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This story was submitted to the People’s War website by notts libraries on behalf of D. Hazel Fawcett (nee Clark) and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was seventeen and living in London at the outbreak of the war, we experienced air raids, on one occasion my bedroom ceiling came down and the windows were blown in. When the London docks were bombed we went to Archway Bridge Highgate and could see a sheet of flame across the horizon.

In 1941 I saw an article in the paper asking for volunteers for Ack Ack, this was something I wanted to do and I overcame parental opposition to the idea. I enlisted in London on September 17th 1941, notification to report for one month’s initial training at Guildford followed. We went to Waterloo station where a lot of other girls were waiting for the train, five of us, all strangers got into the same compartment and stayed together during our time at Guildford.
On arrival at the camp we were given our army numbers, kitted out, had health checks and a lot of marching drill!

At the end of the month I was posted to Arborfield for initial Ack Ack training where I became part of 483(M) hy (heavy) Ack Ack Battery R.A. Men trained on the guns girls on the height finders, predictors, plotting, spotting and radar. More marching and a lot of ‘shouting’ of information.

After Arborfield we went by train to Burrow Head, a very bleak place on the West coast of Scotland, for firing practice. There I spent my first Christmas, it blew a gale every day and was almost impossible to stand upright. Braving the weather to go to the toilet (non flush) at night was a major event!

The Church Army hut was very warm and welcoming, there we could get a cup of tea and our weekly sweet ration. We went out to Whithorn one night and went to a house for supper, the table was loaded with food and for one and sixpence it was possible to help ourselves to anything we liked.
After a month at Burrow Head we were deemed to be trained and were posted to our first gun site near Sheffield. We were billeted in huts each holding twelve girls with a round stove in the middle of the hut for which we had an allowance of one bucket of coal each day. Fires could not be lit until 4 o’clock in the afternoon.
The ATS did everything on site except fire the guns, my initial training had been on a height finder but after a short time as the tactical control officer’s assistant. I gained my first stripe and then my second and reached the dizzy heights of Corporal. I went on several courses including aircraft recognition which I later taught.
I understand that there were 74000 ATS in Ack Ack.

Our second site was on the East coast near Grimsby and our routine continued as before, during an air raid a chandelier flare lit us up like day and we put up a barrage in self defence.
At the end of 1943 we moved near to Yarmouth in Norfolk where there were a lot of American air force bases. In the summer of 1944 American Fortresses and Liberators took part in daylight raids flying out in formation at 6 a.m and usually returning mid afternoon. Some were very low with holes in the side of the fuselage, an engine out of action. We saw two planes drop out of the sky and crash; we counted the men as they jumped out and hoped they all made it safely.

General Sir Frederick Pile, head of Ack Ack Command, visited our site and told us we had been chosen as the first battery to be posted overseas, we had the necessary inoculations and were given ten days embarkation leave on the fifth of November 1944. We reported back to camp to be taken to Eastleigh by train, unfortunately we arrived to be told our boat had been sunk and were given more leave while we waited for the next boat.

We finally arrived in Ostend on the ‘Lady of Man’ and were taken to our site (between Brussels and Louvain) by a 3 ton lorry. It was a long journey through the countryside without toilet in sight! In desperation we stopped by an isolated house and our officer asked the lady if we could use the toilet, which was outside (non flush) and spotlessly clean. To say that the unfortunate woman looked absolutely gob smacked when she saw the lorry load of ATS was no exaggeration I didn’t know the capacity of the bucket but hoped it would hold out!
We were stationed in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge and were ordered to be ready to move at twelve hours notice should the fighting spread in our direction. Fortunately it didn’t come to that, British troops joined the Americans and defeated the assault.
It was during our time in Belgium that some of our girls were involved in an accident between the lorry on which they were travelling and a train, an officer and a Corporal were killed and several girls injured.
This was a very sad time for us all.

We stayed at our site in Belgium until the war ended and Ack Ack was no longer required. A selection team came out from England to decide where each of us should be posted and to this end we sat written tests. In spite of asking to go to Signals I was posted to 21 Army Group HQ in Brussels, this meant leaving the friends I had made in Ack Ack.

In June 1945 we were posted to Bad Oeynhausen in Germany, this became the HQ of BAOR (British Army of the Rhine). While there the first parliamentary elections after the war were held and I was eligible to vote for the first time. A polling station had been set up at the hall in the park and on polling day we made our way to vote. At the entrance to the park someone had put up a very large placard saying ‘Vote Labour’, I cannot remember who the candidates were or who I voted for.

What had been a Hitler Youth camp by the Monhe Dam (of Dam Buster fame) was taken over for BAOR personnel to have a break. A friend and I went for three days. The accommodation was very small wooden huts among the pines, each had two minute bedrooms upstairs sleeping four in all while a soldier with a rifle occupied the downstairs room, we were well guarded.
Dances were held in the large hall which was also the dining room, in the evening we had to be back at our hut by 10. p.m.
We were very near the dam wall and it was possible to see where it had been breached and later repaired.

Towards the end of my service Field Marshall Montgomery left BAOR and gave a farewell address which I attended. His departure was very impressive, white ropes were attached to the front of his jeep and he was towed out of HQ perimeter by six soldiers.

The Control Commission for Germany was formulated to take over from the military and I was asked if I would join them when demobbed but I decided that after nearly five years in uniform, of which seventeen months were abroad, I was ready to go home.
After it had been deferred for three months my demob came in May 1946 and it was a wrench to leave my work and my friends.

It was a very tedious train journey to Calais, the railways were badly damaged but since the allies had disrupted the railways it was no good complaining about it. At Calais I boarded the ‘Royal Daffodil’ to Dover. Many years later I discovered that this and the ‘Lady of Man’ had been Isle of Man ferries.
For my time in the ATS I was awarded the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal and the War medal.

I made some very good friends while in Ack Ack and HQ BAOR I know that sadly at least two of them, Gladys and Doris, are no longer with us, Terry and I regularly phone each other

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