On 14th March 1920 Frederick Donald Hall was born in Redhill, Surrey to James Thomas Hall and Ellen Head. They lived in Nutfield. In 1938 Don was 18 years old and working as an under gardener his father, who had served in WWI and retired as a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Royal Artillery, recognised that another war was on the horizon said to him “Well boy if you want to do your bit you had better join up now” As a consequence Don enlisted in the Royal Artillery on 13th April 1938 for 6 years; following his father’s footsteps. He carried out his training as a Surveyor Royal Artillery with 1St Survey Regiment RA at Larkhill.
September 14th 1939 saw Don aged 19 in France having travelled with his Regiment from Avonmouth to St Nazaire with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) Things were quiet until April 1940 when the Germans invaded, Don had just returned from a spot of leave in UK when the Germans made a surprise attack Don remembers.
“My Unit was on the edge of a wood north of Poperinge, about ten miles from Dunkirk. The unit was on foot and stopped on the edge of a wood where Don went into the wood to attend to a call of nature. Through the trees he saw a German tank regiment formed up and some men having a meal break only a hundred yards away, cutting off the road back to the British positions. He turned back expecting a rifle in the back on his neck but it did not happen, he had not been seen. Quickly he went back to his unit and told them what he had spotted. Orders were given; no talking, no smoking. The unit laid low until nightfall, when they made a successful dash back through the German lines. They had no food or other supplies and were forced to live off the country. Don remembers the cook hacking pieces of meat off a dead cow to feed the men.”
Don further recalls some incidents during the retreat to Dunkirk.
“We were the wrong side of a wall where we could get strafed easily. We decide to get over the wall and get to the other side of a road. We hopped over the wall and as we ran across a Stuka strafed us and the road was a cobbled one which sent shrapnel up and hit me in the leg. When you are twenty years old it’s a game to you and you say to yourself, he missed me again”.
On another occasion they were at an observation post at a farm where there was a large manure heap in the centre of the farm yard; the farmer’s wife also put there the personal night waste in there.
“Our job was to let HQ know where the Germans were. We sent back locations such as two fields away, and then one away. We were then told to get back to a new OP area. The driver of our truck backed out and got the truck stuck in the manure heap and we all had to jump in the heap and push him out. An MP came up just as we got the truck out and told us the Germans 'ere just the other side of the hedge so we had to be quick.”
Sometime during the retreat when he had a jeep and a driver bombardier Don came across some Belgian soldiers trying to get away over a bridge from the pursuing Germans. He stopped and used a Tank rifle which he said he could only fire about three or four shots off before his arm became numb. He fired one shot and got the lead vehicle which blocked the road and he asked the bombardier to get the last one which would have been carrying the ammunition or food but, unfortunately, he couldn’t get it. However, the bridge was blocked by the first vehicle and the Belgians and Don’s unit got away. The Belgium Officer in charge asked for Don’s name, rank and regiment. Don gave him the first two but said that he could not give him his regiment. This resulted in Don being awarded the Albert Medal by the Belgium Government.
Don had two sessions of burial duty at Dunkirk. He said that as his men were doing this he also carried it out. He recalls that they buried them in the dunes my scrapping shallow trenches with their hands. It was not an easy or pleasant thing to do.
Don and his comrades reached Dunkirk around the last day of May. Don and two others went scavenging for food but there was almost nothing to be had. All they got between them was one tin of cherries which they shared over three days on the Dunkirk beaches, under constant air attack from Stukas. Finally they walked out into the sea along the rickety wooden groyne, with bits missing here and there. Don carried his theodolite on his back and thought that if he fell off the plank he may not be able to get back up again due to the weight. They climbed aboard what Don thinks was a Thames pleasure vessel. They were seated in the cabin, ready to go, when a plane dropped a bomb which exploded in the water on the opposite side of the groyne, which took most of the impact. The boat heaved in the water and Don thought it would capsize. However it righted itself and set out to sea. Still there was no food or drink and Don had scarcely slept for three days. The boat was packed full and he sat down jammed between two other soldiers, having no idea where the boat was going. He went to sleep and awoke only as the boat came into Dover Harbour. His unit was one of the last to be taken off the beach.
Once ashore they were given a cup of tea and then herded onto a train. Again they had no idea of their destination. Don fell asleep and. by chance he woke up just as the train passed through Nutfield Station - his home. He asked his signaller for a sheet of paper and added just one line of message -
"I have arrived back in England. Don"
The train stopped briefly at Redhill to shunt onto the Reigate line. No-one was allowed off the train. Don tossed his message to a porter, and the train moved off. It was about midnight at the time. The message reached his mother at Ridge cottages the next morning. The train went onto Aldershot where the troops were fed and watered, re equipped and re-organised. Don remembers being reprimanded by a Colonel Beckett as Don had been back in England for a whole day and there was still mud on his steel helmet.
From Aldershot Don was sent to North Wales. After two weeks he was allowed fourteen days leave, but had been home ten days when he received a telegram instructing him to report to Nottingham. His unit covered the area from the Humber to the Wash, surveying and mapping coastal minefields. Later they did the same area from Dunbar to Thurso in Scotland. Don saw more action in Crete, when the Germans invaded and the British including Don had once again to make an escape.
He stayed home for just over 4 years and was then posted to N.E.W in June 1944 and landed on Juno beach with the Canadians on the second wave.
At the time of D Day he was BSM (Battery Sargent Major) Surveyor Royal Artillery.
The officer landed on the first wave and Don landed on the second wave at approximately 3.30 pm on Juno Beach - 1st Company attached to the 3rd Canadian Division. They should have gone in at 12.00 noon but had to lay off the beach due to damaged landing craft and congested beach. Don had twelve men with six jeeps, a wagon with food or petrol he does not know which it was. Before they set off in the landing craft they were fed with chicken stew. The sea was so rough that after a few minutes all of them had thrown it up into the sea.
Don was in an American landing craft whose crew started shooting at planes; as they were spitfires Don told the crew that they were ours and not to shoot them. Luckily they had missed. Another landing craft alongside Don's dropped their ramp to off load and immediately got a shell straight into the front of the landing craft. Don landed at Bernieres-Sur-Mer in a jeep; he told his driver to go along the shore line to avoid German bullets and then turned sharply right and drove up a grass lane next to a large house. - this house is now known as Canadian House and it was the first house liberated on Juno Beach. They then drove over a road and carried straight up the road opposite the grass lane towards Beny-Sur-Mer three miles inland.
Although the vehicle engines were sealed and greased up and the exhausts had extensions the water from the landings somehow still got into some of the engines which did not help. The Canadians had moved forward quickly and Don went out with his driver to locate them, He went across Pegasus Bridge where they were warned to keep in the middle of the road as all mines had not been cleared. He remembers the cafe to the right on the approach to the bridge which is still there today called Pegasus Cafe.Apparently the cafe owner buried champagne in the grounds when the Germans arrived and when the English arrived he gave them spades and told them where to dig which resulted in a celebration. However, when Don went over the bridge, he said they were drinking pints of beer.
Don found the Canadians who were nervous as they had been attacked several times. He looked for trig points to survey guns into a firing position. One trig point looked as if it had been tampered with and he told his driver to get a rope and pull the top off with it just in case it was booby trapped. A sniper began to take pot shots at them from a wood and the Canadians set in half-tracks to flush him out. Don was shot at by another sniper further on; they knew where the sniper was hiding in the corn field and when the sniper suddenly stood up the Canadians mowed him down with machine guns and must have cut him in two.
At the time Don was going along a sunken road to get behind the sniper and when he got level with him he saw a farmer waving at him. Don said he did not know what he wanted but thought that something could be wrong with his family. So Don followed him and the farmer kept on waving to come this way, Don saw a wood pile and the farmer pointed to it. Just then a shot rang out and the farmer fell at Don's feet. To this day Don does not know why the farmer was shot when it was Don who had the machine gun. Don peppered the wood pile and got the 'sniper'. He says that he still gets flash backs to that moment when that innocent farmer was killed.
That night he and another sergeant laid in a slit trench with sten-guns to stop anyone coming up the road. Driving down the road to Caen Don and his driver saw the road was blocked and soon realised they were in an ambush. In front of them the Germans were throwing hand grenades and from behind were more Germans firing sten guns. The driver turned his jeep around and with Don blasting away with his sten gun they made a dash for it. A hand grenade was thrown into the back of their jeep. Fortunately for Don a large radio stood between him and the blast, it protected his head, neck and most of his back, but he was hit by shrapnel all down his right side, back, leg hand and ankle, a small fragment went into his eye He tried to get out of the jeep and a German shot him in the leg.. His driver managed to get him to a field hospital. This was is his second leg injury as he was strafed with shrapnel at Dunkirk.
At one point on the journey a sniper took a shot at them and it whistled through the jeep passing to the rear of both of them. Don told his driver not to nod as his head might drop off.
At the hospital Don was seen and awaited transfer to a landing craft
for a boat home.
Having been returned to England Don was moved around different hospitals and in one of them, needing a shave, he asked the orderly to bring him a razor and brush. The man brought them over and asked for Don to sign for it. When Don asked why the orderly said that the cost would be taken out of his pay. Don said you can take them away and he would grow a beard. An officer came up to see what had happened. Don told him, that if this is how you treat returning wounded soldiers then the local paper might like to hear about it. The man must have thought that he was dealing with a bolshie Warrant Officer as Don was sent a razor and brush without signing for it.
In 1938 Don took out a Post Office savings book and paid in weekly, He carried on paying and in those days everything went into your kit bag. Anyway when his kit bag did catch up with him after hospitalisation the book had gone and so had his meerschaum pipe. Don would still like to be able to trace these things and wonders how much it may be worth after all these years. The savings book that is.
When Don got de-mobbed he was suffering from shell shock and did so for four years. Although this was a result of Dunkirk he had kept it hidden when he was in the army as he said that a staff sergeant could not be seen to have shell shock. On one occasion he was walking along the parade ground when a doddle bug came over. The noise took him back to Dunkirk and the Stuker and he hid up until it passed and no one saw him hide away.
Don rose through the ranks quickly and by the age of 21 he was a sergeant, he then went on to be a regimental sergeant major. He stayed in the Army until 28 May 1946 having carried out 8 years with the colours..
In 2018 he was saying that he would like to make 100 and do the 75th Anniversary to Normandy but would not return to Dunkirk as it was a painful memory with dirt and death and making graves with their bare hands on the beach. In Early 2019 he made a choice to go into a care home to be safe and secure, he now resides in King's Lynn Residential Care Home and hopes to enjoy life a bit easier.
In his life he had three wives all now deceased with two of them he had 25 year anniversaries. He has three sons, one by his first wife who he had not seen for many years but did meet at his 90th Birthday party; he has two by his second wife. His third wife had two sons by two husbands. He is the oldest of four boys in his family and only one is still alive. He has been lucky with his life and has seen many things which only recently he has been remembering and this write up has pulled together facts from his army records and from his own memory. Unfortunately Don passed away this year at the age of 101 This is his story and I commend it to you.
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