A Very Private Celebrity (7 page)

For the next two months, the 1st Battalion was in close contact with the German enemy (Mussolini had signed the Italian surrender in September) fighting up to the River Garigliano. It was not the sort of war Luke expected:

It was to be good training for the invasion of north-west Europe, for which the Desert Rats were soon to be held in readiness. In November, they were billeted in Sorrento, where Freeman was already based with the HQ. In fact, according to his records, he embarked at Naples for the UK on the 19 November. A month later, Luke (and the rest of the 1st Battalion) followed him on the
Cameronia
. They landed in ‘blacked-out, wartime Glasgow on 5 January 1944. It was raining wet soot.’

Between 9 March and 6 July, Major Freeman attended a war course for officers at Camberley Joint Services Command and staff college. He was impressed. He told Driberg that the seventeen-week course gave him ‘the most effective education since Westminster’. He expanded on this in an interview he gave to William Hardcastle for BBC Radio 4 in 1968:

The war left him with a deep respect for the army and a pleasure in the company of intelligent soldiers. The army, in turn, gave Freeman his military bearing and aloof manner. He always presented an immaculate front to the world – the civilian equivalent of being on the parade ground. Until old age, he walked as straight as a ramrod and was well groomed. Some found this obsessive. One of his future lovers became infuriated by his habit of folding his trousers precisely before getting into bed with her.

It was a political meeting at Camberley, however, that was to shape his future. One evening in the mess, he joined the group listening to Captain Raymond Blackburn – a peacetime solicitor with well-known left-wing views. Blackburn had already stood as a candidate for Common Wealth (a short-lived political party with views to the left of Labour on some issues) in a by-election, and now, ‘with a full head of striking white hair, a Heathcliffe-handsome face and dark eyes alight with enthusiasm’, he was haranguing his audience. Most left, fed up with his ‘bolshie’ talk, but one remained. Blackburn takes up the story:

A year later, Blackburn secured the nominations of both Freeman and Woodrow Wyatt as Labour candidates in the 1945 general election.

After staff college, Freeman was sent out to liberated France, seconded from the Rifle Brigade to become Brigade Major of 131st Infantry. He took up his post on 25 July, seven weeks after D-Day. The 131st Lorried Infantry Brigade, part of the 7th Armoured Division, had fought alongside the Rifle Brigade in north Africa and Italy. Less glamorous than the Rifles, it was nevertheless a front-line Territorial Army formation, and comprised, when Freeman became brigade major, three battalions of the Queen’s Royal Regiment (the 5th, 6th and 7th).

By mid-August, the German Army had been flushed out of the close countryside of the Norman
bocage
– its very high, thick hedgerows made it difficult for an attacking force to shoot and manoeuvre through – and was retreating through the Falaise Gap towards the River Seine, 75 miles away. Here the countryside was open and rolling, but rivers like the Orne, Vie and Laison were wide enough to provide good, defensive positions. For the British Army, there had been a high cost to pay for the advance from D-Day. The very high losses of men, the sheer slog of living rough, eating out of cans, sleeping in holes and every day expecting to batter away at another German defensive position was taking its toll on the front-line infantry. According to Freeman, after heavy fighting on Mount Pincon, the 131st Brigade rested 11–15 August – its first break since landing in Normandy. It was entertained by George Formby and his ukelele.

Then the 131st Brigade advanced to Liverot. The village was already in the hands of the Maquis (the resistance fighters of the Free French forces), so the brigade was welcomed with flowers and wine. Capturing Lisieux was far more difficult. Freeman writes that ‘an ill-advised attack by 30 Infantry of 12 SS was dashed by the annihilation of the enemy and the “brewing up” of supporting tanks’. This was followed by ‘heavy fighting, strong pockets of German resistance and stubborn German defence round Lisieux’ led by Tiger tanks of the 12th SS Panzer Division. However, ‘aided by the Free French forces, Lisieux was captured the next day [24 August].’

The cathedral history relates it was only the intervention of a major of the 6th Queen’s Battalion that prevented the famous Basilica of St Thérèse from being bombed flat. For the next three days, the 7th Armoured Division pushed on across rolling, wooded countryside, reaching the Seine on 28 August. Freeman reported that the 131st spent the afternoon ‘bathing in the sunshine’.
27

In January 1945, Freeman was awarded the
Croix de guerre
(a French military decoration), receiving a
palme en vermeil
(vermillion palm) for his part in the events of August. Presumably this was for the combined operations with the Free French forces. The citation reads:

In 1947, Freeman went to Buckingham Palace, with a former girl friend from Oxford, Sally Chilver, who had been a civil servant
working with the Free French in the war, and collected his
Croix de guerre
.

For the whole of November through to the end of March 1945, the 131st Brigade was bogged down in the Limburg province of south Holland near the German border, north-west of Cologne. It just missed the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ – the German offensive through the Ardennes at the end of the year. The rush across France and Belgium had stopped. The supply routes stretched back over 200 miles to the beaches. Petrol and ammunition, hauled by truck from Normandy, were in short supply. The weather had broken too. At the front it rained a fine, cold drizzle so that fields turned to mud. Soon it began to snow, so Freeman ordered another pint of tea a day (‘carried in any form of container available, e.g. cigarette tins’) and half a cup of rum. Chains were fitted to all vehicles. The Queen’s regiments settled down to the routine of the infantryman’s life – a mixture of violent action (at Isenbruch, Bakenhoven, Susteren, Schilberg, Dieteren, Melick and Posterholt, for instance), hours of footslogging, or simply waiting for something to happen. They ate ‘armoured cow’ (spam and corned beef ) and soya sausages bedded in fat. They yearned for ‘zig-zag’ (getting drunk) and ‘jig-jig’ (having sex) with local women. Morale was low; combat fatigue had set in. Losses were so high that each Queen’s regiment had fewer than 100 men left, out of the 450 who had landed in Normandy. ‘There’s only one way out of the infantry, lads, and that’s
feet
first’ went the fatalistic refrain. That was not quite true because the 6th and 7th battalions were withdrawn on 3 December and replaced with the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshires and the 9th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry.

The 131st Brigade knew it was in ‘the most exclusive club in the world’ – the front-line infantry. The squaddies were contemptuous of the men in the rear echelons – the clerks, cooks and ‘admin
wallahs’ – whose lives were more comfortable and in less danger. Freeman was the brigade major, but presumably he too was an ‘admin wallah’. He was billeted at brigade HQ behind the front at Diergaarde and then at Altweert. Perhaps this accounts for his self-deprecating remark to Driberg about his ‘completely undistinguished war’. It wasn’t undistinguished, of course, but he was obviously aware that he was behind those who were doing the fighting. The American war historian Paul Fussell, who was wounded in France as an infantryman, described the gap between the two:

Between 10 and 24 February 1945, Freeman was on leave in England. Encouraged by Captain Blackburn, Freeman agreed to put his name forward for the Labour nomination as MP for Watford. ‘I only did it because I was sure I had no chance of election,’ he said later – the sort of casual understatement that would have gone down well in the Rifle Brigade mess. His pessimism is understandable, however. Watford was a safe Tory seat and nobody expected a Labour landslide. His other reason for standing was more self-serving: if elected, he would get out of the army early. This was the first time his wife Elizabeth had heard of his political ambition: ‘The first time I knew anything of this was on John’s leave in the middle of February. We spent the week rushing round Watford seeing
important people. Then John went back to the war and I started having tonsillitis.’
30

On 28 March, the 131st Brigade crossed the Rhine opposite Bislich, north of Dusseldorf, with Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. Then it drove north-east towards Hamburg. The further it advanced into Germany, the more desperate the fighting became. Freeman’s brigade war diary recalls it vividly:

On 14 April, Freeman signed Operation Instruction No. 1, titled ‘Security Measures in Forward Areas Inside Germany’:

The iron had entered Freeman’s soul. About this time he entered Belsen concentration camp because it was in the way of the line of advance. After he returned home the following month, he told a reporter:

The advance continued at a rush, the infantry shocked and enraged by what they saw. Freeman wrote:

Freeman told the reporter back home: