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This story was posted by Mark Jeffers with permission from the author.

In 1940 I knew war was coming and enlisted in Harlan County in Kentucky, joining the First Armoured Division in the year it was first established. Most of the men in my company joined the army straight out of High School. I trained mainly at Fort Knox from June 1940 to May 1942, also attending Military School in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1941, where I studied the body design and repair of military vehicles. My rank was a T5, or Technician, with the Division’s Ordnance and Quartermaster outfit. I remember clearly the day that we heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, as we had come in to Fort Knox the previous evening, 6th December 1941, from being on manoeuvres through Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. That’s when preparations for shipping the Division over to Europe began.

In early May we were transferred to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then transported to New York to board the Queen Mary for the Atlantic crossing. The passage took a week, beginning on 10th May 1942. I think there must have been 20,000 men on board the ship. At first, the Queen Mary was escorted by two destroyers, but then we were on our own, with only the ship’s top speed (I heard she could do 30 knots) to protect us from U-boat torpedoes. On approaching Scotland we were met by a British naval escort, before arriving safely in Greenock on 17th May. Once there we were transferred to another ship, and then on to a ferryboat, which took us to Belfast. We then caught a train, which took us to Newcastle in County Down. We were billeted in Newcastle for about two weeks. I seem to remember that we stayed somewhere near the present Newcastle Centre. At that time, I was with ‘B’ Company of the 123rd Ordnance Battalion of the First Armoured Division, but I was then able to rejoin my original unit, ‘C’ Company, in Downpatrick. The 210 men of ‘C’ Company were billeted in the Old Gaol there, which had been a barracks for the Royal Welsh Fusiliers earlier in the War.

I remember that we had open bunks on the first floor of the building in the centre of the Gaol, now called the Governor’s Residence. We stacked all our weapons in the middle of the room, which was in one of the wings of the building. On the ground floor on the right-hand side as you came in, there was a canteen, and in the centre was the Captain’s office. Our Captain’s name was Wayne Browning, who was from Michigan. He was a motor cycle racer, and brought a number of other motor cyclists with him into the company, including the Early brothers. Our Platoon Leader was Second Lieutenant Fay, and our First Lieutenant’s name was Parker, who was from Georgia. Captain Browning gave Parker the nickname ‘Pattlefoot’, because he had such big feet. The Company was drilled in the courtyard, and regularly marched up the Mall and around the Cathedral.

While in Downpatrick, I had to go to Ballykinlar camp to deliver messages, but never went to the Racecourse, where other companies were based. We had to use maps to find our way around, as all the road signs had been removed to confuse the enemy. We had motorcycles and 2.5 ton General Motors trucks on the Mall, and later Captain Browning had a ‘jeep’, or open top command car. Jeeps were later replaced by smaller 4-passenger ‘peeps’, with a Ford body and a Wylleys engine, which had been tested in manoeuvres in 1941 and were then put into production in Ohio.

We had no lockers in the gaol, but we had a ‘musette’ or shoulder bag for our kit, unlike the infantry, who had a backpack. At that time I had a M1903 Springfield rifle, and was issued with a new M1 carbine when we reached North Africa. I also had a 45 caliber automatic pistol, but picked up a German P38 pistol left behind in a crate after the German offensive in the Faid Pass in February 1943. When we arrived in County Down we had the soup-plate type helmets used back in the First World War, but while in Downpatrick we were issued with new helmets, like the ones still used by the US army today.

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