´óÏó´«Ã½

This brings me to the beginning of the War, 3rd September 1939. My future wife, Marjorie, at this time had got a job in a Sheffield hospital where she was sharing a flat with some other girls. That weekend I borrowed her brother's little MG and set off bright and early to visit her, arriving before they were properly up. After breakfast Marjorie and I went off up into the hills with a picnic and we heard Mr. Chamberlain making his famous broadcast announcement that 'We were at War with Germany’ - very traumatic.

Obviously it set us thinking of the future and it would all blow over by Christmas. Little did we think that it would take six years.

John and I decided to enlist straight away; he went to the Royal Warwichshire Regiment where he was soon earmarked for Officer training, while I elected to try for the Royal Array Ordnance Corps. On 8th Sept I was sent off to Hillsea, Portsmouth where they had their base. They had no Uniform to fit this tall slim soldier, so after kicking around for a couple of days, a Sergeant came with a clip-board asking for volunteers to transfer to the Royal Army Service Corps for a special formation, I put my hand up, and was sent off to Aldershot. They did have a Uniform to fit me, and were only too willing to have me join a nucleus being mustered to join a Base Supply Depot overseas. After two weeks under canvas high up on Bulford Down, washing under a stand pipe in the freezing dawn, drilling and starting to get quite fit, I was in Normandy before the end of Sept.

The Army had chosen a requisitioned Glass Factory in a small town called Redon. It had its own railway sidings and was not too far from a major railway Junction at Rennes, so it had good communications with the rest of the country. The factory had been famous for making ornamental Glass, Baccarat, makers of Lallique. It was a tragedy that all the specialised equipment was dumped out of the buildings in the emergency. Most of our time was spent receiving goods in bulk from trains, measuring out detailed amounts according to ration scales for units all over northern France. I was doing the job of a 'clerk’ and because the establishment that people doing my job should be certain ranks, I was soon a Sergeant, and later Staff-Sergeant.

We worked with Labour gangs for loading and unloading, many of then were educated gentlemen not used to manual labour, but only too anxious to do their bit; mostly Jews who had been rounded up by the Nazis prior to extermination and released by the allies. Many nationalities, all now displaced persons. Hard work made the time go quickly until the early summer of 1940, when things went badly wrong for the Allies. Unfortunately we in the Ranks had no communications with the outside world except letters from home which were not supposed to reveal news, so we knew nothing about the Dunquerk evacuation in late May. In early June we had some aircraft activity which was unusual, so it was a shock when we were ordered to pack only what we could carry on our backs and be ready to leave next morning. We loaded on to lorries and headed for the West Coast, unloading on Common land above St.Nazaire. We were told to disperse and take what shelter we could if there were air raids, but we were very exposed.

All day long we watched lorry-loads of Air Force personnel, being driven to the Port and taken out to troop-ships lying out to sea. We were moved down to the decks in the evening and after spending the night in sheds were ferried out to a Ship which was almost filled already. There were two Liners waiting to depart in convoy. We were the last to join the Lancastria and had some difficulty finding space on the upper decks, ,all the lower decks were filled with RAF Ground Crews loaded the day before. We were very lucky. I was allotted to a cabin on A Deck which was already full of NCO's, so I spent the night on the floor. Next morning there was an air raid alarm and lo-and-behold there was a huge explosion which shook the ship. It seemed like almost at once alarm bells were sounding and the Watertight Doors were being closed. The ship was obviously listing. The Tannoy said get up to the promenade deck. Luckily I only had one flight of stairs to negotiate just as the water tight door was closing. By the time I got out to the open deck, the ship was listing quite badly. There was a Regimental Seargeant Major there keeping control who said 'get rid of your equipment and get over the side if you can swim' I took my boots and most of my clothes off and scrambled down the side of the ship into the water, swimming away before the inevitable oil spread over the water. I was never a strong swimmer but was very glad to make some progress and wallow on my back for a rest occasionally.

Within twenty minutes the ship turned over with the propellers in the air with non-swinmers clambering over until it disappeared. Not a happy sight. During the time that I was in the water, aircraft were machine-gunning the mass of bodies, many of whom had been caught in the oil slick. I managed to get to a small ship that was taking survivors, although it seemed to me the distance was increasing instead of getting nearer, and I had not the strength to clamber up without the help of willing hands. The ship was crammed with unclothed men standing close together. We were taken on board an empty freighter, John Holt, registered in Hull. We were put down in the hold, out of sight, and very soon were bound for England, the Captain refusing to wait for a convoy. When we were approaching the English Channel we were allowed to move around the ship, and it was then that I heard Churchill's famous speech broadcast on one of the crew's radio, stiffening our resolve to 'fight on the beaches' etc.

When we were approaching the coast, England looked so beautifully green, and we were going in to Plymouth. My clothing consisted of a shirt, socks and a ruined wrist watch; it is no wonder that for ages after I had nightmares of my being in public places with no clothes on. WRVS ladies came on board with hot drinks and blankets to cover us and we were taken to the nearest Army Depot where we were given some clothing and the first meal for several days. I and the survivors of our Unit were packed off to Chesterfield, from where I was able to make contact with my family.

It was now nearing the end of June and they had had no news of me since the Dunquerk evacuation, so I guess they were concerned. Marjorie came up to see me in her little car, and she had been able to make tentative arrangements for us to get married on 6th July. I got permission to have 48 hours leave for that. Marjorie came to pick me up on the Friday evening; it was a bit difficult because the Unit was going to move to South Wales during the weekend, so I was going to have to find them on the Monday.
The wedding was all that I could have imagined or hoped for, except that I was only half there; too much had happened in too short a time. I cannot imagine how so many guests came at such short notice. The Service was in St. Peters, Maney, which was the Parish Church the Sawyer family went to, and the reception was in the garden of my family home. Auburn' on Lichfield Road. The weather was perfect, films were taken and many photographs. We left in Marjorie's car for two days at Stratford on Avon in a private Hotel owned by an acquaintance of my father. We saw a play at the Theatre followed by dinner, always a good experience; and finally the awful moment when the train took me away by whatever route to Cardiff, feeling very glum. I got a bus headed for Barry, and was dropped off en route, climbed a fence and across a field where the Unit were camped.
Within a very few days I was on the move again, and this time to Glasgow, where No.1 Supply Reserve Depot, a peacetime establishment, was being evacuated because of the bombing, from Deptford on the Thames estuary to Thornleebank on the Southern edge of Glasgow.
Calico Printers had suffered the same fate as Baccarat in Normandy, being requisitioned in the national emergency, because it had the right physical features - dry buildings and railway sidings. All the machinery was thrown out to make way for the stores. It was an extraordinary establishment in that it was run by Army officers and a few military clerks; all the rest were Civil Servants of various grades, from lowly labourers to Government Annalists. I became Chief Clerk and was promoted to Warrant Officer Class 2, Staff-Quartermaster-Sergeant. I was accommodated in civilian billets, and the few military 'other ranks' were fed in a local Cafe contracted to do so. The Officers lived out anyway, and some even had their wives with them. I was lucky because a long standing family friend had a flat in Glasgow, and I was able to visit them from time to time. Her husband was employed at Kings College. London, and they had all been evacuated to Glasgow University. Marjorie came up for the occasional brief stay. One could get a third-class 'sleeper' on the train for 8/6, instead of sitting up all night with a dry mouth.
During 1941 Marjorie was working at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham which was newly and only partially opened. She contracted Meningitis, caught from overseas forces, brought back for hospitalisation. She had been put in a Ward in her own hospital and was seriously ill. I had compassionate leave, but she was spark out and didn’t know I was there. We were very lucky because she responded to the new drug M an B 693 - an offshoot of the newly discovered Penicillin. It gave her an amazing recovery, and in a matter of weeks she was convalescing. We borrowed a flat which I heard of, over some shops on the Front at Helensborough, on the North Bank of the Clyde, looking out towards the 'Tail of the Bank' where ships gathered for convey. It was early Summer 1942 and the weather was lovely. I travelled out by tram and train daily so I didn’t have to have leave, although my Colonel did give me permission. By this time Marjorie was very fit again. Richard was born in March 1943 at Hednesford, my eldest sister’s house.
I felt it was tine to step pussy-footing in such an easy job for so long, and applied for a Commission. After tests at a pre-OCTU I was accepted for a course at the Officer Cadet Training Unit, Southead on Sea, Essex, an evacuated town on the Northern Thames Estuary. It was quite a tough experience, but I managed to survive and passed out as a Second Lieutenant - the lowest form of humanity. My first posting after a brief leave was to a Tank Brigade Company in the middle of Kent. About this time in preparation for the Second Front Invasion, the South of England was sealed off for Security reasons, with restricted communications and censored correspondence.
I was soon posted to a newly formed Unit which would serve a Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment who would be going overseas in a Land roll rather than Anti- Aircraft. We were due to land D + 21. We had to learn to waterproof our vehicles and practice 'wading'. When the time came we spent a night in the Grand Stand at West Ham Stadium and embarked on a Landing Ship Tank (American) next day at Tilbury. We heard that the Grand Stand had a direct hit from a V 1 Flying Bomb just after we left. After rolling on to Mulberry Harbour (Floating Dock) we 'waded' to the beach at Avranches. When the Allies finally broke through from the beach-head, the advance was sometimes so rapid that it was hectic to keep up with supplies. We were attached to the Canadian Army and used the Maple Leaf route which was clearly marked through Normandy. Belgium. Holland and finally crossing the Rhine into Germany.
In 1944 our Gunners were deployed around Dunquerk to enclose a persistent pocket of Germans who it would have delayed the advance to clear out. In the Autumn of that year the Germans took the Americans by surprise with a counter attack through the Ardennes. They did manage to stop them, but there was an acute shortage of ammunition. We got involved in this going right back to an original dump in the grounds of a Chateau deep in mud as I remember, near Bayeux in Normandy, about 500 Km each way in appalling weather conditions, driving night and day. The further East we got, the icier it became, and although the trunk roads were straight, they were cobble-set surfaces, and cambered from the centre. As we approached our destination we were faced with convoys of Huge American vehicles hogging the middle of the road coming in the opposite direction with headlights full on. Not much fun.
By the time the flap was over it was Christmas, and we ended up in a small town on the Waterloo side of Brussels. My Captain and I got ourselves billeted in a house where the lady's husband was away from home on ‘resistance' business. They were very kind and welcoming and plied us with food and drink. The husband returned while we were still eating, so there was much excitement and jollification. Photographs were taken which were sent to England by 'underground' means. We were much too weary to really enjoy it. In the meantime at home. Josephine had been been born at Hednesford, but it was well after Christmas before I had that news.
After Christmas things were a bit slow, until the Rhine crossings were established. Hamburg was reduced to rubble, cleared by Bulldozers so that traffic could get through. There were many devastating sights of Allied bombing in Germany as we travelled around, it seemed so odd that civilians we spoke to seemed friendly, in spite of their appalling living conditions and the fact that they were defeated. We finally settled down in tine for VE Day a few miles South of the Danish herder. Our lorries were sent up into Denmark to fetch supplies. There followed a period of no excitement, although I remember going past Belsen Concentration Camp, and seeing people who had obviously been inmates, living skeletons. The Amy issued booklets which were supposed to be used for discussion groups. The Army Bureau of Current Affairs was so obviously slanted to the Left that it is no wonder Churchill's Government was defeated at the first General Election. I guess he was ready for a break, but it does not show much gratitude for a great War leader.
Morale was low with not much impetus on work, and most people were just waiting for their turn for Demobilisation. My turn came in 1946. I travelled alone by train through countryside that I had passed over the years, in stages at transit camps. It seemed so strange being alone, and no longer part of an organised machine. Of all places I was directed to a Demob Centre at Taunton School, where I left my Uniform and equipment in exchange for the most awful civilian clothing, feeling anything but proud of my appearance, finally arriving home feeling like a stranger.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.