大象传媒

This story was submitted to the site by Wendy Jones on behalf of Chris Burt, who has given their permission to add their story to the site, and understands the sites terms and conditions.

Between 1942 and 1944 I served in 462 Squadron as an armourer. This is an incident that happened just before Christmas 1943. We were moving up through the desert in Libya, supporting the advance of the Eighth Army, and it was going to be a pretty dull Christmas - as usual.

It was decided to send an aeroplane to pick up some spare parts in Cairo (being a Halifax, they could do a longish journey like that in one go). In picking the spares up, the crew were able to locate some Christmas cheer goodies - this included a large quantity of Muscat de Samos wine.

While they were at the airfield in Cairo, they found an ENSA concert party aiming to get to Tripoli. They agreed to give them a lift, on condition that they gave the squadron a concert - the entertainers were only too happy to agree to this.

The squadron which was over 850 men had a thoroughly enjoyable evening being entertained by all the girls in their dresses, dancing and singing. A comedian was a particular hit - he was Reg Varney. He was just like he was in later years on TV, although he was doing a stand-up comedy act for us.

The ENSA troupe was put up in a tent overnight and then taken on to Tripoli the next day. It was a fabulous morale-booster for us.

I remember another occasion when we had moved to Italy in 1944. We had R&R in Naples for two weeks and went to the Naples Opera House for a performance of Aida. There was a huge shortage of male artistes so some elderly local men were drafted in to the chorus to be part of the 'army' of the grand march. As there was only a small number of men, they had to march across the stage, run round the back of the scenery and march on again to make it look as if there was a huge chorus. The thumping of boots on floorboards as they ran round the back became hilarious. All the servicepeople in the audience roared with laughter! We had a great evening.

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