- Contributed by听
- CSV Media NI
- People in story:听
- Captain Andrew Mitchell
- Location of story:听
- from Madras with several vessels to Port Dixon in Malaya
- Background to story:听
- Army
- Article ID:听
- A4291553
- Contributed on:听
- 28 June 2005
This story has been collected and transcribed by Mark Jeffers with permission from the author. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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My unit was under the name of Operation Zipper, which was the invasion operation of Malaya. This was supposed to have taken place in mid-September 1945. We trained for three months and we were brought out of Burma into a place near Bombay to practise landings and operating tanks and other vehicles. The vehicles were waterproofed so that they could land in deep water and then go ashore. We were taking a change of clothing and a ground sheet per man.
We embarked from Madras with several vessels to Port Dixon in Malaya, which was four days sail away. We had many Indian troops, those who鈥檇 served in Burma, who hadn鈥檛 seen much of the sea before and of course they were seasick. They were lying below decks and with the smell of oil and vomit and the toilet. The toilet was a medieval affair, which was a plank with a hole in it. You squatted on the plank and that was your toilet.
We were the first to arrive. We had been given our orders from the Colonel before the Japanese bomb was dropped and we didn鈥檛 know the surrender had taken place while we were at sea. We didn鈥檛 know if there was going to be any resistance or not. We had a mini-Normandy invasion going on. But luckily for us the surrender had happened on the 12th September I think, there was no opposition. There were lots of Japanese dugouts that were all empty except for a lot of Chinese people looking for cigarettes.
They were bartering to see what we would sell to them. It was lucky that it was the Chinese who greeted us instead of the Japanese because all our tanks got stuck in the water and we would have been sitting targets. I was very grateful for the dropping of that bomb. There were many British Service people who V.E. Day didn鈥檛 affect as they were being shipped out for the invasion of Malaya too.
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