大象传媒

My father enlisted in the Territorial Army around 1938. He was mobilised in 1939 and more or less immediately sent overseas with his RASC field workshop to Belgium. His unit consisted of a column of stores and workshop trucks and their inital task was to drive from the Channel ports towards their war location close to German border.

Before they could get to their objective, the Germans came over the border and began their drive towards the Channel. My Father's column were ordered to turn around and make their way back to the Channel ports as fast as they could. He said that at times they had to avoid certain villages and drive around them because the Germans were already there and it was basically a race with the Germans towards Dunkirk.

The convoy got within a few miles of Dunkirk and met with a massive traffic jam of British Army lorries. They were ordered to get out of their trucks and take whatever they could carry. They left the trucks with their engines running and with their oil sump drain plugs removed with the aim of seizing the engines, thereby making the trucks unusable.

The now dismounted soldiers started walking towards the town of Dunkirk, past all the abandoned British Army equipment. All the canal bridges had been blown and the only way over the water was to step over the roofs of trucks that had been driven into the canal and sunk to let the soldiers pass over them on foot.

My father eventually reached the beaches at Dunkirk and joined a line of men waiting to be taken off the beach by small boats. The men were wading out to sea and were up to their necks in water. They waited for hours like this until the boat crews hauled them aboard and took them out to bigger ships waiting out to sea. He was taken on board a destroyer and then back to England where he landed with nothing more than the clothes he stood up in.

He was then shipped around the country from camp to camp until being posted to India for the rest of the war. His unit were shipped to India via Capetown where he saw Table Mountain. On the way the convoy was attacked by submarine. Dad said that the most frightening thing he ever experienced was being aboard a troop ship, locked below decks and below the water-line while the escort ships dropped depth-charges.

Dad had enlisted as a Craftsman but ended his service as a WO1 Conductor. While in India he was based in a massive camp on the Kyber Pass. He was regularly the Duty Officer and part of his responsiblity was to enforce the standing order that three new graves were dug every evening. In the morning, all three graves were filled. I asked him if it was because men were sick in hospital. He told me that often apparently healthy men went to bed and simply died during the night. They were buried by the time morning came.

He always considered himself fortunate because prior to Dunkirk his RASC unit had been designated to support a Highland formation. However, on being shipped to Belgium this was changed and they were give a different task. He was fortunate because the entire Highland formation was either killed or captured at Dunkirk.

It seems incredible to think now that in the six years he served during the war he only came home from india for two weeks, just long enough to marry my mother, and then he had to go back to India. There were no flights then and it took three weeks to get home and three weeks to get back.

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