210592 Cpl. William Patrick Butler British Army 2nd Btn. North Staffordshire Regiment from:Chesterton, Newcastle-under-Lyme My Grandad, Bill Butler, joined the North Staffs Regiment in the early part of WW2. He served in the North African campaign and was wounded and taken prisoner in an attack near Medjez on 23 April 1943.
Grandad was reported missing presumed killed in action. A requiem mass was said for him at the local Catholic church in Chesterton.
Grandad always said that the attack was against Longstop Hill, and I would like to know if anyone knows where the North Staffs were on 23 April 1943.
He said he and his mates advanced but the tank support never arrived and they were wiped out by a German attack supported by tanks. I have recently checked the CWGC website for burials of North Staffs soldiers in the Messicault Cemetery and 24 are recorded as killed on that day.
He was captured by the Germans and operated on by German surgeons who sewed up his wounds (they left a rifle bullet in his chest which stayed there for 40 years until removed in the 1970s). He remembered recovering in Carthage Cathedral and then spending time in a military hospital in Tunis. One day a German medical officer came through the doors of the ward and announced: "Gentlemen, I have a visitor for you: an officer of your 8th Army". Tunis had fallen to the Allies. Grandad was repatriated to the UK and invalided out of the Army because of the injuries to his arm.
Grandad was not one for military reunions, but he told me a lot about his wartime experiences. He seemed to have enjoyed his time in the Army, though I was never too sure quite how his experience of the fighting had affected him. He had seen his friends killed in the attack in which he was wounded and he was quite matter of fact about the deaths of young men around him.
He had a lot of respect for the Germans as soldiers and he himself had been very well treated after he had been wounded. He recounted patrolling against German paratroopers and his sadness at seeing dead Germans who from their photographs were clearly family men like himself.
In 1994, we took him and my Grandma to Tunisia to visit Messicault. He had done a bit of research on where his friends were buried. It was a very moving visit. One particularly sad moment was that he discovered the grave of one friend who he thought had survived. A strange coincidence was that this chap was buried next to distant relative of mine from my dad's side, somebody we had no idea about, also from the Potteries but in the Reconnaissance Regiment.
He died in 2003 aged 90. The priest made the point at his funeral that there are not many people who have had 2 requiem masses said for them. We often think that he was so lucky to have made it to the other side of the hill and a further 60 years of life. His friends weren't so lucky. It is a beautiful cemetery, but a sad and distant place.
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