大象传媒

The following stories are a few of many related to me by my grandfather whilst he was in hospital. We had always enjoyed his "funny" war stories and encouraged him to tell these to us in order to try and cheer him up through his confinement.
However, as the weeks went on in hospital he revealed the darker side of war in stories that he had never told anyone before. I recorded the anecdotes he told us and the following are some of his stories from Italy.

When we went to Anzio it was murder.We didn't know where we were going - they never told us. Why, I don't know, perhaps they didn't want it to leak out? We had to follow this white tape in the dark. We got up on the top ground onto a field covered in green grass, like a cricket pitch. I said to my lads, "They want us to dig in here, we shall get mortared to hell tomorrow." A mortar is a small bomb, they send them up and they come down like rain and explode on impact, or they can delay them a bit.
Anyway, the ground sloped away from the enemy side and we were in little slit trenches. So I said to Tom Sherman,my Lance Sergeant,"We're not going to stop here, it's too risky - soon as we hear the mortars coming we'll all run down the slope and lay down."
We dug in. We hadn't been dug in long when all of a sudden we were mortared. Jerry must have seen us digging in - because it was a virgin field with short grass. So I said, "Down the slope! Down the slope!Keep your heads down!" I never lost a man. I know it was luck, but it was the only way I could think we could protect ourselves. I had a woollen scarf that Mum knitted for me, when I found it, it was blown to hell. It wasn't on me, I must have dropped it. I don't think I'd do it again.

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I was just out of hospital in Italy after my legs had been stitched up after treading on a mine. There was an ancient brothel - it had pictures on the wall painted years ago. But to get in you had to pay something, the attendant wasn't there, so I said " Let's climb over." I climbed over so far and jumped. Every stitch broke.I got back to the medical place and he said "What did you do here?" I said, "I tripped." They had to do my legs all again. What an idiot. Saved a tanner though, didn't it?

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There was a cenotaph in Italy where there were two or three dead bodies - Italians. The villagers begged us to go and get the bodies for them because there might have been more mines. So three or four of us did and the villagers gave me a bottle wine of theirs - a real beautiful wine. So I gave it to one of the lads to look after. When I went back later on that night there were two or three blokes drunk. They were! They'd been drinking this bottle - I never even had a taste of it! It knocked about three of them out. It was a frightening place really.

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