大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War website by Liz Andrew of the Lancshomeguard on behalf of John Nield and with his permission.

I was fifteen when the War broke out. My mother had died and I lived in Cleveleys with my Dad. On the Saturday afternoon before the Declaration of War the billeting officers came round but they didn't bother with us. My Dad was the church organist and on Sunday morning he was out at church and I was at home making the dinner and listening to the radio . As soon as I heard the announcement that War had been declared I couldn't get down to the Methodist church quickly enough to let him know the news. The first thing he said to me was "If this lasts as long as the last one, you'll just about miss it.

As soon as we could my friends and I volunteered to be messenger boys. You could enlist for the Raf when you were seventeen and a half, so, when we were sixteen, three of us went down to a Selection Board at Padgate. We said we were seventeen and a quarter.

I didn't get anywhere because my eyes didn't converge and I wouldn't have been able to land a plane. One of my friends was thrown out for a similar reason - but the youngest of us, Geoffrey Barker, actually became a pilot. He was later killed.

I began working at the Ministry of Pensions at Norcross and some of my friends there went away to train as radio operators for the Merchant Navy - but my father wouldn't sign the papers. So I tried to enlist for the Royal Armoured Corps so that I could drive a tank. No, they said, You can join the Royal Corps of Signals. It was by then October 1942.

I did six weeks Infantry Training at Catterick. The drill pigs barked and shouted. We were trained to kill and they turned us from sloppy civilians into smart soldiers. Then I trained as a radio operator - it was absolutely superb training and I succeeded in passing all my tests. I volunteered for the Airborne Signals but I couldn't go till I was eighteen. But half a dozen of us were selected for special training with some new equipment. We were based down in Egham in Surrey during the summer of 1943 and housed in great big houses on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Once my training was completed I was assigned to the Golden Arrow section - a selfcontained mobile signals unit with our own transmitter, receiver, aerial amd generator. There were 27 of us and in our pay books there was a stamp saying, " On no account must this man be moved from this section."

We were given a fortnight's embarkation leave and then we were off. We joined the Strathmore in Liverpool, then sailed up to Gourock to join the rest of the convoy. The ship had been a liner in peacetime with a limit of 350 passengers and crew on board but she was converted to a troop ship and there were 5000 of us crammed in. It took us four or five weeks to get to Bombay and we were dodging German submarines all the way. During the night you could hear the depth charges.

It was on the 5th November 1943 when all Battlestations went. We were under attack from German aircraft with radio torpedoes. The Strathmore was the lead ship. We were zigzagging. There were ships being hit all over the place. Three torpedoes were aimed at Strathmore but as we zigzagged they missed us and hit the next ship, The Marnix. For me these were the most frightening moments of the War.

When we woke up the following morning the rest of the convoy had split and disappeared. One part had headed for Monte Cassino but it was later obliterated. We however carried on through the Mediterranean hugging the North African coast and reaching the Suez Canal, the Red Sae and Aden. In Aden I relaized what a rotten lot the British could be. One of the local people was fixing an oil hose to the side of the ship so that we could refuel and the crew deliberately emptied a bucket of rubbish over him.

When we landed at Bombay I had never seen such misery and poverty. There were people living on a tip with just a stick and a blanket for their homes. Our radio equipment had not yet arrived so we had to wait for seven weeks. We journeyed from Bombay to Delhi to meet up with the 408 Indian Signals . The Colonel there wanted to get his hands on us but our commanding officer - a Second Lieutenant managed to keep our unit intact.

Eventually we picked up our equipment in Calcutta in 1944. We had big vans like removal vans housing our receiver, transmitter and aerial. We had orders to join a ship called the Itora which took us to Chittagong in East Bengal and from there we ended up with the 14th Army at a place called Comilla. We made our headquarters in the Comilla Jail. The climate was atrocious even though we had air conditioning in one of our vans. There was lots of sickness and dysentry. We suffered from conditions like Bengal foot and prickly heat which would sometimes go septic. The food was terrible too. When tins of beef are kept in temperatures of 140 degrees, the contents come out like spew. I lost loads of weight - I must have been down to 8 stone. The Casualties were far greater from disease than from Japanese action.

We were there 9 months. The 14th Army was coming up to the great battle of Kohima. Had the Japanese been victorious they'd have been through to India and would have linked up with the Germans in the Middle East. We were 50 miles behind the Front Line. We were sending communications back to Ceylon in 5 letter codes. The Battle was a close run thing. At one point our trucks were wired up ready to be destroyed before the Japanese could seize them. But the Japanese lost the battle and we were taken back to Calcutta and from there to Bharatphur.

In the meantime the 14th Army was pushing down through Burma. Suddenly we had orders to move to Ceylon where we had only been landed for four days when the Atomic bombs went off. It was our job then to communicate with all the Japanese commanders dictating surrender terms.

We arrived in Singapore in September 1945 in time for the surrender of the Japanese. It was a bit like going to Belsen. The Japanese had ruined everything. They had been terribly cruel both to prisoners and to the civilian population and everywhere you looked there were little crosses to mark the spot where a prisoner had died.

From Singapore we were posted to Batavia. Dr Sukarno of the Indonesian Republican Army was not going allow the Dutch to reclaim their empire there. The Japanese were actually protecting the Dutch women and children from the Indonesians. But once the situation had been brought under control, Batvia became, for me,the best part of the my military service.

We were quartered in a lovely bungalow and drove around in a Buick car. We were very friendly with one particular Dutch family - Willi, Tine, Tommy and Eric Wenas who lived at 6, Mampamweg.

When I look back now I think I wouldn't have missed it all for anything. Working in the Mobile Signals Unit was the best job of my life. But I still think someone was looking after me - I must have had a guardian angel. I am still in touch with some of the men who served in the Golden Arrow sections in the Far East. Sometimes I feel guilty - especially when I meet some of the Burma Star veterans who fought at Kohima. But in war you take your chances and that's it.

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