大象传媒

This story was told to Sheila Jones at Broadstairs Library - and the author is fully aware of the conditions set out by the 大象传媒.

My name is Albert Moore and I volunteered to join the Territorial Army in April 1939 when I was 18. This was when the force was doubled in size from 125,000 to 250,000.
My unit was a City of London Regiment and my battery was recruited from Lloyds of London. We were mobilised in late August 1939 to gun sites in Kent although we were only partly trained. We were placed with experienced units. Later on after further training we were involved in the defence of Welsh and English airfields, because supplies were being flown in from America 鈥� i.e. new aircraft. We were then air defence for Bristol and Cardiff, by then I was a radar operator. We supplied information for Civil Defence as early warning of air raids but our military language was held to be a trifle too strong for the young ladies on Civil Defence duties. Remarks such as 鈥減ass my crimson cocoa鈥� were deemed unsuitable for delicate feminine ears.
After seeing this kind of action against aircraft in London, In June 1941 we embarked for overseas and arrived in Egypt after a short stay in South Africa. We then found we were part of the Eighth Army. In December 1941 we went 鈥榰p into the blue鈥� which was the local expression for our first visit into the desert. We were part of the force which was to relieve the siege of Tobruk. Our first night in the desert was spend at Sidi Rezegh and we woke up in the morning we realised that we were in the middle of the battlefield that had taken place before we arrived. We realised that there were burnt out tanks near us and when we checked we saw the crews still sitting in the tanks, burnt alive. This brought us down to earth. At this time, because we were artillery, we were short of personal arms e.g rifles, machine guns etc. and so we equipped ourselves with the weapons lying around us. Some of us had German rifles, Italian carbines or whatever was to hand.
After the siege of Tobruk was lifted and we joined up with the garrison we pushed on into Libya and eventually reached El Agheila. At this point the war stabilised. This was when General Rommel came on the scene with the Afrika Korps. Tanks attacked our positions, at this time our armoured divisions were changing over. Seventh Armoured, the original Desert Rats, were being withdrawn for rest and refitting. A new armoured division, the Second, fresh out from England, were caught by the Germans before they were in position for an attack. Because of this we had to retreat back to Tobruk and there we set up defensive positions called 鈥榖oxes鈥�. Each box contained one half of the battery, that is four 3.7in guns and was supported by Bofors guns and infantry. The idea was that we would hold these boxes as safe havens able to withstand tank attacks. At times we were surrounded and came under shell fire from tanks but we were able to return fire and drive off the tanks to protect our infantry.
I celebrated my twenty first birthday at this time, by sharing 4 cans of beer between 6 of us, courtesy of the RAF. Unfortunately the first can was wasted by careless use of my army jack knife.
In the summer of 1942 we had to pull back to the Egyptian delta and it was shortly after this that Tobruk fell to the Axis forces. After this the defensive positions were set up at El Alamein and we were withdrawn some 60 miles to defend bomber bases. This continued until the breakthrough at El Alamein in October 1942 and we could clearly see the artillery bombardment even though it was so far away. German gun flashes were red and different to ours. After the breakthrough we followed up the army鈥檚 progress to Tunisia and subsequently Sicily and Italy. When we were in Italy there was little work for anti-aircraft batteries so we were disbanded to provide re-inforcements for other units. Because I was a radar operator everyone in my trade was withdrawn to a specialist camp for re-training and re-testing. We then discovered that we were to form a new unit named 鈥淔ield Radar Squadron鈥� and that our job was to track armoured vehicles and in particular mortars which were being used against our infantry and were a problem. The army used sound locators but the Germans were aware of the time lag between the location and returning fire. Our function in using radar was to cut this time lag, and in fact in practice, we were able to reduce the time to less than 10 minutes instead of 30. The reason his was important was because the Germans mounted the mortars on lorries and moved them quickly before we could locate with the sound locators. We trained with the Americans jointly but after training the Americans joined the Fifth Army and we remained with the Eighth Army.
One of the strangest coincidences was that although our unit consisted of people from various units I found that I shared my birthday with 2 of my colleagues whose surname was Morgan, which was also my mother鈥檚 name. On the strength of this we had a combined birthday celebration with Italian wine which was a great success because our Sergeant was last seen climbing a small tree under the impression it was a lamp post.
I remained in Italy until August 1945, the fighting ended here before the rest of Europe. I then came home on leave for 3 months and was then posted to Germany where I remained until May 1946. I was demobbed in August 1946.

Thank You Mike! (That's his nickname!!)

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