We ended up in Basly.
And in the morning the steeple of the church
in Basly, there was a sniper,
sniping at the “Chauds” that were getting
up to go through Basly.
And he was popping at them and, of course,
we were running around, picking them up, etc.
So one of our lads ran over to the
self-propelled regiment of artillery.
Now we had self-propelled artillery in the first
instance because the towed guns and
whatnot were not practical.
Now what they had, there used to be a tank called
the Priest in the American army so they
got the permission to modify these
Priest chassis and mount a 105 mm on them
so in the early stages there was this mobile artillery,
I think it was the 19th self-propelled regiment or something.
And he told the guy, he said,
“Look, there’s a sniper up there.”
So the guy whipped his gun around and “Boom!”
blew the steeple off and the pile that was there.
And some of the “Chauds” come up and
they blew the locks off the vestry and
ran through the church, up the steeple and
all they found up there was a couple
of shell casings; no corpse, no nothing
so they weren’t sure whether the guy
got away or if he was in the pile of rubble and
whether it was a German or
a sympathizer because there
were sympathizers there and they
had been flushed out of various places.
The civilians, they weren’t given a niche,
they were just “pst”, that was it but the
Germans, of course, were taken prisoner.
But anyway, we never knew what was there
until the 40th anniversary when I went back.
I was able to unravel the mystery and
I had two buddies from the unit and
I called them up and I said, “I’ve found out!”
And when I went up there with the bus and
had asked the (inaudible) I said,
“Were you here in 1940?”
to an interpreter because
my French was “un petit peu.”
And he said, “Yes.” “Well, were you
here when they blew the steeple?”
“No.” He ran away when the fighting started.
“Did you come back after the war in 1945?”
“Yes!” “You saw the pile of rubble?” “Ya.”
“What was there when they took it off?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t here!”
And there was a little woman standing
listening to all of this, she says, “I was here!”
Now she was 59 or something or 49, whatever it was.
She was 10 years old, that was it, so she was 50.
And she said, “My father was the mayor and
when they took up all the rubble they
found a dead German.”
And he was interred in the graveyard there and
disinterred when the Germans Graves Commission
came down after the war to find their casualties
and so I was able to clarify that,
clear up that mess.