David Willey | Top 5 Veteran Stories | The Tank Museum

thank you for watching the tank museum's youtube channel and don't forget to subscribe if you can support the museum please think of backing us on patreon or joining one of our membership schemes or if you watch to the end of this video you'll be able to see how you can help the museum by buying items from our online shop [Applause] hello my name's david willie and i'm the curator here at the tank museum and this is going to be my top five tanks now many of you will have watched other versions of the top five tanks and what we really do with this is we give people the choice of whatever they see as the important tanks to them whether that's because that's the first tank they made a model of whether it's because there's uh you know a family connection any reasons that that's what you can choose your top five and for me one of the things that i'm very conscious of here at the museum we talk a lot when we do things like tank chats etc we talk an awful lot about the vehicle why it was made some of the background i often go on about the historical issues going on before that vehicle is made but one element we don't talk enough about i personally think is that key element the crew every vehicle you can see in our collection every vehicle we talk about that element that comes along with men nowadays women as well the training they get the skills they can bring their motivation that's what makes a difference in battle when that vehicle has to be used so what i'm going to be talking about with my top five tanks are vehicles that remind me of veterans i've met i'm really going to be talking about in this instance five second world war veterans and their stories relating to the vehicles and what it was like in a way for them and the impact that's had on my view of this amazing collection we have here at the tank museum so let's have a look at the first of my top five this tank is the british light mark 6b and for me this vehicle has got an association with peter volks who was a young royal tank regiment officer who joined up just before the second world war he was a great uh motorcycle enthusiast and he goes out to france to fight in that famous battle of the battle of aris where the fourth and the seventh royal tank regiment do a sweeping attack against the advancing column which is mainly of the transport column the bit they hit of the seventh uh panzer regiment rommel at the front rommel comes back sets up an improvised gun line and both the fourth and seventh vehicles get heavily decimated but the key element of that arrest attack it has puts the frights in the german high command hitler himself he's worried about the fact that here we go again is this another battle of the man um like from the first world war that he remembers is this something that's going to stop us so he creates a pause for the german panzer divisions about 24 hours and that is vital in allowing the british expeditionary force to reinforce some of the channel ports and ultimately save the army at dunkirk now peter vokes was part of that and he has an interesting role in the battle because he's basically acting as a liaison semi-reconnaissance officer and at one point he's sent away from the main attack he comes back only to see the tanks littering the battlefield that he can't work out initially what's going on why aren't they maneuvering what's uh happening with some of these vehicles only then to realize most of them have been knocked out he reports in he's told basically to take his light 6b try and get back to the rallying point so off he heads towards vimy uh they pick up his driver at the time is someone called corporal robert burroughs but they pick up another a stranded major from world tank regiment called fernie and he jumps on the vehicle and they head off but as darkness falls they take a wrong turn and this begins for them an odyssey that goes on from the 24th of may to the 1st of june where they're basically they get trapped behind german lines initially in their tank they even join a german column at one point as they're heading westwards basically and at one point he actually ends up being waved forward by german soldiers in the end they have to abandon their light 6b and peter takes from the vehicle the compass and we've actually got that in our collection here and they use that the three of them to carry on heading west trying to get back to the allied lines there's a series of adventures they go through they have to lay up they hide a couple of nights there's a point where peter volks ends up shooting a german officer at close range where they think they've been captured and they managed to get away still and then they get to the somme river they are helped by a belgium refugee they find a potential place to cross they have to hide up because the germans are patrolling this point the other side of the river there's where the french army are and on the 1st of june at about 1 15 in the morning they decide to try and swim across to get away so they can hopefully rejoin the allied forces now robert burrows the corporal has been very solid in all of this he's been as peter volks says an inspirational figure and when they're about to swim he basically says look i'm not a great swimmer peter tries to help him across as they swim the river they're already tired they're already exhausted they haven't had much food for that period they've been on the run and in the course of this night crossing they get separated robert burrows the driver gets swept downstream and he's drowned stuart fernie managed to get across they're separated peter with the compass manages to get across and they finally reunite with the french troops and are sent back and ultimately peter comes into weymouth harbour after trying to rejoin his union which has now been evacuated now that story i mentioned because when peter voe was down him we were talking about these things that idea of him feeling responsible for his driver as a young officer there and he said when he got back to britain one of the first things he tried to do he had to report in he was debriefed he gives his account of what's happened but then he went to see the burroughs family who were farmers down in somerset and he said to us that he saw a lot of fighting in the rest of the war peter but he said that was the time he was the most frightened was waiting outside the door where the family had assembled they'd all sat around to hear how basically robert burroughs had lost his life and this is what he says where he went in to actually explain things they were all looking at him so he told the story from the beginning to the end and they all listened in complete silence and when he'd finished there was still silence then slowly the farmer shifted in his seat and he said all right lad everything was done that could be done don't blame yourself and he says there at that moment the tension broke he nearly broke down in tears and i think that's one of those stories i tell when we come to here when we're talking to the army young ncos young officers one of those things about that story is he felt he'd done everything he could but had he really and it was only when he got the blessing from the family that look i see you couldn't have done any more in that situation so when we're saying that i think on the whole the army gets this because they do they try everything with their training with their preparations everything before they go off and fight my only question i would ask is do politicians and do we as civilians do the same have we really thought of everything before we send young men off to fight and that's the story i associate peter and this amazing light mark 6b vehicle this is the british a13 the cruiser tank from the early war period and my association with this vehicle is with a gentleman called ron huggins who was a long-term volunteer here at the tank museum now ron joined the 10th of zars back in the 1930s actually in 1936 and when he joined up he was actually given a horse and a saber that's what he was going to go to war in but very rapidly the 10th of ours was one of those cavalry units that ended up getting mechanized and in 1940 after dunkirk the tenth azaleas are part of that british force that is sent out to try and help reinforce the french with the first armored division and ron sees service there he's fighting in one of these a13s and he loses some of his friends in a13s in that fighting in the end he has to abandon his vehicle and he with a number of other soldiers that are making their way to the coast he ends up signaling a british warship they're using a lamp and in the end a boat comes ashore stays offshore with a naval officer in shouting to make sure before they come in that these are british soldiers they're going to come again to rescue and it's not a german trap um so ron makes it back to britain um he's promoted ultimately he becomes a regimental sergeant major for the 10th of ours he sees action in north africa he's blown out a number of vehicles um he's actually there when the famous german general von thoma is captured uh he then goes across he sees a lot of action again fighting his way up italy and uh again after the war like so many of these people who've had that responsibility role uh of a regimental sergeant major he ends up going into social work that idea of looking after people making sure people are kept on the straight narrow et cetera now when ron's wife died in the 1980s he came down to the tank museum and started volunteering here and when i came here there he was on a regular basis whenever we have an event a half term he'd lay out a table with all his kits on and he'd talk to people about it and i know there'd be thousands of people out there with photographs or remember ron when they were kids meeting him etc and the interesting thing is you can never find a bad photograph for ron he's always smiling he's always got this big grin on his face as he's talking to people now ron also he commanded our sherman tank with another great veteran harry webb and that used to drive around the arena all the time and i always remember other people who were in the tank at the time they'd say ron really lived it he'd be giving commands into a microphone even if it wasn't attached to anything he was back there he relived his events all the time and i think as time went on that war service um was became more important to him and and he certainly wanted to share his experience with people and that's why we had ron here on one particular day where we had lots of different school groups in and we had different servicemen talking about their experiences from guys serving today we had some women who'd been in the land army in the second world war all sorts of people there talking to youngsters and i remember they were all sat around and ron was talking about his world war two experiences some very young kids there the teachers i was at the back and a hand went up and the question was asked did you ever kill a german and i remember feeling that prickle that went round the teachers everything had gone really well up to now is that the sort of question we should be asking a veteran in that way completely unfazed ron comes back and he explains he's in his a13 he's in france he opens the hatch he's looking forward they are waiting for a german attack and he sees in a ditch crawling towards him a german soldier and he said i reached into the turret i took out my service revolver i lent out i aimed and i shot that german soldier and you could hear the silence as it were of all these kids looking at him and the kid who asked the question said what did you think of that and he said at the time he said i thought i'd done my job well i'd aimed at his body mass shooting a pistol by the way is not the easy thing like westerns you know the i don't think it was ron who told me the story said you know it's hard to hit the the the ocean from a dinghy you know aiming a pistol and shooting it well is a really hard art so he said i did my job i thought i'd done it well i'd aim for his body body mass i'd done that as i was supposed to do and he said we went back after that day he said we leaguered up with the tanks he put his blanket over his head and he said he cried like a baby because he realized there was some mother some father who didn't realize their son was already dead and that moment you could see all the kids had taken in what he was saying and typical for ron not phased by any of it but told these wonderful stories to people so ron huggins for me the a13 what a gent of a guy what wonderful way he shared his stories to many many people and i'm sure some of you watching this may remember coming along and seeing ron and talking about his tank this is the wartime german panzer iv tank and way back in august of 2000 i was lucky enough to meet and have a good chat with a german crew member of one of these vehicles now the chaps name he was joseph scherniker and he was known as joe and he came down here with his family and we put him back in the tank he told us a number of stories about what it was like inside of panzer iv and also we sat him down and did a proper in-depth interview with the volunteer who was doing those interviews back then someone called nancy langmaid now why i found this one particularly interesting for me i was relatively new here hadn't met that many germans in terms of world war ii crew members what was you going to expect and when he told his story it was an interesting one um he'd actually grown up as a sudaitan german which after the first world war basically when czechoslovakia is formed the sudetenland with many germans living there becomes part of czechoslovakia so he did that as his background he was quite happy to admit when the germans invade they were happy about this the fact that they were now back to being germans etc and he also talked about his early life there which was working on a farm relatively poor how he then joined the local rail service so he learned about morse code and he was only a youngster when the war began so when he was a teenager in about 1943 the ss came to where they were basically all helping out on a farm gave a presentation and he ended up thinking this is for me if he's going to join the forces which he would have had to done in about a year's time he would go with this ss unit and this was the ss unit called the viking division and that was made up with flems uh dutch various other belgiums nordic race people who the idea was you join us you can help us defeat communism and bolshevism out in the east so he joins he gets about three weeks training on panzer iii they want him as well because he can do morse code so they think straight away he can become a funker or radio operator and he's sent out very quickly to the eastern front and he says he arrives on the eastern front goes is allocated to a panzer it's dark he literally goes in the tank in the dark under fire in action he climbs through the front there he doesn't actually get to meet the rest of the crew till the following morning now he's fighting out on the eastern front and he he describes all that in the interview that we get we had with him um really interesting details uh the weather conditions the horror of the nature of the fighting and he himself was actually caught in what was known as the chicasi pocket in january february of 1944 where a large force of germans are surrounded by advancing russian forces and there's a breakout there's an attack coming from the other way now he loses he describes losing his tank in that engagement and he has to fight as an infantryman and this little piece here again that fighting on the eastern front this is from the interview we did where he's doing this defensive role there we were only infantry and we could see from miles into the territory where the russians were coming along and there were columns and columns of tanks and troops at about 10 o'clock that night the russian infantry attacked we were just in a few foxholes so it didn't take very long for them to overrun us a hand grenade exploded just a couple of feet away from me i was in a foxhole with another soldier i'd never met him or didn't know who he was and he took the full brunt of the blast it was dark all i could hear was just the blood gushing out of him and i could just hear him talking to his wife and that was it and he goes on and he describes other horrifying the retreat trying to get back to the west and the interesting part of the story for me was he manages to actually surrender to allied troops in the end taken prisoner his prisoner in belgium initially in 46 he's actually sent over to britain and he described again the different lifestyle how it was changing and he worked on a farm and realizing being he's a sedating german who'd fought in the ss he knew that if he basically went back to the east he'd probably be shot so he ends up staying in britain he becomes a postman up in lancashire marries a local girl and that family had came down with him on the day and what i found interesting when we put him back in the tank and he was telling these stories his son was there his uh daughter-in-law his wife uh grandchildren and when we were talking it was just really interesting because they came over and at one point i was able to talk to the son saying you know interesting hearing his stories isn't it i'm sure for you and he said yeah he's never talked about them in the past and being here they came out and the other way around as well a bit later i said to joe what's it like being back and here with your family and talking about these things and he said i've never spoken about this before they've never asked me so it was that peculiar moment where the vehicle again was almost a catalyst of him being able to come up with his wartime stories and his family actually hearing it and i think both of them for most of their lives had kind of avoided that issue what he'd been doing during the war and for me at the time it was one of those revelational moments of hearing the other side listening to a wartime german veteran telling his stories about what it was like in fighting in a vehicle like this panzer iv this tank is the british cromwell tank again another one of those cruiser tanks uh that was used really in the second half of the war by the british forces and for me this tank's associated with a veteran i got to know very well a chap called reg spittles now reg was 22 when he was put in command of a cromwell and he was a corporal and he was considered the old man of the unit at 22. he was the second north antioxidant squadron and they go out to france just after d-day and he talks about serving there and what i found interesting about reg i actually bumped him for the first time he used to come down here with another veteran called mike bush and they turn up every year for tank fest and i used to get to have a natter with them and it became a regular occurrence they came down with their families and uh i got to calling them i can't remember why the the old reprobates and they loved all this and we had a good old natter each time and in fact matt who's filming this today took some lovely photographs of the two of them together when they were down here one time now those two gents again they they shared a wealth of stories but reg in particular he ended up going along to a local school where he became almost their adopted veterans and as part of that the stories he would sometimes tell me on the phone or when we were here he wrote them up and there was something about reg the way that he did it that by design accident however you want to say it they were perfect little gems of stories the way he wrote them because he was going to be telling them to school kids they needed a beginning a middle and the end and his turn of phrase the way he did it just seemed to hit the spot beautifully and i just want to read you one of these stories that he i remember he told me and later when i saw it written down slight variations in him from how he told it to me but he was basically out in normandy and because he was the corporal at 22 the younger members of his crew he was always trying to be very fatherly to them making sure they didn't get into trouble they did as they were told they made sure that they never went too far away from the vehicle without their side arm with them so if you were taking a shovel off somewhere you had your weapon with you as well because again you know you weren't too sure all the time where were the front lines it says german snipers about the place and he writes this absolutely lovely story where they're in a french farmyard um they've stopped up they're in column he sees some raspberry canes and he thinks i'm going to go off and get something and this is how he writes it as he put it together to tell the school kids having told my driver not to move i took a can in intending to liberate a few of those raspberries and doing the thing that you do with your own strawberries i ate my fill first before filling the can now at that some time in your life you have most likely had the feeling of doing something you ought not to be doing and then of the prickling at the back of your neck indicating danger so suddenly my intuition of happily picking raspberries changed to a sudden feeling of danger which in normandy could be the prelude to sudden death i was literally frozen to the spot not being in a situation i could defend myself when suddenly the leaves in front of me parted and a face appeared you can imagine my mind was racing total turmoil and a voice spoke it turned out to be a young girl of about 16 years of age and obviously very well educated because in perfect english she said hello tommy almost speechless i managed to say i'm sorry but they look so nice and ripe and she replied please take what you want and then she said quietly thank you for coming and i just love that as a typical red spittle story the way he can tell it with such charm such innocence and at the same time i come back to reg because these were guys serving in these tanks they were an army of liberation for my number one i want to choose this tank the british conversion of the sherman that makes it a firefly with that 17 pound a gun on and for me i associate this vehicle in particular with a veteran called ken tout now ken you may have some of you may have read one of his books he was a fairly prolific author after the second world war talking through a number of the battles he fought in and he wrote what i can only describe as one of the best accounts of what it's like fighting in a tank in world war ii it's just called tank and it's 40 hours in a tank in august of 1944. now ken we've interviewed here at the tank museum a number of times um he's a he's a wonderful gentleman and i really wanted to end with ken on a much more perhaps optimistic note than some of the other stories i've been telling because even though ken talks about the loss um the sacrifice and the cost of warfare and for ken it really influenced the rest of his life he he had a strong christian faith he still has that strong faith but it was really interesting to see how how he went on in his career the good works he did throughout the rest of his life and the fact he did a phd he gets an mbe for gerontology looking after how do we keep older people active in life um and he's still at it to this very day which is why i wanted to sort of end with ken as as there is a banner figure because his war service he he goes out to normandy he's again another one of those members of the northamptonshire yeomanry he explains very well not only just what it's like serving in a tank and how tactics the use of things like the 17 pound on a firefly how they learned to adapt meeting powerful german tanks ken's there of course at the battle where joe eakins knocked out three enemy tanks in a row so those parts of his story you know he's very very good at explaining but he also says in one of the interviews something again what's it like being part of that unit and i just want to read you one of the lines he says here um which is before going off when asked the question you know what's it feel like going off to war going off to battle for the first time and he says in a sense i suppose it was one word to use was exciting um you have to remember that we were only grown up school boys we most of us 19 20 or 21 years of age and to many of us it was we were people who couldn't afford to go on holidays overseas so for many this was the first time that they'd actually gone abroad and he goes on to say here um we couldn't believe we'd arrived in such a place so there was excitement all around but there was also a tremendous sense of comradeship it was like playing in a football team or a cricket team it wasn't just the 11 of us or 15 of us it was 500 of us and that was the regiment and we were all together particularly in that way you have a regiment so there was great excitement and great comradeship now ken's also very honest he's he he says about the fighting he was also and he goes on to talk about when he meets german soldiers and especially with the normandy fighting what he discovered the difference between what he would call the normal german soldier and fighting sometimes the ss but here's his description here of uh how what it was when meeting prisoners of war he says one of my tasks on more than one occasion when i was a tank commander was to be the tank responsible for gathering together prisoners that were to be taken so one talked to the prisoners some of them spoke english and french and you began to realize that these people many of them weren't zealots they weren't nazi fanatics they were ordinary people who had been farmers or mechanics or bricklayers or whatever in hamburg or hannover and here they were talking to us showing us pictures of their families having surrendered and of course the main part of the german army the wehrmacht pretty much to played according to the rules now can i mention that because we're really fortunate to get some german veterans back here and ken was one of our british veterans that we got to meet some members of tiger tanks from the second world war who came when we opened our tiger exhibition now ken as i mentioned he has a a a long life in terms of his writing books he serves the community and he's still doing that to this day as i'm making this film we were talking to ken a week or so back and he's still there helping with his neighbors his charming wife kai keeping an eye on things during lockdown making sure some of his pensioner neighbors have got their food orders coming in he's part of the neighborhood watch he's still doing that service to this day and it's great for us because we can talk to ken and i just want to really summarize that point we've missed none of us now can anymore talk to a first world war tank generation anyone who fought in tanks in world war one they're all gone the world war ii generation they're thinning out but they're still there so if you have that opportunity introduce the kids to them talk to them if you can record what they're saying listen to their stories what a wonderful experience that is and it's certainly been for me working here at the tank museum and think as well there's veterans post world war two as well all their stories that need to be listened to understood and hopefully captured as well so the whatever our interest in the subject whether you're a gamer whether you're a model maker whether you love the technical specifications we know from the actual veteran who served in the vehicle what it was like not just our suppositions as we as i've said before sometimes we play with the subject they did it for real if you want to know more about the veteran's story i can only recommend go to our online shop and have a look at some of the books we've got there some of them are their own memoirs some of them are compilations great stories of what it was like to fight in tanks in the second world war we have a fantastic selection of books models clothes and other gifts on the tank museum online shop when you buy from our online shop you are supporting the tank museum charity and that means we can carry on caring for our collection and producing this content if you have supported us already thank you very much subscribe and do keep watching

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 445,584

Keywords: the tank museum, tank museum, bovington tank museum, david fletcher, david willey, military tank, military history, tank museum top 5, the tank museum top 5 tanks, top 5 tanks, top 5 tanks tank museum, top 5 tanks ww2, world of tanks, panzer, panzers, panzer iv, sherman, sherman tank, sherman firefly, british ww2, british ww2 tanks, dunkirk, battle of france, 1940, 1944, cruiser tank, ww2 veterans, veterans, german ww2 veterans, second world war

Id: qwtFNqRM1ZE

Length: 32min 15sec (1935 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 25 2020