大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from CSV Action Desk on behalf of Mr Donald Horton and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Horton fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I left East Keal, near Spilsby and joined HMS Royal Arthur near Skegness in 1943 at about the time that the Allies were invading Sicily. This was a shore training establishment which, amusingly, the Germans claimed several times to have sunk! I was there for six weeks; for a country boy it was hard on the training ground and I heard language that I didn鈥檛 even know existed before. We often went on hard route marches; as we got back it caused an uproar to see the slogan, now camouflaged, stating 鈥榦ur true intent is all for your delight鈥�! After the six weeks had ended I was drafted to civilian billets in Brighton to learn Morse and then on to Eastbourne to learn Japanese Morse in the blind school there. A further six weeks later it was on to Portsmouth, in the awful barracks there.

Portsmouth had been badly bombed and it was a hard time for all. During June 1944 I had to load stores for D-Day. We were, of course, in a sealed off area; everything was strictly censored. There was a terrible hush over the area before the Allies actually landed. After that the Buzzbombs started coming over both day and night. One never heard the word constipation in those days!

I was among other lads from the area, from various backgrounds, loading stores for D-Day. One morning I was standing alone, cap flapper back, hands in overall pockets, when this large cavalcade of cars loomed up, packed with gold braid. In the middle of it all was a car with just one man in. Rather to my surprise this man gave me a personal acknowledgement, before speeding by. It wasn鈥檛 very long before my Chief Petty Officer came running up, huffing and puffing and said, 鈥淒o you realise who that was?鈥� Casually I answered, 鈥淪ome great admiral I guess.鈥� 鈥淭hat was King George VI!鈥� he said, 鈥淥n his way to see the troops in Normandy; it is a very foggy morning and they are taking a chance with him.鈥� I rode on air all day!

I was later drafted to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a dry sailor, based at a large radio station in Colombo, where there were ninety sets all listening into the Japanese. The authorities had got the situation so sized up that they knew when the code was going to be changed even before the Japanese operators themselves. Day and night duty in a hot climate took it out of everybody. When the atom bomb was dropped we were fairly quickly demobbed. I was sent back to Portsmouth, so no frontline duty; but rather an interesting three years for a lad from a small Lincolnshire village!

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