´óÏó´«Ã½

RASC

ROBERT NELSON WHITE

Part 2 Call up after the War, RASC, Army of Occupation in Germany, Berlin Airlift, Belsen, Demob

This is an edited version of an interview by Sylvia Burrows on 30th April 2004. The original recording and full transcript are held in the Wessex Film and Sound Archive, ref. BAHS 110 and BAHS 111. © Basingstoke Talking History.

Part 2 describes his experiences of the declaration of war, making equipment for lifeboats and aircraft, Army Cadet Force, Home Guard, WD Inspection and the end of the War.

CALLED UP
Eventually, of course, at seventeen and a half I got my calling up papers and went away for the medical. Well, after being in the Army Cadet Force I was quite keen, so that after my medical I remember going back to the firm and the foreman said, 'Well, where's your paper?' I said, 'What paper?'. 'Well, your deferment paper, why didn't you register?' 'Oh,’ I said, ‘I didn't, I refused one. I've decided to go in the Army.' He was very disgusted. So on 20 March 1947 I went in the Army; full of enthusiasm.

TRAINING
I went to Brock Barracks at Reading for my first six weeks’ training, which was a great experience. Taking the train from Southampton, I of course changed at Basingstoke and someone had said, 'Oh yes, I know where Brock Barracks is, it's on the Oxford Road. You want to get off at Reading West.’ So obviously being informed, with my little suitcase and belongings, I got off at Reading West and walked half a mile up the road to Brock Barracks. Other boys who, unknown to me, must have been on the train and from other places, had gone on to Reading station and they were all collected and eventually they had to march down. I remember three of us walking into Brock Barracks and the Colour Sergeant then, with his great red sash, a big bluff faced chap, asked, 'Where was your warrant made out to?'. I said, ‘Well, Reading'. 'Why didn't you bloody go to Reading?' Then the main crowd gradually marched in. They were dismissed outside and then had to file through the guardroom and there was a chap there named Furness who I remember fondly. He'd been an Eastend barrowboy and came with all his belongings in a brown carrier bag. He had this old mac that draped over him, great long, blond, lank hair, and he had quite a long nose and he seemed older than the rest of us. Of course, he goes up to the Colour Sergeant and says, 'Where do we go, mate?' and there was a complete outburst. 'Don't bloody mate me either!’ Eventually order was restored and we were sorted out and marched off to barracks block.

The Army was a great shock to me really because I'd been brought up mostly with old people and worked mostly with the old fellows, so I wasn't subjected to the sort of backchat, to the biases and the prejudices that young people have. I was in a barrack block with a young Jewish soldier called Shram and he seemed to get the sharp edge of the Londoners’ tongues. One day he came in and he’d been given a very successful beating, which I really couldn’t understand, and I was quite concerned. That was my first encounter with the idiocy of that sort of life.

The first night there after we got our clothing issued we literally lay there and had hysterics looking at these two idiotic stablelads parading up and down in these big vests and underwear, which were dangling below their knees. I suppose the principle of the Army was that people had to be knocked into shape and subdued, but I didn't see that. While I was there that week my Grandfather died. He'd been with us all our life. He'd looked after me while my Mother went out to work, and when my Mother had died and I wanted to go home to the funeral. It was really touch and go as to whether they were going to let me go home for the afternoon from Reading, but they did in the end.

Basic training was done at Farnborough and then I was transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps as a coppersmith and we went to Farnborough and trained in the ways of the Army. I went to Hereford first and from there I went to Thetford which was the holding company. Prior to going to Thetford there'd been a great hooha about the RSM at the Army Prison there. Part of the game there was that prisoners would man-handle the pile of rocks from one side and then they'd walk back and man-handle them back again. One of the poor prisoners had died of heart attack and this RSM was held responsible. He didn't go to prison but it was felt that he showed less concern than he should have done and we found out that this RSM had been posted out of the Army Prison into this place.

As a coppersmith I was sent, for a fortnight, to the Royal Army Service Corps Waterbourne Unit in the Isle of Wight where they had a depot and from there back to Thetford for two days and then on to Bielefeld in Germany.

ARMY OF OCCUPATION
A lot of the younger Germans obviously weren't very impressed with us and a lot of the men who'd been in the Army were passive about it. Life was hard for most people in Germany and a lot of the older people didn't want to know, they just wanted to try and get on with their lives. There was a lot of disruption. I thought Southampton and Portsmouth had been blitzed but I was sent up through Brunswick and I was amazed at the sight of rows, and rows, and rows of shells of buildings, with pathways where the roads hadn't been cleared. One thing about Southampton was that you knew within a couple of weeks where the roads were, the roads were back again. It took longer for the buildings, but here I was in late 1947 and early 1948 and there were buildings with black crosses on. The assumption was that this was the sign dead bodies were there, but when you looked at the state of the buildings, the rubble hadn't been cleared, it was quite believable. It was frightening. I watched a building being slowly dismantled by hand, and it was mostly women. A great long line of women carrying two bricks at a time, from hand to hand, and then they were being chipped and cleaned and stacked. Of course some of my soldier colleagues were saying, 'Oh yeah, they followed their fathers’ loyalties, a good Hun's a dead Hun.'. But I didn't see that.

Food was plentiful for us but I don't think it was for the Germans. It's surprising if you're in the services, you're not aware of it, but then I can remember going out into the country and getting eggs. I suppose in the country you had your ration but they couldn't afford things like cigarettes and sweets. German children asked, 'Got any, haben sie sweets?' and 'Haben sie cigarettes?' Well, if I had some I would give them. I remember buying a little box camera to bring back for a nephew, and of course you had German marks at the time, and there was NAAFI money, the NAFS.

From Bielefeld I was sent to Trieste as a coppersmith in the Army Fire Service and I took a long trip up through Austria. I saw ‘the big wheel’ in Vienna with what looked like railway coaches on it and this was a massive structure compared to the London Eye. The dock at Trieste is on a V and on one side were the American ships and on the other side the British and French, and some others. At weekends, and sometimes in the week, groups of American seamen and British seamen would meet and all hell would break loose. All you would hear would be the sirens on the American military or naval police. The Americans always came up in jeeps but the shore patrol from the British troops were always walking. They seemed to lay in with the same amount of enthusiasm whether they’d walked there or been driven there in jeeps, but whoever got close got clobbered. I was only there a fortnight when they decided to disband the Fire Unit and so I was sent all the way back to Bielefeld. From there I wended my way back through Vienna. I couldn't have gone across Berlin because it meant going through the American Zone, and you went up through Germany just across into the shared Communial Zone of Austria and Vienna and back down. I went back up and of course they didn't want me. I didn't have any pay but I managed to get free tea and buns from the Church Army and Toc-H in the larger towns where there was a military establishment. I did find one or two where, because I had my paybook with me, you could get someone to pay you. But when I got back, of course, I had a certain amount of back pay. It was only three weeks but at 4/- a day it was a fortune. I went there just before Christmas, and I was there till I was demobbed in 1949.

BERLIN AIRLIFT
I was on the Berlin Airlift, which was quite exciting. Prior to the Berlin Airlift, of course, being soldiers we didn't get to read papers a great deal. We were sent on an Air Dispatch Course at Gatow, which was a British Air Force Base. The highlight being they had two Dakotas, just the fuselages and the stub of wings and a tail, mounted on concrete blocks in the positions as if they'd been sat on the ground. We spent a happy three weeks going around picking up ammunition boxes that were filled with gravel, loading them in lorries, and taking them and loading them in this aircraft. We were taught how to balance the load in the aircraft, and lashing down, helping to man-handle a 25 pounder into the fuselage of this Dakota, and Gerry cans. And then eventually the blockade of Berlin started. From there we went to an airfield at Wansdorf and I got a flight into Berlin with two others from the workshop, along with the postbags, coal and dried potatoes.

BELSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP
We had read about the concentration camps and five of us went on a trip to Belsen in early Spring 1949. A lot of the huts had been burnt down, but the administration huts were still there. I can remember seeing pictures in the paper and in the newsreels of bodies that had been covered over and you could see the outline of these great mounds, and they were massive. They also had a display of photographs that were obviously taken either by Army photographers or press photographers. But it was clearly evident these photographs weren't going to be seen on the newsreel or in the papers. They were of bodies, just dead bodies, and the conditions in the huts where, at the time when they were photographed, there were still people living there. The armoured group that overran this place knew it was there, but they were appalled by what they saw. A secondary unit, I think the Army Medical Corps, came in and on seeing the conditions realised that cholera and typhus were running rife there. Another unit was brought in under greater strict instruction, because by this time the first group, as I understand it, were taking the law into their own hands. A lot of the internal organisation within the huts was done by fellow inmates. I don't blame them, I try to understand what an absolute hell they suddenly they found themselves in.

One photograph was of two women peering up from under tiers of about five bunks; shelves that’s all they were, shelves. There were three or four people lying across the shelf. The two outside could get out and do what they wanted but those in the middle had to climb over somebody. And there were shots there showing the people in the middle and they were dead with live people still lying either side. These were obviously taken within the first day or so as there were pictures of crowds of prisoners shuffling around in all sorts of conditions. Some were obviously delighted, some looked quite dazed, and there were those who thought, ‘An army is an army, is an army, we haven't been able to trust the German one, what makes you think we can trust this one? ‘

To me it was a great shock, unbelievable. When you're that young you don't necessarily look at detail, although we heard about the massacres, you imagine people being cleanly shot but of course it isn't, it never can be, can it? I don't know how the people who found the camp managed to cope, it was reasonably sanitised by the time I saw it. Most of us were very quiet on the drive back.

We stopped at odd farms surrounding Belsen on the return journey and the locals denied any knowledge of it.

DEMOB
I'd passed as sheet metalwork and I'd also worked with a crew on a Scammel recovery vehicle and I was no longer considered a coppersmith so I took over the stores in the barrack block. I was in control of the German cleaners for the block and was also on good terms with the German tailor, so eventually I had a uniform that had box pleats in the back, faced collars. I saw myself as a real military dandy, there was no doubt about it. As we came home and got off from the Hook of Holland to Harwich I was cornered by an MP who accused me of being improperly dressed and wanted my name and number, and he would watch out for me on my return. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I was on the way to be demobbed. We were allowed to come home in our battle dress and the bare boots. Yes we kept them.

I was so happy to be back as the Army was getting on my nerves and the family were just as glad to see me home. There wasn't any great party as the war had been over some time, and I was just one of the umpteen thousand National Service lads coming home.

Well I'm glad I went and I don't begrudge going in.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.