大象传媒

My mother used to be in service, at that time we lived in the Paddington area of London.

I started work as an office boy, and as the war clouds gathered, the company encouraged us to join the Territorial Army, and promised to continue to pay our wages.

I joined the Royal Fusiliers, a searchlight unit at Wembley. There I was, once a week learning to operate a searchlight. And then came the war.

I received a telegram to report to headquarters. I became a fusilier.

I went in as a boy and came out a man.

I moved to Norfolk, and joined a searchlight site there. The only problem was - we didn't have a searchlight. That shows just how hard up we were for weapons and things like that. We were given extra pay each week to wear our own clothes. It was a very bad winter so we got 'Hard Living' expenses when we were living in tents. Later on we were billeted in the local village.

I got fed up with that and did something you weren't supposed to do; I volunteered to join another regiment on its way to the Orkney Islands in Scotland.

My hobby was collecting newspapers and studying remote islands, so I was quite looking forward to that, but I got more than I bargained for.

I was station on Hoy, reputed to be the loneliest search light site in the UK; there was no one there, just a track to the site, and three or four houses. Usually there was ten or twelve of us to man the light and the rations lorry only came once a week.

We would be called out when an aircraft was heard, and direct the light towards the noise and wait for a flare which would tell us it was one of ours or not, no flare, and the anti-aircraft gun stationed a few miles away would fire along the path of our beam, to try and shoot the enemy down. They were usually too high but occasionally we got lucky.

On one occasion the weather was so bad we were cut off from our supplies for a couple of weeks. We had so little fuel we could only use the generator to power the search light every 20 minutes. I remember it was bitterly cold and I got frostbite.

I left that site and went to another in Derbyshire; I'll never forget it. It was my 21st birthday and it snowed.

I put in an application for the Royal Army Ordnance Corps as a clerk. I was sent to another searchlight site.

It wasn't long before they were asking for volunteers to join a new division. A tank division, the 11th Armed Division, I joined it.

This was very different, a highly mobile supply unit. Our job during a battle, was to keep up as close as possible to the advancing tanks, so that if they broke down hopefully we could fix the problem.

Eventually I was sent to Aldershot where our task was to waterproof all our vehicles. It was an open secret that there was to be an invasion, as to whereor when we were going to invade that was completely unknown. There were about a dozen vehicles and around fifty men.

Whilst we were at Aldershot we were confined to barracks, but we could travel, providing we didn't go further than ten miles from the camp. I worked it out that I could get part way home, and then, if I could find a bus, I could get all the way home. I would only get about an hour at home, but it would be better than nothing.

I travelled the ten miles -- there were no buses, -- they were on strike, what a disappointment. I never saw home again for another twelve months.

We set off in a convoy towards London, and eventually arriving on the North Circular road. We had to stop at a traffic jam and I saw a boy who recognised me, I asked him to tell my mother that I was on my way to France.

We arrived at the London docks where once again were cut off from the outside world, you could write letters, but it was impossible to post them. We spent the majority of the time servicing the vehicles, waterproofing them, (by putting stuff like putty all around the engines), cleaning our rifles, and generally preparing for the journey across the Channel, and trying to work out how to drive the vehicles through the water from the ship to the shore.

By this time it was two or three days after D-Day. Crowds of people were watching the convoy pass by, bringing us cups of tea, cheering us, generally we really felt like heroes. Obviously they all knew where we were going, and by that time so did we. The battle of Normandy was well and truly on.

I remember sailing along the Thames and passing the Ford Motor works at Dagenham. They had enormous loudspeakers where we could hear messages, such as 'All the best lads -- Good wishes from Fords of Dagenham'.

We passed Southend and entered the open sea, there were destroyers everywhere. I remember sitting down and writing to my mum, telling her we were on our way to the Western Front, by kind permission of the Royal Navy.

The sea crossing was quite calm and I wasn't even seasick.

When we arrived, it was Juno Beach, it was a dry landing, the tide was out. We were so lucky, we'd heard stories of really dreadful landings when the weather was less helpful. (By now I was a driver clerk).

I drove my vehicle down the ramp, onto the open beach. I saw a group of fifty or sixty German soldiers sitting down in the sand, and I thought to myself, for you the war is over, but for me it was just beginning.

There was a lot of noise going on in the distance, but the first thing I noticed was the stench of death. It wasn't from human remains; it was from cattle lying in the fields. That smell pervaded everything.

When we stopped the first thing we had to do was to cover the vehicles with camouflage nets and dig as many toilets as we could.

The cook had a very good job, he didn't have to cook, all he did was to make tea. We always had plenty of tea, but all we had to eat was from tins. Each man had a knife with a tin opener and a small tin triangle. We had a supply of pellets, which we put on the triangle, set light to it, and this was used to warm the tin, and around five minutes later, a nice hot, or at least warm steak and kidney pudding was available. All our food, meat, rice pudding, all came from tins, and it was our choice, hot or cold.

A few days later we went into action. From then on we were kept very busy, following the tanks and other war vehicles. We passed scores of burnt out vehicles, and lots of prisoners walking the other way. There was men from the Pioneer Corps clearing the way for our vehicles, and where we had to cross fields put they put down stones and all sorts of rubble so that our vehicles wouldn't get stuck in the mud. This was the battle of Caen.

However I never went into Caen, and saw it only from a distance. We went round it. I heard latter it had been very badly damaged. It was estimated that on one day there were 110 British tanks lost to the far superior German tanks.

Although these were hard times the comradeship never wavered, it was never better. We had a job to do, we never thought about being killed. Every day we survived was a bonus day.

The most welcome site was the Ration lorry which came twice a week, not only did we get food, but also importantly, letters from home, and a link for our letters to be sent back home.

The Battle of Normandy was more or less coming to an end. As we passed through the small villages and towns there was utter devastation. It was really sad to see such things. People's lives destroyed. Their only fault was to be in the way at the wrong time. We all had been given French money, but there was nothing to buy at all.

We were racing for the River Seine and over a pontoon bridge set up by the Royal Engineers. By now the Germans were retreating. Not a lot of damage there. All systems were go. We were on our way to Antwerp.

Our relationship with the French people had been rather subdued. There wasn't much of a liberation feeling, it was the same through all the areas we'd passed through, but that was where it ended.

When we crossed the Belgian frontier we really did live up to our name, The British Liberation Army. From then on every town and village roads were clogged up with people, cheering and congratulating us. When we got to Antwerp it was absolutely fantastic, the people were going mad with excitement.

Even today if you wear an 11th Armoured Division badge they still remember us with affection. One of their monuments to the war is a tank from the 11th Armoured Division.

By this time we'd captured 1000's of Germans, and for their own safety we locked them in the local zoo, this caused a bit of a diplomatic problem. It was for their own safety, as the Belgians didn't take kindly to the Germans.

The town was so full there was no room for us so we turned around and stayed in a nearby town for the next week. Little did they know that within two weeks we would be subjected to an enormous attack of rocket bombs, V1s and V2s. Far more than the attacks on London. That was the major, and unexpected battle of Antwerp, where thousands of citizens were killed.

Normandy

Let me tell you about the Ablution Unit. Now that was efficient! You went into the unit took all your clothes off and left them in a heap. When you'd had a shower, funnily enough I don't remember there being any soap, you left the shower and there were trestle tables, with shirts, vests, long johns, and socks. You just grabbed one of each as you went out. If it fitted you were lucky. The most important thing was that they were clean.

The main problem in World War One was lice. Certainly in my unit I don't remember any soldier ever being infected.

The organisation during the war was very good. I never went hungry, but I did miss bread, and real potatoes. We had biscuits all the way through though, and every day we took a vitamin tablet.

It was now September and we had the Germans on the run, we'd covered four hundred miles in six days from the Seine, and one small battle, where we were held up by a Tiger tank.

It was very early one morning, just about getting light. Our major should have waited for re-enforcements but decided to investigate, and within five minutes we'd lost our 'Conductor', (you'd know him as a Sergeant Major), and a corporal. They were our first casualties. We withdrew and waited for re-enforcement, tanks to remove that lone Tiger.

After a week we were on the go again. I remember crossing the Elbe and arriving in Holland. We could see in the distance the factory chimneys of the Philips factory, at Eindhoven, but never went any closer.

We came to a small village, and that was were I saw the first signs of malnutrition amongst the children, there were many of them with sores on their arms, and legs.

We were on a strip of land that could only be described as like a little finger of land that pointed into Neijmegan. The Germans had opened the dykes, they couldn't get to us and more frightening, we couldn't get out. This was now the beginning of winter. All our supplies were coming from Normandy, about a thousand miles away. It was impossible to use Antwerp; we'd secured the town but not the port. By this time we were all very tired, and running short of supplies.

The Germans had stopped running and were being re-enforced directly from Germany. We could see their planes and gliders going over but we couldn't get near them. Their defences were quickly being built up and there was nothing we could do.

Because of the defeat at Arnheim we were bogged down in Holland thoughout the whole of 1944.

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