This is part 2 of the interview with Rudolph Rueter, a German soldier who served as part of 319 Division’s Signals section posted to Guernsey. He served in the island for the entire length of the Occupation up to the Liberation on May 9th 1945. A lively straight-talking character who has some fascinating, extremely honest personal insight into life as an Occupation soldier.
RUDOLPH RUETER
Interviewer: You mentioned that your friend Deisner was involved with a Guernsey woman. Was this a common occurrence amongst local women and soldiers stationed there?
Rudolph: Well, I think they were a different type of women, really, but I am not sure. Most of the time it was just friendly contact or, in the case of Manfred and his Jane it was a real love story. Other than that, they hardly got involved with Germans. I mean, Manfred and Jane had been seeing each other for a long time and then they met again. I think theirs was a true love. The others it was all just, you know, fleeting encounters.
My other comrades, Koehler, who had a girlfriend in town, his encounter lasted a lot longer but it was over when the war was. No, most of these encounters were short lived and probably based on “mutual benefits“. Both parties got something out of it. I don’t know. I don’t know of any case where there was serious jealousy involved. It was all just temporary and not all that serious.
Interviewer: Moving on, we understand that you were involved in a life-threatening incident involving a shipwreck during your time on the island. Please can you tell us the story of what happened?
Rudolph: I had not had any leave for over a year when I was granted fourteen days in January 1943. It was four of us from our unit, who were to go on holiday. We were driven to the harbour to board the ship ”The Scotland“ or something like that. There was another ship in the harbour, too called France or Normandy, a small steam ship. It was a passenger ship. Ours was a freighter. I got on board and looked round for a place to stay the night. I looked down one loading hatch and saw timber loaded down there on the cement floor and a ladder leading down. I thought to myself, ”better not go down there, if something happens you’ll never make it back up again“. I checked out another loading hatch and there, the same scenario, a timber load and on top of it comrades sitting chatting, playing harmonica, looking forward to going home. But I thought to myself better not go down there either. So I looked on deck for somewhere to stay the night. I decided to take shelter from the wind behind some planks.
We started moving but were still waiting for the convoy from Guernsey to take us to St Malo. Whilst we were waiting for the convoy, I suddenly noticed these light signals, the ship turned and it became unpleasant up on the deck. So, I decided to go down the iron spiral staircase, down to the first level. I went into the machine room, the steam room. It was nice and cosy there. I sat on my suitcase resting my back against the isolated wall of the hot boiler and everything felt great.
We had been going for ten minutes or so, when the ship came suddenly to an abrupt halt. The lights went out and on again. Then, we started moving again. I think, that was the biggest mistake. If the ship would not have moved again but kept sitting on the reef it may not have sank. So, any way, there I am in the machine room and feeling all cosy. Suddenly there was a bang, the light goes out. I get up. The light comes back on again and for a moment everything seemed okay. A moment later however I saw the water gushing forth from underneath the floor. There was such a high pressure, it must have been a meter high or so. And it moved from here to there, because the ship swayed. So, I call this sailor over, he was busy further inside the machine room. He comes, sees the water and tells me to get out of there. He gets a crate and starts to take out the embers, to avoid an explosion because if water gets near the boiler it all explodes. I left him to it.
Upstairs they were busy firing flares. It was all chaos. I tried to find myself a place in a life boat, I’m not a good swimmer. There was one seat left in one of the boats. But the boat was still tied to the ship by the ropes and none of the sailors were in sight to undo them. They had all disappeared, the sailors. There were only two life boats, anyway. In the second boat, it was already in the water, I saw a female passenger and a few people from the Organisation Todt, old people, you know. I remember thinking, these must be French people, maybe they were being exchanged. Anyway, I had a knife on me and I was about to cut the ropes of the boat when I suddenly realised that by the time I would have untied the boat on both ends somebody else would have taken my place in it. It didn’t make sense to me, so I didn’t do it. The boat later sank together with the ship.
I found myself one of metal-framed inflatable life-rafts. I struggled to pull it from underneath this iron bar. By now the water had risen to knee level. You could hardly see the railing anymore. It looked like the ship would sink any minute now. Some people jumped into the water holding onto their suitcases some undressed before they jumped in. I thought, ”you better keep your clothes on or you’ll freeze“. I had my pistol on me and a sausage. And suddenly there was water everywhere, just gushing forth. The timber was floating past me and I drifted away from the ship. Rescue people started to fish out people at the other end of the ship. I called out for them. One of them heard me, turned the spotlight in my direction and told me that I would have to wait as there were far more people waiting to be saved on the other side of the ship, and that they would come back for me later. Well, I clang on to the railing with one hand and the inflatable life-raft with the other. The raft also contained a net, but the net was broken. Finally, I managed to climb inside the raft. It was old and rusty and leaked, and my legs didn’t fit in. All the while I kept drifting because of the strong current. It was something like eight miles per hour. I kept drifting and drifting because of the strong current. The rescue people had forgotten all about me. I was all by myself.
Some time later I saw a light coming from the land. I tried to reflect it with my aluminium water bottle, so they would see me. But they didn’t. I thought if I get to a bay by myself, there will be mines and I will explode up into the air. All the outer bays were full of mines, weren’t they. So I kept drifting round the Island all night long.
In the morning, drifting past one bay after the other I said to myself “you have to get on land at some point.” I had made myself a paddle from the timber that was floating round everywhere. It looked like a timber road in the sea. So, I took my makeshift paddle and tried to get on land. But I kept drifting because of the strong current. I remember thinking if you don’t reach this bay over there, right now, you’ll drift into the open sea. In the end I took my pistol and fired a few shots in the hope, someone on land would hear me. And then I saw a flare being fired on land and thought, “thank God, somebody saw me”. Two hours later a tug boat came towards me and I thought, “God, I hope, they saw me”, when suddenly the boat turns back. It had come across a mine field and had to turn. But they had seen me. They threw me a rope and got me on board. There was a British pilot on board. He was amazed to learn I had survived. They had not expect any more survivors after all these hours.
I remember asking them to help me get undressed. I also remember the smell of porridge and asking them for a portion. They gave me one and then I fell asleep. That’s all I remember. I had saved one bullet for myself in case I didn’t make it or got rescued because I was scared of drowning. I kept the pistol as a memory. Later, back home my father bedded the pistol into the mortar of the kitchen stove because he didn’t want to hand it over to the Allies.
Interviewer: What happened to the other three soldiers you were with from your unit?
Rudolph: They all drowned. I was fished out at the northern side of the island. The ship sank on the southern end. I always used to think, it was one hundred and seventy people who had drowned. Some statistics say it was one hundred and thirty.
Interviewer: Did such a high number of casualties come as a shock to the troops in the island?
Rudolph: It was nothing unusual. For example, I was reported missing around lunch and found the next day in the afternoon. I had already been pronounced dead.
Interviewer: So death was not something unusual for you to deal with?
Rudolph: No, nothing unusual about that. We had the news coming in from Russia. People were dying every single day, a lot more people. The guys on the ship had just been unlucky. The guys from my unit who’d been on the ship with me had all been excellent swimmers. Only one of them survived.
End of interview.
Read Part 1 of this interview. The boating accident described above is of great interest to the Occupation Archive. If anyone has more information on what this disaster might have been such as boat name and more accurate facts, we would be very interested in hearing about them.
Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission
