大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by CSV/大象传媒 Radio Nottingham on behalf of Arthur Oldfield with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."

It's September 1939, and I've just celebrated my 21st birthday. I've also had an invitation (?) to join the Royal Engineers.
So we find ourselves in France (having done our six months training) and were immediately ordered to advance North. On our way up we came to a small town called Armentiers. We had been travelling some time and we forsook our convoy for a while and took a rest. We went for a walk around the town. It was beautiful, with a delightful market place, a lovely old church surrounded by quaint little shops, and the people made us very welcome. Our short stay came to an endand we reluctantly said our goodbyes.
We hadn't gone very far when a squadron of German bombers passed over our convoy. We thought that we might be their target, but thankfully for us they continued on their way. We reached Bruge and were ordered to retreat! Dunkirk was our destination and we came back to Armentiers, but Armentiers was no more. The town had been heavily bombed and was in ruins. We now knew the target of the bombers, and we felt very angry and sad.
We reached Dunkirk and were there for three nights and three days. It wasn't very pleasant with shelling and dive bombing.
We eventually arrived back in England and the White Cliffs of Dover were a most welcome sight.

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