan, London, 1988, p. 183
21 Hastings, op. cit., p. 233
22 ‘The Rommel Papers’ by John Freeman, New Statesman, 1953 West Herts Post, 19 April 1945
23 Luke, op. cit., p. 87
24 Ibid., p. 88
25 John Freeman interview with William Hardcastle, transcribed in The Listener, 12 December 1968
26 I Am An Alcoholic by Raymond Blackburn, Allan Wingate, London, 1959, p. 51
27 WO 171/662
28 WO 373/186/1115
29 Fussell quote in Whiting, op. cit., p. 194
30 West Herts Post, 19 April 1945
31 WO 171/4393
32 London Evening News, 7 May 1945
33 WO 171/4394
34 London Evening News, 17 May 1945
35 WO 171/4393
Chapter 3
Government minister – the rise
THE LABOUR PARTY closed its conference at Blackpool on 25 May, 1945, by singing Jerusalem with evangelical fervour:
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand;
’Til we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
A new spirit had taken over the party – it had won back its will to win. Its leader, Clement Attlee, said in 1940: ‘The world that must emerge from this war must be a world attuned to our ideals.’ Those ‘ideals’ were based on socialism.
Tom Driberg, who was now a Labour candidate, wrote: ‘The next parliament could be epoch-making: it could inaugurate the socialist epoch in Britain.’ He remembered the soldiers he had met on Charing Cross Road on the evening of VE Day. One held a red flag, another wrote on it in ink: ‘We will now proceed to the establishment of socialism – Lenin, 1917.’
Freeman was a favoured son. At the Blackpool conference, chairman Ellen Wilkinson summoned him to the platform: ‘I give you a Desert Rat, who has just received the German surrender of Hamburg.’ Legend has it that this rousing call was followed by silence – as Freeman was in the bath sipping whisky and soda and reading The New Yorker. This legend needs a sprinkling of salt, because Freeman told exactly the same story in reference to the announcement of his victory at Watford in the general election of 1951. It is the kind of story he would have encouraged, of course, because it displayed his nonchalant behaviour and his dislike of publicity – that Rifle Brigade cool again. When Professor Harold Laski, the chairman of the Labour Party, spoke for Freeman at Watford on 29 June, he recalled Blackpool: ‘No person attending the conference made a greater impression than Major Freeman. A few weeks ago I was passed a cheque to give to a young candidate most deserving of honour. Without a moment’s hesitation, I passed the cheque to Major Freeman.’
Nevertheless, that summer Freeman felt sure he would lose the election at Watford. It had been a safe Tory seat and perhaps he did not really want to win. In any event, he travelled back to Germany and applied for a permanent job with the control commission, just in case. He told his family years later that he had been offered a senior post with the Allied control council in Berlin.
Freeman’s elect
ioneering followed the Attlee line, which blamed the Tories for wanting to bring back the past, while Labour promised to bring in the future. Freeman said that this had been clear before the war as well as after:
It was not all roses in the political garden before the war – there was great strife in this country, only delayed when both sides came together to fight fascism. But we were fighting for different things. The Tories were fighting for their privileged position. We saw not a threat to our privileged position because, God help us, we hadn’t got one. But we saw a direct threat to our standard of living.1
Freeman’s opponent, Commodore W. Helman, displayed just such ‘privileged behaviour’ in his conduct at the hustings. He arrived late for the Conservative meeting in the town hall on the eve of the poll and then refused to answer any questions: ‘It is not my policy during elections.’ According to the West Herts & Watford Observer, the chairman then announced ‘with deep regret that at Freeman’s final meeting when Mr Churchill’s name was mentioned it was greeted with boos and shouts of Vote for Freeman’. The Tory’s right to rule was overturned the next day and a framed photo of Freeman hung on the wall in the Labour Party offices for many years.
In fact, despite the scent of glorious victory in the air, Freeman found the counting of votes so disagreeable that he vowed never to go through it again. He wrote in the New Statesman in May 1955, when he was on the verge of leaving Parliament:
Keenly observed by the press, by their followers and by their enemies, they [the candidates] will force the sparkle of optimism into their eyes, which are red-rimmed and perhaps near to tears. They will squeeze out encouraging quips in voices harsh with the laceration of public speech. And they will feel simple fear; the fear that a career is about to be destroyed, that security has gone, that the cause has been betrayed. The fear, in fact, of failure. As the pile of their opponent’s papers will overgrow their own, anxiety will give way to the suspicion and then the certainty that they have lost, to the suspicion as certainty, and finally to certainty itself, tolled out in the flat strokes of a town clerk’s tongue. They must adapt themselves as best they can to private life – hindered by the slightly absurd label of ‘failed MP’.2