IN the weeks leading up to Remembrance Day on November 11, Second World War veteran TOMMY AITCHISON will be profiling Bermuda war heroes or those with close affiliations in Bermuda, who saw action in the 1939-1945 conflict.

This week the spotlight falls on Captain Edward (Ted) Zoeftig of the 5th Battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment. After the war, Ted withdrew from a career on the London Stock Exchange to follow a career in the field of education.

He was, for many years, tutor-in-charge of a College of Further Education in London. Ted's daughter, Mrs. Ruth Kempe, is managing director of Howe Enterprising Limited, a Bermuda firm specialising in interior design and home furnishing, with a showroom in Hamilton.

I HAD wished to visit and investigate my grandfather's home and my ancestry. From what I had been told as a young boy in the 1920s, he had been born around about 1835 in the District between Lubeck and Hamburg.

In 1938 I took part in a youth hostelling trip by bicycle to visit Schleswig-Holstein. Munich intervened. Then September '39 commenced the astonishing times which some of us underwent as very young men and women - boys and girls.

I volunteered in October, 1939. Such times brought out characteristics of courage, light-hearted comradeship, and a devotion to a cause. The cause was a just one indeed; the delivery of Europe from a mediaeval tyranny and a horror and, on occasion, of mass murder not known since the 30 Years' War.

My personal family links were not to be thought of, so, from October 1939 until the invasion of Europe in 1944, I had no opportunity to satisfy my own personal curiosity. By then I was a First Lieutenant in the Royal Gloucester Hussars, and on its demise was transferred to the 5th Battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment. It was then I thought: "Who knows, I might reach North-West Germany."

Following basic training, I became an instructor in the 55th Royal Tank Regiment at Aldershot. From there I went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst to become an officer.

My account now is of various happenings as a tank/troop leader aiding the forces of retribution as they ground their way forward to the obliteration of the land of my (male) forefathers. From the landing on D-Day, nothing exciting happened to me until the breakthrough from Caen.

I became a casualty when I was wounded by shrapnel during a mortar attack outside Caen. After a short time in hospital, I was able to return to the Regiment.

We left the stench of that battered place, moved through Lisieux and crossed the Seine about August 27. Light casualties from mortaring and Spandau fire gave us good cause to be on the alert.

Upsetting was the blackness of the human spirit. An example springs to mind. We were moving fast through a rolling, beautiful countryside on a wonderful, sunny afternoon. I had been ordered to move along a side road. The whole Battalion was moving fast spread out over many miles.

At a leafy little junction stood a group of perhaps seven agricultural folk. In its midst was a pale blotchy head. I ordered my tank to stop. None of my crew was over 21. They stared in disbelief. A girl or young woman, practically naked - what rags she wore in tatters, head shaved, or had her hair been torn out?

She was being thrown to the English wolves as she twisted and squealed. On command "Driver advance", our Rolls-Royce Merlin engine moved our 30-ton monster away at a roaring 25 mph. We left this little scene of human misery to itself, but not from our memories.

The following day the squadron moved through the mining area of Lens.

THREE hours behind the main column, due to engine trouble, we were now battling along through the villages at 35 mph. Reactions from the local population were amazing. Flags had not yet appeared in great numbers, but spirits had.

We belted around a shallow bend in the country road which ran parallel to a narrow valley. We were surrounded by maximum voice decibels, enormous grins, bad teeth, hoarse breath, peculiar French, unbelievable hilarity, jugs of wine and tots of local gin. In less than two minutes we roared away.

By September 2, the 22nd Armoured Brigade (the Desert Rats) were running low in supplies, particularly petrol. The 7th Armoured Division had been using 70,000 gallons a day, all brought forward by "B" Echelon lorries. (Reference: official history of the 5th Battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment, 7th Armoured Division.)

ON mid-day, September 3, General Verney, General Officer Commanding 7th Armoured Division, warned a "special task force" - a small composite group of armoured vehicles and tanks - to make the "last, long gallop to Ghent".

We moved through St. Denis Westrem on the main road from Ghent to Courtrai. There were seven of us left - seven tanks, that is, each with a tank commander and four crew. All that was left of "A" Squadron, 5th R.T.R. The rest were written off somewhere along the road from Audenarde.

It was September 5. Some people had come five miles to greet the liberators. There weren't many of them. I remember very well indeed a motorised German 88 coming from Courtrai. Civilians were running all over the place. I could not give the order to fire without harming them. My colonel was not pleased. Later, the 88 came back along another road. It was destroyed, but the crew escaped.

Early the following morning (September 6) our Squadron Sergeant-Major was killed. Then I heard from a resistance man about the join-up of German forces at Latham St. Martin. I called up my colonel, who refused to attack.

Later, he changed his mind and allowed me to take one tank, my own. We had no infantry cover. The resistance worker told me there was a group of German officers in the convent immediately ahead. We'd been under stress for days. I jumped off to the doubtful, drawn looks of my crew and headed up the driveway. The crew covered my solitary progress by aiming the 77mm turret gun up the driveway with both machine guns well trained. The German officers and the resistance major were there. We exchanged salutes. Then the one British tank, followed by half a battalion of the enemy, made a disciplined march back the five miles we had just made on our own. Our Squadron Captain met us in an armoured car after two or three miles. News spread and when we reached the main road, 400 yards from St. Denis-Westrem, Belgians were gathering. You can imagine their reaction on seeing the enemy column. Our colonel had organised a stockade for the prisoners of war.

I told the German colonel to descend. He stood beside me. From out of the jeering, baying mob a small man seething with rage dashed across the road with another following. They were on the German colonel in a flash, kicking and stamping.

"Stop!" I shouted, because I thought he was my honourable prisoner of war.

I defended him and was dashed against my vehicle, kicked in all sorts of places until it abruptly stopped with the small man waving his arms, foaming at the mouth, weeping, being hauled off by my crew.

On September 7, the seven tanks converged with the others to enter Ghent. People lined the streets. Flowers were heaped over our blanket rolls and engine plates, the lap-gunner's plates and against the turret. People behind and around us surged and swirled with happiness and joy, a chorus of exhaltation focused on us.

BELLS were ringing. This must have been the music that returning victorious Roman legions had heard. A momentary approbation to forget, for a space, our soldier's role. The crew were enveloped, embraced, possessed by golden faces and hands swept up to us and, for a moment, over us.

Bedecked like natives of Hawaii, gifts were thrown, kisses given, treasured bottles of liqueurs kept from the dark days of 1940 for just this longed-for moment. Small wonder that none who experienced it can forget or escape one single facet of that crystallised moment of glory.

The very close contact with so many of the enemy at Latham-St. Martin - not just eyeball to eyeball, muzzle to gun muzzle confrontation of the usual kind - gave me, for the first time, an opportunity to see the enemy as young men of my own age range.

They were obviously highly disciplined, intelligent and keeping to a tight personal regimen. Thus I saw them as individuals each holding himself from degenerating into the morass of defeated self-pity, subservient and beaten, cringing, all of which I had anticipated.

We showed them no leniency. They were stripped of watches, money, wallets and the officers lost their boots if they were any good. But we did not strip them of their self-esteem. An incident springs to mind.

A party of four, one of whom was quietly crying, approached me. The unhappy one had been in Rommel's desert army, and had carried his father's watch with him until this day. It was his only memory. I ferreted through the bags. It was a battered old silver watch. I gave it to him.

My curiosity as to my relatives (remote) in North West Germany was rekindled outside Ghent by these soldiers. I am undeniably of North German-Scandinavian stock - partially. Undeniably, they had been involved in devastation and now their own homes and culture were being obliterated. We were directed, with others of course, to help clear the Northern Ghent Canot (RABOT) area of the German garrison which had refused to surrender to our Colonel Gus Holiman.

"We must have at least a general to surrender to," they said. I had run my tank, as far as I possibly could, up the canal bank without toppling backwards. It was impossible to get the tank on to the canal's edge so I could not sufficiently depress the gun mantlet in order to fire over the canal at the fine country residence which was the German command. The range was about 1,000 yards and plenty of troop movement was visible through my binoculars. I called up my gunner to view the situation from the top of the tank. We were dreadfully frustrated.

I reported to Squadron HQ. After about ten minutes, during which I viewed a steady evacuation of the German garrison, an immaculate Royal Artillery captain was driven up in a jeep. He gingerly climbed aboard, kept well down, trying not to touch the dirty tank. In a flash, he appreciated the situation and asked to use my microphone. I suppose we looked dirty and a bit surly. He demanded, not artillery, but aerial-borne rockets.

With a crash, crack and thunder three planes, which would have given Wagner's chosen 12 Valkyries fright, arrived hurling thunderbolts less than 200 feet above us straight through the small pretty woodland into the proud old mansion. Retribution and another story for our grandchildren.

The urgency of the rush to Ghent had climaxed with Squadron talk and hopes of "Berlin by Christmas". However, with the approach of autumn, the advance of our Squadron became increasingly less glamourous.

The Arnhem adventure was over, and with it my hopes for Christmas. We were given the task of cleaning part of the Brabant area as far as Nistelrode. Generally speaking, it was, I quote, "Hard but monotonous fighting, so very bitter because the enemy always seemed to withdraw when pressed, having no great reinforcement strength."

The terrain was extremely difficult for tanks and our Cromwell never used its speed; boulders and narrow, wooded lanes took off many a tank track. It was also a happy hunting ground for enemy snipers or foxhole men. We had casualties, of course. And reinforcements.

HAROLD Derbyshire was 20 years old - gentle, restrained and cultured, with not an atom of ferocity in him, a British Latin American volunteer and a third-generation Argentinian. Tall, urbane, he had come to fight for the beleaguered home country. Harold carried a Bible but had, so far as I can recollect, no reassuring thunder of a personal God. He was a cheerful, likeable lieutenant commander and was no man's conscience except his own.

One morning at first light we took our positions and waited at the alert close to Oss in Holland. After two hours or so it came. A "crack", a thump, but no flash. All crews strained to see the next flash, anything to fire at with our two machine guns and a 77mm high explosive or armour piercing gun per tank.

All gunners were traversing their gun mountings, peering through their telescopes. What seemed like a complete vacuum and an everlasting silence encapsulated us in a frozen endless moment. Two hundred yards away, with a clang as if a great gong had been struck, an evil mushroom cloud ejected. The enemy's missile had penetrated Harold's Cromwell tank's armour and exploded the many rounds of 75mm high explosive and armour piercing ammunition, each three feet tall, stacked around the turret. In this raging sound of war, Harold and his young crew no longer existed.

That evening, on return to lager (the tank assembly area), as his friend and brother officer, I wrote to his mother in South America. A year later I received a reply, which had chased me half-way around the world.

Shortly after this not uncommon event, something took place that was billed, we understand, in the media, as a great artillery barrage similar to World War One. We were to drive under it and I suppose after it to the green fields beyond. Hence the Tank Corps colours, through mud, blood and the green fields beyond - brown, red and green.

We were briefed well before dawn, when each tank commander met each infantry officer whose platoon the tank was to support, cover and fire into position. Our platoon was to clear a wood, in which a farmhouse stood, bordering on to a large open space which led to fairly open country. My tank would be in the open all the time, a few yards from the wood's edge.

The infantry said I would draw enemy fire. They would have to keep low. The tank's work was to spray heavy machine gun fire with the occasional high explosive jungle. The sniping for over an hour was vicious and mind-deadening. All the infantry officers were killed. The captain was dragged back, a grey inert body. I waited for a pause in the sniping, climbed out of my tank and dived into the ditch and saw the dismayed soldiers there. I said I'd try again and the sergeant said he would carry on.

The leap back into the peaking height of the tank cupola was achieved without a sniper's response. The tank ranged up and down firing continuously and still the crack of the sniper's rounds passed within inches of me.

VERY soon we were called to reform. On the other side of the woodland was Lieutenant Collinge, a reinforcement officer recently posted to the Squadron. He had been in the desert with the 5th Royal Tank Regiment and been put in the cage (collection area for prisoners of war), spending about two months as a prisoner of war in Italy.

When released, he married in England and said how his wife was expecting their first child. Although he could have rested relatively safe, he insisted on returning to his old squadron. He was a young man, shortish, dapper, alert and self-effacing, whom I remember vividly. He could not possibly hate anyone. For some reason he had climbed out of his tank on to another and was pinpointing a position on that commander's map. Collinge was shot dead by a sniper. O, valiant heart!

Our Colonel Gus Holiman, veteran of early desert days, was sniped dead in much the same manner.

Later on in March 1945, we crossed the Rhine to Vreden in a night attack in which my troop was point troop and I was lead tank and seriously wounded.

Now I realised my tank was heavily fired on. What had happened to my crew?

"Had I failed them? What was to have been the first, firm, speedy sure-footed thrust over the River Elbe had been tripped. What a bloody mess. Do something," I told myself. "At least you're not dead. Think clearly, Zoeftig!"

I was wounded and captured temporarily, but eventually we had reached the bridge, but too late. It was blown up in our faces. There were heavy casualties, killed and wounded, from my crews and the infantry we carried on the tanks.

Eventually, after many a war-time hiccup, I made contact with my Teutonic relatives. The astonishing fact is that their district, not far from Luneburgh, was occupied by the 7th Armoured Division in which I was a troop/tank commander.

My uncle was born in 1869 in the little town of Trittau. He was an orthopaedic footwear manufacturer and died in 1950. He was, according to the Rathaus, a much loved member of the community.

Other relatives live in Tremsbuttell. Some are buried in the Martin Luther Kirk in Trittau. All were Lutherans. I was reassured my grandmother was Swedish and was born in Malmo. My mother's ancestors mainly stem from East Anglia.

I had done my bit in closing down the gas chambers in Germany and Poland. Now the invasion of Japan beckoned. I took a boat to join the 25th Dragoon Guards in Singapore. Promotion was promised.

The atom bombs and subsequent surrender of the Japanese now made our services as an invasion force unnecessary.