Readers remember World War Two

FIRST TO begin: I assumed the large black and white photograph of a man in army uniform sent me by Captain Neal Alexis together with the badges and handwritten information on the cadets and published with last week’s column was a photograph of the Captain himself in younger days. However, Ian Lambie called from Tobago telling me that the person in that photograph was Sergeant Major Clemendore, a disciplinarian who formed young cadets into young soldiers and not Captain Neal Alexis in the photograph published last week. My apologies . . . Next: Mr Ian Senior e-mailed to tell me the cadets had Commanding Officers (Commandants) appointed from the Local Forces who held Army Commissions, usually from the Trinidad Light Infantry Volunteers (TLIV) because the Corps was attached to the TLIV “and structured into it until 1953.”

Other readers who have also been calling and e-mailing their memories of World War II in Trinidad deserve to have their stories told before we end this series. We begin with an e-mail from Lennox de la Rosa in Florida who was a student during World War Two and spent all his school vacations with his parents at Point Galera Lighthouse where his father was the head lighthouse keeper. He writes, “The candle power of the revolving light had to be reduced to avoid giving help to the German U-boats captains wanting to check their position. However, we could hear the submarines from time to time when they surfaced to charge their batteries. There was a lot of traffic in the waters between Toco and Tobago. I remember seeing a destroyer accompanying a convoy dropping depth charges; we guessed their sonar had picked up an echo from an enemy submarine.

“An outpost of the US 33rd Infantry Division was stationed in our yard to keep a lookout for any suspicious movements at sea. The soldiers patrolled remote beaches in the Point Galera area where they often came across empty life rafts and debris from sunken ships that had washed ashore. This unit was in constant contact with Wallerfield and Fort Read. “The US forces constructed a small airstrip a few hundred yards from the lighthouse so that planes unable to reach base in Wallerfiled could make an emergency landing. That airstrip saved the lives of the crew of a Liberator bomber on its way to Wallerfield for refuelling (Wallerfield was the refuelling stop for aircraft going to Africa). “The Liberator pilot had to make an emergency landing on our airstrip, however, the runway was too short for the plane to take off again after refuelling. Army engineers spent about two weeks extending the runway. At that time, the type of equipment the engineers used (bulldozers, or tractor-crawlers as they were known at first, see the photographs on this page) had never been seen before by us in that part of Trinidad. The construction site was a big attraction for villagers. The runway had to be extended all the way to the sea for the bomber to take off. That airstrip is no longer in use, but saw a lot of light aircraft traffic in its day.”

Although I got a great deal of information from Gaylord Kelshall on Fort Read and the air base at Wallerfield, I was hoping to get some more information from US sources on airfields in Trinidad in general and Wallerfield in particular. Wilma, however, had other ideas, She knocked out communications via the Internet, forcing me to leave that subject for another week. Meanwhile... Reading that I wished I had a photograph of Basil Anderson, his daughter, Ingrid Collier, sent me his photograph — and some more details of the hardships he endured as a POW (Prisoner Of War) in Germany. Readers may recall I referred to him as an escape artist par excellence who escaped from both the Germans and the Russians.

After 12 successful night bombing missions Basil Anderson was shot down on the thirteenth mission.  MS Collier writes that with the port wing of the aircraft on fire, the pilot ordered the crew to bail out; her father turned his gun turret all the way to one side so that he could open the door to the turret and roll out backwards. He tumbled through space before pulling the rip cord, whereupon the parachute opened with a loud crack and one of the straps hit him in the face, injuring his chin. He landed in a cow pasture spraining his ankle as he tried to disentangle himself from his harness. He stayed quite still to check out his surroundings but there was no sign of other crew members, or the Germans. He buried his parachute, hid at the edge of the field until morning and began limping towards the North. For a week he stayed clear of towns and the occasional German patrol but at last he was captured by the German Home Guard, handed over to the Luftwaffe and interned in Stalag Luft 4B, a huge prisoner-of-war camp for 47,000 prisoners from 23 countries.

Ms Collier writes, “One by one his crew arrived in camp.  His captain had actually been on a train to Spain when (he was) caught by the Gestapo... although the food in the POW camp was not good” (at a ceremony to launch Gaylord Kelshall’s book The Golden One Hundred at the Military Museum on October 24, Ian Brunton, speaking of Basil Anderson, said he (Basil) hated evaporated milk because he’d been forced to survive on a diet of boiled turnips and evaporated milk while he was a POW) “it (the camp) was comfortable enough...but it was Basil’s duty to escape, and he did in company with a South African Flight Sergeant. They cut the fence wire, and, avoiding the searchlights reached the tree line.” Three days later they reached the river Elbe; while trying to find an unguarded bridge or boat they were captured by a German army patrol, beaten, and returned to camp where they were beaten again and put in solitary confinement for three months. That did not deter Basil from attempting another escape — from solitary confinement into the main camp where he was hidden in an escape tunnel under construction.

For months he remained in the tunnel while the Germans searched for him high and low. Meanwhile the escape committee made a French uniform, manufactured a false ID for him and, pretending to be a French soldier on a work detail outside the camp, he walked out and at the first opportunity dropped out of the detail to hide in a roadside ditch. Having evaded all attempts to recapture him, three days later Basil came to a river he couldn’t cross, was caught and captured again, and sent for three months solitary confinement in Stalag Luft 3, a camp for RAF troublemakers. When he’d served his three months he was allowed into the main camp where he met fellow Trinidadians, Garth Lyder and Arnold Kelshall. As the Russians advanced into the Germany, the Germans marched the whole camp around trying to avoid the Russian Army...just before the Russians arrived the guards disappeared. To the astonishment of the prisoners, the Russians simply replaced the German guards with Russian guards telling the prisoners they would go home via Russia. They decided they’d rather escape.

They waited until the sentries were drunk, stole some bicycles and rode out of the gate. The guards fired a few shots then gave up reckoning the prisoners had nowhere to go. Basil pedalled westward furiously for several days until he collided with a Soviet army truck driven by a drunk Cossack who staggered up to him, laughed, then got back in his truck and drove away leaving Basil with a broken foot and no bicycle. In a bizarre turn of events, he was rescued and sheltered by a German family until the Russians broke into the house. As he still had his RAF papers he avoided being shot but he was, once again, a prisoner. He was taken to a Russian field hospital where doctors tried to set the bones in his foot but he could not walk and was still in great pain. Some months later he was handed over to the Americans who sent him to a military hospital where surgeons operated on the five broken bones in his foot.

Only when he was able to walk again was he handed over to the RAF and demobilised and came home. Basil Anderson died in Washington State, USA on November 17 2004, as he was getting ready to return home. The local American Legion gave him a veteran’s funeral, with a jet flypast in his honour in memory of his extraordinary escapes in World War II. Next week - I’m making no promises but hope it will be Wallerfield at last. annehilton@rave-tt.net