大象传媒

Mr Patrick Strafford's story.

I was fourteen on December 15 1939 and was well aware of the situation on the continent. With three older brothers I was very politicaly aware. Aware of the massive army and strong navy Hitler had.
We were now at war but the blitz in Sheffield was a year away and as I've told in another story I experienced that.
Before the blitz everybody in Sheffield had speculated that they would never be able to bomb us (mostly for geographical reasons - and wishful thinking). Other towns were being bombed regularly though, so we were well aware of what might happen.
We were also reading and hearing about attacks on our shipping. In the middle of 1940, while we were thinking of what might happen to us, we evacuated all our troops from Dunkirk.
Lord Hawhaw was on the go at this period and my brothers and I thought that he was a bit of a laugh - he was the butt of much of our humour.
At home we were concentrating on building air raid shelters and strengthening cellars. While the fire brigade erected large water towers to help put fires out.
After Dunkirke we were under the real threat of invasion which we knew was imminent.
Hitler seemed to be bombing us at will - mass bombing raids on all our towns and cities but in 1941 Germany invaded Russia - not us. It was common knowledge that he wanted Russian resources. But the Russians kept him busy - it was more difficult than he thought.
As a teenager all this was building up and making me, and all of us, want to do our bit to do something.
My father died in 1941 and my brother joined up in 1942. I was 17 and was trying very hard to join up through the usual channels but was told to go away - I was too young.
I decided to lie. I registered with a call up group who were all twelve months older than me and to do this I gave my wrong age. I told them my birthday was in January thus making myself eleven months older and I was called up on May 20 1943.
I reported at Barnard Castle in Durham before being moved to a training camp where I did elementary infantry training before moving to another training centre at Berwick on Tweed. Within a month or so I was with the 1st/4th KOYLI. I joined my company at Muthill.
This was the real army, we were taken to mockups of Hitler's West Wall to train and to sea ports to train with landing crafts. The weather was bleak! Waiting about on landing crafts was very bleak.
One of the places was on the Isle of Bute where we were doing beach landings and working with the sailers who would eventualy land us. The weather was so bad we sometimes fell asleep in snowdrifts and this was the first time I had rum. I remember traing for street fighting in old and disused factories etc. The training was also being done by foreign troops - American, Canadians, Polish etc.
One training session I paricularly remember was the 'creeping barrage' which meant we were advancing on a beach with explosions going on all around us - to get used to it!
One of the mock ups was a gun enplacement similar to the ones on the West Wall. Our drill was to practice to capture it with team work. Hand grenades first - then run in and place another one through a gun slit - one to make him duck, the other to give us time to 'post' another.
We then went south to Lowestoft where we were given technical training, map reading etc and unarmed combat! The striking thing about Lowestoft was the massive number of service men - Americans Poles and many other nationalities - all congregating for the push to Normandy.
Throughout my training I was aware that I was too young to be there but looking at some of the other lads I would guess they were the same as me. Strangely there were also a few men who I judged to be too old to be there. This proved to be so when they were killed and their names and ages appeared on headstones.

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