This as an article from a friend and fellow guide, Merryn Walters, known to many of you as the map lady from her appearances at We Have Ways where she talks about all things maps. Merryn and Andy Aitcheson delivered an outstanding tour for us last year called “Walking with the Jocks”. That was Part 1 of 2 and in October the duo are set to deliver the second instalment following the footsteps of Peter White and the KOSB as they fought to liberate Europe in 1945. She talks here about their latest recce for the tour.
Going out on ‘recce’ is one of the most rewarding parts of being a battlefield guide. Andy and I have always made a point of going off the beaten track, just as much as we stay on it, and the rewards have been invaluable. Sometimes you find more than you’re expecting. Always, you hope you’ll have the opportunity to share those discoveries with other people.
In October, we’ll start Walking With the Jocks with an amble up and over the Teutoburger Wald – I have to admit, it’s one of our favourite places to visit. There’s so much of the history still untouched, and of course there are the parallels dating back centuries to Romans fighting in the same place. It makes for a fascinating insight to strategy, and also to simply ‘how’ battles happened, planning the mix of armour and infantry in an unhelpful landscape.
On the tour, our stands start on the banks of the Dortmund Ems canal – how DO you build a Bailey Bridge, and why, and where, and when? This crossing is mentioned in various regiments’ histories, and is the jumping-off point for not only Scottish regiments but others, too.
From there though, we’ll be actually walking up and over the Teutoburger Wald itself – through the woods, up over the ridgeline, passing in single file through the footsteps of the KOSB … but of course there were men from the Herefordshire Regiment, the Monmouthshires, the Fife and Forfars, the Devonshires, the Royal Scots and others too.
We have all the maps of the area to hand, always, and make a point of using them. Large and small, it’s both reassuring and disturbing to follow the fate and the fortune of young men from square to square, and from six-figure grid reference to six-figure grid reference.
Here at Ibbenburen, for example, we walk through the blue-on-blue incident, in which self-propelled Archers used the right reference at the wrong time – or was it the wrong reference at the right time? You decide.
The Teutoburger Wald itself is a joy to walk, but it holds reminders there were two sides to this story – several small cemeteries, with German infantry as old as 49 and as young as 15. Fifteen years’ old.
That makes us think, and gives us pause to reflect that not everything was as simple as it appears to be in the war diaries. But that’s our reason for being here, we’re bringing those records to life for a better understanding of what happened. Understanding how the force line moved forward into Ibbenburen itself, for example – a sizeable town now, divided at it southern edge by the modern motorway, and many parts of it were, of course, rebuilt. But from Ibbenburen, we then move north.
This, we think, is what makes this tour special.
Having started with the focus on battle action that really exemplifies how the British had honed their tactics (and their logistics too), we’ll be sweeping northwards to Bremen and then beyond.
Captain Peter White’s experience gives us the skeleton from which to follow the KOSB of course, and to understand the war from a young man’s point of view. But we’ll be visiting Rethem (where the Welsh were embroiled on the banks of the Aller), and seeing how the British Army and her allies were sweeping now at pace … and this is as much about liberation as it is about battle.
Yes, we’ll be walking through the woods again Walsrode – we believe we’re the first to pin down these locations accurately, and it’s taken several recces to do so. Crouching low, you’ll see how a platoon moves forward under cover between the pines, as quietly as possible, inch by inch, trying to pin down a German contingent that was proving ‘troublesome’ to men billeted nearby – and we’ll walk you up the track, between the trees, and down through the sandy loam into the very clearing where two young men lost their lives as part of that attack. There are few, if any, descriptions of the fighting that took place in North West Europe as evocative as Peter White’s recollections of this manoeuvre.
But in addition to the planned actions, the skirmishes, and the ambushes, we’re also stopping at locations where British forces were liberating slave labour, and prisoners of war.
Our plans at the moment are to visit both Sandbostel – Stalag XB, the only remaining camp that has wooden ‘hut’ structures in which you can see how prisoners of war lived; a superb exhibition centre too – and, briefly, Bergen Belsen too. The Scots were involved in liberating prisoners of war from these camps as they progressed across the north west arc; we’re also going to factor in a visit to the submarine bunker Valentin to the north of Bremen.
To call it a megastructure is to understate its existence by a country mile, and then some. It is the largest free-standing bunker in Germany, with a footprint that runs to some 35,000 square metres – a monument not to success, but to insistence. The outer shell measures over 400 metres in length and is almost 100 metres wide. Built by slave labour to house U-Boats it never acually functioned. In March 1945 RAF Lancasters dropped Grand Slam bombs on it, penetrating the roof in two places.
Bremen itself is our centre of course. We’ll be staying here for a couple of nights, and as a Hanseatic city it is an absolute treat – and a miracle the RAF didn’t hit the historic central quarter, and so many of the older Hansa buildings themselves. From the Bottcherstrasse, with its historic connections to Adolf Hitler’s vendetta against ‘divergent’ art, to the cathedral itself – a vast gothic space, in which Peter White and his men ‘toured’ when they had a moment’s peace from pinning down troops in the area – it is a great place to recover from the day’s touring.
We’ll also pass through Fallingbostel and it’s here, on our last recce, that we found ourselves walking the ground on a rarely-visited location, one that brings the scope and scale of war in 1945 sharply into perspective – the mass grave for 30,000 prisoners of war. Usually overlooked.
At Becklingen as well, we’ll find many of the young men whose stories we tell. This CWGC cemetery is a very special location – but so too is one of the last stops on our tour, Lüneberg Heath, where Field Marshal Montgomery took the official surrender in May 1945.
After the previous days’ walking and discovery, we cannot think of any better place in which to gather together, and commemorate the immense sacrifice of those who went, those who didn’t return, but also those who are determined to remember.
In October 2025, when we go ‘Walking With the Jocks’ , we’re not just following in the footsteps of the 52nd (Lowland) Division. There’s more to the men’s achievements than ‘head for Bremen.’ We’re tracing an exposure of systems, of cruelty, and of liberation too – how it’s remembered by those who were not there, but owe their lives to those who were. Sandbostel and Belsen show us the meaning of endurance, because Valentin shows us the enormity of the Reich’s enduring futility.
