大象传媒

This story has been contributed by Bill Spry and is added to the site with his permission.

I returned to West Africa on the S.S Ranqitiki landing at Freetown on 1st July 1943. The port was given this name because thousands of slaves were brought here when slavery was abolished.
This time I was only there for three days when I travelled on the S.S Corfu back to the Gold Coast.
The 82nd (West African) Division was a new division being put together in Nigeria. On 19th October I was put in charge of a road convoy leaving the Gold Coast and travelling through French West Africa down to Nigeria.

The division eventually set sail for India on 21st April 1944. My Signals unit travelled on the HMT Duchess of Richmond. We went via Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, landing at Bombay on the 1st June.

We travelled for five days on a train across India to get to Calcutta. The carriages were very primitive, wooden benches to sit and sleep on, no glass in the windows, the toilet was a compartment with a hole in the floor.

The train used to stop for hours in the middle of nowhere. We would make tea by getting boiling water from the engine.

We eventually arrived and set up camp in a place called Ranchi, in Bihar Province. We moved into Burma, crossing the Brahmaputra River on 25th September. I will perhaps write about my experiences in Burma at another time.

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