大象传媒

Dedicated to Kelda Harrison
LAWRENCE鈥橲 WAR MEMOIRS: PART 1
The Second World War broke out in 1939 when I was 17. I was working for the Dunlop Rubber Company in Aberdeen in the north of Scotland. I was on a scholarship course learning to be a future Manager, but with the war going on and my friends all joining up, I got restless, so one day I walked down to the Recruiting Office.
They asked me what I wanted to be and I said, like every young man at that time, that I wanted to be a Fighter Pilot. So OK. I went through all the tests for fitness but when I got to the eye test they took a quick look and said 鈥淪orry your eyes aren鈥檛 good enough鈥�. (I have had monocular vision all my life 鈥� which means that you only see out of one eye). But as I was leaving the building feeling desperately disappointed, the sergeant, at the door said, 鈥淵ou look downhearted, sonny, what鈥檚 the matter?鈥�
I said, 鈥淭hey鈥檝e turned me down for a fighter pilot.鈥� He said, 鈥淣ever mind young man, you go right back in there and tell them you want to join the army - you see what happens!鈥� So I did, I saw the same medical and eye people and they passed me A1. The army apparently didn鈥檛 mind men with only one working eye!
I was sent to a young soldiers鈥� battalion because they weren鈥檛 calling men up till they were 18, I was still under age. I joined the Royal Scots in Edinburgh. I wasn鈥檛 there long before I managed to get transferred to the Royal Engineers, where I was trained to be an Engineer.
It must have been winter because it was terribly cold, so when one day a notice appeared on the battalion鈥檚 notice board, asking for young volunteers to go to India, and to be trained there to become officers, I jumped at the opportunity, and soon I was joining one of the great liners in Liverpool. Off we sailed, going straight across the Atlantic towards America.
We had a great escort of naval and other ships and then when we thought we were far enough away to be safe from U-boats (we hoped) we turned south.
There were around 5000 of us soldiers and officers on this ship, which normally only took 500! We cadets, as we were called, were put on the lowest deck and one day when we did a practice emergency, it took us 戮 of an hour to get up to where the rescue boats were. I don鈥檛 think we would have stood much chance if we had actually been torpedoed during that time.
Eventually we docked in Durban, South Africa. On the quay, there waiting for us, were hundreds and hundreds of cars. Eventually everyone on board was taken by some family to their home, where they were looked after for the three days we stayed there. In those days there was still apartheid, so I鈥檓 only talking about white people.
I had a lovely time going out in their car and seeing some of the sights, but alas soon it was time to return to our ship.
After another week or so we finally arrived in Bombay, as it was called then, in India. Your granny was there too, when she was a baby, so she tells me. In those days India was not divided into India and Pakistan, it was all just part of the British Empire.
We had two days to spend in Bombay and a friend I鈥檇 made on the ship said he had two addresses 鈥� one was his aunt鈥檚 and the other address he had been given by some friends, and he wasn鈥檛 sure what it was.
We decided to go and visit his aunt, so off we went in the intense heat of midday 鈥� which gets very very hot in Bombay 鈥� asking the Indian policemen if they knew where Grant Road was? They looked at us rather oddly but pointed us in the right direction. At last we thought we must be getting near, but when we looked around us, we could see this area seemed not at all the kind of place where one鈥檚 aunt would choose to live. Eventually it dawned on us what the area really was, and this explained the strange looks of the policemen. We had the wrong address and this was clearly Bombay鈥檚 area of ill repute! So we hurriedly retraced our steps.
The next day I was put on a train with five others and we travelled to Kirkee, outside Poona. We reported to the office there, and we started our training to be officers, in what was going to be called the Bengal Sappers and Miners.
Going back to the beginning, I must tell you that when we were on board, all the cadets had been lined up and separated into various groups, according to where we were going. Some were infantry; some gunners and five of us were engineers.
The officer checked the numbers and when he came to our group he looked puzzled and said 鈥淭here are five of you, but on my list there should be only four, who鈥檚 the odd man?鈥�. It was soon clear that it was my name that wasn鈥檛 there. Nobody knew what to do with the extra cadet but finally it was decided to let me go with the other engineers, if that was what I wanted to be.
Another check took place when we were approaching India and of course I was once more spotted as the odd man out. Again the same decision was arrived at. We arrived at Kirkee and reported in. The officer looked down the list before him and then he looked at us in a puzzled sort of way. I knew what it was: 鈥淚 think it鈥檚 me sir!鈥�. He told me I couldn鈥檛 stay at Kirkee, I was meant to be in Deolali, the gunners鈥� training centre. I told him I鈥檇 never asked to be a gunner, I only wanted to be an engineer. He said he鈥檇 ask them if they wanted me and came back later to tell me, much to my relief, that the gunners didn鈥檛 want me.
At the end of our training (6 months) I went up to Roorkee to join a training battalion. Roorkee was a beautiful spot at the foot of the Himalayas 鈥� you could see them every day, with their snow-covered peaks glistening in the sun.
Our job was to train raw Indian kids to be good sappers and miners and I was there doing that for nine months.
While we were in Kirkee we all had had to pass our exams in Urdu, the local language, and by the time I left Roorkee to join an active unit, I was quite a fluent speaker.
I then joined the 67th Indian Field Company which was in a beautiful spot just outside and north of Goa, a village called Ratnagiri.
By this time I must have been about 21. We had a lovely four months there, training our men in preparation for embarking on an enemy coast. Most of the time all it meant was trying to teach as many men as possible how to swim! I really loved that. Each day I would take the best swimmers right across the harbour and back again.
Let me now return to Kirkee. The day soon came for which we had waited so long, the day we were to start our journey to the Front Line. We all piled into a train, with Jake, my commanding officer in charge of it, and off we started on the long journey - not to the coast as we had expected, but up to Kohima 鈥� a small village in North Assam, where our troops had at last managed to halt the Japanese advance.
But I never got there. Later I heard it took the rest of the Company 3 weeks on the train, which shows you just how far they had to travel. But my stop was even longer.
Before we got on the train the Thompson sub machine guns on which we had been trained, were exchanged for a much cheaper automatic gun called the Sten, which was actually far more dangerous.
I called all the NCO鈥檚 together and the Jemadar of my platoon 鈥� who was the only man who had been instructed on the Sten gun - to demonstrate how it worked, and how dangerous it was to the user, not the enemy! We were packed tightly together in this third class carriage, I was sitting opposite the Jemadar, when in a moment of forgetfulness he put the loaded magazine into the gun and started to pull back the bolt. It was greasy because it was new from the factory. It slipped through his fingers, there was a loud explosion and I saw blood seeping through my shorts. I had been shot, before I had got anywhere near the enemy!
I didn鈥檛 feel any pain, just shock. There was a doctor on the train and as the train was stopped he was sent for. When he arrived he was clearly more shocked that I was, at the sight of the blood, for he started to put the bandage on my shorts, instead of on my leg! I pointed out that actually it was my leg that was bleeding, not the shorts. Eventually, much relieved, he completed the job and retired to another seat where a fellow officer had a flask of whisky. The two of them proceeded to drink the lot!
The train moved on until we got to Tatanaga, a town owned by Mr Tata, who was a multi millionaire who made shoes for the whole world. Fortunately he had built a splendid hospital, and when I managed to get out of the train I was put on a stretcher and then into an ambulance and was soon there.
The surgeons were good and I remember no more till I woke up in the hospital ward. Incidentally there was another wound on my backside, where the bullet came out, but our pathetic doctor hadn鈥檛 thought to look for that!
I later learnt that the stengun was set to fire automatic, but that it jammed the first round. If it hadn鈥檛, I wouldn鈥檛 be here today to tell you this. And the surgeons told me later that I should consider myself very lucky, for the bullet had grazed both the main artery and the main nerve. And with the doctor we had on the train, if either of them had been severed I certainly wouldn鈥檛 have survived!
Anyway, I healed quickly and was soon able, with the help of a good walking stick, to rejoin my Company, who had advanced from Kohima and were constructing a road through the teak forest following up the retreating Japanese.
Eventually we reached the banks of the mighty Chindwin River and there we camped. That night my platoon was ordered to build a raft, which would ferry the troops across with their big guns and tanks the next morning.
We started to put our raft together. It consisted of large steel girders, which took six men to lift. And that was when we discovered that whoever had chosen this place to build, had not looked too carefully, for the bank was thick mud through which my men鈥檚 feet sank as they struggled to lift the heavy girders. We were up a creek, literally! But we just had to struggle on, and as the dawn was getting near it was finished and the motor boat with Jake at the wheel towed us down and into the Chindwin, where we lashed up to the shore.
We had done a few trips back and forth when suddenly the Japanese opened fire with a large gun, and one shell plopped into the river just beside us. My men were so frightened, that they all jumped overboard! I knew that many of them had never learnt to swim, so we unhitched the motor boat and Jake proceeded to fish them all out.
This left our huge raft 鈥� 60 foot wide and 60 foot long 鈥� to drift rapidly down the fast flowing river and all we had on board was me, my jemadar and my havildar. We did what we could with the oars but it was hopeless, and down river we continued to go. Eventually we managed to get the raft into our shore and luckily not into the Japs and anchored it there. Jake came back and towed us upstream again, to continue our ferrying.
Our next job was to build a floating bridge, made up with lots of our rafts connected together. Then the army poured over. At the time I believe it was the longest floating bridge in the world!
We moved down the river a bit, to a place where there were steep cliffs. The Japs had managed to build an ingenious timber bridge. That was no good for our heavy guns and tanks. So we built one of our Bailey bridges round the edge of the cliff, which was quite a tricky job.
I should explain here, that whenever we had camped previously, it had always been on a riverbank and when we had finished the bridge we were building, the men asked me if we could fish the river. So I chucked 1 lb of gun cotton into it and we had enormous fun swimming and catching all the fish which came up. It might seem a rather unfair method of fishing, but those fish were the only fresh food we ever had because all the supplies of food were dropped by parachute to the whole army every day. Sometimes we got American boxes of food, which were much better than the British, as they always contained things like chocolate and chewing gum which, of course, we all craved.
So when we had finished our bridge on the cliffs of the Chindwin, the men asked me if we could fish? I pointed out that the river was much too wide and deep for it to be possible. They persisted, so I gave in and we went out into the river in a little rowing boat. This time I chucked overboard 25 lbs of explosive and we rowed furiously away, waiting for the big bang. But there was no bang and I thought it hadn鈥檛 gone off, when suddenly an ENORMOUS brown bubble broke the surface, and there in the middle of it was an equally gigantic fish. Quick as a flash, one of my men - Ali Mohammed, leapt overboard and fastened himself to the fish, which was as big as he was. But I knew Ali Mohammed couldn't swim. The fish went down and then broke the surface again, still with Ali Mohammed attached. We rowed frantically to rescue him, but down he went again, and when he reappeared he was still clinging onto the fish but this time we managed to rescue him 鈥� still attached to the fish 鈥� which we towed ashore. That night the whole company ate fresh fish.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

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