World War II: The Autobiography by Jon E. Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

fire engines are working outside now and half the people in the air-shelter including Uncle Pieter have gone out. I went out for a while and they were taking dead people out of the bombed houses. Uncle Pieter sent me back to stay with Keetje. There is a funny smell in the air like burnt meat and a funny yellow light all over the country from the incendiary bombs. Three men were killed trying to get a bomb away that hadn’t gone off yet. One of the men was our postmaster and I loved him very much. He gave me my first bicycle ride. It is awful to watch the people standing by their bombed houses. They don’t do much. They just walk around and look at them and look sad and tired. I guess there isn’t anything else they can do but it seems awful. . .
    At the end of our street the water is coming in where the canal locks were hit and I guess it will just keep running over the land until it is fixed. No one does anything about it because there are too many people to be helped and fires to fight. Twelve people on our street were killed and I knew every one of them but I knew Heintje best. Mevrouw Klaes has been crying ever since the bombing. Some people prayed all the time and some sang the national anthem and some just sat and stared. A woman who is very sick with a bad heart looked as if she might die. She was very pale when she came and still is. Jan Klaes is Mevrouw Klaes’ other son and he is fighting somewhere like my father is. I said a prayer to myself for Father and I hope God heard it in spite of all the noise. I told Uncle Pieter I had prayed but he didn’t say anything, just laid his hand on my shoulder. Uncle Pieter has gone off to the hospital to try to find Mother. It is getting late and he is worried, I think. I know he will find her. Keetje has gone to sleep again but she talks in her sleep and wakes up all the time asking if the war is over and things like that. Poor Keetje, she is so little and doesn’t know what is happening. I think I do and it is worse than anything I ever heard about and worse than the worst fight in the cinema. The ambulances coming and going and so many dead people make it hard for me not to cry. I did cry some while the bombing was going on but so many other little children were that no one noticed me, I think. I just got into bed with Keetje and hid my face. I was really frightened this time.
    Later:
    Uncle Pieter came back. He didn’t find Mother because she is dead. I can’t believe it but Uncle Pieter wouldn’t lie. We aren’t going to tell Keetje yet. The ambulances are still screaming. I can’t sleep or write any more now or anything.
    OPERATION YELLOW: CROSSING THE MEUSE, FRANCE, 13 MAY 1940
    General Erwin Rommel, 7th Panzer Division
    The masterstroke of Fall Gelb was its by-passing of France’s 87-mile-long Maginot Line (a concrete “Western Front”); the Germans simply came round its top, through Belgium and Holland. The Schwerpunkt of the German onslaught was in the forests of the Ardennes, assumed impassable to tanks. No less than 1,800 Wehrmacht panzers filed through its thickets and woodland. There was some hope that the River Meuse would contain the juggernaut; this was rudely shattered by General Erwin Rommel of the 7th Panzer Division. His opponents, the French 2nd and 9th Armies, were typical of France's lack of modern equipment; they had not an anti-tank gun between them.
    On 13 May, I drove off to Dinant at about 04.00 hours with Captain Schraepler. The whole of the divisional artillery was already in position as ordered, with its forward observers stationed at the crossing points. In Dinant I found only a few men of the 7th Rifle Regiment. Shells were dropping in the town from French artillery west of the Meuse, and there were a number of knocked-out tanks in the streets leading down to the river. The noise of battle could be heard from the Meuse valley.
    There was no hope of getting my command and signals vehicle down the steep slope to the Meuse unobserved,