Ernest Brough - Capturing a German and surrender

Transcript

I dug myself a bit of a trench to hide in case things got a bit hot and I tossed a bit of dirt up in front of it. Anyway, I was going round yelling, "Hände hoch" and I come across this curtain moving on one…there . I says,"Hände hoch. Hände hoch." and anyway, I pulled the curtain back and he'd had his foot nearly blown off, you see, so I pulled him out and I said to Frosty, I said, "I've got to do something with him."

And he said, "Well, whatever you think." So I pulled him out and I put him on, piggy-back, you see, "Get on my back." So we went up toward the hospital they'd built and I'd only got halfway up and a bloody big tank missile went past me over my head and I went, "Shit, that was close." I fell over on top of him and I thought "Oh the poor bugger", you know, with his crook foot, "Come on, get on my back."

I got him on my back again and got up to the hospital and it had a big tarp around the back of it, around the side of it and the bloke inside was going like this to me, he could just see me, sort of just cool off a bit, you see, ‘cause I was armed up.

I had a couple of lugers on my hip and I was Cowboy Bill for a minute or two and I left him there and I got down, I got back to me dugout again and I just got into it and got down under cover, sort of thing, below the sight line and they fired a burst of machine gun fire at it letting me know, "Get back in your dugout and stay there", you know, sort of thing, and then, the lieutenant was there looking after us, I said to Frosty, I said, "You better look out" I said "they're on the move. It won't be long before they're on top of us", you see, and I said, "You want to make up your mind what you're going to do." I said, "You might have to surrender because we've got no tanks in here all we've got is rifles" and I said, "We're not going to beat them with rifles." So we had to surrender.