Dr Tom Renouf  

                                              
80, served with the 5th Battalion Black Watch of the 51st Highland Division

 

"I was 19 when I signed up. I’d just finished my training and joined the Highland Division and I landed in Normandy straight away. When you’re on the front line, only one thing is certain. That is that you’re going to be killed or wounded. The number who survive without injury is very small indeed. I know of two people in the whole of the division who went from El Alamein to the end of the war without being wounded - that’s out of 20,000 to 30,000 people. Some of the young boys who joined us one day were killed the next.

"On VE Day we were in the slip trenches. We were attacking towards Bremen and Hamburg, in the last stages of the war. There were no celebrations for us. We were too frightened to move out - we didn’t want to be the last casualties of the war. We protected ourselves and came out when we thought things were safe. Most of our frontline troops were like that.

"So while they were dancing round the fountains in London, it was a very different story for us. We got word of victory about two days beforehand and it was during that period that we were very, very careful. There were rumours, and the day before we knew the declaration would be made shells were still dropping, and mortars were still being fired at us.

"We knew the war was going to end but we didn’t know how quickly. We were still 100 miles from our final objective. When it did end, we were able to get there by truck rather than having to fight our way.

"On that journey we went past Belsen and we saw those people standing at the fence in their pyjama-like uniforms. Everybody said, ‘What is this?’ Nobody knew, except one man who said, ‘It’s a concentration camp.’ We never knew about concentration camps. One voice did, and I think he was probably Jewish.

"After it was finished, it was quite some time before we got home; for some people it was well over a year and a half. The way in which we were demobbed was according to demob numbers. If you were in at the beginning of the war and you were old, you got out quickly. If you were young and in at the end of the war, you had a high number and didn’t get out for over a year. That was the case for me. Our feelings were relief that it was over but it was a big, big change for us. We had lived our lives concentrating on listening for shells and mortars, looking for snipers, watching where we walked for mines - the whole of our being was concentrated on surviving. When we were losing our comrades day after day the burden of sadness had to be postponed for the future. Now you could return to normal. You were all the more conscious of the beauty around you. You would hear the birds which you never heard during the war, you would see the flowers, you would smell the smells of the countryside and you would have time to enjoy a meal, even if it was an army meal. The change was quite drastic and it took quite some time to adapt.

"Sixty years later you look back on it and you can’t quite remember all of the brutality of war, although you do remember it. You do remember all the friends that were killed at the age of 19, you’d never forget that. It all comes into focus now, 60 years later."