SWAY AND THE SHERWOOD RANGERS, SPRING 1944
This was the basis for a talk I gave in Sway village hall on 4 June 2024 as part of the village’s impressive array of D-Day anniversary events, partly organised in conjunction with St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery in Lymington. My thanks to fellow St Barbe trustee and Sway parish councillor Neil McClocklin for inviting me to speak.
Introduction
By the spring of 1944 the residents of Sway had seen pass through their village hundreds into thousands of soldiers, drawn from a variety of regiments and corps. Billeting service personnel became the norm for families with a spare bedroom or two. Nor were these troops all British. For most villagers this was their first encounter with Canadians.
It was almost certainly their first encounter with an armoured regiment, the noise, exhaust fumes, dust, churned up mud and sheer physical presence of the Canadian tanks leaving an indelible impression. After the Canadians left calm returned to the village, but in late April 1944 the tanks returned.
This time they were mostly Shermans, or their more lethal version the Firefly – state-of-the-art tanks fresh off a ceaseless production line in Detroit. Shermans would spearhead the invasion of Europe. Not that the Sherman was an untested tank. Its arrival in North Africa in 1942 was a key factor in the Eighth Army’s reversal of fortunes after El Alamein and the Allies’ final victory in the spring of 1943.
Nor were the two tank squadrons posted to Sway untested. They formed part of Nottinghamshire’s Sherwood Rangers, a Yeomanry regiment which had fought its way across the Western Desert. The Sherwood Rangers had been in training at Chippenham Park near Newmarket, but they were now encamped across the New Forest and the Test Valley. In early June they would relocate to Lepe and Southampton for embarkation to France.
For the next 11 months they would time and again find themselves in the vanguard of 21st Army Group’s advance from the Normandy beaches all the way to the Baltic. In April 1944 the Sherwood Rangers was already renowned as a tried and tested tank regiment. By VE Day it would be one of the most decorated units in the British Army, albeit at appalling cost.
To keep its tanks in the front line an armoured regiment required a large and well-organised logistical and mechanical back-up: out of around 700 men, only 210 would be inside the 50 or so tanks that made up the three main squadrons. Throughout May 1944 the Sherwood Rangers’ support echelon was based in Sway – as the numbers suggest, this was a sizeable presence.
For much of May also based in the village was the Sherwood Rangers’ most experienced and most decorated veterans of the desert war, A Squadron.
The presence in the village of the regiment’s support echelon meant Sway was host to the regimental padre, Reverend Leslie Skinner.
The presence in the village of A Squadron meant a temporary home for its commander, Major Stanley Christopherson, and his second-in-command, Captain Keith Douglas.
Here we have three remarkable men in the heart of the New Forest on the eve of Operation Overlord (probably billeted in Sway House, in South Sway Lane).
Why were these three men remarkable? Furthermore, why should Sway take pride in, if only for a few short weeks, hosting this particular regiment – a Yeomanry regiment which on the cusp of war constituted a motley collection of Nottinghamshire horsemen, in peacetime its officers sharing their spare time between fox hunting and obsolete cavalry manoeuvres?
The Nottinghamshire Yeomanry Regiment (Sherwood Rangers)
Booted and spurred, with heavily polished Sam Browne belts and riding boots, the interwar Sherwood Rangers rode on manoeuvres at their annual summer camp as if the Great War had never taken place. Like other counties’ Yeomanry regiments these were amateur soldiers firmly rooted in rural life and a semi-feudal, paternalistic social hierarchy. An ageing aristocrat, Lord Yarborough, was the colonel, and among his officers were no less than three Masters of Foxhounds. Subalterns from less privileged backgrounds, NCOs and troopers invariably boasted a lifetime of handling horses.
When in mid-1942 these men finally went to war as an armoured regiment they took with them the language and culture left behind in the villages and country houses of the rural East Midlands. For example, radio communication was rooted in cricket and hunting analogies. Keith Douglas’s memoir From Alamein to Zem Zem provides colourful examples of RT exchanges, along the lines of a tank pulling out of the line ‘returning to the pavilion.’ A further example involves Lord Yarborough’s successor as CO: another local landowner, the MP for Birmingham Aston Lt-Colonel E.O. Kellett, known to one and all as ‘Flash’. On the eve of Alamein ‘Flash’ Kellet informed Captain Patrick McCraith that his troop of tanks would be first to navigate the German minefields, telling him to “Put on your white flannels…You’re batting first for England.”
Yet these same amateur soldiers adapted very quickly to the harsh realities of mechanised warfare, not least because the overwhelming majority – officers and men – was keen to learn. Crucially, they were keen to keep on learning, right until the end of the war. In consequence, they evolved into a highly efficient and effective fighting machine.
By the time the Sherwood Rangers arrived in Sway the character and composition of the regiment had changed markedly, not least because so many prewar personnel had been killed, seriously wounded or taken prisoner. 288 would die across the course of the Second World War, including 34 officers. For example, in the first six weeks of fighting in Normandy no less than 40 tank commanders – a staggering 80% of the total number – were killed in battle. ‘Flash’ Kellett and his successor as CO Donny Player were both killed in North Africa, following which command of the regiment was held by outsiders. The CO when the Sherwood Rangers embarked for France was badly wounded on the evening of D Day, after which command of the regiment passed back to one of its own, Stanley Christopherson.
Christopherson was not a Nottinghamshire horseman, but he rode well and in 1939 he fitted into the mess courtesy of his upper-class background (a colonial background, Winchester College, and a lawyer in the City). From 1942 to 1945 many of the incoming officers were ‘temporary gentlemen’ from an urban middle-class background, initially ignorant of the regiment’s roots and tradition. A cadre of veterans provided continuity (if fully recovered from their wounds junior officers and NCOs would return to the regiment). In due course the old hands recognised the need to integrate new arrivals as quickly as possible, not least as the turnover in personnel was so great.
Remarkably, the Sherwood Rangers’ tally of 30 battle honours between 1939 and 1945 was unmatched by any other unit in the British Army. The achievement is that much more remarkable as the regiment’s tanks first saw action as late as June 1942: 8th Armoured Brigade was formed in August 1941, but it took ten months to have a full complement of tanks delivered and for its regiments to be fully trained in mechanised warfare. The Sherwood Rangers had carried out policing duties in Palestine in the spring of 1940 before packing away their sabres, saying farewell to their horses, and retraining as battery gunners. Cavalrymen turned gunners served with distinction in the fall of Crete, from where only two escaped, and in the siege of Tobruk.
The Sherwood Rangers’ baptism of fire was the Battle of Alam El Halfa in late summer 1942, and evidence that they were quick learners was the 26 enemy tanks destroyed in one day on 5 November that year. The regiment was in the vanguard of the initial advance at El Alamein, later being singled out by Rommel for its success in penetrating the Afrika Korps’ forward line. That role of punching a hole in the enemy’s advanced defences was repeatedly undertaken in the 1942-43 advance across Libya and Tunisia, at an appalling cost in tanks and men.
The regiment’s dubious reward was to return to England to train as one of the four British armoured regiments chosen to land on D Day. It went on to fight on 50 of the Normandy campaign’s 60 days duration. The Sherwood Rangers continued to provide infantry with an armoured punch through northern France, Belgium, Holland and into north Germany, taking part in both Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge. Somehow, despite the appalling casualties, Christopherson’s regiment avoided the fatal fatigue and decline in morale of so many units Montgomery brought back from North Africa to fight in NW Europe.
The Sherwood Rangers’ achievements from the regiment’s landing on Gold Beach on 6 June 1944 can be summarised thus:
- first British troops to enter Bayeux after D Day;
- first British troops to enter Germany and break the Siegfreid Line;
- provided front line support for every single British infantry division and for three American infantry divisions, including the 82nd Airborne at Nijmegen.
Taken with the regiment’s earlier successes in the Mediterranean, this was an astonishing set of achievements. It’s little wonder that the Sherwood Rangers are today recognised as the British Army’s finest tank regiment of World War Two – and in the spring of 1944 they could be found here, in the village of Sway.
Lt-Colonel Stanley Christopherson
Stanley Christopherson died in 1990 aged 77, in a village not that dissimilar to Sway – Wye, near Ashford. He was best known for founding a local prep school with his wife, with older villagers vaguely aware that he might have had ‘a good war.’ He was an unsung hero, even for his children. That changed when James Holland edited Christopherson’s diaries for publication in 2014, followed seven years later by Holland’s exceptional Brothers In Arms One Legendary Tank Regiment’s Bloody War From D-Day to VE-Day.
Ironically, Christopherson had featured in several books previously, as over the decades after 1945 several members of the regiment had published memoirs. He also features in From Alamein to Zem Zem, where Keith Douglas renames his squadron commander ‘Edward’. In the book some comments about ‘Edward’ are quite hurtful, but when Christopherson read the manuscript in early 1944 he only insisted on one change: he took exception to being described as a ‘deplorable’ dancer when Douglas had never actually seen him inside a ballroom. Douglas did acknowledge that Christopherson was a very good rider, as demonstrated on D Day when A Squadron landed at Le Hamel: Christopherson had to liaise with the CO of the Essex Regiment, and he did so by commandeering a stray police horse and riding under fire to the agreed meeting point.
Christopherson wrote of A Squadron’s time in Sway that it was obvious D Day was imminent:
We spent our time waterproofing and de-waterproofing our tanks, and partaking in various amphibious exercises, working in close cooperation with the navy and infantry. All embarkation leave had been completed, and each time we went on an exercise nobody knew whether we would return to our billets again. One day in the middle of May we left Sway, never to return, and ended up at Hursley Park, near Winchester, which turned out to be our assembly area preparatory to the invasion.
Major Christopherson had by this time held a commission for just over 3½ years. Five days after landing in Normandy he found himself in temporary command of the regiment. A shell had landed on the Regimental Headquarters, killing all of the Sherwood Rangers’ surviving senior officers from prewar – including the acting CO Michael Laycock. Stanley Christopherson’s appointment was made permanent on 15 June 1944 and as a lieutenant-colonel he commanded the regiment until its final dispersal in early 1946. Remarkably unscathed, he directed every operation right through to the German surrender.
Christopherson’s surviving comrades, his commanding officers from Montgomery down, and his diary entries together testify to someone whose capacity for command was based on a unique combination of: quiet authority, resilience, calmness under fire, remarkable courage, good humour, common sense, humility, open-mindedness, diplomacy, psychological strength, and a keen sense of humanity however dark the circumstance.
That courage and that ability to lead from the front however dangerous the conditions had been shown time and again in North Africa. It was displayed once more in NW Europe, but this time with responsibility for a fully operational armoured regiment. Christopherson ended the war with the MC and Bar, the DSO, and the United States Silver Star. (It’s worth noting that in 1944-45 the Sherwood Rangers’ awards for valour included 18 Military Crosses and 24 Military Medals.)
The demobbed Stanley Christopherson went off to work in South Africa before returning home in the late 1950s to enjoy married life and fatherhood. We don’t know if the Christopherson family holidayed at any time in the New Forest and on the Solent, but it would be nice to think they did, and that they came to Sway. If they did visit Sway then we can be sure Stanley would tell the children that he had been here before, but nothing more. That was the sort of chap he was…
Reverend Leslie Skinner
Stanley Christopherson’s wedding was conducted by Leslie Skinner, the Sherwood Rangers’ regimental padre in 1944-45. The loneliness of command and the loss of his closest friends left Christopherson increasingly reliant on the Methodist minister as a trusted confidant and counsellor. In his diaries he wrote of Skinner:
The padre was a short, dark man with a very pronounced North Country accent, which advertised his Yorkshire descent of which he was extraordinarily proud, and he always exuded energy and humour. I shall always remember the opening words of the first service which he found time to conduct after landing in Normandy. He said, ‘There are no atheists in a slit trench.’
Skinner was also extremely good at disguising his profound deafness, as evident by his status as senior chaplain in 8th Armoured Brigade. From D Day onwards the padre was resolute in rescuing the severely wounded and retrieving the dead, often climbing into a tank that had suffered a ‘brew up’ to recover body parts. Determined that no member of the regiment would be left on the battlefield he displayed enormous courage and emotional resilience. He shared with Christopherson the almost daily task of writing letters of condolence. Together, the two men are the absolute heroes of Wood’s Brothers in Arms.
On A Squadron’s last Sunday in Sway Leslie Skinner celebrated communion among the tanks lined up outside the village. The service was organised by Christopherson’s second-in-command, Keith Douglas. At evensong that night in St Luke’s Skinner was surprised to find Douglas in the congregation. After the service the two men went for an all-night walk in the Forest. Douglas told Skinner of his ambitions for after the war, but his firm belief that he wouldn’t make it.
Only a few weeks later, on 9 June 1944 near the village of St Pierre south of Bayeux, the padre buried Keith Douglas in a temporary grave (today he lies in the CWGC cemetery at Tilly-sur-Seulles). Running along a ditch back to his tank Douglas had been hit in the head by mortar shrapnel and died instantly.
Captain Keith Douglas
As we’ve seen, Keith Douglas wrote an extraordinarily vivid account of tank warfare in the Western Desert, From Alamein to Zem Zem. Douglas had joined the Sherwood Rangers in 1940, and he was – in Stanley Christopherson’s words – ‘a complete individualist, intolerant of military convention and discipline.’
In his memoir and in poems like ‘The Aristocrats’ Douglas chronicled the passing of all those huntsmen from the shires who had ridden to war in September 1939. Christopherson felt his number two had nothing but contempt for the Yeomanry’s landed gentry, but From Alamein to Zem Zem and the poems suggest a more nuanced and more sympathetic view of ‘Flash’ Kellett and all the other foxhunting, cricket-loving officers who lost their lives in North Africa and Normandy.
Ironically for someone so short-sighted, Keith Douglas was also a very good illustrator. However, Douglas’s reputation today rests primarily upon his poetry. Postwar champions of his work like Ted Hughes argued that Douglas was the finest poet to emerge from the armed forces during the war.
When stationed in Sway Douglas was often absent without permission in London, seeing a new girlfriend, overseeing the last stages of publication for his book, and seeking out magazines for his poems. Fellow officers, even Christopherson, tolerated Douglas breaching security because in North Africa he had been severely wounded and had displayed great courage – but also because his mood was ever more fatalistic.
Time prevents consideration of why Keith Douglas was such a remarkable poet, so let’s simply conclude with his final, retrospective poem ‘On a Return From Egypt, completed in Sway. It’s both lyrical and full of foreboding. Sadly, it acts as a testimony to all those Sherwood Rangers who passed through Sway in the spring of 1944, but were denied the chance ever to do so again:
To stand here in the wings of Europe
disheartened, I have come away
from the sick land where in the sun lay
the gentle sloe-eyed murderers
of themselves, exquisites under a curse;
here to exercise my depleted fury.
For the heart is a coal, growing colder
when jewelled cerulean seas change
into grey rocks, grey water-fringe,
sea and sky altering like a cloth
till colours and sheen are gone both;
cold is an opiate of the soldier.
And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers
come back, abandoning the expedition;
the specimens, the lilies of ambition
still spring in their climate, still unpicked:
but time, time is all I lacked
to find them, as the great collectors before me.
The next month, then, is a window
and with a crash I’ll split the glass.
Behind it stands one I must kiss,
person of love or death
a person or a wraith,
I fear what I shall find.
