大象传媒

I was in the 8th Battalion the Middlesex Regiment 43rd Division.
I was 14 when war broke out.
I volunteered to be a Fire Watcher around once every two weeks.
I'd just started as a junior tailor. My manager was a full time ambulance driver, so from the age of fifteen I was really in charge, but I was still training.

I was fifteen at the time of the Battle Of Britain. We were sitting in the garden sewing the clothes we were making and watching the dog fights over London as they progressed.
That year I volunteered to join the Home Guard, and joined the West Kent Battalion, Battle Patrol.

It was the end of '42 and my friend and I volunteered to go into the army together.
We wanted to to join the RAF Regiment, but that didn't happen, we joined the Rifle Brigade.

It was Christmas 1942 and we were called to York, from there we went for training, which was quite tough. It was the first time we had been away from home, and I'm afraid we got bored.
My friend volunteered for the Parachute Regiment, and I volunteered for the Commando Depot, so we were split up.
I trained for six weeks, which was hard going, but didn't make it.
I was sent back to the Rifle Brigade and went North again to the Middlesex Regiment, which I thought rather come down, and trained as a driver. Eventually I became a despatch rider.
This was about a couple on months before D-Day.

I found myself in the London Docks aboard a ship heading for Normandy, four days after D-Day.
When I was landing the heavier vehicles caused the landing craft to sink down into the sand.
When it came to my turn, the craft was lighter and therefore higher.
There was about three inches gap. I drove of across the gap and my chin hit the speedometer hard and cracked it.
Anyway I had arrived in the thick mud and grime of a Normandy Beach head; the vehicles being driven across had churned it up. We had arrived on Juno Beach.
We headed to the local aerodrome that had just been captured.

We headed up into the war zone almost straight away.
The destruction, the noise, the dirt, and the cold made it very, very unpleasant.

We became involved in the Battle Of The Bulge, on the American flank. They had orders to send back all soft skinned vehicles, but they took it as a general retreat, which left our flank, wide open.
If the Germans had known that they would have just walked in and totally cut us off. I crossed the Seine, which was pretty hard going, and headed straight for Arnheim, but couldn't get there in time.
I saw all the gliders and planes flying over, there were hundred and hundreds of them and thousands of parachutes, and I wondered if my friend was amongst them.
There was only one road, and we were harassed most of the time by snipers in the trees picking off the officers and the NCOs.
They were more visible because their uniforms were more recognisable than ours.
Eventually they covered themselves up with coats and scarves so the wouldn't be recognised, which did reduce the loss.
When the snipers ran out of ammunition they would come down from the trees and give themselves up. We took many prisoners who thought we were going to shoot them. The German army commanders had told them that the British would not take prisoners. We did of course, and we handed out cigarettes.

As we moved around we saw lots of bodies birth German as well as British.
Eventually we made it to the bridge on the way to Arnheim. We'd lost a lot of men, the radios didn't work, and often there was radio silence anyway, we couldn't tell if it was the radio working, or obeying radio silence.
It was better to use despatch riders, but we were vulnerable, not protected by the armoured vehicles.
All we had were the bikes and we were just being easily picked off.

I lost my bike, which ended up in the Rhine, and it took an awfully long time to get another one.
It came from another regiment, probably from another rider who'd been killed.
We eventually arrived in another town I think it was Millingen.
We took over the basement of a row of cottages to protect us from the weather and the German snipers.
At last we'd found somewhere quite comfortable, there was only one problem. The straw we used as bedding was full of fleas. And we were bitten. It was terrible, really, really bad.

We moved North towards Bremen, and was based there when the end of the war came.
I can't remember just what happened that day.
I remember there was a big bottle of rum we'd found on a personnel carrier. It should have been given to us in Holland, but somehow had been forgotten; now we took advantage of the mistake.
To say that we got drunk was not true; we got very, very drunk.
We'd heard that in anther building was an SS officer who had shot his wife and child, and then turned the gun on himself. One by one we took in turns to look, we couldn't believe the dreadful sight.

We went looting.
I remember we went into one house where there was an elderly woman and a couple of children, all crying. I was the only one in the regiment that could speak German; I'd learnt it at school.
She told us her story, all her men folk were dead, she had no food and no money, and the baby was dying.
We came out of there giving them food, and cigarettes, all feeling desperately sad at what we'd witnessed.
Not everyone was bad, but this was war.

After the way finished we were station in a place called Lipschtadt. I got fed up with teaching new recruits, still coming over from the UK, how to drive and shoot.
I joined the Palestine police. The first party was leaving for Brussels, and just after our arrival the bridge over the Rein collapsed, and because of the weather we were stranded for over a week.

By this time we'd run out of money. The local TOCH helped us out, they gave us food and money.
When we got back to the regiment the Palestine job had fallen through, so I enlisted in the Military Police.
A few weeks later we were moved to Paderbourne, to the police school.
When we arrive in the barracks we were told that the NAAFI was off limits until we'd been briefed as to how to react to the rest of the army where, because we were policeman, we would be hated, and despised.
That proved true. My friend and I went into the NAAFI, where we were completely ignored.
An officer came in and we were ordered to service and clean all the bikes.
I can't help feeling that if we hadn't admitted to being able to ride we would have had a much better time. We did have some authority over the troops. I passed out as a member of the winning squad and sent to North Germany.

That was my war

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