大象传媒

Having joined the Royal marines at the tender age of 16yrs 10mths in March 1942 the next four and a half years was one of lots of excitement and near death experiences.

It is difficult to catergorise and compare these incidents, whether it was a direct hit on our ship, HMS Uganda at Salerno or being attacked by kamikaze fighters off the coast of Malaya, or caught in the crossfire of rioting in Surabaya in Indonesia, without my rifle and protected by Japanese soldiers who saw me safely back to a British American tobacco company building where we had our accomodation.

So the one incident I shall write about occured in the Scicilian campaign in 1943, after having endured 38 days of continuous aircraft attacks, our own gun batteries continually firing the double 4.7in anti aircraft gun (8 of them) the 8 barrelled pom-poms, the six inch main armament housed three in a turret in 3 turretts oerliken guns plus a canister of smoke belching out from smoke barrels on the focsle and the quaterdeck which sometimes made breathing very difficult, all this in a temperature of over 90 degrees making the iron deck of the ship red hot.

One afternoon in what could be construded as a lull in the enemy activity, we were given permission to go ashore for a few hours break. There was no where particularly to go but the welcome break to strech our legs on terra firma was in the nature of things very welcome. The ship was about a mile offshore at anchor and eight of us clambered down the side of the ship using a rope net onto a waiting eight man cutter. We quickly got into the boat and with each man having an oar rowed towards the shore, always bearing in mind that at any given moment German aircraft would appear and machine gun anything that moved. So, we rowed about 200 yards from the shore,we spotted aircraft coming in the direction of the ship and us. Well let me tell you that had we been rowing in the Oxford-Cambridge boat race they would not have stood a chance. Those 200 yards in the heavy 8 man cutter practically left the water like a speed boat and as we rammed the beach we shot out from that boat and dived for cover under an old italian lorry abandoned on the beach. At the precise moment the machine guns of the german fighter plane sprayed the beach with their deadly shells and disappeared in the distance. We waited a few moments in case they returned and when we were satisfied that it was reasonably clear we got out from beneath the vehicle and with a sigh of relief dusted ourselves down and strolled off towards some grape vines that were growing just off the beach area.

The grapes were in season ready for picking and we thoroughly enjoyed the fruits of the field, big beautiful white grapes. Before we left the area to row back to the ship, we encountered about six young Italian lads between maybe 10 to 12 years old. They were attacking another young lad with a shaven head and round face and calling him Mussolini. They were glancing in our direction in the hope that by doing so we would not harm them, but our first priority was to get back aboard ship and to relative safety. So we left them to their own devices.

On going back to the beach to board the cutter we decided to inspect the vehicle that we dived under for protection against the German planes, when you can imagine our shock and horror to discover that under the tarpaulin that covered the open back lorry was full of live ammunition, one stray shell from the German plane would have sent us to oblivion, in very small pieces. We got back to the ship, clambered up the nets and went on to eventually getting a direct hit with a 3000lb radio controlled bomb at the bridge head at Salerno - but that is another story!

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