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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Roger Marsh of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Reg Reid, and has been added to the site with the authors permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

The Lighter Side of War

By
Don Alexander

CHAPTER 19: Tunis to Glasgow - October 1943

In the velvety darkness at the Port of Tunis the troopship returning 133 Company to England slipped its ropes, there was the faint thud thud of the main engines and it eased away on to a calm sea. All the lads wore life wings though the sailing was a pleasure compared with the hazards of the voyage from England with its mountainous seas, sickness and Admiral Karl Doenitz's wolf packs. Germany wasn't yet defeated but the submarine danger had subsided. There were no more qualms, there was no more sea sickness, at least not until they reached the Irish Sea.

There the seas were very rough indeed. Johnny O'Toole was a Scouser and had found on the Tunis battlefield a powerful pair of German military binoculars. From saying they might have been Rommel's he was coming round to think they definitely were Rommel's. They were strapped carefully round his neck, a prize of war, of Germany's defeat in the desert. He scanned the horizon and claimed he could discern the Liver Buildings.

Brotherstone mentioned that they were not far from Connah's Quay now and his Lucy.

"Let's have a look." Wheeler to Johnny O'Toole.

Brotherstone: "You can't see Connah's Quay."

Wheeler: "I know you can't. Daft bat. Who wants to see Connah's Quay? Let's have a look at Liverpool, Johnny."

Johnny O'Toole carefully took his binoculars from around his neck, passed them to Wheeler; the vessel lurched and Wheeler dropped them into the heaving seas.

The sea was so rough that the ship couldn't land at the 'Pool. They changed course and headed for Glasgow.

Johnny O'Toole's comments to Wheeler are not recorded.

Glasgow to Clacton-on-Sea, Essex
Leave in Sheffield - November - December 1943

A train was laid on for 133 to go from Glasgow to Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. Wheeler tied a child's tin bucket and spade to his kit bag. "To think this train journey to the seaside is provided free by his Majesty's Government," he said wonderingly.

The Essex seaside town, full of cheerful Cockneys in summer paddling in the sea with trousers rolled up and skirts hitched up, was a bit gloomy in November. Butch's memory of the town was gloomier still because he had toothache. Too much rock? - assuming rock was available in war time. If it was available it would be `on points' rationed. Be that as it may, the army dentist's view was that with one tooth aching and a few others blackened and broken it would be kindest to pull the lot out and give him army issue false ones.

All the lads were then granted fourteen days leave and Butch headed for Sheffield - where his mother was staying briefly with a relative. She had done her stint in a Stoke munitions factory and wanted to go back to being a waitress. She was due an interview at the Queen's Hotel, Leeds, the best hotel in the city. It would mean uprooting again but then Northerners tended to tip well - even in Leeds!

In Fitzalan Square, Sheffield, Butch met a friend of Ron Gregory's who thought it remarkable that Butch and Ron, two 8th Army "Desert Rats" had not met in the desert. Since the Sahara could swallow Britain, France and Germany together with much more of Europe, Butch thought it wasn't too remarkable. Neither knew Ron was killed at El Alamein. Butch didn't want to go to Dore to see Mrs. Gregory, in fact he didn't really fancy seeing and chatting with anybody thanks to those damned false teeth.

That blasted army dentist!

The General Alexander - Montgomery winning team in North Africa had now split up and Alex was forcing the Germans into a slow bloody retreat through Italy while Monty was in England preparing for the big one, the invasion of Europe. Ron could have been in either theatre of war.

It was nice going on trams again squeezed into the upstairs back bay with four or five Sheffield lasses, squashed between them shoulder against shoulder, thigh against thigh - steady on, Butch - and don't smile too much - not yet anyway with these damn false teeth. The girls, from Bassets Liquorice Allsorts, Batchelor's Peas Factories or the Hope and Anchor Brewery, inquisitive and high-spirited at the end of their shifts, laughed and joked as the tram rolled and clanged and screeched along the rails.

Male passengers on the trams either worked with hot metal - you could tell these by their white silk sweat scarves - or with cold metal, their overalls smelling of machine oil, a prevalent smell in Sheffield from the time you got off the train at Midland or Victoria Stations.

Otherwise it made sense to be in uniform rather than civvies. Girls would give you packets of liquorice allsorts, mis-shapes or bottles of Hope & Anchor Breweries Jubilee Stout:

`Land of Hope & Anchor, Mother of the free
how can we extoll thee, who art born of thee'

(With all that theeing and thouing, even the hymn writer must have been a Sheffielder!)
A man in uniform could get on the Spion Kop end at Hillsborough or Bramall Lane for nowt, not that Butch was bothered about football. Communists leaning over the Five Arches railway bridge with their white paint and brushes had smartened up the slogan `OPEN SECOND FRONT NOW!'

The original had been there soon after Hitler invaded the vast reaches of the Soviet Union in June 1941- Operation Barbarrossa.

Stalin, that other great tyrant of the times, had called Churchill a coward for holding back, but Winston, like Monty, had known the horrors of the First World War. Should we wring our hands and risk untold thousands of British and allied lives in an early invasion to help the Soviet Union? Their war, their `Great Patriotic War', didn't start until mid 1941; until then they had a pact with National Socialist Germany. When Germany had invaded Poland from the west, Russia invaded Poland from the east. Poles had no great love of either dictatorship.

Britain had pushed huge amounts of military equipment to Arkhangelsk to help the Soviet Union, and thousands of our merchant seamen and Royal Navy lads died for their pains.

Would Stalin have helped us? Yes, but only if it suited the interests of the Soviet Union!

Such, unfortunately, is the way of the world. What did that old Victorian fox Disraeli say? Something to the effect that we have no permanent enemies or permanent friends and must work solely on what suits British interests and the interests of the British Empire. When soldiers' mothers saw the slogan `OPEN SECOND FRONT NOW', most thought, "Why should we?" Though British troops with Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Polish and French swarming all over Southern England wanted to go through with it, get it over with, go all the way to Berlin.

Butch didn't ponder on these things, not on the trams anyway. Lieutenant Errington's advice and years of army service had given him the confidence to look at and talk to the young women workers with their lovely, scrubbed, sometimes tired, faces, their hair hidden by "turbans"; even when older women joked that they'd take him home to bed with them, he wasn't too embarrassed. He had to look at them. The tram windows were embedded with wire mesh to protect against bomb blast and he knew the gold painted notices, for instance, forbidding spitting on the tram by heart.

He was sympathetic to the women, thousands of whom worked in munitions and steel works. In melting shops they worked the overhead cranes high above the furnaces, sitting in their little cabins, sometimes knitting while waiting to lift a ladle of molten steel or scrap. In the rolling mills some even worked on the shop floor catching the red-hot steel bars or strip with tongs as it snaked across the floor and directing it through rolls. ‘On 'floor workin' wi' tongs!' Their men, husbands or sons might also be working with steel and they'd both arrive home dog-tired, `aif deead', or their men might be in uniform, perhaps killed. They might have lost loved ones or their homes in the Sheffield Blitz in September 1940. (Seven hundred killed, many thousands injured, 82,000 properties damaged including thousands destroyed beyond repair.)

He felt like hugging them all, but restrained himself.

Pr-BR

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