FOR almost 70 years, Fred Pettinger never spoke about his wartime experiences. He didn’t tell his wife, Vera, about what happened to him in the Battle of Arnhem and afterwards; or his children, Janice and Colin; or any of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

“I wanted to try to forget what went on in the war,” says the 90-year-old, who lives in St Olave’s Road in York.

But then, a few years ago, his elder brother, Jim, died. At the funeral Jim’s son, also called Fred, told his Uncle Fred that he had never known about his own father’s wartime experiences – other than that Jim had been at Dunkirk.

It made Fred think. And he decided that, with his 90th birthday approaching, it was about time he told his own story.

And what a story it was: about a young Tommy from Yorkshire whose life was saved during the Battle of Arnhem by a Dutch girl who fished him out of the Rhine after his boat was hit by a German mortar.

He never spoke of her in his later life, apart from very briefly to his wife. But he never forgot her, either.

Fred put pen to paper: and at a party at the Parsonage in Escrick on December 1 to mark his 90th birthday, he got up and told his assembled family and friends the full story for the first time.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. “Though I don’t know why!” he says gruffly.

Afterwards, as his granddaughter Isla was driving home, her six-year-old son, Loughlan, said: “I’m going to tell my teacher what my great-granddad did!”

It’s that kind of story. We can’t do better than let Fred tell it in his own words...


Sixty-nine years ago as of yesterday (November 30) I was celebrating my 21st birthday in a slit trench dug into the bank of the river Rhine on the Dutch side at Nijmegen, waiting for the bridges to be cleared at Arnhem so we could continue our fight into Germany. The thought did occur to me that the prospects of reaching a ripe old age were slim indeed.

Six months previous in early June, we landed at Sword Beach in Normandy, fought our way to Arromanches, on to Bayeux, then Caen and along into Holland, encountering stiff opposition, especially at Eindhoven and Overloon.

The infantry regiment I belonged to had suffered many losses. The troop that left England with 40 men and myself as Troop Sergeant was now down to 29 men with an average age of 20 years.

I did get a birthday card from my men written on toilet paper with the words “you might need this Sarge when we cross that river”. The airborne troops that landed at Arnhem came a cropper with Hitler’s crack SS Panzer division lying in wait and we failed to capture the bridges.

So the top brass decided to send a sortie across the Rhine to test out the opposition. The engineers brought in some pontoons and at dawn on December 12, 1944, we attempted to cross the Rhine.

Halfway across the river the officer-in-charge of our boat ordered me to get a Bren Gun and go into the front of the boat and give cover fire if needed. He said: “We are like sitting ducks here”. I thought that I’d be a standing duck, but you have to obey orders in the army if you agree with them or not.

A third of the way across the river I heard the German mortars start up, the sound every infantry man dreaded: “the moaning minnies”, a salvo of eight mortar bombs at a time screeching down on you. One of them landed on our pontoon, the blast blowing me into the river and the rest of my platoon all killed or drowned.

Trying to swim with all your equipment and heavy army boots is no joke in freezing water. I managed to get rid of my pack, but still made little progress to the riverbank so I decided to let the current carry me downstream.

Then I heard a woman’s voice calling “Tommy, Tommy” and on the bank a young woman threw me a rope with an old bike inner tube attached that I managed to grab and she pulled me ashore.

With my teeth chattering and shivering to bits, she guided me to her dad’s farm where, to my surprise, there were two paratroopers she had fished out of the river previously. They got my wet clothes off, gave me towels to dry myself and one of them managed to dig some of the shrapnel out of my backside and stop the bleeding.

Unwittingly, that young officer who ordered me to stand up and give cover fire saved my life but lost his own. That’s fate for you. I eventually caught up with my regiment with the help of the Dutch Resistance at Munster who had me listed as missing, presumed dead, but luckily had not yet informed my parents.

The last battle I took part in was to capture the airfield at Bremen. Then we could not believe the war was over. The powers that be decided to send our regiment to Burma to fight the Japanese, but came unstuck when the Yanks dropped the atom bomb and the Japanese surrendered.

They then diverted our troop ship to Egypt and we spent the next 12 months stopping terrorists from blowing us, and the Suez Canal, up. Then the troubles began in Palestine, so off we went again, stopping the Israelis killing the Palestinians and the British with yet more bombs.

I was eventually demobbed in 1948 and put on reserve for five years.

Then I met and married Vera and was gifted a daughter and son, grandchildren and, bless them, great grandchildren. I have never spoken of my wartime experiences to any of my family before today.

Perhaps one day they may recall the sacrifices my generation gave to ensure peace in our time and maybe give a thought to the old man hobbling down the street with his walking stick and what he went through in his youth.

One night in the 1950s, after I had a very fitful sleep, Vera on waking said “you called out a name in your nightmare, Troos Kellenar, who was she?” I replied with a lump in my throat, “a very brave Dutch girl who rescued three soldiers from drowning during the war, that’s all you need to know love”.

- Fred Pettinger