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This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Tracy Yates, Centre Manager of Mayfield UKonline on behalf of Don Jennings and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

My experiences of the War 1939 to 1945

I trained as a REME 1st class craftsman. Several months prior to D-day I was engaged in training to waterproof vehicles (among other things). I used to take the vehicles waterproofed through water dips and went on a course at Scarborough to test water proofing. We went out in ships with our lorries and came back in to the beach, ramps were dropped on the ship and we landed the vehicles in the water.

Getting nearer to D-Day (about a month) we had moved our workshops. I was in a third echelon mobile workshop and we moved to Sussex. We unloaded from trains jeeps in boxes, we must have partly assembled thousands of jeeps for the units to collect. The infantry collected 20-30 of them a day.

As D-day got nearer we moved to Tilbury and loaded our workshop (about 20 vehicles) on to an American ship, not knowing exactly what was happening. The ship moved 15 days after D-day and we landed on the beach through the water and up onto the sand. The beach was quiet at this time but ships were still firing overhead. All the time we were repairing vehicles — we saw Caen being bombed, we had to go to the Falise gap to get spares off vehicles that had been in the battle. We had a few days near the beaches and my brother found me! A few times I went to see him — he was driving a Dukw unloading ships — I went out once or twice to the ships with him, on my afternoon off, to get there I hired and signed for a fold up bike from the stores. My brother had also meet another associate from our villiage whom I also did meet.My brother was sleeping in a sand dug out, And I was sleeping under the trucks, that is if the trucks were full.

We kept moving along with our workshop until Arnam, which was the big battle. We were stuck in Helmont, Holland for the winter (we used to ice skate up and down the river!) and was it cold! My unit was billited in a Philips cycle factory,And as for guards at night, we had to gaurd a power station, that was a very hot place to be in, better than out in the cold. As time moved on I crossed the Rhine over a Pontoon bridge. I finished in Lubeck, North Germany, near the Baltic Sea.

Just before the war ended I had leave and came home to get married, after about 10 days leave I went back again. We got Married in april 1945 then it was back to Lubeck Germany by then we were reparing the very early VW Beatles, It was 1947 before I got demobed, by then I had become a S/SGT

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