'It was a joyride interspersed with flights of terror': Northampton veteran recounts the last weeks of action in Germany before VE Day

Former Corporal Berresford might be one of the youngest living veterans of the Second World War in the UK.

Although he is now 93, he was only 17 when the army finally enlisted him, and it would take another year for him to be deployed.

And for all his waiting, he was only in action for six weeks before VE Day was declared and the war finally stopped.

"Not that anyone told us," Frank told the Chronicle and Echo at his Parklands home. "Every other regiment had a VE Day but no one told us. All we noticed was the shooting had stopped.

"Those six weeks in Germany were a joyride interspersed with little flights of terror."

This year will mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day on May 8. Ahead of the commemorations, the Chron was able to talk to a veteran who was deployed in Germany when the war ended.

As a young man in Sheffield, Frank did everything he could to sign up for service.

"I was uniform daft," said Frank. "I was in the Home Guard at 15 and that was only because I lied about my age.

"I was refused for the RAF, the Navy, the Merchant Sailors and the Marines, until finally I knew I would just have to wait until I was 17-and-a-half for the Army."

And even after a year of training in Scotland and enlisting with the 7th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, it wouldn't be until March 1945 before Frank would finally see action in Germany - and the "flights of terror" that came with them.

Unbeknown to Frank, he and his unit's goal was to push through to the city of Kiel in north Germany - mainly to stop the Russians from claiming Denmark after the conflict.

But for him, every day that passed they were just told to advance. They never knew where they were, what towns they saw or what their goal was.

At one such town, they were only told they needed to "clear it out".

He said: "The whole incident between us getting out the truck, losing two men and running back took 20 minutes. I couldn't even comprehend it at the time."

To the unit, sweeping through a town in occupied territory meant walking through in file and waiting for someone to shoot first.

It came to the point where the squad needed to cross a street. The soldier at the front, 'Johnny Boy', only peeked around the corner to see down the road.

"The shot rang out straightaway," said Frank. "Johnny Boy sprang back with his hands over his face. The sniper had been waiting for us to come around the corner."

A company commander told them to withdraw while a medic treated the injured man - until they got to a street that should only have taken a few seconds to cross.

"'The company commander told us, 'on my signal, run like hell'," said Frank.

"So we ran like hell. And straight away a machine gun opened up, and a tank opened up. We didn't know where it was coming from. It was just bang bang bang.

"We ran like hell and took shelter. When we looked behind this one man - Tiny we called him - was lying in the road. An anti-tank shell had hit him in the foot.

"Straightaway the commander and this medic walked straight out, picked him up and carried him over to shelter. I thought it was immensely brave."

In as short as 20 minutes, Frank and his unit were ordered to return to their truck and get out again.

It added to the day-to-day sense of only knowing what your job at that point in time. It stood alongside incidents like when Frank and his troop investigated a barn only to have mortars fall all around them. Or how the first action he saw was when he lay on the ground as a column of tanks fired over his head into a forest with no visible target.

It many ways, the Germans had already been defeated in those last six weeks, but the fighting continued right up until the surrender on May 8.

Frank said: "My army service was the best time of my life. It just exceeded anything else.

They should have sent me sooner - it took Montgomery six years to win the war but once Frank got in there it took six weeks!"