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I’m James Andrew Ford, and I’m 90 odd. I was 90 last September, 2005.
Originally, I’m from Hamilton. I went nearly everywhere in the Mediterranean area. I was in the RAF. You get posted here, you get posted there, six months here, three months somewhere else, but it was all the RAF, basically.
I got sent down to Falmouth, by mistake, to work in air and sea rescue. That was rough. Going into the channel, picking up chaps that had been downed. German or British. That didn’t last long, because I wasn’t air and sea rescue, I was just an RAF bloke who was handy, that’s all. (What was your job in the RAF?) General. General everything. I’ve been a cook.. I’ve been everything bar the kitchen sink! I actually started off as air crew, but my eyes let me down. I found out one of my eyes was dodgy, so I ended up as ground crew, and then I moved to general ground crew. You just moved around.
I went to Borras, in Wrexham. Borras was a very small air training base for officers. It became a night fighter’s station. I came in 1941. There was nothing much doing, until the Germans started bombing Wallasey, Birkenhead and Liverpool. They came back this way, and we could never catch them. Well, this station was night fighter, so what we used to do was, the Gerries used to go into the North Wales mountains, to try and get back to Germany, and if there were any left over, they used to drop their bombs on the Wrexham area. They weren’t very successful. They were after Marchwiel (the munitions factory) and they were after Monsanto's.
So the night fighters used to meet the Germans above them, and down them. They were quite successful, I believe, to chase them off. After that, they went back in the Shrewsbury direction.
After that, I went overseas, to North Africa, along with the so called Yankees. That was 1943, or 1944, I can’t remember the exact dates. We went to Sicily, but didn’t stay long. In fact, it was a bad place. Full of disease. The Germans purposefully left people poxed up, so that the British troops would go in. In fact, Montgomery stopped our men going in to Sicily, because he said that there were more men in the sick bay than there was wounded. It was purposefully done.
We didn’t go to Casino, thank God. That was a bad time. Fair play to the Gerries, they didn’t half hold on to it. We bombed and bombed and bombed, but they held on. The Poles had a bad time, a lot of men killed. Things were bad there.
From there, we went to Northern Italy. I ended up in Milan, then higher up, towards the Austrian borders. We met some of the Russians. Rum lot, they were! They were a bad lot. You couldn’t take their word for anything.
Towards the end of the war, there were a lot of loose soldiers. We called them bandits. They belonged to nobody. They could be Austrians, Germans, Russians.. just floating around. If you gave them money, they’d fight for you, if you didn’t, they wouldn’t. And the Russians.. a lot of Eastern European people.. well we had about a thousand. We handed them back at the Austrian border, and they handed back the so-called Europeans. The Russians were very cruel. No messing at all. They used to shoot the lot. I remember them shaking hands with our officers, and the Russians went over a hill, and we could hear them. They went into a wood, took them over, and we could hear the machine guns going. We couldn’t see them. But no Russians came back. They shot their own. They could be anybody, they’d been freelancing for years, because Europe was in a mess, and you didn’t know who was what, and some went to Germany, some went to Britain, and some went to Italy. But after that, I came back to Blighty, thank God. Things weren’t good.
I was nearly captured at a place called Lyon, towards the beginning of the war. We weren’t there five minutes, and the Germans surrounded us. We were given duff information. We thought we were moving into an aerodrome, and the Gerries just sat back and watched us. Our CO, Tomlinson, came from round here (the Wrexham area). There’s still some of his family in the Cheshire area. They were farmers/ milk people.. cheese and all that. He was a damn good CO. He was sharp. To us, an old man, but he wasn’t an old man at all. He must have been in his forties. I was one of the lucky ones. I got out. I managed to get out, and went to Dover, to Shorncliffe Barracks. It was a hell of a place. I’d have been better off as a Prisoner of War! It was very rough indeed. We were treated like dogs. When we arrived down there, all we had down there was tins of M and V- a mixture of vegetables and meat. We had no money. You couldn’t go to the NAFFI. There was no NAFFI to go to. You couldn’t even chat up a girl! It was hopeless.
Eventually, I was sent to Norfolk. That was quite a good camp, but the Germans were always raiding it. That got me very bitter about the Germans. They used to slip in about four or five o clock, machine gun the streets, when the children were coming out of school. We got very bitter. I didn’t mind fighting the Germans, but when you saw them machine gunning the kids coming from Sunday school…
I met the Mrs, Betty, because she was helping troops from Liverpool. Many of them had been badly burnt on oil ships.They were coming in to Clatterbridge. She was a nurse, I think she must have been. I met her in Wrexham after that. Funny how it works out. She’s a good girl. She ended up in the Royal Observer Corps.

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