Monty’s primary objective was the Elbe. He directed Second Army and Ninth US Army towards, respectively, the stretches of the river from Hamburg to Wittenberge and Wittenberge to Magdeburg. Second Canadian Army was bolstered by the arrival from Italy of I Canadian Corps of two divisions, to which was added 49 Division. As they had been ever since the breakout from Normandy, the Canadians were responsible for the left flank, which for this phase meant clearing the north-east of the Netherlands and the North Sea coast and its hinterland from the Zuider Zee to the estuary of the Elbe.
Good progress was made by 21st Army Group, although Second Army encountered pockets of stubborn resistance along the Dortmund–Ems Canal. Ninth US Army was particularly successful, pushing forward towards Hanover and making contact on its right on 1 April with First US Army at Lippstadt, thereby completing the encirclement of the Ruhr.
Monty was already thinking beyond the Elbe, as a signal to Eisenhower and Brooke on 27 March indicated:
My Tactical Headquarters moves to an area 1033 Northwest of Bonninghardt on Thursday 29th March. Thereafter the axis on which my Tactical Headquarters will move will be WESSEL – MUNSTER – WIEDENBRUCK – HERFORD – HANNOVER – thence via the Autobahn to Berlin I hope.1
It was not to be. In a series of extraordinary decisions, which had implications not only for the advance itself but also for the post-war history of Europe, the whole emphasis of the campaign moved in a different direction. Eisenhower decided to reduce the Ruhr, which Monty felt should be masked but otherwise ignored, to send 6th US Army Group to tackle the ‘National Redoubt’ in the Alps, which turned out to be totally fictitious, and to direct the bulk of 12th US Army Group on Leipzig. Without informing the Combined Chiefs of Staff, he signalled his intentions to Stalin, making it quite clear to the Soviet leader that he was leaving Berlin to the Russians. Although it had already been decided that the German capital would be in the Russian Sector after the war, any chance of using its possession to strengthen the Western Allies’ hand had now been lost.
In order to achieve his strategy, Eisenhower removed Ninth US Army from 21st Army Group on 4 April and placed it once more under Bradley, who had been lobbying intensively for its return since mid-January. Monty, who was informed of the decision on 28 March, was predictably furious. Simpson had done very well under his command and Monty was relying on him to provide the necessary weight for 21st Army Group to get to the Elbe. As usual, Freddie was deployed to put the case for retaining Ninth US Army to SHAEF, using his close relationship with Bedell Smith. His efforts were in vain, although it was agreed that Simpson should protect Monty’s flank.
Freddie was now exhausted by the constant struggle to advance Monty’s arguments in the face of determined opposition, whilst at the same time retaining Allied harmony. His staff had for some time been deeply worried by his state of health. His memory was not always accurate and his Military Assistant, Bill Bovill, was instructed by Freddie’s senior subordinates to act as a ‘remembrancer’, keeping track of his decisions and instructions. Brigadier Bulmer, a specialist on the medical staff, reported his concerns to Monty, who summoned Freddie to see him. Freddie agreed that he was badly in need of a rest, but argued that, at this late stage of the war, it was vital for him to stay on. After much discussion, it was agreed that he should remain, but that he should be treated with drugs to help him to sleep and should take a complete rest in Brussels every two to three weeks, where he would be completely sedated. If the war did not end within three months, he would be relieved of his appointment. Whilst the drugs worked reasonably satisfactorily, the enforced rest in Brussels did not. Freddie carried on much as before, with Bovill keeping a very close eye on him.
One issue which had been taking up a significant amount of Freddie’s time was North-West Holland, which Monty, for sound reasons, had decided was not a military objective. Ever since MARKET GARDEN, when the Dutch unions came out on strike, temporarily paralysing transportation in the country, there had been a severe shortage of food supplies and this had translated into famine over the winter. Civil Affairs and the Q branch had done what they could to prepare for liberation, but were constantly distracted by other issues. Graham suggested that a District Headquarters, responsible to 21st Army Group and acting in conjunction with the Dutch Government and the SHAEF Mission, should be set up to handle the situation, a proposal to which the War Office agreed. Sandy Galloway, who had been the first BGS of Eighth Army, was appointed to command the new Netherlands District, relieving Main HQ of the direct responsibility for stockpiling food, fuel and other essential supplies and assembling the transport – road, rail, canal, sea and air – which would be required to distribute them as soon as circumstances permitted.
It probably did not help Freddie that Main was temporarily disrupted by its first move since arriving in Brussels in the previous September. Now that 21st Army Group was advancing increasingly rapidly, the Belgian capital became too distant for driving to and from Tac to be a practical proposition, and it was vital to get closer. The relocation was first considered in early February, with the intention of being installed in the new site by the date of the Rhine crossing, in order to avoid moving during a mobile battle. Eindhoven was initially chosen, but Llewellyn’s recce party reported that, whilst physically possible, it would require widespread dispersion, with 100 per cent billeting. It would also be necessary to clear several entire streets of more than 1,000 inhabitants, which it was felt might cause repercussions with the Dutch. Moreover, it was thought to be very difficult to accommodate both Main and the HQ of Second Tactical Air Force. The proposal was shelved and a new site was sought.
Further reconnaissance identified a location in the Ninth US Army sector between the Maas and the Rhine. This was the Johannistaler Institution, a lunatic asylum at Suchteln, north-west of Mönchengladbach, whose fifty or so buildings were spread over a wide area, but were able to accommodate both Main and Second TAF. There were as many as 6,000 staff and inmates to rehouse, which caused strong but unsuccessful representations to be made by the local Burgermeister, and the whole site needed to be disinfected, but it otherwise satisfied the criteria. The necessary work was carried out in time for the advanced party to move on 29 March, followed by the first echelon on 4 April and the second echelon on 6 April. It was much further forward than Eindhoven, let alone Brussels, but by this time Tac was already about 100 miles away.
Whilst most branches of Main HQ continued to work as before in the new location, this was no longer true of Civil Affairs and Military Government. Monty himself had been thinking about Military Government since the previous September, when it seemed for a brief period that 21st Army Group might be in Germany within weeks or even days. He was horrified to hear at that time of a proposal by the War Office to create a new organization, separate from the Military Government, to be called the Wehrkreis Control Mission,2 which would be responsible for disarming and disbanding the German armed forces. He understood that it would have a large staff and would be commanded by Major General Charles West, a former COSSAC planner and subsequently a staff officer at SHAEF, where he was thought to be in the anti-Monty camp. Monty wrote a strong letter to Grigg, disparaging West and proposing that the tasks should instead be carried out under the control of 21st Army Group through the normal chain of command.
In the event the Wehrkreis Control Mission was never formed, as it was decided that the administration of the British Zone after the defeat of Germany, including dealing with its armed forces, should be exercised entirely through static Corps Districts, under the control of a Zone HQ which would itself replace the Army Group HQ. The German civil administrative units – Provinzen, Länder, Regierungsbezirke and Kreise – would be retained and military government detachments would appoint and supervise local officials and run the country through them. Corps District boundaries would follow the administrative boundaries of one or more of the larger units. Until the end of hostilities, however, I Corps, which was not needed for active service after the end of 1944, was to establish the first such Corps District in the areas of Germany which progressively came under British control, reporting to 21st Army Group Main HQ. Civil Affairs was now delegated to the SHAEF Missions in the liberated countries, and the focus was shifted entirely to Military Government.
This in turn led to a change of leadership. Brigadier Robbins, the Deputy Chief Civil Affairs Officer, was succeeded on 17 March by Gerald Templer, a long-time favourite of Monty’s, who was designated Director of Civil Affairs and Military Government, the first part of the title being dropped before very long. The appointment was upgraded to the rank of major general, which put it on a par with the heads of other branches.
Templer had been a student of Monty’s at Staff College and had always been marked out by him for advancement. He served in 1940/41 as commander of an independent brigade in V Corps, of which he became BGS in succession to Simpson when Monty left. He was then swiftly promoted to divisional and corps command in Home Forces, before asking for demotion in order to be able to go on active service. Having led 56 Division in the early part of the Italian campaign, he was transferred to 6 Armoured Division, in command of which he was badly wounded. After convalescence in England, he was given a highly frustrating job in SOE before being summoned by Monty, who had characteristically followed his wartime career very closely.
Monty’s insistence on Templer’s appointment did not go down well with the War Office, who believed that Robbins had done an excellent job. Both Grigg and the Permanent Secretary, Sir Frederick Bovenschen, suspected that his relief was due to the animosity of Feilden, which may have been the case, given the often conflicting requirements of Civil Affairs and the Q Branch. One argument against his retention, however, was that Robbins was not a regular soldier, and the demand for one in the very different environment of administering a hostile territory in the aftermath of a war was compelling.
Templer, renowned for his incisiveness, was just the man for the job. Unlike Robbins he could speak to the corps commanders as an equal. ‘Bubbles’ Barker, who succeeded O’Connor at VIII Corps, had been a fellow student at Staff College, Horrocks had been his neighbouring brigadier in Home Forces and Kirkman, Monty’s onetime BRA in Eighth Army, who now relieved Crocker at I Corps, had been his corps commander in Italy. Templer immediately set about weeding out the weaker officers in his branch and replacing them with more suitable material, including George Baker, released from Staff Duties to take on a senior administrative role.3 This was just in time, as the front was moving forward fast and more and more areas were coming under British control.
Another consequence of the speed of the advance was that Tac found itself in the same situation that it had experienced in August and September 1944, when it scarcely had time to pause for breath at each new location. On 29 March it moved to a ridge near Bonninghardt, still some way back from the Rhine at Wesel, on ground which had been fought over in VERITABLE and GRENADE and was heavily mined. For these and other reasons, its ranks had been swollen by a detachment of engineers, who were to be employed in future to make sites safe. On the last day of March Tac crossed the Rhine by one of the great floating bridges and passed through Wesel to an escarpment above the village of Brunen, close to where Operation VARSITY had taken place. On 3 April it moved towards Münster and camped in an uncomfortable site north of Nottuln, a quarry which was flooded in parts but whose choice was dictated by the presence of a large tower on which to fix the No. 10 set’s transmitter.
There were now some changes to the Liaison staff. One of the originals, Dudley Bourhill, left and was replaced by Peter Earle. Earle, a regular officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, had caught Monty’s eye as Military Assistant to Archie Nye, the VCIGS. He had visited Monty in Normandy, both with Nye and as his emissary, and had also met him on his visits to the War Office. He was anxious for a more active role and Monty duly obliged. Monty also added to the number of LOs, which had been stuck at seven since some of the Americans had left in August. It was now increased to eight with the addition of John Sharp. Another regular, this time a gunner, Sharp had served in the BEF and with a field regiment in North Africa, where he had won the MC and bar. He had subsequently attended the wartime staff college course at Quetta.
As Ninth US Army was no longer under command, on 27 March Monty shifted Tac’s line of advance away from the axis proposed to Brooke and Eisenhower onto a more northerly course, so to be as close as possible to Dempsey’s Tac HQ. The next stop on 6 April was thus at Rheine, where the site was a recently evacuated and heavily bombed Luftwaffe camp. Bigland, still diligently maintaining contact between Monty and Bradley, now found that he was having to travel hundreds of miles by car and plane between Tac and Eagle Tac, which had relocated at Namur for the Rhine crossings, before moving back to Luxembourg and then on first to Wiesbaden and next to Bad Wildungen, near Kassel.
The advance continued inexorably. On the right of Second Army, VIII Corps experienced the least difficulty with the Dortmund–Ems Canal and made good progress past Osnabrück, crossing the River Weser at Minden and Stolzenau on 5 April and taking Celle and a bridgehead over the River Aller on 10 April. In spite of stiffening resistance it reached the Elbe on 19 April and cleared the bank along its sector over the next five days. XII Corps in the centre experienced some fierce fighting around Rheine, but its Weser crossing near Nienburg was almost unopposed. It took Soltau on 18 April and Harburg, on the Elbe opposite Hamburg, on 23 April. On the left, XXX Corps had been held up for the longest on the Dortmund–Ems Canal and continued to experience strong resistance as it approached Bremen. It was only on 26 April that the city was fully taken and the corps could advance towards Cuxhaven at the mouth of the Elbe.
In the meantime, First Canadian Army was also making good progress. II Canadian Corps, which had crossed the Rhine under Second Army, now reverted to its original parent, forcing its way up the east bank of the River Ijssel, thereby blocking the way to any German forces attempting to escape from the Netherlands between the Zuider Zee and the Lower Rhine. It was in Groningen by 16 April from where it moved towards the Weser at Oldenburg. With XXX Corps now past Bremen, it focused on capturing the ports of Emden and Wilhelmshaven. In the meantime, the newly arrived I Canadian Corps made an assault crossing of the Lower Rhine upstream from Arnhem, taking the town on 14 April, almost seven months after the beginning of the ill-fated Operation MARKET GARDEN. It reached the Zuider Zee on 18 April.
From the barracks at Rheine, one of its least appealing sites, Tac moved on 10 April nearly due east to one of the very best, Schloss Ostenwalde, between Osnabrück and Lübbecke. This attractive and comfortable seventeenth century country house was the home of Baron von Vincke, a cousin of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who was rapidly ejected to the local Gasthof. Unusually for a location when Tac was on the move, the building was used in preference to tents for the messes, and Monty himself was so enchanted by it that he decided then and there to have it as his HQ after the war had been won. It seemed to many to be an oasis in the middle of war, but it was only for four days, after which Tac was on the move again, to a site just west of the Weser at Nienburg. There it paused for a whole week near a water tower which did service simultaneously to host the No. 10 set transmitter dish and to supply the besieged inhabitants of Bremen with water. On 21 April Tac set off again, this time to settle around some farm buildings among cornfields north-west of Soltau.
One result of the swift advance was that a large number of German units found themselves isolated behind Allied lines. Many surrendered, but a few fought on. This was to have tragic consequences for Tac, which now found itself, in its urgency to get as far forward as possible, in the middle of a battle zone. The LOs were as busy as ever, with many having to travel by Auster to reach ever further flung formations, particularly in First Canadian Army. Peter Earle, who was responsible for VIII Corps, which was situated near Lüneburg, had been in an Auster which was written off landing at the corps airstrip on 19 April. Two days later he was to visit the corps again and this time elected to go by jeep. The safest route was to travel along the corps axis, which ran from Uelzen north to Lüneburg, but this meant first driving east from Soltau to Uelzen, nearly doubling the distance and making it very difficult for Earle to return in time to brief Monty. He therefore resolved to take a more direct, albeit also more risky route.
Just as he was about to leave, Earle was approached for a lift by John Poston, who had been allotted 11 Armoured Division. As the division was known to be resting, both men thought this a waste of time, but Earle suggested that they both go to VIII Corps HQ, where information on the division’s future employment should be readily available. Leaving Earle’s driver behind, they made the outward journey without serious incident.
At VIII Corps Earle met Barker, who explained his plans and also advised that another route, somewhat further south, was likely to be more satisfactory for the LOs’ return journey. At about 18.30 they were making good progress towards Soltau across some open heathland when shots were fired at them and they saw Germans ahead on both sides of the road. They both fired their Sten guns until they ran out of bullets, whereupon Earle, who was driving, was wounded in the arm. He aimed the jeep at the greatest threat, a machine gun on the right, but the vehicle overturned and both men were thrown out. Poston, lying on the ground with his hands above his head, was bayoneted to death and Earle was captured, but not before he had substantially erased his chinagraph board. He was taken to a German dressing station, from which he was rescued by British troops the following day. It was only then that he was able to send a signal to Dawnay reporting Poston’s death. Transferred to the casualty clearing station at Soltau, he was visited first by Ewart and Sweeny, telling them what had happened, and then by Monty, who pinned the ribbon of the Military Cross on his pyjama jacket.
Poston was the longest serving of all Monty’s junior staff, first as one of his two ADCs from Egypt to Italy and then as a LO. He was the unofficial leader of the LOs, the one who knew just how far to play Monty, and a swashbuckling character in his own right, even ‘liberating’ a German caravan, in which he lived with his pet dachshund. He was the Master of Ceremonies in the B Mess, which he kept well supplied with liquor and where he was a keen exponent of chemin de fer, and he worked just as hard as he played, being thought fearless by his fellow officers.
Monty was distraught. He remained in his caravan and hardly spoke for two days, refusing to see visitors. Sweeny and Bob Hunter recovered Poston’s body from a shallow grave at the ambush site and brought it back to Tac. The funeral at Soltau, at which Padre Tindal gave a moving address and Monty wept openly, was attended by a number of senior officers who flew up from Main HQ. Poston was buried with full military honours, including a guard of honour from his regiment, the 11th Hussars, which was serving nearby. The Prime Minister, who greatly admired Monty’s LOs, sent his condolences and Monty himself wrote an obituary in The Times, concluding with the words: ‘I was completely devoted to him and I feel very sad: something has definitely gone out of my life.’4
The German soldiers who had killed Poston and wounded Earle were part of a substantial regimental group, some 4,000 strong, which had been bypassed in the advance. Sergeant Kirby, billeted in a house some distance from Tac, was rung one night by the Officer Commanding the Defence Company and urged to get back within the perimeter immediately. The Defence Company and armoured cars formed a screen and all other personnel were armed and on full alert. An uneasy night was passed, during which tanks were heard passing nearby, but they failed to spot the camp and were wiped out by a brigade of 53 Division on the following day.
Three new officers replaced Poston and Earle. The first was Terry Coverdale, a major in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers who had served in Monty’s old 3 Division throughout the campaign and who joined whilst Tac was still at Soltau. On 28 April, however, Tac moved to its last wartime location, a windswept site on Lüneburg Heath, situated on a bluff with a magnificent view to the south, whose elevation was as usual dictated by the demands of the No. 10 set. It was there that the last two wartime LOs reported for duty.
Toby Wake, unlike the other new arrivals, already knew Monty and also had personal connections at Tac, as Dawnay was his brother-in-law and Henderson an old school friend, whilst he had been Carol Mather’s best man. He had served in the 9th Battalion of his regiment, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, at Gazala, and in the 1st Battalion from El Alamein to Tunis, winning the MC before being wounded a few days before the Axis surrender and repatriated to England.5 Shortly before the Battle of Mareth, he and his brother Peter, serving in the same battalion, were invited to join Monty and Henderson for a picnic lunch on a hill not far from the front line, where Monty explained graphically and, as it turned out, mistakenly, how he expected the battle to go. After his recovery, Wake attended both the Senior Officer’s School in Oxford and the wartime Staff College course at Camberley, before joining the 2nd Battalion of the KRRC as a reinforcement in Normandy, seeing a great deal of action there and in Holland and the Reichswald. He was then posted to Pip Roberts, GOC of 11 Armoured Division, as a GSO2 before being ordered to join Monty.
Richard O’Brien had been summoned before either Coverdale or Wake, but only arrived at Lüneburg after a long journey. He had come from Italy, where he was serving very happily with the Leicestershire Regiment when the call arrived, prior to which he had had a busy war in the Middle East, winning the DSO and MC. He later found out that he had been warmly recommended to Monty by Sandy Galloway, who had been impressed by O’Brien as his ADC when in command of 1 Armoured Division in 1943.
It was now vital for 21st Army to cross the Elbe and advance to the Baltic, both to cut off the remaining German forces in North-West Germany and to prevent a westward advance towards Denmark by the rapidly approaching Russians. For this operation Monty was reinforced by Ridgway’s XVIII US Airborne Corps of three divisions. VIII Corps forced a crossing on the night of 28/29 April and was followed to its right by the Americans on 30 April. Opposition was light in both sectors. While 11 Armoured Division entered Lübeck on the afternoon of 2 May, 6 Airborne Division had arrived in Wismar, some 40 miles to the east, that morning, only hours before the first Russian patrols were encountered. The Russians were permitted to enter the town in small parties, but prevented from advancing any further to the west. In the meantime, Hamburg was invested by XII Corps and the garrison commander surrendered the city on 3 May.
On the same day Dawnay received a phone call from ‘Spud’ Murphy, Bill Williams’s predecessor at Eighth Army and now the senior intelligence officer at Second Army, to say that a high-level German delegation from Field Marshal Busch, C-in-C North-West, had arrived at Dempsey’s HQ. He was instructed to send them on to Tac. Monty ordered a Union Jack to be erected on a flagpole and, when the party arrived, instructed that its members should stand at attention underneath it until he made his appearance. He immediately demanded to know who they were and what they wanted. They turned out to be Admiral von Friedeburg, the recently appointed C-in-C of the Kriegsmarine, Rear Admiral Wagner, his flag officer, Major General Kinsel, Busch’s Chief of Staff, and a Major Friedl.
With Ewart acting as interpreter, von Friedeburg explained that he had come to offer the surrender of all German forces in the North, including those facing the Russians in Mecklenberg. Monty replied that he had no authority to treat in respect of any force opposing the Russians, but would take the unconditional surrender of those in Holland, the Friesian Islands, Heligoland, Schleswig Holstein, Denmark and those parts of Germany west of the Elbe still under German control. If this did not happen, he would be happy to continue fighting and, rubbing home the point, he showed the Germans his dispositions on the map. Upon seeing the hopelessness of their situation, von Friedeburg broke down. He said that he was not empowered to agree on that basis, but that he and Friedl would return to Flensburg, the capital of Germany following Hitler’s death and the appointment of Grand Admiral Dönitz in his place, where he would recommend its acceptance to Dönitz and Field Marshal Keitel, Chief of Staff of the OKW.
Whilst Wagner and Kinsel remained at Tac, Warren and Ewart accompanied von Friedeburg and Friedl back to the German lines through Hamburg. On the following day, 4 May, Warren returned to the same spot to pick up the two officers, now accompanied by a third, Colonel Poleck, who had brought with him the German army, navy and air force ciphers. They were driven back to Tac, where Monty insisted on seeing von Friedeburg alone to satisfy himself that the Germans were complying fully with his demands. They then moved over to the tent to sign the surrender document, which would take effect at 05.00 on the following morning. The event, with Monty sitting on one side of the table, the Germans on the other, and Ewart standing behind Monty’s shoulder, was immaculately stage managed, although the initial surrender document produced failed to include the German naval forces in the area and had to be re-typed. The audience consisted of Tac staff, war correspondents and photographers, with two BBC microphones on the table. Neither Freddie nor any other member of the staff at Main was invited. Monty read out the surrender document, the Germans signed and then he, too, signed on behalf of Eisenhower. After almost eleven months, 21st Army Group’s campaign was at an end.
The war, however, was not quite over. On 5 May von Friedeburg was flown to SHAEF at Rheims, from where he signalled Keitel asking for permission to sign the instrument of unconditional surrender. The response was that this was to be carried out by Colonel General Jodl, Chief of Operations of the OKW, who was duly flown by Freddie from Tac to Rheims on the following day, which at least enabled Freddie to be present at the celebrations after the signing early on the morning of 7 May. The detailed terms of the surrender were communicated to Tac by SHAEF, with a request that they should be delivered by hand to Keitel, who was due to go to Berlin to sign once again for the benefit of the Russians on 8 May. They were taken to Flensburg and handed over personally by O’Brien, accompanied by the war correspondent Chester Wilmot, with Sergeant Kirby acting as interpreter.
Prior to that, Freddie had been handling the negotiations for the relief of the population of Holland. The Germans, led by Seyss-Inquart, the Reischskommissar of the Netherlands, and Colonel General Blaskowitz, the C-in-C, proved very difficult, but on 30 April, with Freddie and Galloway now joined by Bedell Smith and Prince Bernhard, agreement was reached, and on the following day Galloway’s trucks, trains and barges began to move into the occupied territory, whilst RAF and USAAF planes dropped in food.
By the end of the war Tac had more than doubled in size from its beginnings at Southwick Park and now numbered some 50 officers and 600 other ranks. It had 200 vehicles, a dozen dedicated aircraft and had travelled 1,100 miles since landing in Normandy. It now became a temporary centre of communications and the channel through which orders were transmitted to the German forces in the British sector, for which purpose a small German staff was set up in its own camp under Kinsel, who proved to be highly efficient. Freddie held a meeting of the senior staff there on 5 May before leaving for Rheims, to deal with the liberation of Denmark, the immediate policy for the fighting formations of 21st Army Group, the disarming of the Germans and the provision of food and medical supplies. Of those present, Belchem, Richardson, Williams and White had all been at Eighth Army’s Advanced HQ when Monty arrived.
Emotions at Tac ranged from relief to jubilation to utter weariness, but amidst the general celebration of victory there was one more tragedy to come. On 10 May, escorting a German admiral in a jeep to Kiel, Charles Sweeny was fatally injured in an accident. What made it worse was that he had very recently married, and his new wife wrote to Monty to ask if she could attend the funeral. In what Monty later called one of the hardest decisions of his life he refused to allow her to come, as it would set a precedent which he could not allow. As he had done for John Poston he wrote a moving tribute in The Times, which included these words:
It is with a heavy heart that I record the death of another member of my team of liaison officers, who was also a former A.D.C. – Charles Sweeny of the Royal Ulster Rifles … The loss of Charles is hard to bear … He became my A.D.C early in 1940 and was with me at Dunkirk. Charles was an orphan and possibly it was that fact that drew us close together; he knew the depth of my devotion to him because I had told him of it; he knew that he could call on anything from me, as if I was his father … He had a very strong character and was utterly incapable of any mean or underhand action; his sense of duty was highly developed, and his personal bravery was very great …
I loved this Irish boy and his memory will remain with me for all time.6