大象传媒

We were camped in tents known as EPIP鈥檚. They were quite adequate for about ten people in reasonable comfort, but it was not possible to stand up anywhere but under the ridge. Being the clever boys that we were, we decided to lower the floor to give us more headroom, we dug out the floor about two feet deep to gain more head- room and put some of the soil into 鈥榝limsy鈥� petrol cans to make a decent wall to the tent. I shall be referring to this operation later!

I think we arrived at Kirkuk in the middle of November, and the purpose of this task was to protect the oil-pipe line which runs from northern Iraq down to Basra, in the Persian Gulf. Although I know that my brigade was somewhere in the vicinity, I have no idea where their camp was. We saw very little traffic passing on the road, and I suppose there were more Arabs passing on their donkeys, very often with pairs of tigress salmon draped over their backs, than any other traffic.

To break the monotony, after vehicles had been repaired or serviced I would take them out on quite un-necessary road tests. One day I was testing a motor-cycle, seated on the pillion seat with my head down, isle of man fashion, and when taking a bend I got on to a stream of oil, probably leaked from a passing lorry! The bike shot out from under me and I stopped in a drain on the roadside. I managed to ride it home, and had to face the wrath of Private Webster, who had to repair it again!

On another occasion I was out on a bike doing a road test and I met Major Hollands, our company commander, being driven back to camp in his staff car, when I got back to the camp, our company sergeant major came over and told me to report with him to HQ. He told me that I was on AF252! A charge! I asked him why and he said I had been riding a bike without a crash helmet! 鈥淗ow did you know?鈥� I asked 鈥渢he OC told me鈥� he said. I thought that it would be good practice for the major in his little court house, but I didn鈥檛 say so! I received a reprimand!

As a matter of fact, the major was hockey correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and I read his articles quite often when the war was over. I met him at a reunion at the Conaught rooms near marble arch on the edgeware road, in about 1950, and you can probably imagine the conversation we had!

The question of recreation arose on the camp after we got settled in, and we managed to clear a piece of ground behind the camp for a football pitch and had some good games, inevitably, the boys organised an inter-platoon competition and news of this arrived at brigade headquarters, who sent talent scouts to see if any of our boys were good enough for the brigade team. We supplied players on several occasions after their visit.

We are now approaching the middle of winter, and the rain was getting persistent. Our draining channel was working very well and taking the water away nicely. Until the Wadi filled up, that is! We now had to jump a two foot channel of water on one side of the tent to approach the entrance. This was no problem until one night the wall began to leak into our tent well. I had mad myself a camp bed, but some of the chaps were sleeping on the floor. They decided to go sleep in the vehicles until morning.
About an hour later, there was a sudden swishing noise and the tent wall collapsed letting in the water and the tent was awash! Our clever idea of filling the petrol cans rebounded on us and the weight of the soil and cans on the soaked soil was too much. How do we get out of this one?

The following morning we baled out most of the water and dismantled most of the wall. We then got more cans and rebuilt it, starting on the floor level this time, and sloping the wall slightly outwards, filling in as the wall grew and we made quite a good job of it, I think. We then got a couple of oil stoves lighted up and dried out as best we could.

Close to Christmas time I was on orderly sergeant duty, and I was in our tent chatting with the other chaps about nothing in particular when the orderly officer, Capt. Pike arrived. 鈥淐ome on,鈥� he said, 鈥渨e will go to the officers mess鈥� The sequence started again! I have no idea how I got back to my tent, but when I arrived I was covered in mud! The next day I was relieved my war had not yet started!

We spent Christmas as best we could in the camp. One advantage senior NCO鈥檚 had was a whisky ration, one bottle every two weeks. And some of the sergeants did not take their full ration, which meant more for others. Who were the others I wonder?

Life went on much the same during the early part of 1943, and after a couple of months or so, we had orders to move out. We returned to Egypt by the same route as we left and eventually set up camp to the south west of Suez. There was little to complain about except for the dust storms. Every afternoon the wind began to blow and visibility was 30 yards at the most, and our tents and our kit were full of it. We weighted the sides of the tent down, and shut up shop, taking a rest until the wind dropped, as it invariably, finishing our duties later.

Whilst we were in Egypt we managed to visit Cairo and the pyramids at Giza. I didn鈥檛 get a ride on a camel, but I went into the great pyramid and saw the magnificent interior of the tomb. One of the attractions was an Arab who climbed the pyramid for a piastas. He went up there many times a day. He must have been very fit! We also went swimming in the bitter lakes, which is so densely salted that even I could not sink!

Soon the atmosphere began to change, the officers began to act even more normal than usual, and there were unmistakeable signs that a move was imminent. Then we had a visit from Field Marshal Montgomery! He was in his Humber staff car and he stood up holding on to the windscreen, and told us that we were going to 鈥渉it him here and hit him there鈥︹��, and it was going to be so easy! We did not get an opportunity to ask him where we were going, but we were soon to find out.

When we eventually go on the move again, we went to the docks at Alexandria. Our next destination turned out to be Sicily. We landed on the South East coast near Augusta, and then motored up the coast past Catania and on to a place approaching Taormina, Where we set up camp. The Brigade had preceded us, and I think had a difficult time for a while.

When some of our friends called to see us we were told that one battalion of the royal Berkshire regiment would be replaced in our brigade. This turned out to be true, and they were replaced by a battalion of the Welch regiment.

After leaving Iraq, where we were briefly a part of Paiforce, we were in Monty鈥檚 eight army, but now we had joined the central Mediterranean force. I think that one of our brigades from the 56th division went up with the eight army into the desert campaign, and we were to meet up with them later, in Italy.

It was not difficult to make friends in Sicily and we found a few who spoke American English, but this was were we began to pick up a bit of Italian. Eventually we moved into a vineyard and I tied up my bivouac to the fence supporting the vines. The grapes began to ripen and I could reach out and taste them before breakfast! Soon the girls came and started the harvest and, I suppose, treaded the grapes.

Most of the locals made wine and kept it in wooden barrels in a corner of their living rooms. I can鈥檛 say I liked it very much, but I drank it with them.

One incident occurred which is worth a mention. Johnny Johnson, our MSM, made friends with some people in a village a few miles away, and he asked me if I would like to go with him and visit them, I agreed and off we went. We had a very nice evening, but they were over generous with the bottle, and Johnny was too tight to drive home! I had to take over his 15 cwt. Truck and do the driving.

The coast road at this point is a bit hazardous at the best of times, with tight bends and a sheer drop to the sea in many places; I safely negotiated a bend and came to a jeep lying on its side in the middle of the road! I stopped the truck and some army officers appeared, they were from one of the field ambulance units. They asked for help and so I let off the handbrake and let the truck roll down the hill a bit closer, but when I wanted to stop it I couldn鈥檛 find the footbrake and ran into the jeep!

No harm was done, and I volunteered to get my breakdown lorry and take the jeep back to our location. This was agreed and I drove back to camp and got the breakdown lorry. As we were motoring back to the jeep, the officers were puzzled because my crew started to appear. Strictly against army regulations, they always slept in hammocks slung in the back, and I had a quiet word with them before setting off back! We righted the Jeep, hung it on to the crane and took it back, from where their own w/shop collected it the following day.

Shortly after we got settled in our camp we had quite a spectacular display of anger from Mount Etna, which was to the north from our camp. It was particularly brilliant at night, but apparently it is seldom dormant and our hosts thought nothing of it, I thought Sicily was a beautiful island and was sorry to leave it. But we had business to attend to further north!

As usual, we had no idea where we were aiming for; we loaded up all our equipment and followed the leader. We arrived at Messina, crossed over to the mainland, and carried on to the north, keeping to the coast road as far as possible. We were about three days en route, passing Salerno, where the Americans, with British help, had recently, made a landing, on past Naples and we eventually arrived at Caserta. We parked our vehicles under an avenue of tress leading up to Bourbon palace, now the command post of General Mark Clark, OC American 5th army. We had travelled nearly 400 miles from Sicily.

We were of course, supporting 168 brigade as usual, and we were now attached to the American 5th army!

A tragic accident occurred on the evening we arrived. One of the tradesmen in the other section, a chap called Hounslow. (We knew him as 鈥楥lass鈥� because he was always grumbling about class distinction,) had gone out and found a friend he hadn鈥檛 seen for some time. They were walking along the road in the dark and an American in a jeep ran into him and he was killed. What awful luck.

Our company commander was finding life a bit difficult with all this rushing about the place and living in a tent! We had a conference, and I suggested getting a clapped-out ambulance and making a caravan. I got the job! Off I went back to a vehicle dump at Naples and had a look round. I found an old Austin ambulance which would be suitable and asked the chap I charge to keep it for us. The major sent a couple of chaps to collect it, and we were in business!

We removed the engine and front axle, and stripped off everything, leaving only the body on the chassis. As the roof over the driver was part of the body, we left it in position, having in mind a nice veranda for the major to address us from. We then cut and welded the front part of the chassis to form a tow bar, made a towing ring and welded it into position. If we had a sudden move we could now hand it on the back of a lorry and take it with us. (All our Lorries had a towing hitch)

But we had not yet finished. We had saved the battery, acquired some nice little lights and we fixed and wired them up with switches. Very cosy! We also made up a jack for the drawbar with stationary. Then came the bunk-bed, the table, and a few hangers for uniforms and accessories and we handed it over. This was, of cou7rse, done in our spare time, but as most of our work was done under the cover of darkness, like recovering ditched vehicles, for example, we were not delaying the end of the war! As a matter of fact, in my experience we had far more ditched vehicles to recover than those damaged by shellfire.

There are a couple of incidents worth recording! I was asked to go with an officer from another brigade to access the possibility of recovering a lorry which had gone off the road and down into a shell (or bomb) crater. This was on a road half way up a wooded hill and the crater was on a bend, taking away part of the road. The driver must have lost contact with the driver ahead in the dark. Those little lights on the diff. housing again!

The lorry was lying on its side about 30 feet below road level, with its wheels hanging over a further drop into a ravine. It would be difficult, but with two breakdown lorries and crews, I thought we could do it.

Having received the go-ahead, we went back and set the cranes each side of the crater, passed the winch cables under the lorry and slid it back towards the road and partly up the slope. We then fixed a check cable to a set of ground anchors to prevent the lorry from rolling over too far, and pulled it further up the slope until it toppled on to its wheels. It was then a simple job to winch the lorry up the crater and on to the road. And the engine started!

The other job was similar in a way; the driver lost contact and drove into a very narrow lane off the main road. He had gone partly up a bank, resulting in the lorry toppling over and wedging its self in to this lane with high banks on both sides. The lorry exactly fitted the lane!

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