| I remember reading the obituary of one officer once - this was before the internet and I can't remember his name.
Like Backhouse, he had been captured in the very earliest weeks of WW1, and spent the rest of WW1 in a prisoner of war camp.
In April 1940 he was commanding a battalion in Norway, when they found themselves surrounded on three sides by the Germans, and their retreat was cut off by a deep ravine behind them. However, he was determined not to become a POW again, and he remembered that in 1910, he had been on a fishing holiday with his father in that same spot. He remembered that there had been a wooden footbridge over the ravine. That night, he took a couple of soldiers with him, and scouted along the ravine and found the bridge. Managing to hold out another day, the next night he managed to extricate the entire battalion over the bridge, which they then destroyed behind them (as quietly as possible I imagine), and they made it to Narvik from where they were evacuated back to England. He finally got his DSO for this. |