大象传媒

Before WWII ever started my father was a soldier, having been educated at the Duke of Yorks School in Kent. He went there as an orphan, at 6 months old, because his father, Sgt Ernest Denbow, was killed in Ireland in the Army presence there, in Killkenny, in 1912. He was in charge of the boiler house, and it ran out of diesel fuel: somehow, by accident, he poured gasoline into the diesel tank and the boiler blew up.

However, my Dad, also called Ernest John Denbow, was in the Royal Signals, and I think he was a Corporal in 1938. He was allocated to work/gain experience in the telephone exchange in Leeds, where my Mum Freda worked as a telephone operator. They were married in July 1939 in Headingley, Leeds. After the outbreak of WWII Dad was posted to Burma, joining the 14th Army in the 17th Indian Division Signals: he was a Sargeant by then. He spent six years retreating all the way up Burma, back into India (now possibly Bangladesh), and then turned round, advancing back into and down through Burma. Place names like Kohima and Imphal were the main points on my Dad鈥檚 maps. He had no leave or holiday back to the UK, but he had a couple of short breaks away from the front, which he took in India. Late in 1944 he returned/was posted home, for the first time in 5 years, now with the rank of Lt. Colonel. During the early part of 1945 he was used as a lecturer, visiting factories to motivate them, to encourage the workers to produce the products needed to keep the forces supplied, in the closing stages of the War.

I was born in 1946, and Dad never spoke about the actual war. If he did, when old colleagues came to stay, he did not sleep for days. A few photos of the signalling systems that they used to use, along the jungle tracks, can be found in the HMSO 1946 book 鈥淭he Campaign in Burma鈥� by Frank Owen. They basically used telephone poles with wires strung between them, and intermittent signalling posts with either Morse sets or voice communications, I don鈥檛 actually know which, but I think Morse, all battery powered. This was through the jungle, so his major task and responsibility was to use his soldiers to keep the wires intact, after damage from enemy action, sabotage, and just wind, rain and animals in the jungle, plus poles falling over etc. All the supplies came up the long trail from India, on donkeys: these supplies included wire, batteries, signalling poles (these presumably in wagons, or maybe they cut trees down to make them). They did have some jeeps, but supplies came mainly on mule trains. All the Morse sets were powered by dry cells, ie 1.5 Volt batteries, which lasted no time at all in the humidity of the jungle conditions.

Back at home in 1945, one factory he went to in Essex to give his standard Pep talk was making the dry cells they used for the radios/Morse sets in the jungle in India/Burma. He asked the factory manager what he had told the workers there about where the batteries were used, and he said he had never been told officially, because of the Official Secrets Act, so he had said that they were used in submarines. Maybe they were, but Dad threw away his standard speech and explained that he himself used these batteries for Morse sets in the Burmese jungle, sending messages back and forth from the front line back into the supply bases in India; that they arrived at his outposts on mule trains, and half at least were ruined because of the rain and humidity that had seeped into the packaging in transit on the ships from England, and then on the mules across country. Worse, once they were unpacked and loaded into the posts they suffered from the humidity, even in their huts, and lasted maybe a tenth of the expected time.

A later message from the factory manager told Dad that production had rocketed after his talk, despite the imminent end of the war in Europe, because the people in the factory at last had a feel for what their efforts meant to the soldiers on the Front Line.

Nick Denbow
nick@nickdenbow.com
23 September 2005

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