‘You talk to other servicemen, not your kids’
Brian Howarth, 95, joined the Royal Parachute Regiment as a 16-year-old pretending to be 17, in time for Germany’s last offensive on the Western Front
You’d think that getting shot in the bowels would be incredibly painful. “It’s not really,” says Brian Howarth. “You don’t feel anything, because it’s too quick for your nervous system to take anything in. But then it does start hurting after a time. We all carried morphine, you see,” he says, chuckling.
Howarth, a 95-year-old Yorkshireman, is describing the end of his war – being shot in Germany in spring 1944. He had joined up in 1943, a 16-year-old pretending to be 17. He joined the Royal Parachute Regiment in time for the Battle of the Bulge, in which Germany made a last, desperate gambit to keep hold of mainland Europe. Howarth joined the regiment’s 13th battalion in its painstaking effort to take a village near the château in Luxembourg in which they’d been billeted. German Tiger tanks knocked out the Allies’ Sherman tanks, and Howarth found himself holed up with two other soldiers and a terrified cow.
German soldiers were hidden in houses, which required hand-to-hand combat to get them out. A misstep would run the risk of mortaring. On the fourth morning, “Jerry vanished”.
On March 24, Howarth was parachuted into Germany. “It was pretty rough, the drop. A hell of a lot of casualties, I think 20 per cent.” Around him was chaos. “Dozens of planes shot down everywhere, and the gliders, they were on fire. Terrible sight. You get people who’ve jumped out of aeroplanes, because it’s on fire, and they land on their feet and their legs go up into their body.”
Howarth was one of a number of soldiers asked to find and secure a preselected farmhouse for brigade HQ. Three of them got there. “There were no Jerries in the house except a dead officer, who’d had a lump taken out of his head. What happened to him, I don’t know. Shrapnel?”
The brigade set off into Germany, meeting resistance in several villages. It was in one of these villages that Howarth was shot. He was taken back to England and spent VE Day at Nottingham General Hospital. “The nurses gave us mirrors so that we could look through the window in the mirror and see the goings-on in the courtyard!”
The time Howarth describes “doesn’t seem so long ago at all”. In the wake of the 75th anniversary, he’s been thinking about it more often. What does he think about during the two-minute silence? “You remember the people you knew,” he says.
Howarth, who is forthright and occasionally cynical, thinks that some of the Remembrance Day pomp and circumstance is done for show. People are more selfish than they used to be, he says. But he thinks the recording of war stories is important “if it teaches you something”, even though he never said much about it to his two sons while they were growing up. “You talk to other people who have been in the services, but not your children.”
Later I speak to his son, Tony, 73, who gives the same account. “Little snippets come out now and again,” he says, but these snippets amount to almost nothing. “I don’t even know where in Europe he got shot.”
Even knowing as little as he does about his father’s war, Tony never misses a Remembrance Day. “I find it emotional just thinking about what these lads went through.”
After the war, Howarth worked as a driver. From 1991 to 2003, and from 2015 till the present day, he has been a Chelsea Pensioner. The Royal Hospital Chelsea, which houses veterans over the age of 65, has been a “sanctuary”, he says. He and the other Pensioners don’t talk about the war much, he says. Judging by the playful comments the others make on seeing him all dressed up, they spend more time bantering about the present than dwelling on the past.