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This contribution summarises the service of Bill Spry (R Signals, Gold Coast, Gambia, then 82 Div Burma 1941-45). It was submitted by Bill to the People's War team in Wales and is added to the site with his permission.

I had been serving in the 53rd (Welsh) Division TA in Northern Ireland. We were there in case the Germans landed in Eire to attack Northern Ireland and it was very boring. So in May 1941, in a moment of madness I applied for a transfer and found myself at the Central Hotel in London, a transit camp where some thirty officers, NCOs and men were formed into a draft for the Gold Coast. We were all strangers to each other, the draft being made up of volunteers and misfits from all over the UK — I hasten to add I was one of the formers!

We were issued with a massive amount of kit, including camp beds, folding washstands, chairs, mosquito nets, solar toupees and spine pads. But instead of long trouser and shorts we were given ‘long shorts’, horrible things that you wore with the legs buttoned up during the day and let down to mid-calf length in the evening!

We sailed on the HMS Esperance Bay and were taken ashore as Accra via ‘mammy-chairs’ and canoes (that was quite an experience). We were driven to Achimota College which had been taken over by the army and we were told we were to become GHQ Signals, to provide radio communication between the four West African colonies. A month later I was sent to Gambia to take charge of our wireless station there and stayed for almost two years.

Then I was given six weeks recuperative leave to the UK, I returned to Accra and was informed I was posted to 82 (WA) Division, then forming at Ibaden in Nigeria for service in Burma. We were in the Arakan area until July 1945 I was informed that I was to be repatriated since I had served more than four years overseas. Now there were quite a few of us sent home and replaced with new NCOs, fresh out from England and this did not please our West African soldiers. ‘You done bringing us this place, now you go home, leave us here. Dese new massas (our replacements) dey no savvy us at all!’ There was a special relationship between the West Africans and the British, a combination of friendship and discipline which they understood and I felt quite guilty about leaving them there. The war ended suddenly while we were on the ship home ( the atom bombs in August 1945) and the division returned to the Gold Coast and Nigeria six months later.

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