The Times - UK (2021-12-21)

the times | Tuesday December 21 2021 51

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Nevertheless he was soon boxing for

the regiment.

When war broke out in September

1939 the Tenth initially remained in En-

gland. In May the following year, with

the sudden German thrust into Belgi-

um, they were rapidly embarked for Le

Havre. Mid-crossing, the Germans

having broken through the French

defences, threatening the Channel

ports, they were switched to Cherbourg

and taken by train to the Seine, north of

Rouen, to reinforce the hasty defences

of Haute-Normandie. On May 26, the

day the evacuation from Dunkirk

began, they took part in the Anglo-

French counterattack against German

bridgeheads at Huppy near Abbeville.

It was little short of chaotic, the Tenth’s

light tanks no match for the Germans’

firepower. Having lost most of them,

the regiment fought as improvised

lorried infantry until on June 16 they

were evacuated via Brest.

A year of anti-invasion watch and re-

equipping followed, until in November

1941 the Tenth were shipped to North

Africa to join the 7th Armoured Divi-

sion, the “Desert Rats”, so-called for the

divisional emblem worn on the battled-

ress sleeve. Covill, by now a sergeant,

took part in most of the battles of 1942

as the Eighth Army alternately

advanced and retreated in the desert in

the face of Rommel’s Afrika Korps and

the Italian army, until at El Alamein in

November the British army gained its

first conclusive victory of the war. The

Tenth were in the thick of the fighting,

capturing Rommel’s deputy, the com-

mander of the Afrika Corps, Lieuten-

ant-General Wilhelm Ritter von

Thoma. The Eighth Army’s command-

er, General Sir Bernard Montgomery,

at once invited him to dine in his trailer.

“I sympathise with General von

Thoma,” Churchill remarked on learn-

ing of it. “Defeated, in captivity and...

[pause for dramatic effect] dinner with

Montgomery.”

Von Thoma inadvertently yielded

much useful information on the Ger-

man “V Weapons” programme while in

captivity in London.

Covill was twice wounded in the sub-

sequent advance into Tunisia and then

up the east coast of Italy, and was men-

tioned in dispatches. His DCM for the

action in the Argenta Gap was

approved three weeks after the

German surrender, but there was no

immediate let-up for the Tenth, who

were railed north to Lübeck on the

Baltic for occupation duties with the

British Army of the Rhine.

Here Covill met Ingeborg (Inge)

Jeske, a striking blonde some inches

taller than he. Inge, born in Berlin, had

worked as a shorthand typist through-

out the war in Hermann Goering’s avia-

tion ministry, lately in Krakow, and had

been relocated to Lübeck as the Rus-

sians advanced west. She was from an

old royalist family, had learnt English at

school and had never been in the Hitler

Youth so was quickly given security

clearance to work in the Tenth’s orderly

room. It was not long before Covill

sought permission to marry her, al-

though “fraternisation” was still dis-

couraged, and in some cases forbidden.

He was sent to England

to find an English wife

instead. The ploy failed

Obituaries

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Page 52

By mid April 1945 Sergeant Douglas
Covill was a battle-hardened 24-year-
old veteran. He had taken part in the
evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, the
battle of El Alamein in 1942 and the
invasion of southern Italy in 1943. As
part of a Sherman tank crew he had
then been part of the slog north until
British troops were checked at the
waterlogged and freezing “Gothic Line”
in the winter of 1944-5. Even at this
stage of the war the Germans were still
resisting stubbornly.
As a troop sergeant in the Tenth, that
is, the 10th Royal Hussars (Prince of
Wales’s Own), Covill now found him-
self in support of an attack by the 24th
Guards Brigade on the Fossa Marina
bridgehead in the Argenta Gap north-
east of Bologna, a narrow causeway of
high ground west of Comacchio lagoon.
It was part of Operation Buckland, the
Eighth Army’s contribution to the
Allied spring offensive to break out
onto the plains of the River Po.
Because the Sherman tank had a
petrol engine it was notoriously prone
to “brewing up”. Like everyone who
fought in them, Covill was familiar with
the joke that the difference between a
Ronson cigarette lighter and a Sher-
man was that the Sherman lit first time.
On April 17 he discovered the truth of
this first hand when his Sherman was
hit by a bazooka, killing the driver. The
tank was quickly engulfed in flames.
The gunner, a big man, was wounded in
the leg, and Covill, who was just 5ft 3in,
had a struggle to extricate him through
the turret hatch. Having done so, his
loader/radio operator, also wounded,
was then able to escape, although the
tank continued on its way until falling
into a canal. Having got the gunner into
cover in a ditch while under small arms
fire, Covill managed to signal forward
the troop’s third tank and direct its fire
on the offending machine gun. Once
this was silenced, he got the gunner on-
to the tank’s engine deck to
evacuate him.
It was at this point
Covill realised that
his troop leader, the
21-year-old Lieu-
tenant Henry
Brooke who had
won MC in No-
vember’s fight-
ing, had been
killed by sniper
fire. Covill ran
forward under
fire from another
direction to take
command. He then
led the remnant of the
troop in support of the
infantry until first light the
following day.
“By his courage and devotion”, ran
the recommendation for his gallantry
award, “he set a great example and
greatly assisted with his troop in [the]
Bridgehead... It is certain that if Ser-
geant Covill had not taken the action he
did, another troop would have had to
take over, and the momentum of the
attack would have been lost.” The bri-
gade commander strongly endorsed
the commanding officer’s recommend-
ation, adding that Covill had shown
“great gallantry, resource, initiative and
determination”. The Allied command-

er-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Harold

Alexander, granted an immediate

award of the Distinguished Conduct

Medal, second only to the Victoria

Cross for valour in the face of the

enemy, and requiring also a marked

degree of application and devotion to

duty. The DCM was the Crown’s oldest

gallantry award, and one of the most

highly prized decorations of

the war. Its discontinu-

ation in 1993 was re-

garded by many as

a mistake.

Douglas

Frederick

(Dougie)

Covill was

born in

Croydon in

1920, the

middle of

three broth-

ers, both the

elder and

younger of

whom were

wounded in Nor-

mandy. Their father,

Henry Covill, was a bus con-

ductor who had played football for

Crystal Palace before being wounded in

the First World War. Covill left school

in Croydon at 14 and began work as a

delivery boy, and then later at Gillett

and Johnston’s bell foundry. Finding

the work dull, he enlisted in 1937,

joining the 10th Hussars in Tidworth

on Salisbury Plain the following year.

The regiment had just returned from

India, where they had left their horses,

to begin mechanisation. Predictably

Covill at once acquired the nickname

“Chota”, Hindustani for “little”.

ngine deck to

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st light the

geanddevotion”ran

highly prized dec

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ation in 1 9

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Henry Covill, was

ductorwho hadplayedf

Major Douglas Covill

Veteran of the fall of France as well as El Alamein who later won a DCM in Italy for his courageous action after his tank ‘brewed up’

Douglas Covill, right, was praised for his resourcefulness and determination. Above right, as mayor of Winchester with

Princess Diana, 1988. Below, one of the Tenth’s tanks in Huppy in an ill-fated counterattack during the Dunkirk evacuation

His commanding officer sent him to

England for six months “to find an

English wife instead”. The ploy failed

and two years later Inge and Covill

were married in the garrison church.

Inge died in 2014. He is survived by

their two daughters: Geraldine, who

became a teacher and married a

teacher; and Angela, who was a nurse

and midwife and married a doctor.

The Covills might have returned to

England with the regiment in 1953 but

for an episode reminiscent of Evelyn

Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, in-

volving the spare wheel of a Volkswag-

en Beetle staff-car belonging to another

squadron, which had been misappro-

priated by the now Squadron Quarter-

master-Sergeant Covill in the exigen-

cies of his own squadron’s service.

There followed an unusually prolonged

spell at “ERE” (extra-regimental em-

ployment), during which Covill was

promoted to regimental quartermas-

ter-sergeant at the headquarters of the

1st British Corps in Bielefeld. Here, lat-

terly, he came to the notice of an officer

of the 5th Inniskilling Dragoon Guards

who was about to take command of the

Tenth and who knew nothing of the

affair of the spare wheel. A quartermas-

ter commission was promptly arranged

for him and Covill returned to regimen-

tal duty, where he quickly gained the

accolade “Mr Fixit”, especially when it

came to maintaining the regiment’s ar-

moured cars during the Aden Emer-

gency. Ten years later, in 1969, he was

appointed MBE (Military), by no

means a common honour, “for his un-

tiring work and loyalty to the regiment

and the army”.

Covill retired from active duty as a

major in 1970 after the Tenth’s amalga-

mation with the Eleventh to form the

Royal Hussars, serving on as a retired

officer in Germany and then Hamp-

shire until finally retiring fifteen years

later. By that time a phrase had entered

the language of the regiment: “Covill

can fix anything.”

In 1988 he became Mayor of Winch-

ester, and remained a demon bridge

player until at 97 his eyesight and hear-

ing failed him.

Many years after their marriage, the

Covills invited to dinner the command-

ing officer who had tried to thwart their

intentions. As he left, he wrote in their

guest book, “peace treaty signed”.

Douglas Covill, MBE, DCM, tank troop

sergeant and hussar quartermaster, was

born on November 14, 1920. He died on

November 15, 2021, aged 101

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