大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from Reading on behalf of Ronald Summers and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Summers fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I joined the Home Guard in Reading around 1940 as a boy of 18 and can still remember the makeshift equipment we were given to use, such as the Northover Projector - a drainpipe which was supposed to fire a hand grenade! What a hope against a 50 ton tank,but thankfully this didn't occur to us at the time.

In 1942 I was conscripted into the Royal Army Service Corps at Aldershot and three months later I was in North Africa. It was the beginning of the campaign there and we sailed from the North of Scotland in the P.& O. Liner 'Strathallan' - all the passenger liners had been conscripted by the Government you know and in fact this vessel was subsequently sunk later in the war, but fortunately with no loss of life.

Just off Algiers we ran aground on a sand bank and were for a time a sitting duck for the enemy aircraft overhead. Fortunately, due to the assistance of smoke-screens we survived and went on into the desert. We were running the Petrol Depot for Montgomery and Alexander, as well as the Americans. There were two units I recall - the Long Range Desert Patrol and what we called Popski's Private Army (run by a Pole),who disguised themselves as Arabs and used jeeps to blow up the enemy's supplies which did a lot to assist our cause.

I recall the heat and above all the flies - the monotonous diet of bully beef and beans, often cooked over a makeshift stove made from an empty petrol can, not to mention the scorpions that fell out of our bed rolls as we prepared to snatch a few hours' sleep.

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