大象传媒

When things were quiet we used to sit and think of home and wonder what was happening back there. Oone day one of the lads received a newspaper from home and one item caught our eye. It was a report about Lady Astor that she had said in the House of Commons that she had called the troops in the Western Desert 'V. Army' and said that al we did was sit around on our backsides and get sunburnt. Well that really got us going and we all felt she should not have said a thing like that, especially when men were beig killed or wounded every day. A lot of the lads went wild when they read this and we nearly had a riot on our hands. Some of the men went to see the O/C and asked him to make a complaint and send it to the War Office. Many of them wrote to their MP's and asked for Lady Astor to apologise for her remarks. HQ sent a high ranking officer to visit us to see what the trouble was about. He promised to look into the matter but we never got to hear what the results were.

Time passed until the 20th October when a special message was sent to the RAF and all Allied forces from Air Marshall Conningham saying that a decisive battle was about to begin and all tank crew and artillery units were given instructions to see that their guns and weapons were thoroughly celaned and ready for immediate action.

Some of the men, including myself, were sent back to the base at Abasir barracks, thinking we were going to have a refit or get some new tanks. Instead we had to report to the medical officer for an examination. After the MO had given me my examination I was told that I was not going back to the front line anymore as I was being degraded to B3 which meant that I would only be sent back there in the case of an emergency.

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