Bill Heppell

SOME time late on the evening of Thursday, September 7, 1944, holed up in an old monastery in the mountains of northern Greece, deep in German-occupied territory, a young British army officer wrote a brief entry in his diary.

He and a group of Greek partisans had spent the previous night and the early part of that day perched on a hillside above the Jannina to Metsovo road, an eight-hour walk from the monastery, planning an ambush. At 6.30am, a convoy of 17 German trucks approached.

“I blew down a few telegraph posts and tried to get andartes [the Greek partisans] to go on road to loot and destroy trucks; no success,” the young officer wrote.

“Went down alone and sat by side of road to wait for firing to lift. Eventually blew up one truck, then few andartes arrived. Captured a German… blew up three more trucks… place like a slaughterhouse. Carried some wounded from trucks to side of road; one Sgt Major blown out of back; looked horrible sight.”

That young officer was 21-year-old Bill Heppell. Almost 70 years later, he still remembers that day. Yes, he admits, it was like a slaughterhouse.

“I went to the first lorry and pulled open the door. The driver was dead over the wheel. There had been an old bronze fire extinguisher, which had got riddled with bullets. A lot of the foam had come out. The driver was dead over the wheel with all this foam down his back…”

Memories like that don’t give him sleepless nights, though, the 88-year-old insists. It was war. “I don’t know how to put it, but… they didn’t seem like people,” he says, sitting in the flat he shares with his wife, Doreen, off Rawcliffe Lane. “They were the enemy.”

Just a few years earlier, Bill had been a York schoolboy – going to Fishergate junior school before winning a scholarship to St Peters. In 1942, at the age of 19, he volunteered for the Royal Armoured Corps and went to Sandhurst.

By the time he was commissioned, there was a glut of young tank commanders. At the Tank Corps depot in Dorset, there were notices asking for volunteers for the Parachute Regiment, the Glider Pilot Regiment – and to be dropped into the Balkans to help the resistance.

Bill volunteered for the latter. “It seemed the most attractive option. I was 20 years old, I wanted to see some action. It was a big adventure.” He did a series of parachute training jumps, learned a little Serbo-Croat, and met some of Marshall Tito’s partisans. Then, in 1944, came that drop into northern Greece.

Along with a handful of other British officers and soldiers, Bill spent several months with the Greek partisans in the mountains of Epirus. The Germans were stretched thin and close to pulling out of Greece.

“We were ordered to hinder this as much as possible,” he says. That involved both training the local andartes in the use of mortars and machine guns – and, where necessary, taking direct action to harass the Germans and ambush convoys.

The British team’s base of operations was a house in a small village. “There was no road into the village, only mule tracks,” he says. “There was no electricity, only oil lamps, and very little food.” The only water came from a distant well. “There was a little donkey that brought us our drinking water in a barrel.”

Partisan leaders were ex-army, but many of the ordinary guerrillas were villagers fighting for their homeland – one had been a teacher, Bill recalls. He and the other Brits picked up enough Greek to ask simple directions, but for the most part relied on an interpreter.

Nevertheless, they spent long periods in the company of the partisans, marching on foot through the mountains, often dressed as shepherds, on the lookout for bridges to blow up and roads to ambush, or recceing German-held airfields.

At one, Bill’s sergeant, Jim Russon, walked right across the airfield, dressed as a shepherd.

“Jim got a few grey hairs as a burly German headed for him,” Bill noted in his diary. “No trouble though.”

The next day, back at their village hideout, there was a scare.

“Up at 6am,” Bill noted. “Scare from villager that Germans were coming; couldn’t see any with glasses so had breakfast. Looking again found 120 Germans with trucks surrounding Yannista – half an hour away. Hurriedly packed and left.”

Bill and his comrades kept busy.

“We laid mines, blew bridges and ambushed small enemy convoys, which usually only travelled early in the morning as RAF planes came over regularly to attack anything that moved,” he says.

At one point, he and a colleague used a mortar to land a half-dozen bombs on a German camp guarding a bridge – then were shelled for their pains as they withdrew. He never came close to death, he says – though Sgt Russon, and an interpreter, were killed in 1945, when they were lifting mines. It was only when he had been evacuated and was stationed in Gaza at the end of the war that he learned he had been awarded the Military Cross.

“The Brigadier told me, and presented me with the ribbon. I was really quite chuffed.”

Demobbed in York in 1946, he met and married Doreen, and spent most of his working life as an environmental health officer and housing manager for rural district councils. He also worked for a few years in the estates office at the University of York, retiring in 1982.

He and Doreen have spent many holidays in the Greek islands, but he has only been back to the mountains of northern Greece once, to show his wife the village that was his base when he fought with the partisans.

They got quite a reception, he admits. “We turned up on spec. I wanted my wife to see the sort of country we had been in. But they were delighted to see us.”

Bill’s wartime diary is now kept at the Imperial War Museum. A few extracts from it are included in The Words Of War by Marcus Cowper, published by Mainstream in paperback this summer, priced £8.99.


Margaret Tansey

Margaret Tansey, née Curry, was 16 the night the bombs fell on York. Her older brother, Geoffrey, had gone away to the war, and her father had died when she was young, so it was just her and her mum at home in South Bank Avenue that night in April, 1942.

They’d gone to bed as usual – “we never heard any sirens” – only to be woken up by the sound of bombs dropping.

There was a shelter at the bottom of the garden – but with bombs falling, they felt it was too dangerous to go out. “So we went under the stairs. There was a cupboard, and people said that was a good place. We sat there and heard the bombs dropping.”

One came very close. “We heard it whistling, which meant it was near. My mother took my hand and said ‘God help us’.”

The bomb landed lower down South Bank Avenue. “But our chairs were lifted off the ground and a shower of soot came down the chimney.” Later, once the bombing had stopped, they peered out of the window. The horizon, Margaret recalls, was in flames. “Mum said: ‘York is burning!’”

A couple of days later, cycling along Coney Street to help some friends whose flat in Burton Stone Lane had been hit by a bomb, Margaret passed the smouldering ruins of St Martin Le Grand Church. “It was a terrible mess,” she recalls.

She noticed bits of brightly coloured glass, presumably from the church’s stained glass windows, on the road. “The road must have been so hot it had melted, because the glass had sunk into it.”

When she was 18, Margaret, who now lives in Bishopthorpe, volunteered to join the Wrens. After training, she joined the Fleet Air Arm as an air mechanic, and was based at HMS Black Cap near Warrington until the end of the war, working on Seafires – the naval version of the Spitfire – Hurricanes and Corsairs.


Guy Jefferson

AS A 15-year-old, Guy Jefferson found himself working as a civilian vehicle maintenance assistant at RAF Linton. The base while he was there was used by the Royal Canadian Airforce, and he remembers watching their Halifaxes take off for night bombing raids over Germany.

It was an extraordinary sight, he says.

“When they got airborne, they were joined by all the other bombers coming from Leeming and Dishforth. It was a real sight – 100 Halifax’s heading south.”

The aircraft would circle the airfield after taking off to gain height. “It was deafening.”

On one occasion, one of the aircraft had trouble getting airborne. “It went through a hedge and came straight towards me! It was quite frightening.” Fortunately, the airfield was on an old farm, and the aircraft ran into old slush from the farmyard. “It got stuck in this, spun around, and broke into about three pieces.”

At 17, Guy enlisted with the RAF as ground crew, and was posted to Tockwith. After the war, he first became a radio repairman, before going back to work at RAF Linton for many years as a civilian radio/ radar engineer. He was awarded the British Empire Medal for his contribution to radio and radar communications. He is now 82 and lives off Shipton Road, York.


David Hull

THE photograph of a German fighter bomber shot down in October 1940 after a raid on Linton-on-Ouse that we ran in The Press earlier this month sparked vivid memories for David Hull.

He remembers as a five-year-old boy going for a walk with his parents and his grandmother near Linton late one Sunday evening in 1940, about the time the photograph was taken.

The family was walking along the road between Newton-on-Ouse and Linton when David’s father suddenly looked up, then pushed David down to the ground. A German plane came diving across the road above them.

There was an RAF camp at Linton, David says, equipped with anti-aircraft guns. The German plane dived across the road. “It dropped some bombs. I didn’t see them because I was flat on the ground. But they went off. One exploded in a field about 40 or 50 yards away. I got hit on the head with a lump of clay that got thrown up.”

The family picked themselves up and carried on walking. “And we had gone about 100 yards when we saw it again. It had circled around and come back.”

This time it was flying nearly parallel to the road. “We fell to the ground and I can distinctly remember looking up and seeing flashes coming from the aeroplane. It was strafing everything and everybody.”

Nobody in his family was hit. And David, now 75 and living in Rawcliffe, says he heard later that the plane he saw that day had been shot down over North Yorkshire: so it may even have been the very one in our photograph.