大象传媒

This story is taken from an interview with Robin Charley, and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interview and transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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During the war I used to go to school in Cheltenham. To get there I had to go across the Larne to Stranraer ferry. My mother wouldn鈥檛 let me go by the Liverpool boat, because during the Great War a couple of them were sunk by German U-Boats. So you got on the boat, and it used to zig-zag the whole way across. It suddenly turned, the whole boat would swing over and go the other way. There were just blue lights on it. All very dark and scary.

When I left School I went to QUB. And it was so boring there, my Professor was awful. Hopeless. 5 of us decided that we were going to join the army.

[in May 1943] We went to the recruiting office in Cliften St and we got a warrant to go to Omagh. And eventually we did our recruit training at Omagh. We got made Lance Corporals, and then eventually got commissioned into the RUR.

For a bit I was at Palace Barracks, which was the Young Soldiers鈥� training Battalion. I was there for nearly a year.

Then I got posted to the Holding Battalion in Congleton in Cheshire. This was the holding battalion before going on the main Battalion in Europe. And while I was there, just nearly the end of the war, I was given the job of going up to Hoyton Camp in Liverpool where I had to march 1000 German POWs down to Cheltenham to the camp there.
I had a little sergeant, Intelligence Corps, who spoke German, and one or 2 others. We were on this train with 1000 Germans on it. And when we got to Cheltenham I formed them all up. They had to march about a mile to this camp they had to go to.
And on the way 鈥� I went to school in Cheltenham. And I met my German master there. I said 鈥淟ook, sir, look at what I鈥檝e got here!鈥�
I had a thousand Germans under me, and he was the one who鈥檇 been teaching me German about a year before. That was quite fun.

After that I got posted to the 2nd Batt RUR which was then in Belgium, in a girls school they had taken over. I remember there was a big German tank in the courtyard with a big hole in it.

After VE day but before VJ day, we got posted out to a thing called Force 136, the invasion of Japan, which would have been quite dodgy.
We got as far as Egypt, when they dropped the atomic bomb. Thank god, that saved us. We stopped in the Middle East, and we were in Palestine for a few years.

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