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This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People's War site by CSV Storygatherer, Pam McCarthy, on behalf of Bernard Peters. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

I also met up with the Americans as I moved around with my uncle, W. J. Burley, one of the original car and lorry engineers. He was recycling vehicles and broken down machines from the farms and from fields and camps 60 years before the 21st century came along.

All over the UK a nice part of the war effort was collecting scrap, cast iron, malleable steel, brass, copper, tin, lead, phosphor-bronze, gun metal and aluminium. Even garden railings, pots and pans. Truro Cathedral was once surrounded by high, strong, black steel railings; all taken. The houses in Union Place, as elsewhere, each had their iron railings; all taken and never replaced. Not only did we associate with the GIs but also with German and Italian prisoners of war, easily recognisable by a large yellow or green circular patch on their overalls.

My brother, Raymond, latched on to a New Yorker GI, George Fizzuglio. We thought he was the ‘cat’s whiskers’ - smart, sensible and mature. George went through the war, the Battle of the Bulge, through the Ardennes. When he returned to America in 1945/46 he kept in touch. He became a youth club leader/teacher in New York, then a lecturer on a cruise liner. Years later he met up with my brother in London. Finally he died in a New York cinema from a heart attack. A splendid man we still remember.

I am still in touch with the wives of two GIs, long gone, we exchange letters. One lives in Iowa and the other in Minnesota. Of course in Truro 1943/44 when we were young we thought of them as ‘men’. Only in later years do we realise that they were only young men of 19 or 20 years of age.

On our visits to Normandy over 35 years, to Omaha, Utah, to Pointe du Hoc (where the Rangers of the 2nd and 5th battalions had to scale almost vertical 35 metre high cliffs) we always met with the veterans who survived. No longer those young GIs but old soldiers, often in tears at the American cemetery above the beaches, where lie nearly 10,000. But none of Company A of the 116th - they were wiped out on the beach and in the sea.

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