Alan Appleby
Tank commander who acted as a decoy to draw enemy fire and endured a 450-mile forced march
ALAN APPLEBY, who has died on his 99th birthday, was a section commander during the defence of Boulogne in 1940; commander of the lead tank in his squadron during the Guards Armoured Division’s advance through north-west Europe in 1944; and a survivor of the 430-mile forced march from Stalag 344 in 1945.
Richard Alan Appleby, always known as Alan, was born at Godalming on June 24 1918, one of eight children. Both his father and his grandfather had served in the Coldstream Guards. At 15, he enlisted as a drummer boy.
Boy soldiers were spared the Guards Depot at Caterham; accordingly, Appleby was sent to 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards at Chelsea Barracks, where he became a flautist in the Corps of Drums, as well as developing into a combative bantamweight boxer. Every moment was regimented; there was even a drill decreeing that drummer boys were to sleep lying on their right.
He remained with the 3rd Battalion when it moved to Egypt, but in mid-1939 responded to a call for volunteers for the 2nd Battalion Welsh Guards, then being formed, because he “wanted to get home”.
The following May he was a member of a composite Irish-welsh Guards battalion sent to The Hague to rescue the Dutch royal family. A week later, on May 21 1940, with the Wehrmacht closing in on the Channel ports, 20th Guards Brigade – comprising 2nd Battalion Welsh Guards and 2nd Battalion Irish Guards – was despatched to Boulogne, with orders to defend it “to the last man, the last round”.
The Brigade disembarked in the early hours of May 22. In the next 48 hours, successive attacks were repelled, despite crippling deficiencies of equipment. The corps of drums, in an ack-ack role, was deployed on high ground to the north-east of Boulogne; its solitary anti-tank gun was entrusted to Appleby, by then a lance corporal. On May 24, as the Germans closed in, the platoon commander gave the order: “Fix bayonets. The tanks are coming.” The men, Appleby recalled, did not flinch.
The survival – of some of them – was made possible when Whitehall sanctioned the issuing of the more pragmatic order of “every man for himself ”. Appleby was one of those who made it to the harbour. Despite the thundering of the Royal Navy’s 4.7in guns, he was asleep as soon as he lay down on deck. He was mentioned in despatches.
By the time the 2nd Battalion returned to France as Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion for the Guards Armoured Division in June 1944, Appleby was a lance-sergeant, commanding the lead tank in his squadron. It was a certainty, recalled a fellow tank commander, Derrick Edwards, that the lead tank in any squadron would be hit. During the advance from Normandy into Belgium, Appleby and his crew survived the destruction of three Cromwell tanks, and were among the first – the very first, Appleby believed – into Brussels on September 3, where the citizenry greeted their liberators in gratifyingly uninhibited manner.
Days later, 1st and 2nd Battalions Welsh Guards were engaged 60 miles further east in a chaotic and brutal battle for the village of Hechtel, heavily defended by 1st Hermann Göring Regiment and 10th (Gramsel) Parachute Regiment, the latter a composite of experienced troops and Hitler Youth convinced that they would be shot if captured. On September 9, Appleby’s squadron commander, Nigel Fisher (later Sir Nigel Fisher, MP), ordered him to take his tank forward down an arrowstraight road to a crossroads – “as a decoy”. Appleby asked for permission to finish breakfast; it was granted.
He never doubted the outcome. Minutes after reaching the crossroads, the Cromwell was hit by an 88mm. Yet again the crew survived, bailing out and scrambling their way to a barn as Appleby shot a pursuing German. But by the end of the day they had been captured and separated. Appleby was locked in a cattle truck overloaded with more than 60 others. It rattled off. In the days that followed, the door was occasionally opened and a bucket of water placed inside. On the fourth day, Appleby heard the command: “Englander aus!” Only then did he realise that he had been the solitary Englishman aboard.
Entrusted to an elderly German guard, he marched hundreds of miles, from one prison camp to the next, including Ravensbruck; the sight of women and children pressing against the wire would remain with him for life. When his German escort broke down, Appleby carried his kit for him, until, eventually, he was taken in at Stalag 344 at Lamsdorf, Poland.
That winter, the Pows survived on “rubbish and grass”, occasionally supplemented by guard dog.
In January 1945, the Long March began. Initially, nights were spent in barns. Some Pows attempted to hide in hayricks before daybreak. The Germans responded by incinerating the buildings, shooting Pows as they emerged. Later, the men slept in the open, often in thick snow. Many froze to death. Others were killed when strafed by the RAF, which mistook the column for German reinforcements heading west.
Further deaths followed liberation by the Americans, who fed the prisoners doughnuts. Appleby tried in vain to intervene. “The men hadn’t eaten for months; it killed them,” he recalled in an interview for a forthcoming documentary film, Heart of The Dragon – The Welsh Guards at War. He limited himself to liquid and sauerkraut – with one exception. Knocking on the door of a house, he was let in by a young woman who fed him fried bread, bacon and egg. As he ate, he noticed a piano. An accomplished pianist – courtesy of lessons his mother had paid half-acrown a week for – Appleby asked if he could play. The woman and her daughter watched as he played Liszt’s Liebestraum.
Flown home weighing six stone, Appleby was recuperating in hospital when he received a letter announcing that he had been awarded the Military Medal for his courage at Hechtel; another contained an award of £75; a third was from Nigel Fisher. “I hated having to ask you to do it,” wrote Fisher, “but the way you took it was magnificent.” Appleby, added Fisher, had been “the first and last tank commander who ever actually reported himself as hit before bailing out.”
Declining the offer of promotion to Drum Major, Alan Appleby left the Army, training as a bricklayer before establishing his own building firm. A man of unquenchable public spirit, as well as stoicism and strength, he was also variously a scoutmaster, youth leader, a teacher at a school for young offenders and, after moving to the Isle of Wight in the 1980s, a full-time instructor in the island’s prisons.
In 2009 he returned to Hechtel for the 65th anniversary of its liberation. Memories of barbarity recurred every night throughout his life. But he bore the German people as a whole no ill, remarking that he had met many who were good.
His first wife, Christine (née Gundry), whom he married in 1941, died in 1987. In 1990 he married Lillian Lear (née Bowman). She survives him, along with three of his sons (another predeceased him), his daughter, and a stepson and stepdaughter.
Alan Appleby, born June 24 1918, died June 24 2017