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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Odilia Roberts from the Derby Action Team on behalf of Eric Smith and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

In my early teens shortly after the outbreak of war I volunteered as a police messenger in my hometown of Walkden, near Manchester. My proudest possession was my blue steel helmet with the word POLICE inscribed in white across the front, but regretfully I had to hand it in after about a year when I decided to join the Air Training Corps attached to my school, Farnworth Grammar School, with a view to joining the RAF when I was subsequently called up for the Forces at the age of 18, in May 1944. After the six months’ statutory ‘square bashing’, which was in Arbroath, Scotland, where we were billeted in old jute mills, I was transferred to Woolwich Polytechnic to start my twelve months training as a radar/wireless mechanic, with civilian billets in Eltham.

In 1944, this was the time of the flying bombs and V2 rockets, but there were compensations in being able to see Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Glenn Miller’s Band of the AEF as well as ´óÏó´«Ã½ recordings of Variety Bandbox and other radio shows at various venues in London.

A solitary flying bomb followed me all the up to Manchester for my Christmas leave. I had hoped after the first six months’ training to be posted to Bolton where I would probably lived at home whilst training as a wireless mechanic, but instead I went to Yatesbury in the wilds of Wiltshire to become a radar mechanic. After three months there, the remainder of the course was in Cosford. It was there that VE Day occurred, a muted celebration for us for we knew we were going to the Far East, where the war was still very much in progress.

I embarked from Glasgow on a troopship bound for Bombay, whence I was posted to 209 Squadron, whose Sunderland flying boats were moored in an idyllic palm-fringed lagoon at Koggala in Ceylon.
When the war ended with VJ Day our principal job was flying POW’s on the first stage of their journey home for hospitalisation. Later the squadron moved to Hong Kong and then to Singapore.

By this time the training period for radar mechanics had substantially increased and there were no replacements in the pipeline or expectations of early demobilisation.

I was repatriated in May 1947 and completed the final year of my service demonstrating a radar set in a mobile RAF recruiting exhibition, touring towns between Oxford and Derby.

When I was finally demobbed in May 1948 it was with the realisation that during my time in the Forces I had been far luckier in my experiences than most.

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