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This story was submitted by Gavin Lea on behalf of Gerard Leo Coyle’s with his permission.

When war was declared September ’39 I was just over 18, my father and brothers were all in the Territorial Army in the fifth boarder regiment on a voluntary basis. What I remember of it we weren’t very well equipped, I was doing what is now called electronics but in them days it was called radio or wireless, things like that. When we went to the army we were all divided into certain regiments depending on what you were able to do, I was put into R.E.M.E which was a one off group as a specialist but first I went with the royal artillery which was poorly equipped. They did not have radar then and the anti aircraft guns had what looked like big ears that you would move to listen for the aircraft. When the signals balanced you would fire but it was a waste of time because the aircraft were too quick, this shows you how ill equipped the war was at the beginning. Because the equipment needed to be more advanced it pushed technology into radar.
I ended up later on in Kin Loss in Scotland on the flying quarters which were sending planes to Oslow. They then asked me back into the army and I was sent to London to put the radar on for the big guns which were heavy artillery, 3.7. There were 12 big guns in total, 4 for each radar which was the basic radar at that time situated on a big wire mesh screen with a transmitter and a receiver that went to a predictor which would give you the co-ordinates to fire. In theory the co-ordinates should have brought the planes down but most of the time it didn’t, the reason for this was because there was one operator in the transmitter section that had to manually put the pulse on the cursor but sometimes it was an eighth of an inch off but that would make the missile miss by nearly half a mile. They made a decision to bring women in to watch them which would hopefully make the male operators more precise when placing the pulse on the cursor. The scientists were then told to create something that would wipe out human error, in other words try to get it automatic so you didn’t have to move it round by hand which is what they did later on.
In my experience of the bombings which went on, the civilians seemed as if they suffered a lot more than what the army personnel were. The army had tin hats and guns but the civilians did not have any protection so when the bombs were dropped if they were in a shelter they were ok but if not there was a lot of damage done. I feel some of the civilians should have been given medals as well as the army but that was not the case.
As the war progressed the technical solutions got more complicated, the powers to be decided we needed a technical branch in the army which is how the R.E.M.E came to be formed. They took a lot of mainly wireless and predictor technicians from the R.A.F and made the R.E.M.E in 1942, which consisted of a lot of R.A.F personnel and a lot of royal army ordinance core. Instead of calling us privates they called us craftsmen, so where you were a private in the army you were made a craftsman in the R.E.M.E. I had to use the type x machine which was what the Germans were using but extra courses were needed to improve your skills. Then when the bombing eased off a bit they began re-building factories and employing women who were not often seen working in factories before 1939 because they wanted to get married so they could leave work and the husband supplied the income. The war changed all that because men were going off to the army leaving work for women, as a result of this the army was far more equipped in ’42 than in ’39 because they were producing guns and planes in the factories. Spitfires and bombers were being produced so we started to bomb the Germans which meant the bombing in London eased off from every day to once a week. Because of this we got an army together to invade Europe and another for the Japanese.
We got sent on a six week jungle training course, at that point I realised we weren’t getting trained for the Germans. The training at Epping Forest just outside of London involved climbing big trees then walking a wire while you were getting shot at, also at the end we were trained to use live ammunition. When we had finished this course we got word from communication that we had to do another street fighting course which was at the Angel District of London which had previously been heavily bombed. We were confused about what this training involved and didn’t know where we were getting sent because of the jungle training for the Japanese and the street fighting for the Germans. Eventually when you got your orders to report, I had to go to Northwich which is a transit camp just outside of Cheshire; from there we were taken to Liverpool and shipped out to the Far East. After about a week or two we realised we were not going to fight the Germans but to the Japanese part. We weren’t very happy about because while we were training they didn’t show us how to deal with the creatures out there, after getting to the Far East, with being in a special regiment we got sent to the Sea forth Islanders. My job was to fix the type x machines as quick as I could if they broke but I still had to do all the infantry training. While out in the jungle it wasn’t so much the Japanese that worried us but the creatures, at one point we came into a spider infested area, I would wake to find about four or five spiders on my net that were about six inches long lit up by my hurricane lamp. After a few sleepless nights due to the spiders we would move off to another area but this one would be infested with snakes, then again with scorpions or centipedes. Obviously we could not train for this in England because we do not have those kinds of creatures, not only that you had the malaria and the mosquitoes, I think there would have been more casualties with the mosquitoes than the Japanese. The war was a funny type because it wasn’t like normal fighting, in the jungle you can’t see and when you were doing a survey around the rice fields the sergeants or corporals would be getting snipered off one by one, this was because they had the stripes down the arm so the Japanese would know that he was an important person so take him down first. Because of this we changed the stripes from down the arm to on top of the shoulder so that they could not see it from the side. At first we didn’t know where the shots were coming from but after a while we would find out, in the middle of the rice field the Japanese had built a little nest and waited. I don’t think there’s an army in the world that could stand the endurance that the Japanese could, as I was concerned they were the best army in the world, they were fanatics. We would find them up trees and in fox holes, they could have been waiting there for weeks, we would never do anything like that. One of the best weapons we had was the flame thrower but that was even difficult to get them when they were in fox holes because you would normally get the soil around them. I didn’t get trained to use the flame thrower but in our group there would be about half a dozen that could use them. I was trained to use the bazooka to take out tanks and small buildings. There was no food because there were no kitchens but instead we swallowed tablets and to shave we had cream which we would rub in then wash off with water from your bottle and wipe off with a cloth.
At this point you could really see how the technology had advanced, commandos had stolen plans for the Atom bomb from the Germans which set them back a bit and we created this bomb which led to most of the Japanese being wiped out. I think that if the Germans had made that bomb first the world would be a different place now. Churchill had started building up the fourteenth army and advancing forward instead of retreating, we got on into Rangoon which is when we dropped the first Atom bomb leading to the Japanese surrendering. Still when we were progressing through the jungle there was still some Japanese troops that could not accept the war was over and carried on. When you think of all the destruction of the war you wonder what it is actually all for, there was a lot of people killed and lots of buildings needed re-building, some still haven’t been re-built to this day.

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