´óÏó´«Ã½

My involvement started when I was 23. I saw 5 years active service.
I had been married in the February of 1941 and got my call up in the May or June of the same year. I had joined the air force as an electrician but did my first training with army infantryman. As they were short I initially stayed with their regiment.

My wife, who was expecting a baby went to live with her mother while I was away We wrote letters to each other, it was the only way to keep in touch, sometimes the letters were regular sometimes not, it took them a while to get through, it was always good to hear from her by letter and to know how she was doing.

We were sent to France and landed somewhere on a beach, it was awful the Germans were taking pot shots at us, some of the lads were hit but you just kept going, the Germans were very close and we could not get through easily-on a night we had to sleep in the hedges; it wasn’t very nice.
Eventually the Germans surrendered I was allowed to go home, back to England for a fortnights leave, by this time I had a baby daughter; it was lovely to go home and see her. In the five years of my service I only had two ‘leaves’ to go home which is nothing but at the time you just got on with it.

When I went back I joined a navy boat as a maintenance electrician, it was a huge Samdart Boat weighing 100,000 tons; we sailed towards Panama as the Japanese were still fighting. We had a busy journey, we always had something to do, we didn’t have time for leisure or entertainment but we did have good grub.
During the journey we stayed on the boat but re fuelled at the Marshall Islands, the Philippines and eventually landed in Singapore.

We were there to help with the building of a new aerodrome at Changi airport and were following the army in.
What we saw was terrible, there were bodies strewn all over the place, lying in the streets and everywhere, after a few days it was all turned back to normal as if nothing had happened. The Japanese surrendered after a while, the bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nearly everyday there was a sign tied to the fence saying x number of Japanese war criminals were being hung that day and we were allowed to go and watch — I never did myself but some people did.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.