Ad & Wal E-Book

Peter Hain

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 441

Beschreibung

Most of us like to think we'd stand up to fight against evil, and yet the vast majority of white South Africans either stood by and said nothing or actively participated in the oppression and carnage during apartheid. Ad & Wal is the story of two modest people who became notorious, two survivors who did what they thought was right, two parents who rebelled against the apartheid regime knowing they were putting themselves and their family in grave danger. Ad & Wal is the story of an ordinary couple who did extraordinary things despite the odds. How did they come to their decision? What exactly did they do? What can we learn from them?

Leseprobe

For Harry, Seren, Holly, Tesni and Cassian Hain

Contents

Title PageDedicationPrefacePrologue1. Soldier2. Settler3. Political Awakening4. Into Activism5. Prisoners6. Banned7. The Hanging8. Departure9. ExileEpilogueAppendixIndexPlatesCopyright

Preface

Their first small steps later became large strides, their modest local actions led to national controversies.

Yet, when they were first asked to help, they gave no thought to where it might lead. Saying yes didn’t seem at all fateful. Adelaine and Walter Hain rather stumbled, oblivious, into it all. At the time, in 1953, it just seemed the right thing to do, in keeping with their values of caring, decency, fairness and, perhaps equally important, their sense of duty.

Staying true to such values, morals, principles was important to them – even if that meant sacrificing the comforts and certainties of job, lifestyle, family, friends, security and indeed country. Maintaining standards was fundamental to trying to live a life of integrity where principles mattered. They didn’t try to play the hero, they didn’t set out with a plan. One thing led to another and, once they had started, there was no way they felt they could walk away or let others down – even though, had the consequences been known at the beginning, they might’ve had cause to pause and reflect.

Ad & Wal is a story of struggle, of sacrifice, of pain – but ultimately of triumph: not for themselves, but for their cause. They were survivors – they came through war, penury, harassment, attacks and bitter loss, still looking on the bright side, chins up, keeping going, making the most of life, living happily at the centre of their close and growing family.

Theirs is indeed a story of their times, their era. Do their values endure? Or have they been lost in a world of personal gratification and celebrity? Could there ever be another Ad and Wal? Or are people simply not made like that anymore?

Not that they were saints – everyone has flaws. I have tried to tell it as I think it was for Ad and Wal, an ordinary couple who did extraordinary things under apartheid South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s – and gave up a great deal as a result. It is indeed the very fact that they were so much like their white peers and relatives – that in their own words they were ‘just an ordinary couple’ – which makes their story intriguing, and along the way raises questions about why they did what they did, why they were rebels, when the great mass of other whites – including all but one of their many close relatives – did not and were not.

If you, the reader, were in their situation, would you have done what they did or stayed quietly with the vast majority, ‘walking by on the other side’?

Of course being published doesn’t make their story more important than those of tens of thousands of other South Africans, including whites like them, who joined the struggle against apartheid. Ad and Wal were, and very much saw themselves as, foot soldiers rather than leaders. They always insisted that others suffered a great deal more and contributed much more, and that their own role was modest.

Above all this is a story: I have aimed at readability rather than deep political or indeed psychological analysis. Other whites also brought up by anti-apartheid parents in South Africa at much the same time have written memorable books. Gillian Slovo’s Every Secret Thing is unsparingly, uncomfortably honest about the personal and the political underlying the leading roles in the African National Congress played by her parents, Joe Slovo and Ruth First. Lynn Carneson’s Red in the Rainbow is a moving tribute to the bravery and fortitude of her South African Communist Party and ANC parents, Fred and Sarah Carneson. Eleanor Sisulu’s Walter and Albertina Sisulu is captivating on her inspirational in-laws. There are also insightful biographies of those times, for instance on the leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, where similar themes – and values – arise.

But writing about your parents is not straightforward and I am grateful to both for their cooperation – despite their misgivings (including on my mother’s side considerable emotional stress) and even embarrassment that they should be singled out. My thanks to my brother Tom and sisters Jo-anne and Sally for their own, sometimes painful, memories, and to Elizabeth Haywood for both her love and invaluable edits. My good friend and wonderful South African historian, Andre Odendaal, gave me sensitively trenchant and detailed advice without which this would have been a lesser work. I am also grateful for their help and comments to Myrtle Berman, Vanessa Brown, Jill Chisholm, Annette Cockburn, Eddie Daniels, David Evans, David Geffen, Hugh Lewin, Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, Jo Stocks, Jill Wentzel, Ann Wolfe, David Wolfe, Duncan Woods, Jane Woods and Randolph Vigne (whose book Liberals Against Apartheid: a history of the Liberal Party of South Africa 1953–68 is an important source). Also to my agent Caroline Michel for her sympathetic wisdom on authorship; and to Sam Carter, Biteback’s editor, for his enthusiasm for this story. Finally to Joe Hemani for his unfailing support and generosity in friendship.

Above all to Mom and Dad – Ad and Wal – who will always be an inspiration to me and many, many others.

Peter Hain

Ynysygerwn,Neath

November 2013

Prologue

If the end was bitter, at the start they could not believe their good fortune.

It was morning on 21 October 1944 when two army radio operators, Walter Hain aged nineteen and Lanky Brasler aged eighteen, moved to Point 806 high on Monte Pezza in the Apennines. Among some trees they stumbled across a ‘slittie’ (slit trench) wide enough to take both of them.

It was the only one like that they’d ever discovered. Normally a slittie was a one-man trench, long and deep enough to protect a soldier lying in it from shell shrapnel and flying bullets. Sometimes they had to toil away in the hard, unyielding soil to dig out a suitable slittie.

They delightedly occupied this one. To make it more secure from overhead shell bursts, they gave it a roof of tree branches topped with a layer of soil, and a gap at one end for access. As Walter’s meticulous diary recorded, they ‘felt as safe as a house’.

Both were soldiers of the 6th South African Armoured Division, part of the British 8th Army which, with the American 5th Army, was driving the German forces occupying Italy northwards out of the country. One of its infantry battalions was the Royal Natal Carbineers (RNC), and they were in C Company.

That morning their C Company took over a frontline position from B Company and they were able to move straight into existing slitties. Although around ten o’clock German shells started coming over a hill to their left, Walter and Lanky ‘felt very safe and were trying to sleep’. But, two hours later, when shells began bursting nearby and shrapnel flying, they found the din ‘terrifying’.

The two were suddenly trapped in their ‘safe as houses trench’, the Germans pounding their lines. Then – shockingly – their worst fear: shrapnel tore through the access opening in the trench roof near their feet. It hit the top of Walter’s right thigh in the groin. ‘I quickly put my hand down to make sure the family jewels were intact – they were. Lanky shouted: “I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit.”’

‘So have I,’ Walter shouted and Lanky jumped out the opening of the slittie to call for help. ‘Then another shell arrived and Lanky grabbed his back and screamed “Oh Mama, Mama, Mama.”’

Pandemonium. Horror. Walter pulled a moaning Lanky back into the slittie and tried to prop him up; Lanky was badly hurt – very badly. The company medical orderly, Dutch, soon arrived and gave Lanky morphine; it seemed not to make any difference. Despite Walter’s desperate reassurances, Lanky ‘was sure he wasn’t going to make it’ and asked Walter to see his sister. ‘But I told him he’d be alright and the stretcher-bearers would soon be coming.’

Ignoring incoming fire, Coloured‡ stretcher-bearers soon rushed in to carry Lanky away to the regimental aid post nearby, in a large house, Casa Ruzzone. Limping to it later himself, in shock and in some pain from his injured thigh, Walter came across the stretcher-bearers having a breather. Lanky, they told him matter-of-fact, was dead. Surely not. He was stunned, with a dreadful sense of guilt that it was when Lanky had jumped out, calling for help for them both, that the second shell had killed him. Walter had been through some scrapes earlier since arriving in Italy, and counted himself lucky. But now he was overcome by a dulling, deadening despair.

Forty-one years later, in 1985, retracing his steps through the Apennines aided by his old wartime diary and with family members, he rounded a corner in the tiny village of Castiglione dei Pepoli. There, quite unexpectedly, was a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery for South African soldiers, set in a beautiful glade, a kaleidoscope of green shades with a sprinkling of brightly coloured flowers,

Both curious and eager, Walter’s hopes rose and the family stopped. In a small stone building they found a metal-encased ledger, and in it – yes – the location of Lanky’s grave. Elation but also deep melancholy: his emotions swirled as he walked down through rows and rows of white-grey headstones, stark, sombre and dignified. Finding Lanky’s, he knelt down on his knees to photograph it, conjuring an inescapable image of fate: had their positions in that slittie been reversed, it could well have been Lanky and his family visiting Walter’s gravestone. Instead, through friendships made in action in the Second World War, he lived to meet the love of his life.

Adelaine Hain was frantic. Somehow, anyhow, she had to save the life of a close friend and political comrade, John Harris. For five months after John was sentenced to death by hanging, the shadow of the noose hovered as she was involved in frenzied efforts to save him.

As a member of the African Resistance Movement (ARM), Harris had confessed to placing a bomb on the main railway concourse at Johannesburg station in 1964. With Nelson Mandela in prison along with many other anti-apartheid activists, and internal resistance all but suppressed, Harris, along with his close colleague, fellow ARM and Liberal Party member John Lloyd, planned the bomb as a spectacular protest against apartheid.

Police testimony in court confirmed that he had indeed telephoned a warning to the railway police and urged them to clear the concourse, in order to avoid injuring anyone. But the authorities deliberately ignored that and an old lady tragically died, her twelve-year-old granddaughter maimed for life, others injured and burnt.

This would have carried a life sentence for manslaughter had John Lloyd not turned from co-conspirator to state witness and damningly insisted – against all other evidence – that the act was pre-meditated murder. The judge accepted Lloyd’s version with fatal consequences for Harris.

When his legal appeal on 1 March 1965 failed – because no additional evidence was forthcoming – Adelaine rushed about Pretoria helping organise clemency appeals. Repeated pleas to Lloyd, safe in England, to retract the damning part of his evidence were refused. John’s wife Ann and his father flew down to Cape Town to appeal to the Minister of Justice, John Vorster. But he was hostile and intransigent and, even worse, asked her questions seeking to entrap and implicate her in the bomb. Petitions from a range of public figures were presented and the matter was even raised in the British Parliament. But the state would not budge and a grim sense of foreboding enveloped them all while John Harris was being held on death row.

Then: a slim gleam of hope. John managed to convey a message to Ann that he had been approached by a warder who wanted to help him escape. At great personal risk, and from the outset highly suspicious of a set-up designed to trap them, Adelaine decided to help Ann, with Walter’s support. There were weeks of tense and contorted dealings with the warder. Then he was posted over 1,000 rand to pay for a car and expenses for the escape, Adelaine insisting that Ann had Elastoplasts stuck discreetly over her fingertips to cover her prints.

Beside themselves with worry, they waited for the elaborate arrangements the warder specified were needed to spring John. On the nominated day, two weeks before he was due to hang, he was to be sneaked out of his cell, and climb a rope over a wall.

Nevertheless, as Adelaine had feared all along, it had been a security police trap from the beginning. As John waited in his cell wearing a civilian suit given him by the warder, the door opened as arranged at 2 a.m. But instead of the expected warder it was apartheid’s chief spymaster, General H. J. van den Bergh, mocking him. (Together with John Vorster, ‘HJ’ was a former member of the paramilitary Ossewabrandwag, which conducted sabotage operations against the Allies in the Second World War; both were interned for pro-Nazi activities.) HJ tried to pressure Harris to reveal the identity of his co-conspirators outside. Despite being promised his life would be spared, Harris refused. It was just as well that Adelaine was obsessive both about secrecy and ensuring any evidence of her (criminal) collaboration was concealed.

But she remained distraught at being unable to save him. At 5 a.m. on 1 April 1965 John Harris ascended the fifty-two concrete steps to the pre-execution room next to the gallows at Pretoria Central Prison. Each step was six feet or so wide in a square spiral configuration; there were four landings with metal bars on a side wall all the way up. A Catholic priest, Father McGuinness, walked up the steps talking with him. (John had originally agreed to see a priest because it got him an extra visitor and they became good friends, though John’s firm atheism never wavered.) Inside the execution chamber, which had barred frosted glass windows along the top, the hangman waited. So did a medical doctor to certify his death, and a policeman to take a set of fingerprints and check his face against a photograph to confirm his identity. The death warrant was read to him and he was given the opportunity to say his last words.

Ready, he was now led forward by a warder into the large and brightly lit execution room, some forty feet long with white-painted walls, the gallows beam running its length. (Seven black prisoners could be – and often were – hanged simultaneously on this gallows.) It had a low ceiling with barred windows in the top of the wall. In the corner there was a table with a phone on it, in case a last-minute clemency was ever granted. There is no recorded instance of the phone ever having rung – and it certainly did not ring for John.

In the middle was the cruel hole, rectangular trap doors hinged along each edge. Alongside was a rail at waist height so that the warder holding John’s arms did not fall down the hole when the trap doors opened. Above the trap door was the machinery of the gallows. The ropes and fittings had been adjusted to match his height and weight.

The hangman began his grisly routine, tying John’s wrists behind his back and attaching a rope around his neck with the knot next to an ear. Then he fastened a hood over John’s face with a flap at the front left up until the last moment.

John had begun singing the freedom song ‘We Shall Overcome’ as the hangman turned down the hood flaps, checked all was ready and pulled the lever, plummeting him through the huge trap doors. In the gruesome medieval ritual the rope jerked with such force that it not only broke John’s neck but left a severe rope burn. Christiaan Barnard, South Africa’s pioneer heart surgeon, wrote years later:

The man’s spinal cord will rupture at the point where it enters the skull, electrochemical discharges will send his limbs flailing in a grotesque dance, eyes and tongue will start from the facial apertures under the assault of the rope and his bowels and bladder may simultaneously void themselves to soil the legs and drip onto the floor.

As to whether John would have felt any pain, Barnard added:

It may be quick. We do not know as none has survived to vouch for it. We make the assumption that the dansemacabre is but a reflection of a disconnected nervous system … and the massive trauma of the neck tissues and spinal column does not register in that area of the human psyche where horror dwells.

In keeping with the custom of the Pretoria gallows John was left to hang for fifteen minutes. In the corner of the gallows chamber was a concrete staircase leading to a high-ceilinged room below. Set into its floor was a ‘blood pit’ about eighteen inches deep, lined with coloured tiles, a plug hole in the middle. To one side was a huge low wooden trolley, big enough to wheel over the whole pit. The doctor stood on it after John had been stripped to certify his death. Then his body was lowered onto the trolley and washed off with a hose, the water draining into the ‘blood pit’. A warder put a rope around John’s body which, with a pulley, was then lifted to allow the noose to be taken off. He was then lowered onto a metal stretcher and placed directly into his coffin.

Adelaine Hain had woken unusually early at dawn, waiting still and silent. At 5.30 a.m. the family phone rang and she picked it up, recognising the familiar voice of a security police officer who said scornfully, ‘Your John is dead.’

‡ Mixed-race, one of four racial groups, the others being whites, Africans (blacks) and Asians. Only whites in the South African army were permitted to carry arms. Soldiers from other racial groups, though often in danger, could only perform back-up roles.

1

Soldier

Although the name Hain means ‘small wood’ in German, Walter was from Scottish stock in Glasgow. Yet – even from a city renowned for its socialist activism – little in his background hinted at his later political radicalism.

His grandfather William, a toolmaker, hailed from the Fife town of Auchtermuchty. His father Walter (Senior) and mother Mary were brought up on opposite sides of the main park in their working-class Glasgow neighbourhood of Tollcross. They remained there when they married, living with his parents in a ‘wally close’ – an apartment with a tiled entrance leading off a communal staircase in a tenement block. The ceramic tiles were a distinctive pale cream with a raised ornamental band of green above denoting marginal superiority in a deprived community of similar apartment blocks typical of the city. (The Scots word ‘wally’ means pale ceramic.)

But after the 1914–18 World War, Walter Snr, a newly qualified structural engineer, could not find a job and, unwilling to accept his lot, they joined many others in similar predicaments and emigrated in 1920 to Natal, South Africa, his parents joining them as they made a new life. Walter Snr got a job at a steel construction firm in Durban, designing bridges, but for Grandfather William it was a sad move as he could not find work to continue in his proud role as an engineering toolmaker.

Walter was born on 29 December 1924 in Northdene, a satellite suburb to the north west of the Natal city of Durban, in a house that his father and grandfather had helped build. It was in Parkers Hill, a street located between the main railway line and (now) the M5 north to Pretoria. There were few houses nearby and the children had open fields in which to play, across which were Indian families who grew vegetables and fruit which they sold to the Hain family and other white households. His mother used to make sandwiches for lunch at school, containing special Virol malt extract, which he was told was very good for him. But he habitually swapped them with local black workers for the traditional fare of Zulu labourers, stave pap or putu – made from maize.

He had a carefree young life with his two elder brothers Bill and Tom, playing, swimming, fishing in local streams and enjoying sport, and was especially close to his grandfather, who spent time talking to the young boy. But then came a family crisis. In the great slump of 1929 his dad lost his job and, desperate to work, travelled back, first to Britain then to Canada, moving between various short-term jobs, none utilising his structural engineering skills. The global depression continuing, his dad eventually found work in Kenya with the Vacuum Oil Company and six-year-old Walter recalled being frightened that the passenger ship transporting the family to Kenya’s Mombasa port might sink.

After a year living in Mombasa, they moved back into their house in Northdene, his father rejoining his previous engineering employer in Durban, which now had a job available. Walter was then of school age and did well at Escombe Primary School in a settlement a few miles away, to which he walked daily. It was the only time he wore shoes – at home he and his older brothers were usually barefoot in the typical way of South African youngsters. Once, walking to school with white friends, he recalled coming up behind a group of Indian boys on their way to their school: ‘Get out of our way!’ the young whites shouted merrily at the young Indians; Walter and his mates were the masters. Except for the open-air South African lifestyle and the Indians with whom he came into contact, it was a very British colonial upbringing; most Northdene families had also recently emigrated from Britain.

It was not until his family (with grandparents) moved to Pretoria in 1935 that Walter encountered Afrikaans-speaking whites. He attended Arcadia Primary School and later, with his older brothers Bill and Tom, Pretoria Boys High, probably the best state school in the city, where everyone played rugby in winter and cricket in summer. (He had actually begun high school at another renowned state school, Parktown, when his parents moved briefly to Johannesburg in 1937–8.) Though an enthusiastic cricketer, he did not reach the standard of brother Bill, who had previously captained the first team at Boys High.

Walter was brought up with traditional manners and courtesies, his father strict and his teachers even more so, as he absorbed the prevailing family values of discipline, hard work, honesty and decency. At the same time he was instilled with a spirit of questioning everything, soon developing a vigorously anti-establishment temperament. Perhaps this – together with an instinctive and unusual empathy for the Africans he encountered – was the genesis of what much later became his anti-apartheid activism.

Yet his parents never discussed politics with him. Despite the fact that they had both been Labour Party members in their youth in Glasgow, they shunned the politics of their adoptive country. Like most British immigrants they turned a blind eye to the racism entrenched around them and went along with the status quo. Indeed, of working-class stock and therefore subordinate in Britain, they rather enjoyed being ‘superior’ in South Africa. Whether they knew or acknowledged this, they were an integral part of the institutionalised racism of South Africa, and their views were broadly part of a British colonial view of the world at the time, which even the British Labour Party, despite its emancipatory tradition, was affected by. Therefore, in common with his white school friends, the young Walter took it for granted that blacks were a servant class, both to white families like his and the white society in which they lived cordoned off from areas where blacks resided. Propitiously, however, he was brought up to treat black people with some civility and respect, unhappily not the norm among many whites.

Walter was just fourteen when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, triggering the outbreak of the Second World War. His father and two older brothers quickly enlisted and were involved in the military campaign to drive Hitler’s allies the Italians from Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1940–41. Meanwhile, with his mother Walter had moved back to Pretoria and to Boys High.

English-speaking teenage boys like him were keen as mustard to join up. However, unlike in Britain, there was no conscription as the South African Parliament had decided only narrowly (by thirteen votes) to support the Allies rather than the Nazis. The Second World War had divided South Africa’s white population, English descendants backing the Allies, Afrikaners siding heavily with the Nazis. Some of their leaders, including a future Prime Minister, John Vorster, were interned for pro-Nazi activity including sabotage of Allied troop trains. Ben Schoeman, later a Cabinet minister for twenty-six years, had said in 1940: ‘The whole future of Afrikanerdom is dependent on a German victory.’ A German U-boat submarine abortively landed a former Afrikaner South African boxing champion on the west coast, having trained him in sabotage – he was arrested and jailed.

But his dad insisted Walter continue with his studies and wouldn’t allow him to enlist until he turned eighteen at the end of 1942. He matriculated with a First Class Secondary School Certificate at the end of 1941, including a Distinction in art. His dad, struck by his artistic ability, had already encouraged him to train as an architect and Walter went from school to work as an architectural assistant for Pretoria municipality during the day, studying in the evening for the five-year degree in architecture for which he had been accepted at Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand University.

A year later, now aged eighteen and enjoying his work and studying, he was still determined to serve in the war. Eager to realise his dream of becoming a fighter pilot, he went early in 1943 to Waterkloof military airfield outside Pretoria. The normal tests began encouragingly well. Then, abruptly, his dream was shattered. A test found him unable to distinguish some colours – a form of colour blindness – which barred him from being a pilot. It was a savage blow – made worse since it was so unexpected. He hadn’t been aware of his impairment before. Bafflingly, he was an excellent artist and nobody else had ever noticed it either. Utterly bereft, he didn’t wait for a bus and walked ten miserable miles home, feeling it was the end of his world.

His father, however, who had enlisted at the start of the war and was now a captain in the Engineers at Sonderwater east of Pretoria, said there was a shortage of signallers and suggested he should join the Signal Corps. So he went to the recruiting office, meeting up there with an old school friend, Brian Blignaut, who also decided to become a signaller. Brian was six feet four inches tall and Walter ended up referring to him as ‘Loftus’, later to become his army nickname.

After eventually being accepted into the army aged eighteen at the beginning of 1943, Walter received basic training at Potchefstroom and then at various locations in Natal, with his friends Loftus and Pete de Klerk. Then they left Durban docks on a troop ship, the converted French luxury liner Ile de France, on 30 April 1943, arriving in Egypt at Suez a fortnight later. Serious overcrowding on board meant that, once the ship started rolling in heavy seas, the rail was lined with men throwing up over the side. Serried ranks also about to throw up stood a few paces behind; as soon as convulsions seized one of the latter he would shout a warning, and someone bending over the rail would step aside as he flung himself forward to puke.

When they landed, an overnight troop train infested with bugs carried them to Cairo where Walter was excited to see the pyramids towering outside the city. Still aged only eighteen, it seemed like a real adventure as his train journey continued south along the river Nile to Khatatba in the desert outside Helwan. Here he was to be trained as a radio operator in the 14th South African Signals Brigade. After he and his friends had completed their training they were posted to the Royal Natal Carbineers (RNC), in C Company.

Army life, especially in a north African Arab country, was an eye-opener for the teenager, innocent in many ways and even unworldly. Walter’s was very much a boy’s upbringing – girls were almost a foreign species, to be respected but not touched. Unlike his friends he was also teetotal and did not smoke.

They were able to visit Cairo quite often, including its ancient wonders, and were intrigued by the soldiers’ frequent haunt, the local brothel, ‘Sister Street’. They hadn’t been inside one before and decided to investigate why it had a reputation for being notorious, discovering a walkway in front of a line of prostitutes’ rooms, with women sitting outside dressed only in panties, as customers circulated to make their choices and be taken inside. Walter certainly wasn’t intending that, but as the friends walked along, one of the women reached out and snatched off his army cap. She quickly turned to take it inside but he grabbed it back and they made a hasty retreat – a narrow escape, his relief palpable.

More appropriately, his older brothers Bill and Tom had been to Alexandria for a weekend where they had met some British army girls and taken them to the beach for a swim. They gave the girls’ names to Walter and he and Loftus and Pete did the same, enjoying the platonic outing. Walter’s other strong memory from the resort was encountering a mystery fitting in the bathrooms at their small hotel; they had not the faintest idea what a bidet was for.

His training and preparation over, he was ready and excited about the prospect of action: this was what he had come for. His unit left Port Said on 12 April 1944 on the ship Ascania, landing at Taranto on the southern tip of Italy on 21 April and proceeding to Gravina. A week later they left for Boiano, south east of the raging battle at Cassino, arriving there on 1 May. The Allied advance had been halted there for four months of carnage and his battalion moved into a holding position, relieving a Canadian division just outside the town on 4 May.

Cassino mountain towered above them, commanding the town at its foot and providing observations of the country for some ten miles around. A famous Benedictine monastery, the Abbey of Monte Cassino, crowned the peak like a sheer rock outcrop. German forces were entrenched all the way up the steep mountain sides and in the town itself, mercilessly pounding Allied forces.

On 11 May the final assault on Cassino began in earnest. Now nineteen, Walter joined his unit in the Allied line on 15 May. On the night before the foremost infantry units filtered silently back to a safety line and from 8.30 on the morning of the 15 May, Allied bombing of the town, mountain and monastery began – by noon, when it ceased, some 500 aircraft had dropped more than 1,000 tons of bombs. Only then did the Allies begin advancing into the town and up the mountain, in the face of still very determined resistance from enemy machine gunners and snipers, rain after dusk washing some of the blood away. All hell had broken loose.

Although still high on the adrenalin of innocence, and based in a holding position back from the front, young Walter was astounded by the scale of the action to the fore, planes continuously overhead, the thumping of bombs and the billowing smoke. Exhilarated in anticipation of his first experience of action, his nervousness was dulled by the proverbial predicament of the army private – lots of hanging around and little information. Long, long hours dragged by.

But the rebellious streak which always lurked underneath his polite, respectful exterior prevailed as it invariably did. In contravention of army regulations – which forbade keeping a diary as a potential source of intelligence if captured – he maintained a detailed, well-written one, made more captivating by his beautiful pencil sketches of places, people and incidents. His handwriting was painstakingly clear and neat, often in pencil (he always kept one on his person). ‘I went up and joined our troops in the line. We were in prepared positions which Allied troops had occupied for months, there was a lot of rubbish and debris around, no showers or latrines and the place smelt.’ He was on the reverse slope of a hill and incoming shells ‘ripped over us’.

By 18 May both Cassino town and mountain had been taken, the medieval monastery destroyed, and the successful Allied advance towards Rome began – but at an appalling cost to the Allies. In this battle for Cassino about 200,000 Allied men – including British, Americans, New Zealanders, French, Poles, Indians and Gurkhas – were either killed or wounded. (German fatalities were around 25,000.) It was certainly the most brutal single conflict in the entire war.

A week later he was withdrawn to Fernelli and ‘had porridge with milk for the first time for a week’. Thankful he had not been advanced enough for the four months of slaughter which finally pushed the Germans out of Cassino, Walter was now in the RNC Support Company’s Bren gun carrier platoon. The lightly-armoured carriers, used mainly for reconnaissance, were small, roofless, tracked vehicles, driver and Bren gunner in the front and one seat on each side of the engine in the back. As a radio operator, Walter travelled with his Number 22 set in the back of the platoon commander’s carrier.

The roadsides had been strewn with mines by the retreating enemy and he was shocked that the towns they entered were so battered as to be scarcely habitable. On 3 June they parked next to an artillery battery and incoming German shells blew up one of their parked carriers, fortunately empty. Next day, the Americans took Rome, and on 6 June – ‘D Day’ of the Allied Normandy beach landings – Walter’s carrier moved through Rome, the ‘populace lining roads and cheering, a very clean, fine city with very good-looking women’. Rome, he noted, was known as the ‘Open City’ because its irreplaceable historic heritage encouraged an agreement between the Allies and Germans not to fight in it.

They moved thirty miles north on the Via Flaminia to Civita Castellana, the first of series of walled towns on hills, surrounded by lush ravines. The main road through, he noted, consisted of ‘old, rendered, colour-washed buildings with curved tiles on the roofs, balconies and flower boxes everywhere’. Then they came upon Viterbo, its medieval centre preserved within a stone wall, sitting astride a hill with long views of the plains and lakes around.

No engagement yet with the Germans retreating along towards Florence. But on the twisty road down from Montefiascone, another typical hilltop town, was Lake Bolsena, ringed by hills, a cacophony of croaking frogs and ‘knocked out Panther and Tiger tanks that lined the road on the west side of the lake’.

Continuing north through sunken, leafy lanes, they were now on the tail of the Germans, in a ‘Bren gun carrier probing gingerly forward to make contact with the enemy’. In the rolling country near Belvedere, they stopped up some little tracks to replenish energy in a splendid captured farmhouse which he sketched. Afterwards they drove past the position where ‘a Spandau scythed down seven comrades from D Company’ who had taken some prisoners in the engagement. They slept nearby and he recorded: ‘Dead Jerry aged 18 lying in the trees. Two German prisoners buried him. Grave too short so they jumped on his ankles until these broke then stuffed his feet in. His cross said “Died for Greater Germany”.’

The weather was warm and fair throughout his period of action in Italy over the summer and into the autumn. But despite his keen eye for the greens of all shades in the sweep of hills and the kaleidoscope of colour – red poppies in field after field, bright flowers and bushes – the tempo of action left him little time to enjoy the beautiful countryside. Stunning Tuscany largely passed him by, the breathtaking Apennines with their little villages tucked away hardly registered.

On through twenty miles of twisting roads, action all around: one ‘lot got mucked up’, and he ‘watched Jerries shelling a road and saw a despatch rider go for a loop’ (crash and die). Nervous but pent up as they passed the hill-top town of Cetona, he ‘sketched from atop the carrier’ its distinctive town tower. In these comfortable little Umbrian towns life had been flowing gently by – as it had done for generations and would do again after the war – but now on 26 June in Chiusi there were ‘shattered houses with outside walls blown away, bedding hanging out forlornly and personal possessions strewn obscenely around’. More action: ‘Roy and Mac wounded.’ But then an opportunity in the little town: ‘Got some good books. (Also the diary in which am writing).’ Two days later having left Chiusi, A Company ‘had good show, killed 8 and took 11 prisoners, lost 2 killed’. Despite the ferocity and killing around him, these diary entries were factual, rarely revealing Walter’s emotions: that was not what traditionally brought-up boys like him did. But the customary neat writing, flowing prose and regular, conscientious entries revealed a characteristic orderliness, an organised mind.

Pushing forward in pursuit of fleeing German forces, he called by regional headquarters, pleased to see his brothers Tom and Bill (signallers with an artillery unit). Then on 3 July he was transferred from the Bren gun carriers to C Company signals team with his new signals partner, Letsie. However, that partnership was sadly all too brief. On 9 July, Letsie ‘copped it’. But fate had been on Walter’s side as it was to remain throughout the weeks ahead.

Letsie and I went to have a bath at a little village, Rapale. Letsie washed. When he’d finished I took the bath round the corner to fill it at the well. As I was pumping the first shell landed – didn’t hear the explosion as much as the shrapnel whistling everywhere. I dived next to the wall. Masonry tumbled down just behind me. When all quiet I shot round the corner to find Letsie being attended to by a medical orderly – a shell had sliced off one leg above the shin and he was in a lot of pain. There were two men unconscious in the rubble – heard later they had died. Slept in the rain. Jerry shelled us at about 2 in the morning.

In action, Walter’s company consisted of three platoons (8, 9 and 10) – the soldiers who actually did the fighting – and a headquarters section (HQ). This had a commander (a major), an intelligence officer (Stan Jones) who carried the maps and orders for attacks and a two-man signals team, Walter and Loftus (who had now taken Letsie’s place), to keep the major in touch both with battalion HQ and with his platoons through Lanky. In normal action the HQ section was out of sight of the enemy and did not receive small arms fire, though it did receive shell and mortar fire. The signals team radio came in two sections which had to be connected up, together with a heavy car-sized battery, headphones, microphone and tubular steel aerials. When it was being taken into action, Loftus carried the larger section on his back and Walter the smaller one, with the battery, other bits and his rifle in his hands. When not being carried this radio set was in the major’s Jeep as were Loftus and Walter. Lanky’s set was a one-piece, smaller and carried on his back.

In the days that followed the loss of Letsie, Walter travelled in the major’s Jeep with his radio, repeatedly recording ‘deadly’, with colleagues killed or wounded. The Germans were still being pushed back, but were resisting all the way. Most of the time he wasn’t sure what was happening. He was carrying on, doing his duty. But there was danger around every corner, up every rise, down every valley. At Panzano, in slitties they had dug next to the Jeep: ‘Tanks above road. Bazooka & spandau on corner. Shelling quite close. Spent chunk hit my book about 6 inches from Lanky’s face, another ricocheted off left front wheel past my face into ground beside Lanky.’ Still more fighting and horror as the days in late July flew by. ‘Smith hit, Corbett and McMorran badly … Next day [26th] quiet – Sonny got hit … 27th Benny wounded, Johnny and Red badly wounded, Pete Beaton killed outright.’

Self-portrait aged nineteen as radio operator, 18 July 1944.

Then – some relief, and also a delight: ‘4 Aug: climbed on top of pt.350 and had first look at Florence.’ It had been a place of awe from his art courses at school. Three days later, three weeks’ rest: visiting Siena, another captivating place for the young soldier. Afterwards ‘lazed around and cleaned and serviced truck. Got pinched by the RP Sgt for firing shots from captured Mauser without permission. The RSM just warned us. Got two letters from Mom – a treat.’

On leave he was thrilled to visit Rome.

Went up to the Sistine Chapel and saw Michelangelo’s wonderful frescoes on the ceiling. They seem to stand out in a 3 dimensional way, heaps better than the reproductions one sees … went to see the Colosseum and clambered all over it. It was very interesting and jolly impressive. In the afternoon saw ‘A Canterbury Tale’, excellent film. Went to see Aida at Opera that night but didn’t enjoy it much as all dialogue was in Italian.

Back on duty on 24 August, they ‘took over from the Yanks’ and based themselves at Podere Campolivo, a farmhouse near ‘Caruso’s Castle’. This was a palatial building once owned by the world-famous Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, and C Company’s 10 Platoon was based there. When a company was stationary for some time (as was C in this position), battalion HQ signallers would lay telephone cables along the ground to company HQ whose signallers did the same to their platoons, with communication by telephone rather than radio. Thus at Campolivo Walter’s and Lanky’s time was taken up with laying telephone lines to the platoons, then going out to repair the many breaks in these caused by what seemed like constant attacks from shells. There were casualties and deaths on both sides: ‘We had to “keep our head and eyes moving” – as it’s quite scary.’

Moving on, they waded across the river Arno and on 2 September found ‘good grapes and some lovely pears’. Then, on the way up past Empoli and on to Vinci, they took over a house ‘where a girl in white raincoat was. She had many admirers but unfortunately she left.’ Next day, 8 September, they occupied another house. ‘Went for a walk that evening. Country very hilly and looked beautiful in the afternoon sunlight.’ Five days later, well north of Pistoia, ‘had a lot of trouble laying a line to 8 platoon when a spandau fired. We got down quickly, then a burst of fire “rrr…rip” then “clack-ack-ack-ack” as Lanky accelerated. We did not linger.’

Amid the gruelling action, their lines constantly shelled and needing incessant repairs and re-laying, he was allowed a day off in Florence on 23 September. ‘Saw the cathedral. Stood on the bank of the Arno near Ponte Vecchio, bridges on either side blown.‡ Man in a skiff sculled gracefully along amid all the shambles.’

But, within a month, the almost-charmed life Walter seemed to have lived amid all the death and injury swirling around him very nearly came to an end.

On 2 October 1944 ‘moved up at about 5 in the morning through the small village of Castiglione dei Pepoli’, passing the gentle glade in which, forty years later, he would discover an immaculate South African cemetery had been erected to house so many of the army comrades now with him.

On Monte Stanco death nearly got him. But, before that, they had come upon a church standing proud on its own in Vigo, on the way ‘cleaning up’ some Germans. In the tiny rural church, he ‘got some big candles’ and saw ‘two SS officers, one very haughty though shot through the shoulder. The other shot through the cheeks with great gobs of blood and spit on his chest, moaning in a bewildered, animal-like way.’

They moved towards the small Stanco mountain on 10 October, only too aware that a German SS infantry battalion was holding it. An Indian regiment had tried and failed to capture the stronghold. Now it was C Company’s turn. One of their platoons was ahead on top of Stanco and

chowed [killed] spans of SS who they said came walking towards them saying ‘Surrender Tommies. Hitler will treat you well’. Thought they were drugged. We went up and parked until our other platoons had gone into a casa (at the foot of Stanco). Mortars came over all the time and fell quite close. As we came up the slope towards the casa through the vines, a Spandau opened up on Lanky and Loftus and I. We all fell flat and tried to go straight down into the earth (Loftus had the 22 set strapped to his back, I had the 22 power pack and was carrying the battery and aerial tubes, Lanky had his 21 set strapped to his back). Lanky said he was hit then said ‘No’, and got up and jolled [jogged] for the casa and got there OK. Then Loftus hopped up. They gave him a burst and a wine wire caught under the 22 radio on his back and whipped him to the ground. I thought he’d been chowed but they missed him. He hopped up again and ran for the casa. I got up and hammed and they gave me a burst – I felt something slam me and the other shots from the burst seemed to press past me.

The sheer impact of the bullet knocked him to the ground. Confusion – but all too quick to be terrified, or to understand.

I yelled to Lanky I’d been tonked and he came running back to help me but I found I was OK and told him just to show me a clear space through the wire. Then I got up and jolled, zigzagging along and they left me alone. I climbed through a window into a bedroom in the casa, a wounded German on the bed in a bad state and one of ours also wounded on the floor.

Then – an explanation for his narrow escape: ‘I found the Spandau bullet in my emergency bully beef tin in my Tommy pouch (over my heart), with the tip of the bullet bent’. Although its force had tumbled him over, the bullet had been blocked in the corned beef tin, miraculously saving his life.

Action at Monte Stanco.

No time to reflect or to worry, because their advance platoon had been ‘shoved off Stanco’ and they were told to pull out. But a German sniper was firing at the only door they could get out of.

We called for a tonk on our casa then closed up shop. Cellier the Bren gunner fired some bursts and we went out one by one and gathered behind the casa, where we were hidden from the Germans on the hill. They took a shot at me as I rushed out and it went past my head. Then we all started to joll back and they were shooting at us. I could see little wavy blue smoke lines in the grass in front of me where the bullets were hitting. It was really quite amusing (the whole mob careering across this field, discarding bits of equipment – Brens, Tommies, small packs etc – as they ran). Lanky took a mad tumble and I thought he’d been tonked but he’d only tripped and hopped up again. I was bloody tired with the 22 power pack, battery, aerials and telephones. We ran past a dead Indian, struggled up over the road til we got behind a rise then up over a little gnoll. Then something burst about 1 yard ahead of me on the path. I just saw a flurry in the sand then a hole appeared. It blew the aerials out of my hand, missed Lanky ahead of me and a flat piece bounced off Loftus’s neck cutting it a bit (probably a rifle grenade). We dug in for that night.

Three days later on 13 October two other South African regiments acting together finally pushed the enemy off Stanco and it was taken, despite a lone Spandau still firing. ‘The field we’d run over looked like a real battleground with equipment strewn everywhere.’ A few days later, on the road to the village of Grizzana Morandi, he was ‘molto paura’ (very scared) by dozens of phosphorus shells and 17 October was

a lousy day. Luckily had slitties dug for us. There were shells coming in like an express train. You’d hear them coming, reach their highest altitude then descend near us with a terrific rush and one killed Sgt Taffy – a good bloke. I was shit scared as you could hear the Spandaus going and mortars arriving – I was very pleased I was a radio operator and not an infantryman.

In slit trench, reporting over radio the Germans shelling Grizzana.

Now came the fateful day on 21 October 1944 at point 806 on Monte Pezza. ‘At 0400 hrs we moved past D Company and took over. The slitties were delightful. Loftus and Lanky were on the sets so I laid a line back. Then Lanky and I (who were sharing a wide slittie) started improving our one.’ They settled down to sleep. Suddenly ‘at about 12 o’clock a piece of shell tonked me in the leg (having come through the access opening in the roof near our feet). The wound was in the right groin. I took my shell dressing and put it on my leg.’ Lanky was screaming. ‘I pulled him back into the slittie. Couldn’t see any blood or anything on Lanky but he was moaning. Tried propping him up this way and that but all ways hurt. Then James and Dutch arrived and gave him morphia but made no difference.’ Stretcher-bearers took Lanky away and Walter limped painfully to the medical centre at Casa Ruzzone. ‘Passed stretcher-bearers having a breather and they said Lanky was dead.’

The blunt way they told him did not make it any easier to absorb. Why Lanky? There, right next to him in the slittie? The deaths and injuries to comrades in action swirling around him over the last weeks seemed to have escalated. Shells and machine gun fire had brushed by him. A bullet aiming at his heart had lodged millimetres away in the corned beef tin. Uncannily, he always seemed to have been in just about the right place at the right time to miss injury or death. But now he had been wounded and, appallingly, his mate killed. Of course he knew when he enlisted that war was dangerous. But he never really thought it would happen to him.

Lanky Brasler, later killed next to Walter.

Shivering, dazed and in a state of shock, at the medical centre he was given a new dressing and some hot tea. Then he was directed into an ambulance bound first for Grizzana. The intelligence officer Stan Jones had been very badly wounded and was in the same ambulance but died before they reached the hospital, just seeming to drift away on the journey – a second, terrible shock for Walter. Then he was transferred to a second ambulance to Castiglione and a third – ‘tried to swass [urinate] in the ambulance but it hurt’ – to the South African General Hospital at Florence. ‘They put me into bed. Tried to swass again as I was full but hurt myself and yelled so a nurse came and gave me an injection.’ He was desperately anxious: how badly was he injured? ‘At about 0400 hrs on 22nd I went into theatre (operated on – they put a catheter through my belly into my bladder – the quack [doctor] called it my “super pubic” – with the other end into a bottle to relieve me).’

Eventually, after being moved by ambulance first to Arezzo then to Rome, respite at last:

Went to theatre twice, bottle removed and started walking. (The piece of shrapnel had entered in my groin and penetrated into the pelvis, missing everything important on the way. The surgeon decided it would do no harm leaving it where it was rather than trying to remove it.)§

After time first in a convalescent depot, a transit camp outside Rome (where he was able to enjoy evenings and afternoons in the city), then at Santa Barbara with the Reserves and again the 13th Brigade signals squadron about ten miles outside Florence, Walter was assigned to the Natal Mounted Rifles (a tank regiment turned into infantry) at Bagnolo. His friends Loftus and Pete visited him there and he went on two manoeuvres.

Infantry going in on tank.