大象传媒

IN THE NICK OF TIME
During the war, there was quite a bit of stealing in the army.As Mike put it, 鈥渋f they could get away with it,except for stealing from each other, stealing from the Army was not considered to be a crime, except to the powers that be鈥hat鈥檚 provided you could get away with it鈥�.
During his time in charge of Regimental Police in Kilkeel, he can remember a number of notable incidents when a few nimble-fingered squaddies and locals were caught red-handed.
But there was one occasion when he quite happily turned a blind eye to a certain theft 鈥� which was viewed as more of an act of revenge!
It arose after a receipt had been lost regarding 115 double bunk beds that the regiment in Kilkeel had acquired through the barrack officer in Portadown to temporarily accommodate 230 Dunkirk evacuees who came to the town.
The barrack officer鈥檚 job was to keep a meticulous not e of everything in each billet,and if any losses or damage occurred a charge was made to the regiment.
Mike recalls a civilian by the name of Jackson as the barrack officer in Portadown.
"The barrack officer," he explained, "was not a very popular bloke at the best of times and this fellow Jackson, for some reason or other, wasn't terribly fussed about us either."
DEMAND
Anyway,' when Mike's storeman lost his receipt after returning the bunks to Portadown and a demand threatening to charge the regiment for the already returned items was issued by Jackson, a visit to Portadown was required to sort the issue out.
Mike made his way to Portadown with his storeman, whom he remembers as "a very smart cookie and light-
Fingered to boot Underneath the storeman鈥檚 jacket was

hidden a rather sizeable clock which the storeman had somehow managed to pinch from the general office.
Mike can still remember his feeling of amazement at the time.
"Goodness knows how he did it, but he had nicked it off the wall," he recalled.
The duo set off home with -- as Mike put it -- "an air of conscious pride" and the captured booty was given pride of place in the stores back in Kilkeel.
But that was not the end of the clock's travels!
The adjutant spotted it and ordered it to be placed above the switchboard at Hillcrest to help with the timing of messages.
CRAFTY
Within three. days, however, it was back in the stores thanks to a crafty storeman, who had worked in a jeweller's before the war.
He had told Mike before the clock was taken to Hillcrest: "I'll take it up sir, and I don't think it'll be too long before we get it back."
It turned out he had "doctored" the clock to stop after a couple of days and when it broke down lied to the adjutant that it was beyond repair.
"So, we got our clock back and we stuck it up in the stores where it couldn't be seen, and used it from then on," Mike said.
10

WHO REALLY WON THE WAR, DADDY?

MIKE Sambrook's sons never asked him such a question, but if they had, his answer would have been without hesitation: "The pre-war regular Army Non- Commissioned Officers ."
It was their job to 'convert' the tidal wave of civilians who flooded the basic training camps, into battle-ready soldiers.
"They had a daunting task," Mike recalled. "The recruits called to the colours in 1939 were not volunteers. They came from all walks of life, many of them intellectually and educationally far superior to their instructors.
"Of those that were not, a large number resented being torn from civilian life with all its independences, to be shouted at by men who they believed had only joined the Army because they lacked the intelligence to cope with life outside.
"To make their job even more impossible, they were allowed less than half the time normally allocated for basic training -- 16 weeks pre-war to be cut to six if possible."
So, just how did those NCOs achieve their objective and turn ordinary civilians into groups of well-oiled Army units?
W ell, the first week was spent getting a "battering" on the parade ground, which made the "raw material" even more resentful, Mike said.
Each day, he pointed out, there was two hours' marching drill, two hours' gun drill on our field guns -- at the double -- and two hours of physical training.
Naturally;, it was tough going, but some got it tighter than others.
"Luckily for me," Mike revealed, "1 had been a sports fanatic in civilian life and got away with only a septic toe from an ill-fitting Army boot. But for many, it was near murder."

UNRELENTING

Looking back; Mike described the pressure as "unrelenting."
"It was right turn, left turn, about turn, slope arms, order arms, present arms, slope arms, quick march, slow march and so ad infinitum, or so it.. seemed," he said.
"Our heads were spinning and, as the days wore by, be began to react automatically to the bellowed commands.
"And that," stressed Mike, "was the trick. Independent thought was being slowly and surely eliminated, and, to use a term not then invented, we had been de-programmed."

What the new recruits found somewhat surprising at the time was that, despite the unrelenting pressure, the instructors were genuinely concerned about their welfare and treated any query both quickly and seriously.
"We occasionally saw an officer, but to us Army authority was invested in the two and three stripers (bombardiers and sergeants) with whom we spent our working days ," Mike explained.
"Whilst they had assured us that 'you may have broken your mother's hearts, but you won't break mine,' they had in fact become our surrogate parents.
"To whom else could we take any personal problems?" Thirty recruits were packed into each hut. Each hut had a regular soldier orderly who did the cleaning so that the recruits' time could be fully taken up with training.
"Our man," recalled Mike, "was a Bombardier Tighe, a two-striper with long pre-war service, much of it in foreign climes.
"His service in India had attracted him to hockey, reputed to have been invented by Royal Artillery Officers as a substitute for polo.

'BANGING'

At 0630 each morning he awakened us by banging on the walls and bed ends with his hockey stick.
"At night he regaled us with stories of his service in defence of our empire, in India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Gibraltar and other places known to us as landmarks in British colonial history.
"His racy stories of the soldier's life in these foreign parts held us spellbound, but the recurring theme was his pride in belonging to 'the' regiment, by which he meant the Royal Regiment of Artillery.
"He convinced us that we were privileged to be gunners and that all the hard work was to make us fit for such a privilege. We were now slowly being re-programmed."
Thirty men living in such close proximity and working daily in the same squad quickly bred comradeship. -another vital part of the equation.
And comradeship was certainly high on the agenda of the hut orderly Mike trained under.
He cannot recollect his name, but remembers him as the epitome of the term 'an old soldier' -- even though he admits: "We did not look upon him as a good advert for the Army."
He had apparently been an NCO several times in his long career, but was demoted through the ranks because of his "monumental booze-ups!"
"Shortly before our training was completed," Mike revealed, "we heard that he had been arrested by the Military Police for being drunk and disorderly in charge of 30 bags of chips destined for us, which shows that no-one is all bad.

'DRUNKEN'
"Even in his drunken stupor, or maybe because of it, he was thinking of (his' boys back in the hut.
"We never saw him again, but he had contributed to our Army education with his stories of Army life, where comradeship replaced family loyalties -- comradeship which, when the going got tough, could mean the difference between life and death."
So, that was how, after six weeks of intensive training, the instructors managed to achieve their seemingly impossible objective.
"We had been absorbed lock, stock and barrel into the Army," said Mike. "No-one would have admitted it at the time to feeling proud to be wearing the uniform and to belong to the Royal Regiment, but we were."
To put it simply, Mike sun;rmed up: "All the credit for converting literally millions of civilians into soldiers goes to the pre-war regular soldiers with two or three stripes, who were among the lowest ranks in the Army."
Joining up aged 20,
12 days into the war
World War II had been in progress for just 12 days when a young Mike Sambrook set out from Birmingham's New Street Train Station en route for basic training camp in north Wales.
He was only 20 and Mike, as he waited for the train, can recall reflecting on events that led up to him joining the Army a year earlier than required by law. ~_/ '
After leaving school he had started a three-year premium pupilship in the laboratory of the public analyst in Smethwick, near Birmingham.
In 1938 the director of a local company, who had worked with the same analyst, offered him a job when he completed his training in October 1939.
With war looming, however, the Government decreed that all men aged 21 and over should register for Army service, which meant serving six months full time and then three-and-a-halfyears part-time in the Territorial Army.
Mike's prospective employer suggested that it would make sense for him to do his full time service before starting work with him instead of registering in July 1940.

"I gave the matter little thought and duly applied for a hearing before a military tribunal," he said.
"This august body," he explained, "having heard that a refusal to allow me to register a year early could jeopardise my future employment, reluctantly agreed that I should by allowed to register on the 1 July 1939."
Before the declaration of war, Mike admitted he hadn't thought too much about it, but the reality of the situation dawned on him as he waited to go to camp.
"I realised that before I had asked for the tribunal, I had had a choice," Mike revealed.
"Registration a year later would have seen me 21 years old and, as an analytical chemist, almost certainly in a reserved occupation -- safe from the Army!" "
He can remember thinking: "Now that I was fully committed, the questionwas did I want to be?"
"Whilst I now had no choice ," he reasoned, "it seemed important at the time that this question should be resolved.
"Finally, after much mental chewing of the cud, the romanticism of youth prevailed. I was a knight in shining armour going to war for all the emotional reasons oft quoted by the politicians.
"Little did I know what it would really be like. At that moment I felt indestructible, full of the glamour of the occasion, anxious to get to grips with the foe, to get it over qnd done with and back to living again.
"It all sounds corny now, but that's how it was."

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