- Contributed byÌý
- Wigan Over 50's Forum
- People in story:Ìý
- John Simm
- Location of story:Ìý
- Wigan, North Africa, Normandy
- Background to story:Ìý
- Army
- Article ID:Ìý
- A4446362
- Contributed on:Ìý
- 13 July 2005
I left school at the age of fourteen and went to work in the mines in Wigan until I was nineteen. As a miner I was exempt from military service but I volunteered and served six years in the Royal Artillery. I got married in 1940 and decided to join up to try to earn better pay. Things didn’t quite work out as expected. The pay, at eight shillings per day, wasn’t much better than working in the mine!
I went to North Africa on board the Queen Mary. It took two weeks to get there. As part of 140th Field Regiment I became an ammunition lorry driver with the 7th Armoured Brigade of the Eighth Army. We got the name ‘Desert Rats’ because one of the soldiers found a mole and kept it in his pocket. The greatest worry was being assigned to drive in convoys. They were often slow moving and provided enemy aircraft with an easy target.
The desert was so hot we could fry eggs on the tanks and because of the short supplies of water it was very difficult to have a proper bath. We washed our clothes in petrol and let them dry out on the sand.
It was terrifying in the mornings because every day we were dive-bombed by Stukas, which would scream at you when they were coming down. I started my war in a place called Alamein and the first thing I learned to do was how to dig a hole, which you shared with a mate and never moved far away from. We would send shells over to the Germans and they would send some back, whistling overhead.
When Montgomery took over in Autumn 1942, everything changed. He decided to attack Rommel and the push started with one thousand guns all going off together. This was the beginning of the Battle of Alamein and the beginning of the end for the Germans. The Eighth Army was eventually split up and a lot of them went on to Italy and stayed there. The rest went home to prepare for D-Day. I was one of them. The invasion was a great success but thousands of soldiers were killed. I went ashore on D-Day plus one and was in all of the major campaigns including the Battle of the Bulge and Arnhem.
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