大象传媒

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

I was then posted to an officers training unit and I had to say goodbye to Unit 591 RE. I was sent to Scotland and then I was commissioned to the 52nd Lowland Division. I was recruited in the south of Scotland as opposed to the Highland Division which recruited in the north. I spent the rest of the war with them. We were trained to go to Norway, which, as I found out later, would have been a disaster. The journey across the sea was long, the terrain was mountainous, we had a lack of supplies and the Germany occupancy was vastly underestimated. We could have had sea support but no air support; we didn鈥檛 know all this at the time though. We hoped that if we did go that it would snow, as that was how we鈥檇 been training in the Grampians and the Cairn Gorms. It was eventually realised by the war office that they would never invade Norway, but the Germans did not know that. So we were kept in Scotland, instead of being sent to Italy where we would have been useful, us staying meant that as many as fourteen German Divisions stayed in Norway instead of perhaps being sent to France for the Normandy landings on D-Day!

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.