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May 30th, 1940: I celebrated my 21st birthday on the beach of Dunkirk, No cake, no presents, but the French cafes were closing down and there was plenty of wine. The RASC (Royal Army Service Corps) brought a hot meal of “iron rations” which I enjoyed: tinned bacon & corned beef, beans and hard biscuit, and we always were brewing up tea on the beach. Everyone messed in together, sharing whatever we had. When I arrived in Plymouth on 17th June 1940, straight off the Red Cross hospital ship St. Andrew, I weighed 8 stone.

I had weighed in at 10 stone 10lb when I joined the Royal Engineers in May, 1939. I had signed up under the “Militia Act” for the call up of 19-20 year olds. We were the first of the so called “Militia Boys.” Our uniform included the 3-corner khaki cap, and the RE (Royal Engineer) badge. We were the first to wear trousers with gaiters strapped around the ankle — in World War I they wore “puttees” wound around the legs up to the knee.

Later in 1939 I was sent to France as part of the BEF, the British Expeditionary Force sent to try to stop the German invasion of France. While in France, we were issued with individual portable radios, a novelty at that time. I prized mine; they were issued by Lord Nuffield. I had it all during the evacuation in May/June 1940, even in the water at Dunkirk, and I still had it when I arrived in Plymouth in June. And when I was sent by rail to Derby after Dunkirk, on the train the radio was still working. But I somehow left it on the train.

In May 1940, the British and allies were encircled and outnumbered by the Nazis. When Calais fell, the battle for France was considered by the British leaders as lost, and the mass evacuation was planned. Larger ships able to transport 1000 men at a time — fishing trawlers, ferries, cruise ships — were mustered along with as many large naval ships as possible. But after the May 27th attempt at evacuation, when fewer than 10,000 troops were rescued under heavy firepower — far fewer than planned — it was decided that larger ships were too big to get close enough to the French coast and were too easy targets for the Luftwaffe, so every sea-going vessel in Britain was called out.

On the 30th of May, my birthday, although I was not then aware of it a huge fleet of small boats rescued 30,000 men, and the next day 70,000 were lifted from the beaches around Dunkirk. In the days up to June 4th, nearly 340,000 men were rescued. It is strange, looking back, but you got to the edge of the beach and boats would come in and you just had to take a chance and get on what you could. You could say it was organised chaos. It was not a question of joining your own unit but of joining what unit you could. Dunkirk was the focal point that we were making for, but after we had been on the beaches for about a month we were transported to the west of Dunkirk. I was evacuated from Depanne. We heard there was a troop ship called the Lancastria, a former cruise liner, but the ship was already fully loaded with 5000 men when I tried to wade out to her. Suddenly I saw a German plane drop a bomb down the ship’s funnel, and the shop blew up in front of me. Two thousand five hundred men were killed, among them my friends and fellow members of my unit. My parents were notified that I was missing in action, as it was assumed that I was aboard. I can’t remember much about it. The next thing I knew was I woke up on a Red Cross ship. I had been picked up by an old coal boat and transferred to the Red Cross ship.

We landed at Plymouth on June 17th. It was excellent weather. I helped out as a stretcher-bearer along with other able-bodied men. People were pick-nicking on the beach and invited us soldiers to join them. We had sandwiches and other food, probably all rationed. Initially we were put into a flat-roofed building, the old Ballard’s Institute for the Blind, with the more fit people on the roof, the not so fit, downstairs. I had a fear of heights, but I stayed up on the roof. After a couple of weeks the engineers were sorted out and sent to Derby by rail. None of my friends or others from my corps were with us.

In Derby we organised a smokescreen from crude oil around the Rolls Royce factory, which was making wartime engines. It was really nasty smoke and lay on your lungs. There was an outcry for leave, but none granted. After a few months, probably about September 1940, we did get 3-4 days leave at home, and then we received orders to go to Edinburgh.

In Edinburgh Sgt. Sharp, as I had become, was with “Movement Control.” I went around visiting all the camps in Scotland by motorcycle or train with troop movement orders, to Perth, Inverness, Dundee, Dumfrees, etc, etc. I continued doing this until I was posted overseas again in 1944. Edinburgh itself was never bombed, but Scotland, where many troops were assembled training for further duties, was. I was on embarkation leave in Ipswich before being sent to the Middle East in 1944 when my sister and her husband came down from King’s Lynn to see me. They returned home and the same evening I caught my train back to Edinburgh. The next day I received a telegram that they had been killed in an air raid.

Instead of going to the Middle East, I had “temporary duty” for Movement Control near Rouen, France, in 1944. Then back to Scotland. My O.C. (Officer Commanding) asked if I would like to go to Norway. It was a good posting, he said, because King Haakan, who had been in exile in Scotland, was returning to Norway with a token British force. I said I’d love to go to Norway, never having had the chance before. My orders came: “Report for tropical kit.”

So goodbye to Norway, hello Egypt. “Movement Control” in Ismalia on the Suez Canal included armaments, munitions, vehicles, fuel, food and troops. My duties ranged from coding labels for contents of shipments to loading tanks onto flatbeds. Then for about a month I was stationed at the new Aswan Dam, where every day I drove across it and read the sign “Ransome and Rapier of Ipswich” on the lock gate, as they were the first builders on the project. In Aswan, African troops were being assembled on the Nile to send back to Sudan, Kenya, Somaliland, Abyssinia, etc. A lot didn’t want to go: the food and pay were good in the British Army. Many of our soldiers on leave went off to the sunny beaches and nightlife of Palestine; I visited Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, Tutankhamen’s tomb, Thebes — long before the commercialism of tourism.

In August 1945 I was still in Egypt for V-J Day. Christmas 1945 in Aswan. A group of us went early in the morning to the little Church of St Andrew, which had originally been built for the European dam-builders (probably including Ipswich people). It had fallen into a pretty bad state, so we cleaned it up and arranged for a padre from Cairo to come and take the service. (He enjoyed it so much he stayed the whole Christmas holiday.) And our Army cook baked up an especially nice Christmas lunch for us. After lunch we had a “donkey derby.” I had the fastest donkey in Egypt, it won the race; but I was not on it. I nearly broke my collarbone.

My official demob from the Army came through in July 1946, after a total of about seven years’ service.

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