大象传媒

This story has been collected and transcribed by Mark Jeffers with permission from the author. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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I was in the Royal Artillery, anti-aircraft. I was a member of the 9th Londonderry Heavy Anti-aircraft Regiment, Supplementary reserves. I forged my age to join as I was only 17 when I left to go away.

When we arrived in Egypt things were quiet because there was no war. Italy hadn鈥檛 entered the war yet and it was the life really. The first nine-to-ten months and then eventually Italy came into the war and that heated things up for us because we were then the defence of Alexandria Harbour, which was the biggest Port for the Naval and all the ships in the Med. It wasn鈥檛 too bad with the Italians, at that time we hadn鈥檛 any radar and all you had was a man in the command post with binoculars and if they heard a drone they had to identify it.

But we knew that the only plane that you got coming in high was the Savoya 79鈥檚 that the Italian used. Then we turned the handle of this thing and that was action stations. We had four guns on a cliff face and off and on we saw quite a wee bit. But eventually Germany came into the war and it went from an easy bit to a hard bit. One week especially there was only two of us left from Limavady out of 54 in my section, A section and there were only two of us left.

There was one week especially that both day and night we were in action. Things quietened down a bit but we weren鈥檛 even allowed out on weekend leave. We had to try and recuperate a bit.

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