WW2 Interest.- Manuscript Journal

WW2 Interest.- Manuscript Journal

Manuscript journal compiled by Maurice Weston Brown, Engineering Draughtsman at the outbreak of WW2 and then enlisted in the 1st Support Group Company, Royal Army Service Corps, part of the 1st Armoured Division. The journal covers the years from 1940 to 1945 and providing a first-hand account of the wartime events he was directly involved in, starting with the final part of the evacuation from Northern France in May 1940 ("Moved off at 9am. Long colums of refugees, a pitiful sight, of all ages crowd thre roads making progress at time slow. Many are on foot with hand carts or prams for their few possessions. Others are in every sort and shape of farm cart. Many have been travelling for foruteen days and many have been machine machine gunned on the way", 23 May 1940; "We seem very remote from the general war situation and hear very little news. Most days we are preoccupied with vehicle repairs and inspections ect. Things very active in the air these days", 3 June 1940; "Something very bid is in the wind. You can smel and feel it!!...The air is simply alive with rumours. They seem to be evacuating all British troops from France as quickly as possible. Have the French really collapsed? is the question everybody is asking" 16 June 1940). Later in 1941 Brown's division was dispatched to Egypt via Cape Town and Aden and arrived in Alexandria on December 6th. They took subsequently part in the battle of Torbruk and fell into German hands ("At last at about 5 o’clock after 10 hours of practically continuous shelling German tanks and armoured corps entered our location and we were taken prisoners. However the Germans treated us with good consideration and I saw several acts of kindness and very little of the snarling Nazi I had been led to expect" 20 June 1942). After a few days in a camp near Benghazi, Brown and the other prisoners were taken to Naples and then passed through Rome ("Right from the moment we left Naples, the scenery was spectacular and lovely, reminding me very much of Switzerland. We had a grand view of Vesuvius with its plume of smoke, then followed miles of glorious green fields and woods, a real thrill after so long up in the desert…Later, just as the sun was setting, we passed right through the centre of Rome itself, with St Peter standing out very clearly", 5 August 1942) en route to a camp located in Colle di Compito, near the city of Lucca (camp marked P.G. 60). They were later sent to another camp by Macerata (P.G. 53). The only positive note in their situation was the delivery of Red Cross parcels and occasional mail, but for the most Brown wrote about the constant feeling of hunger and the life inside the camp. On March 16th 1943 he wrote "I haven’t mentioned war news for a long while, I hardly think it worthwhile since it comes solely from enemy sources, and is obviously mostly propaganda for Italian consumption. We get it pretty regularly and reading between the lines it’s very encouraging. I shall like to hear that N. Africa has been completely cleared up though. The Russians seem to be doing pretty well on all sectors..this blasted war seems no nearer its end than it did 12 months ago"; then again on May 14th "N. Africa finished! At last the good news, and from the official Italian and German news bulletin too! One more step nearer the end of this blasted war. ROLL ON THAT BOAT!! LET ME GET HOME!!! ". The rumours of Mussolini's fall was received with great joy and hope "Musso has either flown or being thrown out? The fascist party is finite as from midnight tonight? Rome has had another huge air raid and Sicily is in our hands? And last but not least, King Emanuell and Marshall Badoglio have taken over power in Italy? What a day!! I wonder how much will prove to be true" and when news of the armistice reached them they dared to hope the war was finished "We all hardly dared to believe it last night but now it is slowly soaking in we are FREE MEN AGAIN…The armistice was signed in Sicily on the 3rd of September, the 1st day of the invasion of Italy!!!", 9 September 1943. Their hopes were heartbreakingly crashed when they were made to leave the camp and travel to Germany, where they stopped at camp known as Stalag IV.B, near the town of Mühlberg ("What a hell of a mixed camp this is, there are British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Russians, French, Dutch and Greeks and probably others I haven’t met yet", 24 September 1943). On October 6th they were transferred to a billet in the small village of Klostermansfeld and were subsequently employed to work on the rail tracks. For the following months Brown mostly lamented the lack of news regarding the war ("News is still very scarce, although there are various rumours here and there, all very vague. The Crimea is supposed to be now entirely in Russian hands again. Also we are supposed to have started a new offensive in Italy", 11 May 1944) but he frequently mentioned air raids over Germany ("What a sight, this is the first time I have seen the result of blanket bombing…what a sight of destruction", in Leipzig, 31 May 1944). News of the D-Day reached them on June 7th ("We got the first whisper of something being on last night. And now it seems certain that the invasion has really started. Oh boy, roll on, I only pray it won’t last long") and got better a week later ("The invasion appears to be all along the coast between Cherbourg and Le Havre- Another wave of rumours have just come in , I don’t know where from!! We now hold a front of 300 Kilometres in France and have advance to a depth of 80 Kilometres! Also they say we are now 80 k north of Rome!! And that the Russians have also started a new offensive!!!"). In the last months of the war he wrote about the lack of updates and the heart-breaking sights of wounded soldiers ("the sight we saw mid day depressed us all and made us feel physically sick in its ghastly misery, pain and uselessness. A whole long train of wounded straight from the east front. Broken limbs and bodies in plasters and hungry faces everywhere…wonder what they think of ‘Fight, fight to the last man?!! And all for what? For gods sake roll on the end”, 20 February 1945). Finally, on April 13th 1945, the day Brown and his companions had been waiting for arrived. They spotted lorries and trunks on the horizon “At least we know, it’s the yanks, they are here. We are just going out to speak to them…10 pm well we can hardly believe it, all seem unreal…it was a strange feeling walking out in the village, free and without the eternal sentry…the majority were very friendly and showed they were only too glad it was all over at long last". Things moved pretty quickly afterwards "Colossal news, we shall probably be moved within 48 hours and may be back in Blighty within 5 days. Of course we can hardly believe it, even though it comes from a Major especially sent for the job", 14 April 1945. They were flown to England two days later; the journal is mostly written in small notepads and diaries, with a few loose pages, signs of handling wear and toning to paper; the lot also includes: five loose original pencil views of the POW camp near Macerata, a typed transcription of the journal, a scrap album featuring photographs of Maurice Brown durng the war (including some in Egypt), handdrawn maps of Egypt and the Mediterranean, content lists of the parcels delivered by the Red Cross Society when Brown was in the Italian camps, Brown's identity tag at Stalag IV B, one 'Surrender' leaflet dropped by allied planes over Germany in spring 1945 and other wartime ephemera (qty)

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