• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

The Left Handshake The Left Handshake THE LEFT HANDSHAKE * The editors of this e-edition would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Scouters Steve Bobrowicz, Karl Pollak and Keith Barr in the preparation of this book. Downloaded from: “The Dump” at Scoutscan.com http://www.thedump.scoutscan.com/ Editor’s Note: The reader is reminded that these texts have been written a long time ago. Consequently, they may use some terms or express sentiments which were current at the time, regardless of what we may think of them at the beginning of the 21st century. For reasons of historical accuracy they have been preserved in their original form. If you find them offensive, we ask you to please delete this file from your system. This and other traditional Scouting texts may be downloaded from The Dump. The Left Handshake “B-P” The Left Handshake THE LEFT HANDSHAKE The Boy Scout Movement during the War 1939-1945 By HILARY ST. GEORGE SAUNDERS Originally published by: COLLINS ST. JAMES’S PLACE LONDON 1949 Page 1 The Left Handshake CONTENTS Chapter I BRAVERY: The Story of Jan van Hoof 7 Chapter II ENTERPRISE: Lord Baden-Powell 10 Chapter III PURPOSE: Scouting in the British Isles 19 Chapter IV RESOLUTION: Scouting in Occupied Countries 30 Chapter V ENDURANCE: Scouting in Captivity 82 Chapter VI Scouting in the Empire and in the 100 PARTNERSHIP: U.S.A. Chapter VII Scouting in Refugee and 106 ASSURANCE: Displaced Persons’ Camps Chapter VIII Scouting in the Defeated 114 REFORMATION: Countries Chapter IX ENTHUSIASM: The Movement and its Meaning 120 Chapter X DEVOTION: The Jamboree of Peace 127 APPENDICES 130 INDEX Not included in this volume Page 2 The Left Handshake FOREWORD by The Chief Scout of the British Commonwealth and Empire WHEN COLONEL BADEN-POWELL entered the capital city of the Ashanti people in 1890 he was met by one of the Chiefs who came to him holding out his left hand. B.-P. held out his right in return but the Chief said: “No, in my country the bravest of the brave shake with the left hand.” So began the “left handshake” of the world-wide brotherhood of Scouts. In this book are told some of the stories of courage and endurance shown by Scouts in many different countries during the war of 1939-45. There would not be room even in many books to tell them all. Many, indeed, can never be told; some for political reasons, some because the actors died unknown. They remembered their Promise, to do their best to do their duty to God, and their Country; to think of other people and not themselves. So, when the time came, they were prepared in body and in spirit to render their service. Their record is unsurpassed; they were “the bravest of the brave.” Page 3 The Left Handshake Chapter I BRAVERY The Story of Jan van Hoof IS FACE was that of one who, in the prime of youth, died not only for his country but for the H freedom of the world. The forehead was high and smooth beneath hair well kept but a little distorted, as though he had just run his hands through it. Below the forehead the eyes, looking into a distance which held what the ordinary man and woman may on occasion glimpse in moments of exaltation or despair, but which he was plainly enough – duty, danger, death. They were the eyes of an idealist set in the head of a shrewd and practical young man. For that most assuredly was what Jan van Hoof was. The resolute mouth with the full under-lip, the somewhat large ears, the straight nose with the well-marked nostrils, these were features belonging to one who, you would say, would go far in business. And far he went, into the business of battle. Here is his story. In the third week of September, 1944, the German armies, thrust out with tremendous slaughter from France and Belgium, turned at bay upon the confines of their own country. Opposed to them more than a million men, British and American, who a few weeks before had burst from their congested bridgeheads in Normandy, were now stretched out from the Alps to the mouth of the Rhine, poised ready to deliver, if they could, the final, the mortal blow. At that time it seemed that they would be able to deal it at any moment. Those September days, when the leaves were slowly turning to gold, would, it was confidently hoped, provide the climax of the war. That they did not was an act of fate, who relented at the last moment and granted to a treacherous and defeated people a few months of respite ere the consequences of their sin were paid in full. That autumn of 1944 the 21st Army Group, comprising the British and Canadian forces, after sweeping through Northern France and Belgium, were standing on the edge of Germany confronted by the three great river barriers which, in the northeast of Holland, barred their further advance. These were the River Maas, the River Waal, and the Lower Rhine. Cross them in strength and the war was won, for the main German defences in the west, the vaunted Siegfried Line, petered out in the forest of the Reichswald and would therefore be outflanked. The Germans were as well aware of this as was Field- Marshal Montgomery, and as determined to prevent, as he to force, the passage. It could be made only at three points. The first of them, the Maas, was traversed by a nine-span steel bridge at Graves, the second, the Waal, by a five-span bridge at Nijmegen, the third by a bridge similar in character over the Nijder, or Lower Rhine, at Arnhem. The capture of these three bridges was vital, for they were the three most important links in a single chain, the Eindhoven-Weghel-Graves-Nijmegen and Arnhem road joining Holland to Northern Germany. In a countryside for the most part low-lying and flooded, this road was the only one along which armour could pass, and behind armour lorry-borne infantry and their supplies. Montgomery’s plan was to seize the three bridges by a bold and modern operation of war. “A carpet of airborne troops” would be laid, over which his armies would pour into the Reich. The task of the 101st American (Airborne) Division was to seize the bridge at Graves, that of the 82nd (Airborne) the bridge at Nijmegen, and that of the 1st British Airborne Division the bridge at Arnhem. It was with the second of these bridges that Jan van Hoof was so vitally concerned. He had lived in sight of it all his short life; he was to die beside it. When war came to Holland in 1940, Jan was eighteen years old. The Germans arrived almost overnight, so swift and well prepared was their conquest of his country. They behaved well – at first; but, in common with many of his generation, Jan was not fooled by Teutonic wolves in sheep’s clothing, and he at once made common cause with those who were determined to open the eyes of their countrymen to the real, as opposed to the expressed, intentions of the conquerors. Jan was “a very idealistic boy with Page 4 The Left Handshake high principles of what a good community ought to be.” So said his Patrol Leader, and he knew him well, for Jan had been a keen Cub and Scout. “We often had talks about it and I was always impressed and carried away by his enthusiasm, and that, I think, was one of the characteristic things of his underground work –his steady enthusiasm, and the serious way in which he carried out his job.” The boy was well equipped, then, for the dangerous, glorious, monotonous life of an underground worker. All who knew him describe him as “a silent, simple boy who went his own way.” He rarely told his parents what he was doing and they never asked; nor did his two sisters and his brother. They knew this trait of Jan’s nature. He had said many times as a small boy: “What I plan to do, I will do.” Now the days of darkness had come. His parents watched and waited, but they did not ask what thoughts were alive behind that tall forehead, those steady eyes. Yet he was not naturally secretive for his ambition was to be that most open and frank of all men, a journalist, if possible a foreign correspondent, and when the Germans came he persisted in this desire. “He used to say to me,” said his mother, “that would be a Goebbels, but a Goebbels of a good kind.” Jan believed in the value of journalism and in its power to do good as well as evil. By 1941 the early – it is hard to call it the halcyon-period of the German occupation of Holland was over. The Dutch, ever stubborn, had refused to respond to blandishments. They had grim memories on which to draw. Alva’s pikemen, the legions of Louis XIV, the douaniers of Napoleon, not once but many times had their flat, well-ordered country been the coveted prize of an invader. The latest was Hitler. Well they would deal with him as their ancestors had dealt with the others. Patience and courage. They were the weapons before the year was out the Dutch Underground Movement was beginning to show those symptoms of organisation with which the Germans, with their long experience of Czechoslovakia, Poland and other ravaged countries, were by then only too familiar.

Load more

  136

Copy Link