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The thunderclouds of war were gathering fast. Preparations for mobilisation were now being carried out and masses of stores began arriving. After Poland was invaded we were mobilised and shortly after, on the 3rd September 1939, war was declared.
Quite truthfully, I was quite happy about it; a small war to round off a few years of soldiering would be ‘just the job’ in my opinion, and, after about a week or so, we embarked for France with the British Expeditionary Force without a care, and, thank goodness, without fore-boding of what was to come and where I would go in the next six years.
We arrived at Cherbourg after an uneventful crossing and my first impression of it was gloomy; French soldiers on guard at the docks were unshaven, leaning against walls with their hands in their pockets, and, horror of horrors, their rifles leaning negligently against the aforesaid walls. There was a general air of ‘laissez faire’ about the whole place and it stank with an unwholesome, decaying, fishy smell. We were glad to leave there.
By degrees we travelled north on the infamous French troop trains, with the label "Forty Men or Eight Horses in each truck." (I don’t know who were the worst off, the men or the horses) and by our own transport, stopping here and there for a day or two, in various small French towns.
At one town, where we stayed over, they laid on a ceremony to welcome ‘les Tommies’, which was very nice of them, but before it took place our C.O. lined us all up and explained just what was going to happen and added, with a stony look at us,
“At the end of the Ceremony the Mayor will kiss me on both cheeks to cement the French-English ‘Entente Cordiale’ - if there is even the suggestion of a snigger from you when this happens, woe betide the lot of you; under- stood?"
I don’t know why he looked at me and the rest of the boozing school, when he said this; we really liked him too much to embarrass his good self; anybody else we might have, but not him- he was No. 1.
Eventually we reached our destination, which was outside Lille, which is practically a border-town with Belgium and there we set up shop and stayed until the invasion of Belgium and Holland the following May.
Older readers may recall what a fearful winter 1939-1940 was. Conditions were pretty bad, as we had been living in open barns and such like. Eventually the local people were asked to each take in a soldier or two, just for sleeping; the Army would feed us and, of course, they would be paid for their trouble. By this time most of us had got our feet ‘under the table’ somewhere in the village, it was amazing just how many families, whose husbands and brothers had been called up into the French forces, required a man about the house. The language was no barrier: a few gestures and a shout or two and everybody more or less under- stood everybody else.
We set about trying to make a Unit that would not only work in a static position, but also be efficient whilst on the move from location to location, which, after all, in a mobile war, was absolutely necessary. Not that we showed any sign of being mobile during the long period of the ‘phoney’ war and consequently we drifted into a semblance of barrack life once more, with alternate Saturday and Sunday trips to either Douai or Lille. For us Douai was the most popular, I don’t know why; perhaps the cafes in the Rue de Pippan were more pleasant than their opposite numbers in Rue A.B.C. in Lille; these two streets were fascinating; in Douai the girls were knickerless, but with tops, whilst in Lille they were topless but fully knickered. Strange people, the French, but very likeable.
I wonder how many grey-haired old Grandads, when telling of their ‘derring do’s’ in the B.E.F. ever mentioned, even in passing, the many hours spent in the cafes. We also visited the public baths for our weekly scrub, we were a clean lot of boys.
The winter dragged on, and then Norway was invaded and, whilst feeling sorry for the troops engaged there, we were pleased that it wasn’t us, and carried on with our barrack-like life, which was to end so dramatically, and with fearful consequences for the B.E.F.
During May the Germans attacked the Low Countries which was where the much vaunted Maginot Line ended, and at Sedan where the other end of it was. The Germans didn’t bother with the Line itself, why attack frontally when you can go around? And around they came and, of course, what resulted is now history. When the ‘balloon went up’ (a current phrase meaning that the action had started) we were ordered to advance into Belgium and were hailed as conquering heroes, with many flowers and kisses (on the retreat we were reviled and shot at!) and, by stages, made our way north towards the Albert Canal but due to the enemy’s superior strength, our lads were very hard pushed to hold them and we turned around and withdrew back to France.
At that time we didn’t know what was happening and the thought of the enemy getting the upper hand didn’t occur to any of us, that is until we received our first blast of the hot breath of Mars in the shape of the JU 87: the German dive bomber. We were just passing through the town of Ath when it was attacked by dozens of JU 87s with high explosive and incendiary bombs.
The town was full of refugees, and troops on the move, and it was sheer murder. How our little convoy ever got through that town unscathed will always be a mystery to me. Our collective Guardian Angels must have spread their wings over us, because the death and destruction around us was fearful: buildings crashing down; people wounded and dead horses screaming and, above it all, the hellish whine of the dive-bombers as they carried out their tactics of mass execution and disruption, then fire on top of all this with the inevitable toll of more death and confusion.
We cleared the town somehow, without a single casualty, and turned south into France proper and then west, the same destruction preceding us all the way. At some village or another we stopped and set up shop again, and I was sent to contact our own H.Q. I managed to find them O.K. let them know where we were and returned - to find nobody there!
Consternation! My map was checked and re-checked, and this was where I had been sent from. All I could find now was a few aerial masts and wires. They had obviously cut their aerials and departed at high-speed - but to where? At first I was angry and disappointed that not even one truck had waited behind for me, and then the realisation came that something very untoward must have caused the sudden vanishing act, and that was probably German troops in the vicinity. The thought shook me a bit - me, against the Germans! If caught, would they shoot me or torture me for information?
Remember, I was a very naive soldier in those days; however, whilst indulging myself in a bit of self-pity, I could hear a clanking sound and thereupon ran into one of the out-buildings to hide. The noise grew louder and, peering out through a grimy window, I saw an enemy tank coming along the road. I was petrified with fear, and nearly shit myself, but that Angel, Bless Him, was still around, and the tank clanked on and disappeared.
Sitting down to get my cool back, a cigarette was lighted and I tried to think it out. It boiled down to this: fact one - my Unit had gone; fact two - an enemy tank had just gone past; conclusion - my Unit must have had word that some of the enemy were loose behind our lines and so they had beat it out of that location before they were put in the bag. Well, all calm and collected now that I wasn’t going to be subjected to mayhem, in fact tending to be a bit bigheaded, ‘Oh yes, the tank passed right by me, probably lost." Lost that was it; the tank was a sole effort, no troops, nothing, he must have been lost. So, out came the map, the road he was on noted, and I decided to take a different one and go back to our H.Q.
The site of H.Q. was found without anything happening but they too were gone, just some stores lying about to mark the spot where they had been, plus a 4gallon can of petrol. The Norton got filled up and I continued to head west and eventually arrived at what turned out to be 1st Corps H.Q. Looking for someone to report to, I saw a CSM, identified myself and told him that I was a ‘stray’ -my Unit had disappeared. Without ceremony, he rushed me to the Intelligence Officer, who requested a repeat of my story, which he got, but in the middle of it he asked me where my Unit was in peacetime. He was told, with some bewilderment, that it was in Aldershot.
"What barracks?"
"Mons."
"What’s the name of the road it is in?"
"Princess Avenue"
"Where are the Married Quarters?" He was told. "All right, carryon with your story."
When the bit about the tank came out, he had me point out, on the map, where it had passed the farmhouse, and the direction in which it was travelling.
"Have you seen it since, or any others?" And was told ‘NO’.
Then, very kindly, he told me that he had to make sure that I wasn’t an enemy soldier, masquerading as a ‘Tommy’ as, apparently, the area was full of them, that was why he had asked me those apparently irrelevant questions, and that I was fortunate not to have been shot-up by the tank, as some had been given roving commissions to infiltrate and cause as much havoc as possible. He then ordered the CSM to take me away for some food and drink.
When thinking about it whilst eating and drinking my tea it dawned on me that yours truly hadn’t eaten for over a day. B****y war! I thought - this definitely isn’t in the Rule Book.
After my lovely meal (bread, margarine, cold ‘bully’ and tea), the Sergeant Major took me to the perimeter, placed me behind a wall, opened a box of hand grenades and told me that if any Germans came along, throw them at the motherless sons of so-and-so.
I was shattered, to say the least, never in my six years of soldiering had I ever seen a grenade, never mind known what to do with it, other than biting it first and then throwing it at the enemy (this being the whole of my war-like knowledge, gleaned from the ‘movies’). As I wrote earlier, Infantry were for fighting, Signals were for signalling and never the twain would swap jobs. This was our pre-war training - an extension of the 1914-1918 style of war.
I didn’t know, then, that you had to remove the base-plate and check if there was a fuse inside, complete with detonator and, if not, to fuse it from the supply in the grenade box. If the enemy had come then I might as well have flung stones at them for all the good an un-fused grenade would do.
However we got the order to move and I promptly severed all relations with 1st Corps and went off on my own again to try to find my own Unit, heading north-west as that appeared to be where everybody else was going and, on the way, picked up one of our blokes, who told me that his wagon had broken down and the rest had been told to keep going, so he got on the pillion and we went off again.
The weather was nice, which meant that there was plenty of aircraft about, theirs I may hasten to add, not ours, and the pillion passenger was doubly welcome as he could watch out for hostile aircraft, who just might be tempted to have a go at us. That period of time was like a mad Big Game Hunt, where everything that moved was shot-up and, of course, this included the endless column of refugees, who were a sitting duck to the Master Race.

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