大象传媒

Early in 1945, I was in a troopship on my way out to Colombo in what is now called Sri Lanka, as one of a big draft of naval personnel being moved east to carry on the war with Japan. On arrival, after the three-week voyage, I found myself back in combined Operations, this time as a member of a naval beach signals landing party, dressed in khaki bush shirt and shorts and wearing an Australian type bush hat with a Royal Navy badge on the upturned side brim. We were soon moved from Colombo to Bombay where we trained for six months setting up portable signals posts on the beach and spending much of our off-duty time at the Breach Kandy swimming pools.
Inevitably the day arrived when we moved out for the operation 鈥� the invasion of the Japanese-held Malay Peninsula, 鈥渙peration Zipper鈥� devised by Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, then the C-in-C South East Asia Command.
Wearing jungle green battledress and carrying 24-hour rations on our backs, we were going aboard the landing craft carrier at Bombay Docks, expecting to spend our next night ashore in slit trenches on the hostile beach, being shot at. We noticed on the dockside copies of the local Indian newspaper being sold as a special edition. We got hold of the odd copy and read that the Allies had dropped some huge bomb on Japan and that the Japanese had surrendered. Our course we didn鈥檛 believe it. They had obviously got hold of some wild rumour, we thought. Then suddenly, our ship -- a converted merchant vessel 鈥� began to make V for Victory on the whistle. This was taken up by all the Allied ships in the harbour. We did not realise the full implications of the atom bomb, at the time, but for us it was a wonderful moment. The war was over. I had survived. I was 20 and had virtually the whole of my life in front of me. The cloud of war, which had hung over us since that day in 1939 when I had been evacuated as a 14 year old school boy, had been removed. I could look forward eventually to resuming the civilian career I had barely begun when I joined the Navy in 1943.

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