The Story of RON POLLITT

...Flaherty went first, crawling quickly over a large tree which had been felled by one of our shells earlier. I was next, but as I was silhouetted going over the tree a shot rang out! The bullet clean cut my helmet’s chin strap alongside my right ear and my helmet spun around with the impact. The sniper had not seen Tich who was virtually alongside him, so Tich sneaked off his bayonet and stabbed him in the back. The three of us then made it into the basement and we could hear the Germans all night, it wasn’t until the early hours when they abandoned the villa.

At dawn our Company arrived led by a tank and in it was a war correspondent. He could hardly believe what had happened, the story appeared in the British Press a few days later. It turned out that this had been an SS Headquarters! Unfortunately, this incident gave the wrong impression and when the next listening/fighting
patrol was required it was Easton, Flaherty, Pollitt and 7 volunteers.

We moved on into the Bocage country, this time we had about 10 tanks supporting us. They were not Shermans they were English, so lets call them "Churchills". We were making rapid progress, they must have expected this as we were carrying heavy battle packs.

Out of the blue, someone spotted a German Tiger Tank on a hill very far in the distance and a moment later it fired it’s first shot. It out-gunned and out-armoured the Churchills, one by one it put every Churchill out of action. A Rocket Firing Typhoon was called up and it destroyed the Tiger, we were then very thin on the ground with no tanks and no artillery to support us. We were told to leave our heavy packs and withdraw.

One of our lads had a shrapnel wound in his thigh, the medics had left the area with badly injured tank crews. We knew that the we would be coming back so we left our casualty camouflaged in a hedgerow. It was 2 days before we were able to make it back. We took the medics to where we had left our casualty and yes he was still alive. I was horrified when I saw that his wound was infested with hundred of maggots! The medics, however, were made up as they explained, “he won’t have any infection now.” As for our packs, Jerry had been through each one and removed our soap and socks!”

We began moving again and as the evening approached we positioned ourselves, dug in, brewed up, and had a smoke. Suddenly...