大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from 大象传媒 London on behalf of Douglas Sherlock and has been added to the site with his permission.

"I lied about my age a bit when I joined the Northamptonshire Regiment. It was 8th May 1939 and I was 6 months short of the regulation age of 18, but I was a big bloke so no questions were asked. My initial training was at Northampton and then I joined the 5th Battalion of the Northants and was sent first to Northern Ireland where I was when war was declared. I'll never forget it because our RSM was a little tiny man and we were all much taller than him and he said "Men, we're at war," and several of us burst out laughing but because I was the biggest one, he saw me and said "Put that man on a charge," so I got 7 days 'jankers' to mark the start of the war!

Then I went to Catterick camp in Yorkshire from where we did a forced march right up to Calender in Scotland. It was quite a walk, but we were used to marching, so it didn't matter. We embarked from there to North Africa and landed at the foot of the cliffs in Algiers where there was a fort that we had to take that was till occupied by the French. We got up the cliffs, which wasn't too bad, except that moored in the bay behind us were the HMS Hood, HMS Repulse and HMS Revenge which was scary. Their orders were to shell the fort if the French didn't give in. So we had only a short space of time to get up there and get the French to take their flag down. We achieved that and we weren't shelled which was a relief as we didn't want our own 15 inch shells coming down our throats. Once the French took the flag down, we had to wait for one of our officers to come along to take the official sword from the French officer in charge. I was only a lance-corporal so I didn't have a high enough rank to do that.

They moved us to the south of Algiers with the object of stopping the French embassy people getting away and escaping south with any papers that could be secret. While we were there, one of my mates fired his Lee Enfield 303 rifle because he thought the French were going to attack us. As he fired, the detonation caught the side of his face and did a lot of damage to his ear. I took my field dressing out and bound him up. That got me into trouble again = this time for using my field dressing on him.

Over the next three months, we moved up and occupied Constantine in the Little Atlas mountains. I met a French prison guard there and he took me and a friend back for a meal with his family and I was very impressed with how friendly they were and how happy that we were there. Next, we moved up to the Tabula Plain, where we had to cross a river, but the bridge was being protected by the Germans. We had to get around the back of them so as I was being one of the few swimmers among us, I got a rope around me and swam across so we could build a pontoon bridge to get over the river. We proceeded further north and arrived at a railway line at the same time as some German paratroops landed there. Our orders were to get back to Battalion Headquarters. We retreated in a 15cwt truck with a bren gunner on it who was trying to pick off some of the paratroopers as we came down the road parallel with the railway line. The bren-gunner was killed and I took over his bren gun and shortly after I was wounded in the left arm which was pretty well mangled up. Probably the fact I was wearing a stripe showed up as a target for the paratroopers. Eventually, the driver got us back to headquarters where I was taken into the field hospital, then I was trained back to Algiers and eventually put on a hospital boat bound for Scotland. When we got there all the hospitals were full, so we had to go down to Bristol. I was taken into the 298 American General Hospital at Fishponds, where they took my arm off. After the op, an American officer asked me how I felt and I told him that the only thing I was worried about was not being able to lift a pint of beer again. He said 'only an Englishman would say something like that.' But I did some training on that and quickly got the skill back.

While I was recuperating I remembered a pair of twins in my unit, the Wincells. One was killed and the following day the other was killed. Terrible for their family.

I was one of the early casualties, the luck of the draw really. When I came out I went to the Queen Elizabeth Training College at Leatherhead and then joined a shipping agents in London, then I got a job with BOAC (a predecessor of British Airways) and stayed with them for 30 years ending up as the Technical Records Officer with over 40 staff."

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