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George Reading: My War in the Royal Signals

I was in the Territorials before the war. There was talk of conscription coming in so we thought the choice was to join the TA or be called up. I saw the recruiting officers and was pointed in the direction of the Royal Signals, and they took me. I was given a big wagon with a massive roll of cable on the back. Then we went abroad to Curacao in the Dutch East Indies for two years. When I was told at Aldershot in 1939 that I was going to be sent abroad, they told us not to tell anyone about it, not even our own mothers. It was all secret. We were to sail ‘from a north western port’ (that is, Liverpool). My girlfriend Kate didn’t know where I was for at least six months.

There wasn’t much out there except sun, sand and oil. When we went swimming, there was a man sitting up above us with a rifle ready to shoot any sharks he might see coming near us. The KSLI (King’s Shropshire Light Infantry) were there for two years, in all that heat, only eight degrees from the Equator. I was charging batteries up for transmitting to Jamaica, some 200 miles away. And that was a big distance for radio transmission in those days. Everything we transmitted was in five-figure code, so we never knew what we were sending. Then we were posted to America, New Orleans, up the Mississippi and over to New York to a place called Fort Slocombe. We were there for eleven weeks and had the time of our lives. As we were English soldiers in uniform they gave us the freedom of the city and everything we wanted to do, going into dances or clubs, was free. That’s where we heard Eddie Cantor and lots of the other famous stars singing.

We just couldn’t believe all the cars and the huge buildings. There were six of us together — we’d never seen traffic like it anywhere. One day we were in Times Square, just standing and looking at it all. We were particularly watching the antics of the traffic cop, mesmerised by all his signals and the things he was doing. We’d stood there for so long that he’d realised we were watching him, and he called out to us ‘Do you boys wanna cross the road?’ Eventually he came over to where we were standing. He was Irish! As Irish as the pegs in Ireland. He shouted ‘You’re English! Bloody hell!’ I told him I was from Liverpool. ‘Liverpool! Do you know Paddy Kelly who lives in Liverpool?’ Well, I said, I might, but there were probably thousands of Paddy Kellys in Liverpool.

When he came off duty he started showing us around a bit. He took us to a lovely place, a very posh café in a hotel, where we had coffee and tea. We had a marvellous time, they were real Americans, really good people, not like the GIs they sent over later on. I don’t remember how we met her but this woman called Ann Dralsburg used to take us out — I can remember it vividly after 60 years — and she took us to La Guardia Airport. He’d once been Mayor of New York. We saw all these planes. On our island in the Dutch East Indies all we ever saw was an occasional KLM plane. I had a letter from Ann later on, saying how much she’d enjoyed taking us out and showing us the city.

We came home from New York in 1942 via Nova Scotia on this huge ship that was taking the First American Infantry Battalion to England. As soon as we approached port in Scotland, all these hundreds of people came out along the banks of the Clyde, cheering all the Yanks. Then Kidderminster and Bewdley came into it. We were posted to Chester and stayed there about three months. We set up the radio station in the middle of the Roodee, the racecourse there, and started the first radio link from there. We lived in Park Atwood House, a place I found again 25 years later. It’s now a hospital or nursing home. I knocked on the door and told them I’d been stationed there during the war. ‘Oh, come on in,’ they said. ‘You’re not the first to come back.’

We were sent over to Omaha Beach - that was a bad one, that was a bad one. There were a lot of mistakes made there, but we managed to get through. We were landed from a flat barge. My big wagon had all the radio stuff in it, and some stupid Yank hooked the front of my vehicle onto a winch to try and pull it off the sand, and ripped off the front. Thousands were killed. Next we were on our way to Paris, for the Liberation of Paris, and all the girls came out and threw flowers and grapes at us and the Yanks. You know what they said about the Yanks then? ‘Overpaid, oversexed and over here.’ We were put down at the Longchamps racecourse with the American 19 High Speed Wireless Section. Everything was very secret. We had two nights in Paris, and on the first night the Yanks were still shooting the Germans out of the big houses and other places. At night there was this enormous noise from all the animals at the zoo.

Then we went on to Belgium to join the British 21st Army Group. They took us to Brussels, a very nice place, and we set up our transmitters at another racecourse at Stockel. We were very near the huge three-arched memorial that you see when the television is reporting things from the European Parliament. It’s got a massive chariot and horses on top and it’s called the Cinquantenaire. That’s where we were.

The 8th Army were going off then to Holland, to Eindhoven. We were stationed on the football pitch there. The people there had virtually nothing to eat. A woman came out of her house and said ‘Hello, Tommy, come into the house. I’ve been waiting all these years to speak to an English soldier.’ There was me, Dougie Fairbanks and Larry — we drivers had always stuck together — and she brought out a stone bottle with the word ‘Bols’ on it. It was gin, and she’d hidden it so that she could give it to her first English soldiers. The made a potato dish for us and — guess what the meat was — a roasted cat. Things were so bad for a bit of meat that they roasted a cat. They were starving. They begged single cigarettes from us. They had nothing. The Germans had taken everything from them, possessions, best clothes, jewellery. We saw some serious deprivation there. The roast cat smelt good but we couldn’t actually eat it.

Then it was Christmas Eve. We’d been given two eggs each for Christmas but there was no chance to eat them. Suddenly the cry ‘Panic! Panic! Pack up! Pack up!’ The Germans were coming and we had to move out very fast indeed. We went back to Brussels and spent the night in some stables. It was so cold, we had to wrap newspaper around our legs to keep warm. And I remember the noise of the planes going over, with their doors open, en route for Arnhem. That was when I realised how much we did with relatively little, compared to the Yanks. They’d sent hundreds of bombers over and we managed the job with six planes. It was the same at Curacao. They had about 150 Yanks in 20 tents to do the job that half-a-dozen of us had been doing.

I was married in 1942, and our son was born in 1944, a week before D-Day. I was stationed at Egham in Surrey then and I asked my CO if I could go home to see the new baby. He let me go, saying ‘If anyone asks me, I didn’t see you go.’ I could have got ten years if I’d been caught. I felt very uncomfortable on the train because I was the only bloke dressed in civvies among all the squaddies. After the war, I went to Berlin with the ´óÏó´«Ã½ war correspondents. I went with them to Belsen and saw the ovens.

This story was collected by Genevieve Tudor and submitted to the People’s War site by Graham Brown of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of George Reading and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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