Daniel Dingwall - 30th Anniversary

[venturablue]

A wee tear or two reading that, lovely tribute. Thanks for sharing.

I've now been without my parents for longer than we were alive together. My dad still my best pal and hero.

Shine on.

 

[SM™]

That was really something reading through that just now.

Your old man sounds like he was one of a kind. I'm sure you're very proud.

Talks of his dad in the same way that I talk about my mum, and there can be no higher compliment.

 

[wee bud's pit boots]

A lovely tribute.

 

[mdingwall]

What follows is an account from the comic Warlord about the raid on Rommel's villa - he himself was absent that night - which my dad claimed to have been on. When the film Raid On Rommel with Richard Burton was shown my dad would claim that he was the Commando who threw in the first grenade - "here i come now" he would say.

The leader of the raid - Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Keyes - would be killed in hand to hand fighting which erupted when they were discovered by a sentry. He would be awarded the Victoria Cross for his gallantry.

The raiding party fled but missed a coastal pick up from a submarine and they fled into the desert where the Germans picked them up over the next few days. They should have been shot out of hand under the terms of Hitler's notorious Commando Order which said they would be treated as terrorists, German officers who failed to execute the captured were to be arrested and put before a court martial.

Rommel refused to have the raiders executed and instead insisted that Geoffrey Keyes and other British dead were buried with full military honours in a service conducted by his own personal chaplain. It was for humane acts such as this in the heat of battle that the Field Marshall was revered by the Afrika Korps and regarded as a worthy foe and a decent German by the men of the 8th Army.