大象传媒

"This story was submitted to the People's War site by BARBARA COLLINS-NEWING from 大象传媒 KENT on behalf of Leslie Harris and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."

Leslie was 17 at the start of the war and lived in Folkestone. I tried to join the Merchant Navy. I was an apprentice in the print industry. We used to publish a book on Folkestone called Day by Day. Many people will still remember it. It was a free booklet. When the war was declared I said to my dad I want to join the Merchant Navy. He said no go back to work and forget about the war and he said I couldn鈥檛 go. In 1939/1940 along came Dunkirk and my dad netted a mine in Folkestone harbour. It was reported in the papers. It was a sea mine and floated into the inner harbour and it would have hit one of the cargo boats. My father went out in a rowing boat with two or three other boats and they tied a rope around it and tied it between two buoys until the tide went out. Then the Navy came up and dismantled it.. I said to my father 鈥淵ou have a wife and 5 children and you can do things like that, yet you stop me doing what I want do鈥�.

After Dunkirk I helped dig the tank traps on the hills. Every time Jerry came over he thought we were troops and machine gunned us. Before that we went across the marsh putting up poles to stop enemy aircraft landing. We did that and when we finished in about October time, in 1940, we told we were unemployed. So I volunteered to go to Peterborough to help build an airfield. When we got up there there was a great big marquee with about 500 men sleeping in it. All you had were straw palliases to sleep on with one blanket. The toilets was just a bucket in the middle. I put up with it for three or four days and then left for Wellingborough where my mother was. I got a job as a tractor driver in an Ironstone mine. One of the other employees mentioned that you would never get called up from here. I immediately left for Northampton where I joined up. I went to naval training. I remember Portsmouth getting bombed. We trained during the day and had to do fire watching at night. We were sent from there to HMS Drake, at Devonport. The week before we got there Plymouth and Devonport had been bombed. Everything was flattened. They had lost a lot of valuable men during the bombing. The men that had left the Navy and gone to work as prison officers on Dartmoor were re-employed in the Navy but they then treated you as prisoners. Then I was drafted to the East Indies in HMS Sultan which was in Singapore. We were put on the train at 7.00 am with a little packed lunch. We arrived in Edinburgh the following morning at 6.00 am with no extra food. We sailed for Cape Town and then on to Bombay. We stayed at a reinforcement camp in Bombay for a few weeks. We were in the hold of the ship. During the first day at sea they did not put the cover on the hatch and water poured in. On the deck were the sheep cows etc. We waited for a ship convoy to come into Mombassa., where I joined HMS Colombo. I spent 12 months travelling between Mombassa and Aden.

They were bombing every night and they seemed to sink a ship every day. They sunk the Alexandra. They didn鈥檛 know they had sunk her as she was sitting on the bottom., they thought she was still floating but she was grounded.

We left Durban to come back to England. There is no land between Cape Horn and Cape of Good Hope. The sea was very rough. The waves were bigger than the hills of Folkestone. It took us 4 days from Durban to Cape Town. We had to go in for repairs and we stayed for two weeks. We were escorted by a radar ship back to England. We came back to Devonport. Some of the old crew broke down and cried as they thought they would never get back home again.

After that I joined combined operations and was attached to the signal section in Scotland. We were then sent to HMS Kent. We were responsible for relaying communications from the beaches to the ships. We let them know where the shells were dropping and we let the ships know so that they could improve their aim. I had had 5 weeks intensive commando training in Scotland. I then went to the Isle of Wight. I then went to HMS Prince Albert. They were cross channel ships from Belgium which they converted into assault troop ships.

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