“He stood just 5ft 3in tall in his Army-issue boots and his legs were already weary from battle.
But Corporal Bob Roberts knew precisely what to do when he and his comrades captured a 7ft 6in German. Walk Tall.
The David and Goliath encounter between the diminutive Allied soldier and the biggest man in the German army provided a brief moment of comedy during one of the fiercest assaults of the Second World War.
By the time Bob had finished frisking the lance corporal for hidden weapons, even the other prisoners were sniggering - as were Bob's mates and the German giant himself.
Yesterday the remarkable story of Little and Large emerged for the first time, more than 65 years after they met.
Bob, now an 87-year-old great grandfather, never saw the German again but always remembered the light-hearted image of him towering nearly a yard above him on the sloping battlefield.
'Actually he was 7ft six and a half,' Bob told me yesterday. 'I think he saw the funny side of it. He was obviously quite used to the attention - they told us he was the tallest man in the German army. I got the impression it was nothing new to him.
Up until that moment it was pretty deadly serious. We had just captured five pillboxes that were shelling Dover from where we were in Calais and we'd taken about 250 prisoners. But this seemed to break the tension.'
Minutes earlier, he had been forced to shoot a German officer dead after he pretended to surrender and pulled out a pistol. All around him, scores more prisoners were still only just laying down their arms.
'Then along came this fellow and it all turned into a big joke. One moment I was a blink of an eye from death; the next we were all having a good laugh. Luckily he didn't give me any aggravation.'
The picture was one of several Bob believes were taken on cameras seized for intelligence purposes from the captured troops.
'I did have another picture of me with this big guy, standing under his outstretched arm, but I lost it some time ago when our home was burgled,' he added. 'I couldn't believe it when I saw this photo after all these years.'
Bob, 21 at the time, was serving in Normandy with the North Shore New Brunswick Regiment of the Canadian army.
He was among the troops who stormed Juno beach on D-Day in June 1944. He helped to take out a Nazi machine gun nest before taking part in a pincer movement to trap a battalion of German soldiers firing huge guns across the Channel from pillboxes below the Calais clifftops.”
After a four-day stand-off they raised a white flag. Bob was assigned to lead a party of seven to take the surrender. 'Dozens and dozens of them came streaming out and I just shouted: "Does anyone speak English?" An officer came forward so I told him to order his men to lay down their arms so I could frisk them.
'Suddenly he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a .38. I shot him in the eye and he went down. There wasn't any trouble after that - not even from this enormous guy.'
Bob went on to fight through Belgium and Holland until February 1945, when he was badly injured by shrapnel.
After the war he married his English girlfriend Vera. The couple are about to celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary at their home in Bournemouth.
Had it not been for the photograph and a series of bizarre coincidences, the extraordinary battlefield encounter would probably have faded into history.
Amateur historian Rob Smith, trying to track down his mother's Canadian wartime sweetheart, unearthed the photograph in an obscure archive.
He then found Bob Roberts, from the same regiment, living just a mile from his mother in Dorset. Mr Smith also discovered that the German PoW had been a circus giant in America before the war.
A major who served in Bob's company told Mr Smith the German spoke 'very good English'. When asked how he came to learn it, he said he used to live in New York, where he had worked in a circus. However, he had been in his native Germany when war broke out and was conscripted.
