大象传媒

On my 16th birthday in 1962 my father took me to one side and told me that I should consider myself very lucky to have been born!

The reason, he explained, was that he had been extremely lucky to survive WW2 since an incident in 1941 had resulted in the whole of his unit, except for himself, being killed by the Japanese.

After much persuasion, he reluctantly told me this story...

In the summer of 1941 my father's unit was posted to the south coast of the UK to reinforce the coastal defences.

My father (an army sergeant) was put in charge of a battery of artillery pieces which had been positioned along the tops of the cliffs of Dover, overlooking the Channel.

Precisely what these artillery pieces were I am not sure, but what I do know for sure is that they were extremely heavy, and very difficult to move.

One day in late October, my father's unit was ordered to move a group of these big guns to another location further along the coast, and to do it "double quick".

I am not sure how many men he had in his unit, but in my father's opinion he "had nowhere near enough" for the size of this task. So, as he put it, he "cracked the whip" and got everybody working flat out to complete the task as fast as possible, and typically for him, he "knuckled down" and joined in with the hard physical effort himself.

As the task was nearing completion, there was one big gun left to move, and my father and 3 of his men jumped down into the gun emplacement to start shifting it.

Then it happened. As he reached down to grab hold of this gun, and pulled on it, he felt a searing pain in his abdomen and fell to the ground.

The army medics were called, and they carted him off to sick bay, where it was discovered that he had acquired a severe hernia.

They operated on him that evening.

24 hours later, as he lay in his hospital bed, feeling very sore, he got a message that his unit had been ordered to Portsmouth for embarkation onto an unspecified ship, bound for an unspecified destination.

He was told he would follow them later once he had fully recovered from his operation.

He never did. Instead, he ended up being posted to India the following month.

Oh, and the unspecified ship? He found out later it was HMS Prince of Wales.

And the unspecied destination? Singapore.

And on December 10, approximately 6 weeks after his hernia operation, HMS Prince of Wales was sunk by the Japanese in Singapore harbour, with huge loss of life, including every single man in my father's unit.

That's why he told me on my 16th birthday that I was "lucky to have been born", and that it was "all because of an artillery piece".

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