大象传媒

In December 1944, at about the time I started to travel into the Naga Hills, 345 Company had been given a new responsibility, of which I was put in charge, the operation of Mechanical Equipment Plant Park (North). The name suggested that somewhere to the South, probably serving the Arakan Front, was a similar unit. MEPP (North), as it was known, acted as a reception and servicing camp for every kind of heavy earth moving plant for airfield and road works. Caterpillar, Allis Chalmers and International Harvester bull dozers and angle dozers (the latter with movable blade) large and small, were brought into our camp from the Dimapur railhead for unpacking checking and putting into working order.

We then sent them to various addresses in Burma on tank transporters, stencilled 'to Kalewa' (or Yeu, Shwebo, Monyya, Mandalay, or Meiktila). The range of equipment, mostly of American origin was impressive. As well as bull dozers we dealt with Barber Greene road making units which took in soil and asphalt at one end and spewed out a complete road surface, steaming hot, at the other, and there were strange machines such as a power driven mobile bucket wheel for digging pipeline trenches.

In March 1945 I was promoted to Major, Officer Commanding 607 Indian Electrical and Mechanical Company IE. This was a mobile workshop version of 345 Company and worked closely with the latter. 607 Company repaired and maintained plant up to the limit of capability of its workshop lorries, each of which had an eight inch lathe, drilling welding and other equipment. Any job needing larger equipment was passed on to 345 Company.

607 Company personnel were almost entirely Madrassis. They had been commanded previously by Major J M Morgan IE, a peacetime tea planter who had been promoted to CRE 110 Works in place of Lt Col Kelly IE. The Madrassis and I occasionally had difficulty in understanding each other at first as they did not speak Urdu with the same accent! Many indeed spoke English. My officers were Captain Truter IE, superseded later by Alec Scott from 345, Lieut V K Raju IE, and two RE subalterns newly arrived from the UK, Lieut Peter St J Grant and Lieut Pennock. The latter died tragically in a road accident later in 1945. After some months Lieut Raju was posted away on promotion to another unit and his place taken by Lieut Ted Firman RE also newly arrived from UK. We were to meet again ten years later as colleagues at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Berkshire.

I was now responsible for operation and maintenance of electrical and mechanical plant along about 600 miles of the L of C, commencing at Goalpara in the West, along the Assam trunk Road to Gauhati where we had work at the local civil power station, from there both up the road to Shillong and also along the Assam Trunk Road to Dimapur and from there along the Imphal and Imphal Tamu Road to Shenam, close to the Burma Frontier.

Train to Bombay

In July 1945 I went on leave to Bombay via a night's stopover in Calcutta's Grand Hotel, Chowringhee. I soon received a memo from the Billeting Officer saying that on the following day I was to report for duty to RTO Howrah as OC. Calcutta Bombay Mail one hour before train departure at 1130 HRS.

At times of unrest I might have been expected to take command of all troops British and Indian on the train in order to fight off rioters or worse. This time however I had merely to arrive early before departure time in order to tour, in company with the guard, every coach on the train to check that all light bulbs were present and that the accommodation was in serviceable order. On arrival at Bombay I would be expected to stay behind to repeat the process and list any damages. Fortunately nothing of consequence was discovered.

The advantage of being OC train was that I was given a two berth coupe to myself and was able to travel unofficially on the locomotive footplate during the two day journey. The line was electrified for the last ninety miles into Bombay and I enjoyed the clean comfortable enclosed cab of a large electric loco. Unfortunately during the journey I was bitten on the knee by a noxious insect and on arrival at the home of my friends Professor Sircar (Mathematics Professor of Wilson Church of Scotland College Bombay), and Mrs Sircar, only spent one night with them before having to go into the military hospital at Colaba. There I had my first experience of a new drug, sulphonamide, which fortunately solved the problem within two or three days.

The Sircars could not have been more hospitable. Professor and Mrs Sircar, their teenage daughter Daphne and niece Grace, ten year old son Raju and eight year old daughter Asha all made me feel very much at home. I have never forgotten them. I recall being taken to the largest cinema in Bombay and sitting in the centre of the Grand Circle in the midst of this glamorous Indian family with on each side a lady in a gorgeous sari with beautiful flowers in her hair. I was proud to be with them.

Atom bombs

When I regretfully returned from leave I had a recurrence of the poisoned knee and was a patient in the British General Hospital in Dimapur when the news came through about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At each announcement there were rousing cheers.

Those who nowadays argue that these bombings were unnecessary should ask British ex prisoners of war who were in Japanese hands for several years. Recently, a friend who was a POW on the Siam-Burma 'Death Railway' told me that in his POW camp in Siam all POWs expected to be executed by the Japanese as a last act of defiance before the latter fought to the death in defence of their Emperor and he believed that this would have happened if the Allies had had to invade Japan.

Instead, the bombing persuaded the Japanese Emperor to order his forces not only to surrender but to liberate and care for all prisoners of war. (See terms of the Instrument of Surrender signed 2nd September 1945 at Tokyo). Now that the Japanese were defeated I, like everyone else, was more than ever impatient to go home.

One day in early October 1945 I was on tour of our Assam Trunk Road detachment and called in quite by chance at the Station Staff Office, the local military headquarters at Gauhati. There I was staggered and delighted to be shown a signal which included my name in it concerning imminent departures on the 'Python 29' repatriation scheme, offering an option to go by air. I chose the latter without hesitation and hurried back to my headquarters at Dimapur.

The journey home

The few days left with 607 Company were filled with handover procedures and farewell parties. But I only had Marjory and home on my mind. We had been married in July 1941. As was the way of the Army in those dark days we had been allowed to spend only a very few days together and separated for long intervals until I was posted to India in March 1942. Now the long suppressed thought of being reunited was so overwhelming that I could not properly digest my food from then until I reached Edinburgh. A bottle of Milk of Magnesia was a constant companion! Once home and I was normal!

I received a 'soldiers ticket' and written authority by CRE 110 to depart Manipur Road by the Assam Mail on Sunday 7th October 1945.

The better the day the better the deed! I joined an officers draft at Barrackpore near Calcutta. From there after an interminable delay of two days we went by rail to Chakulia Airbase near the Tata Steelworks at Jamshedpur. There officers of all ranks and regiments waited impatiently for take off.

Our plane load as well as all others was posted on notice boards in order of departure. The unknown factor was the rate of arrival of incoming planes. We were absorbed in counting every plane that landed and took off. One day, when we were five planes from departure, we heard the drone of engines and glimpsed converted Liberator bombers through the clouds. First one, then two, three, four. Then nothing, then at last a fifth landed and shortly we were away!

I had been detailed as OC Plane! From past experience I had learned to look on the bright side of such unexpected responsibilities. The duties were usually light to merely nominal and one got a perquisite or two. In this case I was allotted the only window seat in this cavernous old converted Liberator bomber. We took off at breakfast time and after flying all day landed for the night at Karachi. Here was the most hazardous part of the journey home, a huge large hangar full of four tier bunk beds, offering the very real chance of being killed by falling out of a top bunk on to the concrete floor.

I lay awake all night, determined to get home alive. The next morning we were away again, for the rest of the journey, this time by DC47 Dakota. We sat around our central pile of valises, the traditional bedding rolls, and played liar dice continuously with the remains of our Indian currency.

The fresh faced 19 year old boy who was our navigator emerged from the flight deck and announced landing would be at Mazirah Island in 29 minutes, for luncheon. The night stop was Aden, still, in October, like a furnace.

Next day it was Wadi Halfa, Sudan, for luncheon. With the cessation of hostilities, American Lease Lend had stopped and the Dakotas of Air Trooping Command, many already clapped out, were beginning to be unreliable. On the next leg of our flight from Wadi Halfa to Lydda in Palestine we were ordered to keep a sharp lookout for the Dakota in front of us, which had failed to land at Lydda.

Some time after we arrived at Lydda for a three day acclimatisation stop the missing plane landed. The relieved occupants told us that their Dakota had force landed successfully in the Arabian Desert. The pilot had crawled out along the wing to one of the engines, done something mysterious with a pair of pliers and taken off again.

The Palestinian climate in October was superb, neither too hot nor too cold. We were taken each day in Army lorries to various places of interest. I visited Tel Aviv, a fine modern sea coast city and also Jerusalem where at the School of Arab Studies I briefly met my oldest friend Major Gordon Allan REMC, who after an exciting war in the Western Desert and in Yugoslavia had been selected as a likely candidate for the Diplomatic Service.

Then at last off we went on the last day of our journey home. Taking off from Lydda at 4pm we landed at 10pm at El Adem aerodrome and dined in the Officers Mess. Then without further delay we took off for a night flight across the Mediterranean. The plane had no heating and the windows were apertured to the outside air. We were still in jungle green cotton tropical kit and it was freezing cold. With teeth chattering we survived till a dawn landing, for breakfast at an Italian seaplane base in Sardinia and then immediate take-off. The navigator said the pilot was keen to get home. He was not alone!

Excitement grew as we passed low over France's Vosges mountains discussing among ourselves why the trees were in glorious shades of yellow and gold. Of course! We had forgotten after nearly four years of evergreen jungle life that in Europe there is a season called Autumn.

Back in Britain

At last we identified the English Channel and soon we were back in dear old Britain. I raced for a telephone, ignoring a call to get into a waiting truck. The exchange was Lambourn, Berkshire. The angelic WAAF operator said she would pass news of my arrival to Marjory in Edinburgh - which she did! The date was 22nd October 1945. In 1942 it took two months by sea to India. The return had taken three weeks. The actual flying time was less than 60 hours.

From the Berkshire Air Trooping Centre we were taken by road to Newbury for a train to Paddington. There I had run out of cigarettes. The Station restaurant lady after a close look at my jungle green tropical uniform reluctantly handed over five packets of ten instead of the tin of 50 requested. A civilian later said I was lucky to have got any at all. England was short of everything!

From Euston we RE officers were en route first to the RE depot at Halifax where we were issued with warm battledress and after a short night's rest sent home on two months disembarkation leave. In the train I sewed badges on my new battledress. At Edinburgh Waverley Station I arrived fit for parade.

There at last was Marjory! In the taxi I knocked off her pearl earrings and spent much time looking for them on the floor. Marjory still speaks of the strange figure I cut. With a bright yellow face from years of anti-malarial mepacrine I was still wearing a 14th Army bush hat and carried over my shoulder a Khasi bow - to make sure this souvenir from Shillong would not get broken - and also bore an exotic basket of fruit from Palestine. After visiting parents we soon set off for a second honeymoon in Perthshire. 'The years that the locusts had eaten' were now happily to be restored.

While still on leave a War Office posting order was received instructing me to report to the British Army of the Rhine. By now wise to the tricks of my military trade I used a Field Officer's right to 'discuss' a posting at the fountainhead - the War Office in London.

There, with Marjory never far away, I diplomatically but firmly said that of course I would go wherever I was sent but that I really felt that I had had enough overseas service! I was a civilian engineer! To our delighted astonishment, before expiry of my leave the posting order was commuted to Engineer Stores Central Depot, Stratford upon Avon.

There, until demobilisation leave a month later, we lived together happily in a fine old farm house. Along with several dozen other Sapper officers anxious to leave the Army. I was engaged as a sort of gangmaster in charge of several equally disgruntled Italian prisoners of war spreading manually hundreds of tons of power station fy ash over acres of surrounding fields to prepare them as open air show rooms for myriads of items of Sapper mechanical and electrical equipment. These were about to be auctioned off into private hands. I was to be released from the Army on 10th May 1946 with the honorary rank of Major.

However, at the end of February I was granted 'Release leave'. After a week or two at home in Edinburgh Marjory and I hotfooted it to Manchester where I rejoined the 20,000 workers in the gigantic factory of Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company Ltd in Trafford Park. There I restarted the two year College Apprenticeship I had perforce interrupted in October 1939. Metro-Vickers were good employers and increased my salary of two pounds ten shillings per week to four hundred and thirty pounds per annum in recognition of war service and the fact that I was now a married man with a pregnant wife.

But there was to be no other relaxation! I donned dungarees and was committed for two years to the menial duties of a college apprentice which included on occasion making tea and sweeping the floor for the skilled craftsmen to whom I was seconded. Metro Vickers was a pioneering company in the training of professional engineers.

They had a well equipped Education Department which had been founded at the turn of the century by Dr Sir APM Fleming FRS. For two years as a College Apprentice, following through a pre-agreed programme one would be attached for six weeks each to a number of 'shop floor' departments interspersed with three month spells in 'staff' departments such as High Voltage Research and various design and drawing offices.

There was a similar but longer, (five year), course for Trade Apprentioes which included sponsorship at local; university and technical college courses. One ex trade apprentice for whom some years later I worked in the nuclear power industry had risen to be Managing Director not only of the Trafford Park Works but of other AEI Ltd Group factories. It was a meritocracy.

While working as apprentices to the skilled craftsmen in shop floor departments there were no concessions whatsoever to ex-service rank. Returned officers of the armed forces were now ten a penny and expected to pull their weight as apprentices for two years, and in general certainly did.

We were only too glad to be back home, and in a job with prospects, no matter how lowly. In the 1950s a large very well equipped new Works Training School was built at the South Gate of this huge factory, in which Trade Apprentices were able to be trained in operation of the most modern machine tools and factory processes. In 1939 my father had told me 'There are only two kinds of engineers, those who were trained at Metropolitan Vickers and those who weren't - I advise you to go there.' I had gone there, returned and never regretted it.

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