On the way home from the Netherlands on Monday (closing out the longweekend), we stopped in Venray, where my second cousin once removed Gerard Valentine Ryan is buried, a few hundred metres from where he died on 17 October 1944, at the age of 21. It was literally his first hour in battle. He was leading a platoon of riflemen towards the occupied town when a machine-gun hidden in the trees opened up, killing him and another solder immediately. A third soldier was killed shortly afterwards, while checking on the dead and wounded.
This was at the tail end of the Battle of Overloon, a mopping up of the German presence remaining on the western side of the Maas / Meuse after the much more famous Operation Market Garden.TheAllies captured the towns of Overloon and Venray, but it was a costly victory and the Germans retained their positions on the western bank of the Maas until the war was almost over.
Gerard and his two fellow riflemen were initially buried where they fell, and later transferred to the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery just along the road, along with 690 others. Gerard’s ID tags had been lost, but he was identified by a cross and chain that he had been wearing. Now he rests beside his comrades.
The people of Venray have set up a lovely project where local people and families adopt graves of particular soldiers to look after them and commemorate them. We were privileged to meet Mr and Mrs Jansen, who have adopted Gerard’s grave, and had gathered the details of his death and reburial. I found it tremendously moving that this whole community is still honouring and respecting those who died liberating their town from the Nazis, eighty years ago.
I must thank Mr Hoebers and Mr Vervoort from the Committee, who had organised for us all to meet at the cemetery (the photos were taken by Mr Vervoort); and my third cousin Desmond Ryan, Gerard’s first cousin once removed, who had blazed a trail by visiting a couple of years ago and also put me in touch with the relevant local folks.
My godfather was Denis Napier Simonds, known as Toby to the family; he was the husband of my father’s cousin Bunty, and died aged 50 in 1970, when I was 3, so I don’t remember him at all. We lost Bunty in 2000. but their four children are all alive and well. He had one brother, Malachy, who was shot down near Troyes in July 1944 and is buried at Terlincthun near Boulogne.
Denis himself was in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment as a career soldier, and I recently came across his citation for the Retreat from Burma in 1942, where he was trapped with his men on the wrong side of the Sittang Bridge but managed to get them all back to friendly territory after the bridge was destroyed by their retreating colleagues. General Sir John Smyth was sacked for screwing up the defence, and later sat for 16 years as a Conservative MP.
His brigade was the assigned to the Chindits, and I was very interested to find that one of his comrades, RAF man W.A. Wilcox, wrote and published a record of their campaign together in 1944 which you can read for free here. The second paragraph of the third chapter, with the quote it introduces, is:
The Indians came down in single file. They were a small band of sepoys led by a jemadar. Unshaven and unwashed, some of them wounded, they looked a sorry sight in their dishevelled uniforms, but they gave us a cheery greeting as we passed, to which we readily responded with : “Hello, Johnny ! Tikh hai?” They said : “Bahut tikh!” and the jemadar asked if we could spare any cigarettes. The Commandos needed no asking — every manjack stopped and handed over half his small supply, for which the sepoys were truly grateful. We were unable to supply them with food as we only had one day’s rations in our packs and were even now on half-rations in case of a hitch in the supply-drop plans. Shouldering their heavy mortar-cases they said goodbye and set off again down the road that led towards the plains of India. We continued the climb. Two Hurricanes flew overhead, heading for Kohima. We were already five thousand feet above mean sea level and I nodded to the speeding fighters and said : “I know a quicker and easier way of getting this high than toting a pack and a gun up a mountain.”
In April 1944, Chindit Column 76 was detached from the main body commanded by the legendary Orde Wingate, and sent behind Japanese lines in Nagaland, the easternmost part of India, as part of the 23rd Infantry Brigade. The Japanese succeeded in capturing the local capital, Kohima, but were in the end forced to retreat because the Chindits had successfully cut their supply lines. I must admit that if I ever knew about this part of the war, I had forgotten about it. This is Wilcox’s map which is (with difficulty) matchable to the online cartography of your choice.
Unfortunately Wilcox consistently spells Denis’s surname wrong, but there is no doubt that it’s him. He first appears in Chapter 4:
Major Simmonds, the big, genial, Irish Company-Commander, looked up from his map. He said : “Get me a nice big Dakota — all to myself. I want to go to Calcutta.”
Simonds goes on to establish a crucial fortification, “Ponce Fort”, which the Chindits eventually have to withdraw from, but taking few casualties themselves while inflicting many more on the attacking Japanese. Wilcox at this point has a very bad case of dysentery which takes him out of the war entirely, but he clearly had time while recovering to write this book, which was published in August 1945, only fourteen months after the events it describes.
It’s a vivid first-person account of a crucial but forgotten campaign. There are some beautiful descriptive passages here about the landscape.
The valley was hot and steaming. The river was swollen with the downpour and had oozed over its banks and flooded the paddy-fields, stepped warily on the mud slopes until we reached the paddy-fields where commenced the long wade through the black, smelling water. It wasn’t easy to keep balance. A quelching boot would skid on the clay and down would go some unfortunate soldier into the slime. Almost every one went down at one period or another. To add to the discomfort the rain was doing its worst and the drenched clothes clung to our bodies. A waterfall had to be crossed ; foot and nailed boot clung to the rock as we edged our way, inch by inch, through the stinging spray and blinding floodwater. The man in front of me slipped on the rock-face and disappeared in the swirling waters below. Two of us fished him out and helped him along the smooth- worn rocks. A halt was called and we lay full-length in the filth with our heads pillowed on the wet packs, too breathless and soaked to the skin to smoke a cigarette.
I looked around the valley. On every side, where we lay, there was a wild jumble of black water and green sprawling vegetation. It seemed as though nature had gone mad in that out-of-this-world basin where tree and rock and water were thrown together in crazy confusion. The floor was oozing slime but above that, on the walls of the bowl, was greenness of a beauty that was breath-taking. It seemed to me that in our sea of mud we were the slow squirming creatures that lived and had their being in the mess of mysterious darkness that might have been in the beginning of Time. Primitive protozoa in a glutinous mire of afterbirth.
Unfortunately this descriptive gift is balanced by sheer racism in Wilcox’s descriptions of the Nagaland villagers; it’s clear that they were badly treated by the Japanese during the occupation, but with people like Wilcox around it’s surprising that they showed much affection for the Brits. One interesting character, who I’d like to know more about, is:
Private Wertley, batman to Major Simmonds. His accent was guaranteed to make you look twice at Private Wertley, who was a broad-built young English negro, with a crop of short woolly hair and a wide white smile. Wertley never got ruffled and his slow Yorkshire speech was as unconcerned and genial as a farmer “up for the day” at Stokesley Show.
I suspect that “Wertley” was really “Wortley”, just as “Simmonds” was really “Simonds”, but I haven’t been able to track him down other than in this book.
And that goes for the author too, who I find elusive. He mentions sitting with his fiancee, Joan, on the beach at Saltburn at Easter 1941, and that probably means he must be the Walter A Wilcox who I find in official records, born in Middlesbrough in 1918 and marrying Marjorie J[oan?] Mitchell in 1941, also in Middlesbrough; Saltburn and Stokesley are both within 10 km. But I have no idea what happened to him afterwards – I find a Walter and Margaret Wilcox living in Harrogate after the war, but it’s the wrong end of Yorkshire and the wrong name for the wife. Perhaps they emigrated.
Anyway, for what it is, it’s a very digestible first-person account.
