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We finished up after the first strike. We fell back. Recuperated, sort of, reorganised.
And Ponsford put "Flash" Freeman, with his mortar, in a good position.
And at the given signal "Flash" let flash with HE [high explosive], with his 2-inch mortar.
Blasted the local post office and the school, and that area.
And we went up - one section left, one section right - and we cleared the village.
And, er, we actually chased the Germans round by the cemetery, cos they run off towards Breville.
But they called us back, else we'd have been following them to Berlin, you know. Cos our blood was up.
We took about 35 prisoners.
And I'm afraid to say a lot of the people that was in that garrison were White Russians and Poles.
Now what happens when you're facing a load of maniacs (i.e. us)
and you're shooting at us one minute, then you walk out the door with your hands up?
Er, yeah, well. Like I said, we took 35 prisoners.
And 9 Para took them down the hill for us and there's photos of them taking them down the hill.
And at the bottom of the hill, where the photo was taken, at the junction (the Ecarde, as they called it)
there's our bikes against the wall.
And the 9 Para blokes took our bikes.
Not only them, some of the people in the village took them as well. Thank you very much. Bloody nuisance.
Anyway, that was that. That was the capture of Amfreville.
And of course we consolidated, and then we spent five days in a hedgerow beating off German counter-attacks.
We'd been in that hedgerow five or six days, we'd pushed back how many bloody counter-attacks and things like that.
And we come back into the grounds of the Chateau d'Amfreville.
And, er, we had a night to get a night's sleep. Then we was briefed the day after,
and after that nearly every night we was out on patrol.
Either reconnaissance patrols, raiding patrols, or whatever.
Every night, get out there and do something. Keep the Germans on the hop. That was the idea.
You can't have a continued line, like in '14.
But you've got to keep the others down. Know what I mean?
So that's how you do it.
They call it "aggressive patrolling".
Peter Young used to say: "If you don't go on their doorstep, you're going to
wake up one morning and find him on your doorstep."
"You've got to get out there."
And we carried on like that until we advanced from the Bois de Bavent.
And we advanced right up to the Seine at Honfleur in August [1944].
And we were finished. 3 Commando as a unit was finished.
I know my troop was left with about 19 blokes, all ranks.
Out of 75 soldiers - three officers, four sergeants, a sergeant-major and 74 men - there was 19 all ranks.
That was all that was left.