The Brøgger Chronicle

The Brøgger Chronicle:
"My father went, as a very young man to work for 'the Great Northern Telegraph Company' in Newcastle, he stayed there during the First War, after the war he was posted to Helsinki in Finland, on the way he stayed for a short visit at the telegraph station in Gothenborg in Sweden where my mother was employed as a telegraphist. Sweet music occured, and she followed him to Helsinki as his wife, and during the next few years produced 2 baby-boys, myself in March- 1925, and my brother Svend in November 1926 . . . .

So on the morning of May the 5th 1945 the Danish brigade marched into Copenhagen, and although the real celebrations had been the evening before, when the Liberation Message came over the radio, there was plenty of dancing and jubilation. The Resistance Movement were busy rounding up and arresting collaborators, nazi-symphatizers and the danish traitors who had joined the Hipo-corps.....and for that matter, anybody whom they didn't like (the night of the long knives)

Within a few days the brigade was dispersed all over the country, to take over boring guard duties, the enourmous amounts of material left by the Germans was ofcourse Allied War Loot and Danforce being part of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, it became our burden to guard it.
This turned out a bit of a dilemma, especially for my company.

We were guarding a huge depot of German One-Man submarines in the North of Jutland, each one of them stored on a huge trailer with 64 strong and brand new truck-wheels, which were slowly deteriorating, whilst thousands of Danish lorries were grounded due to lack of tyres, and so of course the inevitable happened. We, the Danish Brigade, organized the distribution of those thousands of tyres to our countrymen

The British Army

When the Danish Brigade was disbanded, at the end of the summer -45, I prepared to start my enginering studies, but the times in Denmark were unrestfull, and I was unrestfull and when a British recruiting office was opened i Copenhagen, ( the war with Japan was not over yet ) I was one of the first to volunteer my services.

The Buffs, Canterbury

We were a group of 81 Danes who left Copenhagen for Canterbury in December - 1945. We were heading for "The Buffs", The Royal East Kent Regiment, which had longstanding relations with the Danish Royal House. We all spoke English rather well, and on arrival at the Buffs headqarter in Canterbury, we were all promoted to lancecorporals and "interpreters" in order to assist the instructors to handle the 3-4000 Danes who arrived during the next few months and most of whom did not speak very much English, if any at all!!!

Ørslev

When I returned to Denmark from my service in the British Army in thr early summer of -48 I din't know quite what to do with myself. On the one hand I wanted to go to the school of engineering, as I'd allways wanted, but for one thing, I just didn't see how I would finance four years of studying, and I didn't feel sure that I would be able to go through with it, having been an officer of the Queen and commander of men for a couple of years. So after some thinking, I borrowed a little money from my mother and set myself up as a chicken farmer in a small village on Seeland called Ørslev. It went badly from the start, and soon I found myself spending more and more time i nearby Copenhagen, where lots of things were happening
back to the Index"