FRANK HILLAND He landed in Normandy on D Day Plus 1.
The kidnapped two British Sergeants, hanged
Frank Hilland was brought up in Abercrombie
Street in Bridgeton, a place he described as
'a slum' By 1943, AGED 17, he was working
for J & P Coates, a large firm of thread
makers, and studying accountancy at night
school. He was then called up into the
Middlesex Regiment.
The regiment had no great prestige or battle
honours. Despite its name, the Middlesex's
st th st
1 and 7 battalions were part of the 51
(Highland) Division. Their main job was to
supply specialists such as truck drivers,
machine gunners and radio operators to
other units.
'Specialist' training was minimal. Frank
described how he became a qualified truck
driver by driving round a field 3 times
without hitting anything. Radios and
machine guns were simply learned on the
job. Later, he would contrast the quality of
the American equipment they received with
the feebleness of much of the British-made
kit. Browning machine guns, Garand rifles
and M3 half tracks inspired real confidence.
Above all, Chevrolet trucks were far more
advanced than the Bedfords he had
encountered in his first few months in the
army. This and an addiction to Sinatra and
Hollywood made him a lifelong admirer of
the United States.
Martin Hilland
Germans had stopped shooting but bodies
still littered the beach. Months of fighting
took them to the Rhine which they crossed
under shellfire in March 1945.
One day in April 1945, his column drove into
Belsen. In a vision of hell, prisoners were
dying from well-meant gifts of corned beef,
packs of rats ran free and camp guards
buried corpses at gunpoint. Everyone feared
Typhus. British units threatened to break up
and massacre guards and civilians. Officers
shot several soldiers to restore order.
Richard Dimbleby said
'...Here over an acre of ground lay dead and
dying people. You could not see which was
which... The living lay with their heads
against the corpses and around them moved
the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated,
aimless people, with nothing to do and with
no hope of life, unable to move out of your
way, unable to look at the terrible sights
around them ... .
'This day at Belsen was the most horrible of
my life.'
By 1946, he was in Haifa, as Jews displaced
from Europe started to force Arabs out of
Palestine. Experience in Germany made him
sympathetic to the Jews but three things
largely ended this. Arabs and Jews both
committed atrocities but Jewish actions
aimed to drive out people who had lived
there for many generations. Then the Irgun
December 2009
them in a eucalyptus grove and mined their
bodies. Finally, the Irgun blew up the King
David Hotel, the British HQ in Jerusalem. He
had delivered some papers there 20 minutes
before the explosion.
He left the army in 1947, married, raised
children and talked about the war only in
sanitised terms. Sometime in the mid 1960's
we went North on holiday and visited Fort
George. In the museum he saw a Vickers
machine gun, a huge weapon hardly changed
from Maxim's 1883 design. He lifted the
breech cover, disengaged the ammunition
belt, straightened and rethreaded it into
the gun, closed the cover and pulled back
the cocking handle.
After a moment, he turned and strode out of
the museum. He appeared to be walking
away from something unpleasant, with no
intention of looking back.
martinhilland@westportconsult.net