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Overview
Conscripted into the British Army in 1940, talented journalist Anthony Cotterell was never going to make a natural soldier. The Army eventually realised that his abilities lay elsewhere and he was transferred to a new department of the War Office where he could do what he did best – write. He would become one of the Army's top journalists, eventually covering the D-Day landings and the Normandy campaign. Anthony managed to blag himself a place in the parachute drop at Arnhem in September 1944 as part of Operation Market Garden. Captured, on 23 September he was one of a group of British prisoners wounded or killed when SS guards opened fire. Treated in a German dressing station with the other wounded, Anthony then vanished without trace, the only member of the party to do so. In Major Cotterell at Arnhem, Jennie Gray tells the story of Anthony's rise to journalistic fame in the Army, the Arnhem adventure, the SS war crime and the disappearance. She then recounts the dramatic and painful three-year search to find Anthony mounted by the War Crimes Group, the Search Bureau and the Netherlands War Crimes Commission, in tandem with the private search made by Anthony's devoted brother, Geoffrey Cotterell. Best-selling author Geoffrey has kindly co-operated in in the writing of this book. Complemented by Anthony's own words, official War Crime Group documentation and the letters about the search that Geoffrey wrote almost daily to his mother, this is a poignant story of one man lost in the tumult of war.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752481388 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 12 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Major Cotterell at Arnhem
A War Crime and a Mystery
By Jennie Gray
The History Press
Copyright © 2012 Jennie GrayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8138-8
CHAPTER 1
THE COTTERELL FAMILY
Anthony Cotterell was not a professional soldier, he was a conscript. Nor could the British Army turn him into a professional soldier once it owned him. First as an ordinary infantry private, then as a very junior infantry officer, he failed to fit the military roles for which the Army had trained him. He got the lowest pass grade achievable on his officer training course, and in subsequent postings proved something of an absent-minded liability to his commanding officers. But what he could do for the Army was write. By the time of the battle of Arnhem, he was one of the Army's top journalists, an ambitious young man becoming famous not only in military but in civilian circles. He went to Arnhem not to fight but to record the extraordinary airborne drop of some 11,000 soldiers in an operation which was confidently expected to end the war by Christmas. Instead, the operation turned into a colossal military disaster. Amongst the thousands of prisoners taken after the battle was Anthony.
The path which led Anthony to Brummen had begun on 9 March 1940, when his call-up papers arrived at his family home in Wanstead. It was the period of the Phoney War, when, despite a few alarms and excursions, life was continuing much as it had done pre-war. Anthony, then only 23, but already a feature writer on the Daily Express, had come home for the weekend as he always did. His family was small but close-knit, consisting of his parents, Graham and Mintie, and his only sibling, his younger brother, Geoffrey, who was trying to become a novelist.
On the morning that he received the call-up letter, Anthony's immediate preoccupation was how on earth he was going to break the dreadful news to his family. Although the letter had been expected for weeks, everyone was hoping against hope that it would be delayed for a very long time. Mintie was in a deep state of anxiety about both her sons, for Geoffrey was also on the verge of being called up. Like all her generation, Mintie remembered the slaughter of three-quarters of a million British men in the trenches of the Great War, and was haunted by the nightmare that it might all happen again.
She also had a less serious concern – she feared that army life would coarsen Anthony. This was not a view shared by his caustic Daily Express friends, who quipped that Anthony would coarsen the Army.
The Cotterells' family home, Ham Frith, stood opposite the Green at No. 1, Grove Park. Wanstead had once been a favourite haunt of Tudor grandees, attracted by the rich hunting in nearby Epping Forest, but their rural idyll had long ago been destroyed by the creeping growth of London. One of the few remnants of Wanstead's golden age, the Green was a meeting place for people with dogs. It was dotted about with a few ancient trees of which the locals were extremely proud: 'They regarded the trees as the innermost outskirts of Epping Forest and as a satisfactory substitute for the countryside.'
Ham Frith was a very large red-brick house, built around 1900, with something of the Arts and Crafts style in its architecture. Handsome, spacious and airy, it smelt evocatively of wood and polish. Several of its furnishings were of good solid oak, carved in the fashion of the Middle Ages as interpreted by commercial disciples of Burne-Jones and William Morris. There were brick fireplaces, leather armchairs, brass candlesticks, and bits of Arts and Crafts-style pottery which had come from Mintie's old family home in Plymouth. Because of the family's love of music, there were two grand pianos, one in the drawing room and one in the back room. A one-storey extension, with a wall composed almost entirely of windows, overlooked the large, beautifully kept garden.
Both Anthony's parents had made their own way in life. Mintie's family, once wealthy, had fallen on hard times after the early death of her father, and before her marriage she had worked occasionally as a singer and a pianist. Graham had come from a respectable but impoverished middle-class background. He too had been a pianist, good enough to contemplate turning professional, but instead had chosen the more prudent path of dentistry. His local surgery was in Ham Frith itself. With its treatment room, X-ray and telephone room, dental assistant's room and waiting room, the surgery took up about half of Ham Frith's ground floor. Graham also had a very prestigious practice in London, in Cavendish Place, between Regent Street and Harley Street. In addition, every Saturday he held a free surgery at Queen Mary's Hospital for the East End, in line with the medical tradition of services to the poor.
Graham had a very dry sense of humour. On Mintie's side of the family, there were two elderly spinster aunts named Pop and Mil, still living in Plymouth – 'dried-up, poor old things, who lived very simple lives'. After they died, someone observed of them piously, 'All they wanted was the air to breathe,' at which Graham snorted, 'And that's all they bloody well got!'
Attractive, sociable, cynical, and very generous, Graham was not short of female admirers. He and Mintie had a strong but occasionally tempestuous marriage owing to his tendency to have affairs. Mintie was a feminist in an unobtrusive way, who once told Anthony's cousin, Rosemary, that she should never support men against women. Strong-willed and passionate, Mintie had been ravishingly pretty in her youth and was still very elegant and charming, with dark hair and delicate features. Geoffrey took after Graham, but Anthony was very like his mother, a masculine version of her fine-boned feminine beauty. He and she shared the same birthday of 19 December. Although they had occasional clashes of will, they were very close to one another and she adored him.
Anthony's bedroom was at the front of the house, overlooking the Green. He had never really moved away from home and family, and the room had been preserved for him by his parents almost unchanged since boyhood days. The arrival of the call-up letter decisively ended the life he had led for the last six years, ever since he had abandoned his medical and dental studies at Guy's Hospital in order to follow his dream of becoming a journalist. He was now about to enter an entirely new way of life, one for which he was unfitted by tastes and character but which he was absolutely determined to make the best of. Weeks earlier, he had decided – with characteristic brio – that he would write a best-selling book about his conscript experiences. Now that the call-up letter had arrived, he immediately began to make notes for the book. It would be published ten months later under the title What! No Morning Tea?, and it would indeed become a best-seller.
What! No Morning Tea? begins at the very moment that Anthony received his call-up letter. The book's unconventional tone, which would be anathema to conventional military types, is immediately evident in the first few paragraphs:
I was just putting the lead on the dog when our maid Daisy gave me the letter.
I took one look and knew. This was it. And it was.
A railway voucher, a postal orders for 4s, and some orders.
For the first time since I left school someone was giving me orders which I couldn't walk out on or argue about. [...]
I really laughed. The whole thing was so awful, it was funny. Everything you had ever worked for was sent up in smoke by that halfpenny circular. Every hope, every plan.
Not that I had anything in particular against the Army. But I was comfortable and I didn't want to be disturbed. An unconscientious objector.
The call-up letter gave Anthony less than six days to put his affairs in order – he was to go into the Army on the following Friday. Needing to be alone to digest the appalling news, he took Sam, the dog, for his accustomed Saturday walk on the Green. He stayed out for more than an hour, walking about and thinking.
I wasn't thinking about the amputation of good-bye, or the blow of throwing up a life that was being quite kind to me. The thoughts jumping through my mind were whether I should take hair-cream and what time I should be free at nights. Then I couldn't get there by 12 noon. That would mean catching a train before 8am, and I never get up before 9. I must wire them to say I shall be arriving later.
My God, no. I must not wire them to say I should be arriving later. That day is done. From Friday on I get there just when they say. 'They' had come into my life again.
By the time he returned to Ham Frith, Anthony had decided not to say anything about the call-up letter but to carry on exactly as if nothing had happened. That way nobody would be upset, and he and the family could enjoy his last weekend at home. At some point during the following week, when he was back in London, he would ring his mother and tell her that he was going to Brighton at the weekend when in reality he would be going to his training camp. He would write and admit the truth only once he was in the Army. The sole exception to the news blackout would be Geoffrey.
Back at Ham Frith it was lunchtime.
Naturally the big topic at lunch that day was when I should be called up. The subject was quite unchangeable.
'It can't be long now,' said Mother. 'I don't know what I shall do when it does come. I don't know. I really don't know. I lie awake at nights shuddering at it. My God, I never thought this would ever have to happen again.'
'Ah well, there you are,' I said.
'Perhaps you'll get another month or two.'
'That's right,' I said.
It was just like every other Saturday afternoon.
After lunch, his uncle and aunt, Ivor and Jane Pool, arrived. Jane, usually known as Janie, had no children of her own, and was very close to her sister Mintie and her nephews. A brilliantly gifted pianist, Janie had once been a child virtuoso, but the death of her and Mintie's father had destroyed her hopes of a glittering musical career. As a young woman, Janie had earned money by playing in the small orchestra of a café popular with First World War naval officers. Amongst those officers had been Graham, who had at first found her rather attractive and paid her much attention until he met her much younger sister, Mintie. Besides being incredibly beautiful, Mintie had a captivating, bubbly, flirtatious manner. Inevitably Graham married her rather than the sweet-faced but older and more serious Janie.
Janie's marriage to Ivor took place almost on the rebound. Ivor was a soldier and extremely good-looking, but he was never to have Graham's success in life. After the war, he became an engineer for the Post Office, obsessed with inventing gadgets which were always going to make his fortune but never did. The marriage was disconnected and unhappy. Ivor grew profoundly jealous of Janie's musical brilliance and independence, and spoke of her with spiteful disparagement in front of other people. A tangential gleam of the situation between husband and wife appears in Anthony's description of the archetypal family weekend at Ham Frith:
Week-ends in our family have always been rather stylised affairs, with the same people being punctually unpunctual for the same things.
Aunt Jane and Uncle Ivor always came out on Saturday after lunch. They had hardly missed a weekend for twenty years. For twenty years Ivor had come in and said that Jane had ruined his afternoon by not being ready at the proper time. For twenty years Ivor had driven out from town like the fire brigade to get to his golf, and then when he got there, wasted half an hour playing games with the cat, the dog or the parrot. Different cats, different dogs, different parrots, but the same games.
This ordered way of life was on the verge of coming to an end. Not only were Anthony and Geoffrey about to be conscripted, but Janie was shortly to volunteer for war service with the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). Her marriage with Ivor would end, and she would spend the next five years on the road. In May 1945, ENSA would take her to Holland just after the Liberation, where she would make the first on the spot enquiries in Brummen about the shooting.
Writing of this last old-style weekend at Ham Frith before everything changed forever, Anthony gently mocked his own pedestrian ways.
My week-end routine was always the same. Golf lesson Saturday morning, pictures in the afternoon, take the dog for a walk after dinner, get up late Sunday morning, play golf with our pro, Allan Dailey, after lunch.
The funny people I met up in London used to tell me I ought to get away for a change at week-ends, but I enjoyed things my way. And at home I got things my way. I enjoyed it far more than having a change spending too much money on too many drinks somewhere in the country.
I tell all this not only for personal advertisement but to indicate the rather pedestrianly routined sort of young man I was on entering the army.
On this particular day, everything went off as it usually did. Ivor played for a while admiringly with the new kitten, Dietrich. Then he, Graham, and Graham's friend Mr Townley, went off to the nearby golf club as they always had done on Saturday afternoons, seemingly since time immemorial. As Graham was leaving, Mintie said 'Don't you be late back from that club,' knowing perfectly well that he would be. Anthony lit his Saturday afternoon cigar and settled down in a chair by the fire; Geoffrey played dance music on the gramophone. Time flew gently. At 4.00pm the two brothers, their mother and aunt had a cup of tea, and then drove to the pictures at Ilford as they had done for years on Saturday afternoons. Anthony found it sad to be doing it for the last time.
The picture ended at about 8.00pm. They emerged into a blacked-out night, lit only by the intermittent flaring glares where men were working on the tube railway extension.
Father and Ivor were home before us. We had a couple of drinks and then sat down to dinner. It was the last beef-steak pie before meat rationing. I went down to the cellar and got our Saturday night bottle of red wine.
We had our invariable argument about sex, about local personalities, and about how to run a house.
The argument, though heated, would not have been a serious one. The family were very close, and their tenderness for one another was expressed in their various pet-names. Mintie's Christian name was Millicent, but to Janie she was always Mintie whilst Janie to her was always Judy. Anthony was called 'The Count' when Mintie and Geoffrey discussed him, whereas when Mintie and Anthony discussed Geoffrey he was always 'Our Young Friend'. On an everyday basis, Anthony was 'Tone' and Geoffrey was 'Shubbs'. This latter name came from the first time that Anthony, then three years old, had seen his tiny infant brother, and with his incredible precocious intelligence had pronounced, 'I name this little thing Shubbles'.
Anthony did not break his silence about the call-up letter either during the evening meal or in the various quiet middle-class amusements of the following day. After years of the rigours of public school, he was too fine an actor to betray his personal secrets and no one in his close family guessed a thing.
For six years Anthony had attended King's School, Rochester, as a scholarship boarder. The school had been his own choice, not that of his parents, and it was he who had arranged the scholarship, worked for it, and won it. A hugely prestigious and ancient institution, King's School had taught him the accent and manners which could only come from such a privileged education. It had also, however, taught him the darker arts, in particular how to tell barefaced lies without the slightest feeling of shame. Like many of his contemporaries, Anthony was about to discover that public school had been an excellent preparation for army life. As a conscript, he would comment that there could be 'no less ardent old school boy than I' whilst acknowledging how well he had been taught: 'From the point of view of personal happiness give me the Army every time, but if you have been to [a public school] the Army discipline and atmosphere comes quite naturally.'
The weekend routine at Ham Frith always concluded with Anthony packing his suitcase late on Sunday night for the return to London by train on Monday morning. On the last night that he slept in his old bedroom before going into the Army, he sat down upon the bed and in his usual hyper-observant way recorded the following:
It was like the last night of the holidays. Only the tuckbox was missing. For the room was still essentially a schoolboy's. The Wonder Book of Why and What and the bound volumes of the Model Railway Magazine were still on the shelves. There were none of the appurtenances of young manhood. No pipe-rack, no tobacco jar, no photographs of young women. The brown Jaegar dressing-gown on the door was still marked A Cotterell, School House. Time had marked time.
By breakfast time my Sidney Carton complex was at boiling point. I was bathed in self-satisfaction; bidding silent farewells to everything in sight, even the lavatory.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Major Cotterell at Arnhem by Jennie Gray. Copyright © 2012 Jennie Gray. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title,Dedication,
Quote,
Acknowledgements,
Dramatis Personae,
Prologue,
PART ONE • BECOMING A SOLDIER: MARCH 1940 – JUNE 1941,
1 The Cotterell Family,
2 Fleet Street Journalist,
3 Conscript Life,
4 The Antelope and Other Unmilitary Activities,
5 Depression,
6 Officer Training,
7 Platoon Commander, Infantry Battalion,
8 'Pleasantly Irresponsible and Relatively Entertaining',
PART TWO • WAR CORRESPONDENT: JUNE 1941 – SEPTEMBER 1944,
9 ABCA-CADABRA,
10 Expanding the Brief,
11 Shubbs' War, Jenny Nicholson, and Anne,
12 Parachutist,
13 Prelude to D-Day,
14 D-Day,
15 With the Tank Crew,
16 The Battle of Fontenay,
17 Interlude,
18 'We are Jumping to a Conclusion',
PART THREE • ARNHEM: 17–23 SEPTEMBER 1944,
19 Sunday, 17 September 1944,
20 The Defence of the Bridge,
21 Prisoner of War,
22 Murder,
23 The Dressing Station at Zutphen,
PART FOUR • THE SEARCH: SEPTEMBER 1944 ONWARDS,
24 After the Shooting,
25 'Missing, Believed Wounded and Prisoner of War',
26 Watkins' Pilgrimage,
27 Janie and the Search for Anthony,
28 Witnesses, Helpers and War Office Stonewallers,
29 Geoffrey Takes Over the Search,
30 Hamburg,
31 The War Crimes Group and the Search Bureau,
32 Back to Holland,
33 Etter,
34 The Enschede Connection,
35 Dr Saniter and Thomson the Orderly,
36 Schmidt, Fritzsche and Other Leads,
37 Demob and Afterwards,
38 What Happened to Anthony Cotterell?,
Epilogue,
Appendix: The Graves at Enschede General Cemetery,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Plates,
Copyright,