大象传媒

I was called up in 1942 so I decided to join the Navy;my three other brothers were serving in the Army and RAF. I did my training at Collingwood and my life in the Navy was filled with lots of coincidences like meeting people I worked with, one in the States one in Singapore , even a school friend in Germany.After 12 months in the States bringing back a minesweeper named Cato I moved from station to station in the UK. I was then moved to a RAF base on the south coast where a lot of the armed forces were and it was here on the 6th June 1945 that the invasion of Europe began. I was then posted to a Marine base, we were issued with battledress, rifle and ammunition, jeep, trucks, ambulances, cranes and, I believe we were now under orders from the Army. We were to be known as MOLCAB, mobile landing craft advance base. We took our landing craft inland a distance of several hundred miles, where we linked up with Army Group. We were there to help in the crossing of the Rhine, and for two nights we slept in dugouts, then we were warned by the officers that at midnight the gun barrage would begin. Over 2,000 guns would be firing over the Rhine--it was like an earthquake. The ground shook, and we were covered in dirt, the sky seemed to be on fire. The following day was Sunday. one of the best sights I have ever seen, when thousands of aircraft began dropping troops over the Rhine. Several of the aircraft were hit by gunfire and came down a short distance from us. After the crossing we moved back to Nijmegen and stayed in a bombed out church school for a while. Then, on the 8th May 1945, the war in Europe was over, time to celebrate, a night I shall never forget. What should have been a time of celebration turned out,for me, to be one of the worst.People were celebrating that the war in Europe was over. People were singing and dancing in the streets ,music playing ,a truck pulled up in front of us full of people singing and full of joy.When a young girl of about 6 or 7 years of age fell from the truck we ran to the truck to help, only to find she was bleeding from her side. It seems that a bullet from somewhere had ricochetted off the river and hit her in her side. I still wonder after all these years about that young girl;a day of joy turned out to be not so joyful after all.

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