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My name’s Kenneth Roberts and I’m 85.
During the second world war, I was everywhere- Egypt, Syria, Lebanon- places like that- and then I was in Italy, Austria (where I met my wife who was a refugee from Hungary). I was in the army. I started off with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, then I was in the artillery, and then I ended up in the Northamptonshire Regiment, so I got around a little bit! I was in North Africa for a while, and I always remember when we first went out there, we landed in Port Said. They took us up to a place called Heliopolis, which was a camp right by the foot of the Pyramids. And, do you know what? We never went and had a look at them. When you’re a young man, these things don’t interest you, the way they interest you today. It’s an opportunity missed, isn’t it?
I was a volunteer initially. I was with the Territorial Army. I joined that in early 1939, when I was 18, and I was in the war until the end. Just the usual kind of things- you remember the good times, and forget the bad ones. But I never regretted being in the army. You met some wonderful men, some very good friends, who you could rely on. And the discipline! They don’t have much of that today. But, no, I never regretted going into the army.
My brother was killed in Italy, just before I got there. His name was Benjamin. He was taken prisoner by the Germans. They were transporting them up to Germany, and either the Americans, or the British, planes came along and bombed the viaduct before this train had gone over, so they all went over (the ones in the train) and got killed. Later on in the year, I spent three and a half months in hospital in Naples, and in the next bed to me, a lad came in who’d been on that train, and luckily enough, he’d got away, and the Italian people hid him until the troops moved up. But my brother has no known grave. There’s a memorial to the unknown warrior. And there’s a plaque in the memorial hall in Wrexham. His name’s on that.
I always remember feeling cold and miserable and wet. And sometimes you wished you were at home with your parents. But, as I said before, it’s not something I’m sorry I went through. I think it did us a lot of good, because it did make us respect everything, respect your life and respect your friends, which they don’t seem to do these days, do they?
One or two episodes make me laugh sometimes. I was coming out of hospital, going back up to our unit, and the sergeant major came along and inspected us before we went back to our unit. ‘Haircut! Haircut! Haircut! Haircut!’ We’d been in hospital, and none of us had had a haircut. So all of us who needed a haircut, he made us get on our knees, and he called this Italian barber to come along and give us a hair cut. He said ‘Don’t take your tin hats off!’ So we had to leave our tin hats on, and he just cut around the sides. Because there was a general, or something, coming round to inspect us before we really went. And, I always remember this general, he came along, and he inspected us, and he said (not to me personally, but to one of the others) ‘What have you done to your hair?’ so this lad told him what had happened. He played merry hell! So he made us all go down to the barbers properly, get your tin hat off, and have it done properly. Little things like that stick out in your mind, and you’ve got to laugh.
On the other hand though, I remember a shell dropping from above my head.. my mate and I were in no man’s land, in between the two armies- everybody had to do it- this was in Italy, just before Bologna, in the mountains. They would fire these rockets- ten or twelve rockets- at you, and one landed just in between us, in our shell hole, and we were close together, and it didn’t go off. Well that really upset my mate. So much that they had to send him back to England, he couldn’t stick it any longer. He had a nervous breakdown. What you called ‘bomb happy’ in those days. I don’t know why it didn’t bother me, really. Perhaps I was a bit dim in those days; I must have been! But it didn’t seem to affect me in the same way that it affected him. Cos I remember I had to call.. there were two of us in one shell hole, and I had to crawl to the next one, because they had the telephone, and tell them what had happened to him, so they sent somebody back to the main line, and they came and fetched him.
Now I remember another thing. We were in a village, still in Italy, and we were getting attacked, and they were sending some heavy shells down at us, and I always remember saying to this lad ‘I don’t mind the light stuff, you know the bullets, but I don’t like these big things.’ And the next minute, he was up and away, and he ran down the street, he threw his rifle down on the floor, threw his tin hat off, and he went down the road like the Dickens. It affected him like that.
And when I was in North Africa- there’s nowhere to get behind in the desert, or not where we were anyway. But we got through that, and nothing spectacular happened- it did to others- but not to me like that.
I was in hospital in Naples, as I said before, because we were up in the mountains, and there was mud- well, you say up to your neck in mud- and I’d got this mud in my boots. I’d had my feet squashed before I went in the army, because I used to work in the collieries. I worked in Llay Main, and Gresford collieries, and I had my feet run over by a tub of coal, and it left a mark, and the mud must’ve got in it, after all those years, and they took me to hospital for that, but.. there were a lot of things… you never forget, but they’re hard to recall. But, I never regretted being in it. At that young age, I was only 18, like many others.
I remember getting called up, I was at Gresford Colliery at the time, and we went up to the army, and we were going abroad, and we were inspected before we went abroad, and I always remember the lad next to me, and he’d just got married, and the colonel inspecting him said ‘Well, you can’t go, you’ve just been married.’ And I thought ‘I hope that doesn’t happen to me!’ You know full of.. we hadn’t been in that situation before, we didn’t know what it was like, so we weren’t afraid, not much. We left that til later. We were afraid many times, many times we were afraid. But at that time, it was all.. bravado. You like to think ‘I can do it. We’re going out to kill the Germans.’ What a thing to say- now, it’s stupid, but at that time, and at that age, these were the things that filled your mind.
There were good times.. you don’t remember the bad so much.. but it happens to everybody, and it doesn’t happen all the time. There are more good times than bad.

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