Fighting Brigadier

The Life of Brigadier James Hill DSO** MC

Peter Harclerode

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781526739186
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

In the 1930s James Hill was forced to leave the Army because he was under 26 when he married. Recalled to the colors, he won his MC with the BEF in 1940. He was one of the first to volunteer for airborne forces and became second-in-command of 1 PARA. He was in the thick of the expansion of Airborne forces in 1941-42 and took command of 1 PARA in North Africa, winning his first DSO. He converted 10th Bn The Essex Regiment to 9 PARA and later in 1943 took command of 3 Parachute Brigade, playing a major role in the D-Day Landings. Wounded twice, his Brigade captured the key Merville Battery.The Brigade recovered to England in September 1944 before returning to Europe to contain the German winter Bulge offensive. In March 1945 his Brigade played a key role in the Rhine Crossing and raced east to block the Russian advance on Denmark.Post war Brigadier Hill was a leading figure in the Parachute Regiment and revered by fellow Paras. He died in 2006.

Chapter 1

Stanley James Ledger Hill was born on 14 March 1911, the son of Major General Walter Pitts Hendy Hill who, himself born in 1877, was the eldest son of a family of twelve children. The custom in those days was that eldest sons inherited the estate and the family business, while their younger male siblings entered the Church or the armed forces, or were despatched to seek their fortunes in the far-flung colonies of the Empire. The Hill family was no exception, except that none of its younger sons opted for the Church.

Walter and his three younger brothers were all educated at Marlborough College. Their father was a firm believer in country pursuits, however, and during the holidays engaged a tutor whose principal task was to teach them to ride, hunt, shoot and fish. His duties were made that much easier because the upper reaches of the River Avon ran through the family estate of Bulford Manor, which included a very considerable sheep farm stretching from Bulford through Netheravon in the north, away to Tidworth in the east.

On leaving Marlborough, Walter Hill was sent to the Agricultural College at Cirencester while his brothers Willy and Douglas entered the Army, subsequently being commissioned into the 5th Royal Irish Lancers and 7th Queen’s Own Hussars respectively. The fourth brother, Harold, meanwhile was despatched to the highlands of Kenya.

The advent of the Boer War and the expropriation of the family estate by an Act of Parliament in 1898, to incorporate it into what would become familiar to future generations of soldiers as the Salisbury Plain Training Area, however, put paid to Walter’s aspirations to become a farmer and thus he too became a soldier, initially joining the Militia and subsequently the Regular Army in which he was commissioned into The Royal Fusiliers in 1900. He served with distinction in the Boer War, in which his brother Willy was killed at Ladysmith, and thereafter in the First World War; in 1916 he was awarded the DSO and the following year was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Although only some three years old at the time, James Hill was always able to recall very clearly the outbreak of the First World War:

My father was serving as an instructor at the Royal Military College Sandhurst and I remember welcoming him outside the front door of our home Belgony, a house situated near the top of the hill in Camberley. Over 6 feet tall with a dark, clipped moustache and a slim upright figure, he wore a well-cut uniform and his Sam Browne belt shone magnificently. It was a lovely sunny day and, having ridden over from the College at lunchtime, he jumped off his horse with the words, ‘We are now at war with Germany.’ My childish mind registered that something important had occurred which much disturbed my parents. My father, who had been Adjutant of the 4th Battalion The Royal Fusiliers before being posted to Sandhurst, desperately wanted to rejoin his battalion which sailed for France in the van of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). No posting of instructors from Sandhurst was permitted, however, until one year later at the end of the summer term of 1915, due to the importance attached to the training of young officers for the BEF.

This breathing space enabled my parents to arrange for my mother, my sister Bridget, who had been born a year earlier, and me, now aged 4, to move to Lincolnshire. There, together with our nanny, Nurse Kiel, we were ensconced with my mother’s parents, George and Gertrude Sandars, who lived at Scampton House, situated some 7 miles to the north of Lincoln where my grandfather farmed some 2,000 acres. His two sons, my uncles, both served in The Royal Fusiliers. The elder of the two, Sam, commanded the 8th Battalion in France where he won the DSO and MC before being wounded in action in 1918 and losing his right leg. My grandmother, Gertrude, served in the Red Cross and would do so again during the Second World War, being awarded the OBE at the age of 80 for her services in both wars.

The war years were happy ones for James and his sister. Their grandparents’ home was a large red-brick Georgian house covered by creeper and a slate roof, surrounded by parkland and approached by a drive lined with flowering chestnuts. To the right-hand side of the front gate stood the village church and to the left three pairs of semi-detached redbrick farm cottages occupied by farm-hands whose wives worked as members of the staff of seven in Scampton House. At the rear of the house were the stables and garage to which was attached a small cottage in which lived the chauffeur, whose importance was enhanced by the fact that he was in charge of only the second car to be licensed in all of Lincolnshire.

It was a close-knit community that appeared a happy one to James and his sister, but as the war years dragged on the staff of Scampton House became depleted. Gertrude Sandars, who appeared to her small grandson to be a replica of Queen Mary in both stature and demeanour, ruled her household by example and single-mindedness; for five days a week, summer and winter, she bicycled 7 miles into Lincoln and back to work for the Red Cross at the Great Northern Hospital.

Meanwhile George Sandars, assisted by forty-four men, continued to run his two farms. He attached much importance to retaining his workforce year in and year out, and thus both farms were maintained in immaculate condition as his grandson later recalled:

Mechanisation at the outbreak of war was in its infancy. The maintenance of the buildings and machinery was carried out in the winter, together with the hand-clipping of all the hedgerows and cleaning of the ditches. As the land surrounding the home farm was mostly clay, most hedges had a ditch to ensure good drainage. The men who carried out the hedging and ditching were divided into teams of four and were responsible for the same hedges year after year. As a result the hedgerow trees – elm, oak and ash – were cosseted and encouraged, and woe betide the man with a slipshod blade who cut back a ‘good young ’un’. In some fields the blackthorn or hawthorn hedges were encouraged as protection for sheep and cattle and after seven years or so, by the time they had grown long and straggly, were termed ‘bullfinches’ by the hunting fraternity because the small birds of that name thrived on their berries. It took a good horse with a stout heart and a courageous rider to jump through them and clear the ditch on the far side.

All this, with the changing seasons and the arrival of steam engines to drive the threshing machines – along with the great shire horses, the pedigree herd of Lincoln Red cattle (their grandfather’s pride and joy), the stock yard and granaries – provided a hinterland full of curiosity and great adventure for young James and his sister.

One day in 1915, however, this picture changed suddenly when George Sandars walked down the drive of Scampton House, through the village and up a ridge some 200 feet high which ran from Lincoln Cathedral northwards for some 20 miles. Situated on the top of this ridge was one of his two farms, comprising lighter land that was ideal for raising sheep and growing grain. To his dismay, however, instead of encountering his shepherd he discovered an army of workmen who had, unbeknownst to him, taken over the farm buildings that morning with orders to construct an airfield – to be called Scampton Aerodrome – which was to be the home of the Royal Canadian Flying Corps. As James Hill would later comment:

There was only one thing for a gentleman and farmer to do in such circumstances and that was to blow his top. My grandfather had a hot temper and proceeded to let off much steam, but all to no avail. It was not so much the expropriation by the government of a top-ranking food-producing farm that he had nurtured over the years that rankled, rather the fact that it had been carried out without notification, consultation or agreement! The highly successful combination of two farms, one with light land and the other with heavy, had been destroyed by the war and thus some hard thinking and rebalancing became a matter of some urgency for my grandfather. For my part, however, the arrival of the aeroplane left almost nothing to be desired.

Throughout his childhood, young James was brought up according to the ideals and standards in which his parents and grandparents believed firmly and maintained with a firm discipline, these embracing a loyalty to King and Country, the family unit and the British Empire. He and his sister were taught to respect their seniors who ranged from the great political officers of state, judges, admirals and generals to teachers, the village postmistress, the parson and the gamekeeper. All were to be held in much esteem and their integrity was not to be doubted.

In 1919, immediately after his eighth birthday, James was packed off to boarding school at Wellesley House, Broadstairs, on the coast of Kent, returning to Scampton House for the holidays. Five years later, in September 1924, he went on to his father’s old school, Marlborough College in Wiltshire, where by his own admission he did not excel academically but shone in other areas of prowess, notably in athletics and in the Officers Training Corps (OTC) in which he rose to the rank of senior under officer. In later years, he described his time at Marlborough:

It was a hard school with no physical mercy. To say I enjoyed my time there would not be true, but it did me no harm. It was not an Army school and my background was different to most of the other boys. Nevertheless, I survived. I was always expected to go into the Army and I thought that would be my lot. I was lucky because as youths or teenagers we were, in this country, very proud of our great empire which was the largest the world had ever seen. Moreover, we had a king and queen whom we automatically loved and revered. These days, it seems to be the fashion to decry the establishment and status quo; in our day, however, very few of us would have queried politicians in power, regardless of party.

In 1929, he succeeded in entering the Royal Military College Sandhurst, passing out two years later second in the order of merit and winning the Sword of Honour and the Sword for Tactics. On 27 August 1931, he was commissioned into The Royal Fusiliers, of which his father was appointed Colonel of the Regiment two years later.

Second Lieutenant Hill was posted to the 2nd Battalion, which he joined as a platoon commander in a rifle company. He took to his duties like a duck to water and revelled in the comradeship and friendship that existed in the Regiment, and in the opportunities that were offered to him and his fellow young officers.

This early part of his military career, however, would prove to be somewhat brief. Hill was courting a young woman, Denys Gunter-Jones, whom he had known for six years; very much in love, they both naturally wished to marry. There was, however, an obstacle to their doing so as he later recounted:

My father had issued an edict that no officer in the regiment would marry under the age of 28 as there were not enough officers to participate in games and other extra-curricular activities with our soldiers. I felt, however, that I could wait no longer and, of course, being the son of the Colonel of the Regiment, knew full well that he could not break his rule just for me. I therefore left the Army in 1936 and transferred to the Supplementary Reserve of Officers.

Hill and Denys were married the following year. In the meantime, he had joined J.R. Wood, the family business of coal distributors which owned a fleet of fourteen small vessels in which it shipped coal and other commodities from the north of England to the south, where it owned a number of wharves along the south coast. During the following two years, he applied himself assiduously to his new roles as businessman and husband. In 1939, however, the clouds of war gathered once more over Europe when an increasingly belligerent Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September. Two days later Britain, together with France, Australia and New Zealand, declared war on Germany and shortly afterwards Hill was recalled to the Colours.

Chapter 2

Having rejoined the 2nd Battalion The Royal Fusiliers in September 1939, Hill was despatched to France in command of the Battalion’s advance party. Prior to his departure, his mother sent for him and said, ‘James, if you are going to survive this war, you have got to learn to harden your heart.’ It was advice that he would remember and heed well throughout the following years.

Christmas 1939 found him commanding a platoon, as he later wrote in an account of his experiences in France in 1940:

On Christmas Day 1939, I found myself commanding an outpost platoon of the 2nd Battalion of The Royal Fusiliers in the ligne de contact of the Maginot Line south-east of Metz during the coldest winter for forty years. Motor transport was impracticable and we were thus forced to rely on horses and mules. The fort covering us was a superb piece of military engineering, but the soldiers manning it appeared to have been poured into gumboots and imbued with what can only be described as the ‘Maginot Spirit’.

Two days earlier, a Fortnum & Mason hamper addressed to me had arrived by horse transport. My company commander had deemed it reckless to expose such a hamper to an outpost and had said that company headquarters should hold it until the great day. His kind offer caused me considerable anxiety! However, at about midday I was summoned to company headquarters, which were located in the stationmaster’s house of a disused railway station. Before entering the house I stopped to wish a happy Christmas to the fusilier on anti-aircraft duty who was manning a Lewis gun that was mounted on a tripod just outside.

I was opening my hamper as the clock struck twelve midday when suddenly my high expectations and tranquillity disappeared. Our brigade commander, a fiery man whom we feared but much respected, arrived full of bonhomie to wish his troops in the front line a happy Christmas.

All would have been well had not the only German reconnaissance aircraft that we had seen chosen that moment to zoom low over the railway embankment, just missing the chimney pots of company headquarters. The arrival of this first real-life target proved too much for our ack-ack fusilier, who, in his excitement to maintain fire and keep the enemy in his sights, tripped over the tripod, bringing the gun to the ground to the immediate danger of all around, including the brigadier. As the enemy plane sped out of sight, our by now irate brigadier stormed into our headquarters, his bonhomie having completely vanished, and we were all given a severe dressing-down for the laxity of our anti-aircraft defences in the front line. All in all, any vestiges of Christmas atmosphere swiftly evaporated!

Fortunately, however, the day was not entirely lost. We had suffered no casualties from either the enemy or our own ack-ack defences. The enraged brigade commander soon recovered his composure and sense of humour – the hamper with its considerable delicacies lay open on the table and this enabled us, with some diffidence, to offer him hospitality, which he graciously accepted. He left shortly thereafter with a warm feeling in his heart which he no doubt attributed to a successful mission restoring anti-aircraft proficiency and martial ardour. We felt that the hamper with its ports, Stilton cheese and Bath Oliver biscuits had more than contributed to that happy effect.

At ‘stand-to’ on that bitterly cold evening I sensed that we had received an appropriate gift for which to thank the Almighty on this his greatest of days.

On withdrawal we were addressed by Neville Chamberlain, complete in black Homburg, pinstripe suit and umbrella. He was excellent, the soldiers were grateful to him to a man for his much-maligned visit to Hitler, returning with the piece of paper on which was written ‘Peace in our time’, for it showed Hitler and many of his henchmen to be the complete bastards which they proved to be – this was not lost on the private soldier.

Hill was not to remain with his platoon and battalion for long, however, as in January 1940 he was posted as Staff Captain ‘A’ at the headquarters and command post of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France, Field Marshal the Lord Gort VC. As he later recalled:

The start of the battle proper found me as Staff Captain ‘A’, accompanied by thirty-two military policemen, crossing the Belgian border on 10 May and being followed by the 12th Lancers at midday. My responsibility under a splendid boss, Lieutenant Colonel Bert Herbert, was the organisation and control of refugees from Brussels, to assist the advance of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to the River Dyle and then regrettably, a week later, the start of the enforced withdrawal to the River Dendre.

During the following weeks, Hill found himself responsible for the organisation of refugee control from the front to Brussels and thence to Renaix, in order to ensure that the withdrawal of the BEF was unhindered; at one stage the traffic was such that it was proceeding down the main refugee route at an average rate of 4,500 vehicles per hour from 0500 hours until nightfall.

On 12 May, I went via the main refugee route to Courtrai to ensure that stops had been effectively imposed along the French border to prevent refugees filtering out of their reception area. I visited the mayor who promised to offer every possible assistance, as did the commander of the local gendarmerie. I passed through Courtrai aerodrome after it had been subjected to an attack by thirty enemy bombers. The hangars were still blazing and no attempt was being made to extinguish the fire. Dead horses were littering the ground and there were at least twenty-five Belgian aircraft on the aerodrome, most of which had been riddled with machine-gun fire from low-flying attacks or were burnt-out. Although the aerodrome was pitted with bomb craters, and the houses, it was surprising that more damage had not been done.

On 13 May, I returned to the command post, and it was then confirmed that I should make my headquarters at Nederbrakel and continue to be responsible for the direct routes from the front to Renaix. I returned to work that evening, and on the 14th went to the embassy in Brussels which was then closing down. I also made a tour of the main refugee routes leading into and out of Brussels. I liaised with the 7th Cheshires, 6th Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders and the 5th Royal Northumberland Fusiliers who were the three battalions on traffic control on the main northern, central and southern routes. Nederbrakel was bombed on two occasions but little damage was done. We were also machine-gunned by low-flying aircraft twice without effect. On one occasion, I saw about twenty German parachutists descending last thing at night in the vicinity of Ellezelles, but we were unable to locate them.

The withdrawal started on the 17th when the BEF was ordered to occupy the line of the River Senne running from Brussels. This, of course, created an additional flood of refugee traffic, which by this time comprised primarily horses and carts, pedestrians and cyclists. Hill visited Brussels that evening and arranged for all refugee traffic out of the city to be stopped at 1800 hours. He also went to Alost, to check the guards on the bridges which had been bombed heavily, before going on to Audenarde that evening. To add to his problems, he was informed that a French light mechanized division would be crossing our routes from north to south. As this formation took eight hours to pass a given point, and the Belgian Army was continuing to go flat out in the opposite direction to the sound of the guns, the prospects for the evening were far from good. It took all night getting the French through, delays being caused by drivers falling asleep in their vehicles, and by a medium tank which somehow became stuck broadside on in the only street through Nederbrakel.

On the night of the 18th, the second stage of the withdrawal from Brussels to the River Dendre was carried out, as he later described:

It was more than ever important now to keep the roads clear of refugees to enable the BEF to withdraw unhindered. That evening, together with the Commanding Officer of the 7th Cheshires, we went up to Ninove where there was an artillery duel in progress. On the morning of the 19th, we found ourselves in Nederbrakel with an 8-mile jam of traffic away to the west, and with a German reconnai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• List of Maps
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Select Bibliography
• Plate section