Lest We Forget: Surrounded at Monte Cassino

WHEN machine gunner Arthur Simmonds and four of his comrades were surrounded by German forces near Monte Cassino, the situation was so bleak they took a vote on whether to surrender.

The rest of their company had been wiped out during one of the first assaults on the monastery which held up the Allied push through Italy to Rome.

The survivors were holed up in the cellar of a building, hiding out from the Germans. The situation was desperate.

It was too much for two of the men, including the company’s sergeant and highest ranking officer, who both broke down in tears and called for the group to surrender.

In the end it was a combination of luck, bravery and determination which saw them escape through the enemy ring around the building where they were holding out.

But escape they did and Mr Simmonds, who had been listed as ‘missing, presumed killed’, was able to briefly leave the combat arena of the Second World War to marry his sweetheart, Vera.

The 84-year-old, who served with the 6th Battalion Black Watch, said: “My company got wiped out.

“One of the worst things is when you are in the front line and a lad loses his nerve. It affects you, and it irritates you, but he can’t help it.

“We were surrounded. There were five of us in this cellar, and the Germans attacked us that night.

“There was a sergeant and another man who started crying. They wanted to surrender, we took a vote on it.

“The lance corporal, he was a smashing lance corporal, he asked me, ‘What do you want to do Simmons?’. I said, ‘I want to escape from here’. He said to my mate Bob Lister, ‘What to do you want Lister?’, and he said, ‘I want to escape’.

“So he said to the sergeant, ‘I’m taking charge’. We stopped there for four days and we came out at night.

“When we were trying to get out, a German came down the steps. He couldn’t see us, there was a recess we were behind. The lance corporal said to me, ‘If he steps in, stick him with your bayonet’, so I had it ready.

“We got lucky, that’s the main point. There was a little stream which we went down. There was supposed to have been a mine placed on it, but luckily for us, it didn’t go off.

“We got out safely, but I got hit, a little one in the head, and I got it over my eye. They were only skin flesh wounds.

“I had been reported ‘missing, presumed killed’.

“After that I came home for one month and I got married.”

Mr Simmonds soon returned to Italy, and was sent back to Monte Cassino where he took part in the Allied victory on the road to Rome.

After the war, Mr Simmonds went back to live at Fenton, where he worked in the pottery industry. He has one daughter, Pamela Buckley, and a granddaughter, Anna Buckley.

Mr Simmonds said: “I don’t like to talk about the war, it upsets me.

“When I think about it now I could cry. I’m choked now after all these years. I lost a lot of men, a lot of them were captured and a lot of them wounded. I won’t go back.”