"The young tank commander seen running in flames along the road was left recognisable to his comrades only by the pips on his shoulder and the white and purple ribbon of the Military Cross on his chest. Robert Boscawen survived the devastating burns from the attack by a hidden battery of four 105 mm flak guns of the German 7 Para on Easter Day, 1 April 1945, that ignited the petrol in his Sherman Firefly as it rushed a bridge on the Twente Canal at Enschede on the Dutch-German border. The debt he felt the world owed to all those who, like two of his crewmen, had lost their lives, was to inform his future political career. Just turned 22, the Old Etonian Coldstream Guards captain already knew too much about the senselessness of war. He had lost a childhood friend, shot dead by a jumpy sentry from his own side soon after D-Day, on the Guards Armoured Division's advance through Normandy. He had watched the Allied advance as far as Brussels – in which his troop was in the van – come to a halt because of supply difficulties, then meet disaster in the resumed forward push at Arnhem after the enemy was given time to bring up extra strength. Unaware of the extra Nazi divisions lying in wait, Boscawen, then a lieutenant, saved Allied dignity during that battle when, as part of XXX Corps, he ejected German forces from an orchard at Bemel on 3 October 1944. From there, according to his recommendation for an immediate MC, the Germans "at daylight... could have seriously threatened the position of the infantry battalion which he was supporting." The recommendation adds that under bazooka and mortar fire "his decision to risk himself and his tanks in close country and in the dark was a very bold one. By it he restored a most embarrassing and dangerous situation. He fully realized that a desperate situation required desperate measures and he accordingly took them with the most satisfactory result." "The most satisfactory result" was that he had saved many British soldiers' lives. He did so, however, as the war began to drag on through a winter before which, he concluded in his 2001 memoir Armoured Guardsmen, better thinking at the top could have ended it. Boscawen, fourth son of the eighth Viscount Falmouth, and belonging to the same Cornish family that produced Admiral Edward Boscawen, victor of the 1759 action against the French off Lagos in Portugal, was not to enjoy Britain's return to life in peace until he had undergone gruelling months of treatment for his blinded eyes and burns-ravaged body with penicillin and saline baths, as one of the "guinea-pigs" of the pioneering surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, in Sussex." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/robert-boscawen-tank-commander-who-survived-terrible-injuries-to-become-a-respected-and-admired-conservative-mp-9057111.html
To save repeating myself, here's a link to the other place http://ww2talk.com/forums/topic/51542-robert-boscawen-mc-1st-armd-bn-coldstream-guards/
