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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from CSV Berkshire on behalf of James McConnell and has been added to the site with her permission. Mr McConnell fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was called up and did 3 months basic training in England then after a fortnights embarkation leave I went up to Greenock and set sail on the old Cunard cruise liner the Franconia. I was eight weeks on the ship when the convoy in which we were travelling split half the convoy went to Durban and the other half went to Cape Town in South Africa. The Franconia went to Cape Town where we refuelled and restocked. While we were in Cape Town we left the ship and were billeted with local families for 5 days. My family were Dutch living in the Dutch settlement of Wineberg, they took five of us.

We rejoined the ship and sailed up to Basra in Iraq where I left the ship and was taken by transport through Baghdad and up to Kirkup near the Turkish border. On the river there we trained for 8 weeks practising landing from landing craft. Water was in short a supply and we were only allowed one bottle of water a day. I saved up warm tea to shave with rather than use my water shaving!

After our training I joined the push to El Alamain where I joined the ‘Desert Rats’. Later I was sent to Tripoli where we practised on the beaches for the landing s in Italy. By then the three parachute brigades were attached to General Clarke’s US 5th Army. They decided to send two brigades back to England and we were quite envious although we were to learn later that the other two brigades had been sent back to prepare to take the bridge at Arnhem from the air.

Just after we had taken Tobruk I was caught smoking in the desert when I should have been in my tent. I got put on a charge and had to go before the Captain. He checked my service record and discovered that I was at 18 years old too young to be fighting in the desert. I swore an oath at this disclosure and expected to be sent back home. The Captain said that they couldn’t let a fully trained paratrooper be sent home so he put me on seven days jankers for blaspheming an officer.

We went to Italy, dropped at Salerno and then got as far as Naples where we were being prepared to take Anzio moving up Italy to Montecassino. The monastery had been flattened by the Yanks when we got there, but German paratroopers were still holding out at the top. We arrived in March, but the position was not finally taken until May. We couldn’t make any movement towards the top during the day and could only slowly pick our way among the boulders dodging the German searchlights during the night and dug ourselves in during the day. We were under heavy fire from the top of the monastery, the Poles lost many men. I was wounded getting shrapnel in my neck and leg. With Montecassino taken the brigade joined up with the Anzio beachhead to advance on Rome.

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