大象传媒

As a young boy I was fortunate enough to grow up on Dartmoor, I say fortunate because this was at the height of the war and here I was, tucked away in a remote part of Southern England, only few miles from Plymouth and the English Channel, yet while Plymouth and other cities nearby were heavily bombed, out on the moors nothing ever happened. The ponies still ran loose as they had for hundreds of years and the river Dart still sparkled in the sunlight, sweet water you could fill from a mug, and the heather and gorse lit up the wilderness with their purples and golds, it was a sanctuary far from the madness that gripped the world.

In the late summer of 1942 all of that changed when early one morning a large convoy of army trucks wound their way through the village. For most of the adults it was a non-even, but to the children it was exciting, especially when word spread that they were "Yanks"

I have no idea how many troops and vehicles there were, except I recall they started coming through sometime around 8 AM, and were still going through into the evening. They headed to a place called "Rundlestone corner" a small cross road on a two lane road, high on the moors and away from prying eyes. Over the next few days most of the older kids headed out to see them and were given candy, chewing gum and comic books, but for the most part Princetown was off limits and the time was spent in training.

I remember that Christmas and the great party the Americans put on for us, and I remember the following summer, watching planes fly in low and paratroopers drop from the sky, a mere few hundred feet above the ground. Yet eerily they left as quickly as they came, one day there was row upon row of olive drab tents, and endless lines of trucks and guns, and the next they were gone. Only odd pieces of paper blew in the wind, scattered out across the moors between the ruts in the heather and gorse, the only reminder that a great army had been here hours before.

It only meant something to me later in life when I realized the date was June 1944 and that these young men had been among the first to hit the beaches in Normandy on June the 6th and it was only recently that I learned they were members of the "Blue and the Grey" proud men of the 29th Infantry Division.

Now as old man I often wonder how many of those young soldiers that brought a touch of the US to Devon, lived through those awful first few hours of Normandy and whether any will return this year to the 60th anniversary.

PS:- There was a sad legacy to all of this and that came in the sudden death and injury of some of the older boys. A small group of them would go out onto the ranges and gather up unexploded rounds, strip off the bullets and use the phosphorous and cordite to make fireworks. One day their adventure ended in tragedy as they jumped from rock to rock. An autopsy said that one of the rocks slipped and struck the end of an unexploded shell, the results were devastating, one boy was killed and several injured with one losing both legs. His bravery in trying to save the lives of his friends was documented in the Daily Mirror at the time. He survived and I saw him many years later on the Isle of Wight.

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