Marianne's Story

By Michael Taylor

Marianne grew up in a small German town during WW2. After meeting an Englishman on a cruise ship, she eloped to Australia and began her own family. Now aged 90, she lives in Queensland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Taylor
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463588123

Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Transport Planning at the University of South Australia. Author or editor of eight transportation books, Dr. Taylor is a leading pioneer in transportation network vulnerability analysis.

Book preview

Marianne’s Story

By Michael Taylor

Copyright 2020 Michael Taylor

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

Formatting by Caligraphics

CONTENTS

WW1 Johann & Elisabeth

Growing up in Beckum

WW2

Life after War

Finding love with Charles

Moving to Australia

The early Years

Setting up House

The Family Grows

The Retirement Years

Moving to Queensland2

Return to Queensland

1.

WW1

Johann and Elisabeth

Johann Heinrich Pott crouched low in the muddy trench, gripping tightly onto his Mauser bolt-action rifle and made himself as small a target as possible. The 18-year-old German soldier was suffering under the barrage of several 18-pound (84mm) British artillery shells landing every minute for hours on end. The deafening noise, the smell of the dead and the screams of those who soon would be created a hell on earth that his stahlhelm (steel helmet) offered little protection against. Once the shelling stopped there would be long periods of silence, so Heinrich’s days alternated between abject fear and mind-numbing monotony. There would be time to clear away the corpses, pick the fleas from his clothes and those of his fellow soldiers and eat the meagre rations that had not been spoiled by the weather or destroyed by the bombardment.

If Johann was able to survive the shelling or a .303 round fired from a British Lee-Enfield rifle, there was always the threat of dysentery, cholera or typhoid fever to prematurely end his war on the Western Front. The cruellest weapon of all, though, was poison gas. The Germans used it first at Ypres in 1915 with the release of deadly chlorine gas, but the British were quick to follow after this statement by a British General:

‘It is a cowardly form of warfare which does not recommend itself to me or other English soldiers. We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us. If this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons we must not refuse to do so.’

Phosgene gas was soon launched onto the German soldiers – a potent killing agent that was colourless and smelled like mouldy hay. There was no right or wrong in what was a brutal and vicious war, and even though only three per-cent of gas casualties were fatal, hundreds of thousands of ex-soldiers would continue to suffer for years after the war. For Johann, the deadly effects of exposure would linger for 25 years before achieving their initial aim.

On November 11, 1918, nearly 4½ years after the assassination of an Austrian Archduke and his wife had begun the unprecedented carnage and destruction of World War 1, German Field Marshal Hindenburg made a speech to his vanquished army:

‘You have kept the enemy from crossing our frontiers and you have saved your country from the miseries and disasters of war. We end the struggle proudly and with our heads held high where we have stood for four years in the face of a world full of enemies.’

Of the 13 million German soldiers mobilised for the war, an astounding 55 % were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Having survived artillery shells, disease, enemy fire, trench foot, trench mouth and poison gas, Johann Heinrich Pott returned to his small hometown, Beckum, in the northern part of North Rhine-Westphalia, and began to resurrect his life.

As a country, and particularly a losing one, Germany did not fare too well after the war ended. In December 1918, an election was held for a National Assembly tasked with creating a new parliamentary constitution. Social Democratic Party leader, Friedrich Ebert, was elected as President of the new Weimar Republic. But it wasn’t just politics that would change Germany. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June, 1919, at the Palace of Versailles in Paris, found Germany responsible for starting the war. That responsibility