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This addition is on the Italy site as that is where my father spent most of his active sevice.

Some memories

My father was ‘trained’ from ’39 to ’41 in Kent, most of the time on the Romney Marshes. A good friend in the Regiment was forever going AWOL at weekends: generally spending his time in London. Somehow he always managed to sneak back into camp. One Monday he was hauled up in front of his major and asked if he, Lancashire, had carried out an amazingly brave act (which he had) on Waterloo Bridge. A lance corporal called Lancashire had been reported as entering a bombed bus and helping casualties with no thought for his own safety. ‘No sir, I had a really quiet weekend in camp’, was his reply.

As a gun sergeant my father was devastated to go through about 6 weeks of firing a twentyfive-pounder in the Middle East without the shells firing. Eventually he took a shell apart only to find it was filled with sawdust. A gift from some well-wishers ‘working’ in munitions factories in Bridgend.

On a NZ Army website I read of the hardened New Zealanders wondering at the youth and naivety of the ‘Black Cat’ Division. My father thought the New Zealanders were the best soldiers he ever saw fight and probably even better soldiers than the Germans he was fighting.

My father was unfortunate to land at both Salerno and Anzio. At Salerno he went in with the American 5th Army under Mark Clark. As an impressionable youth I thought it must have been marvellous to fight in the American Army. ‘What was better?‘ I asked? ‘Only the rations’ he replied.

One event he told me of was where his RA battery (444 battery) were supporting some Gurkha infantry trying to take a hill. In an attack during the early morning they were literally decimated by German machine gunners. Such was their loss that these marvellous fighters were inconsolable on returning to their lines. The next night they disappeared en masse. The next day the same hill was taken without much trouble. On reaching the German positions my father said he’d never seen such carnage. The kukris had been used to mutilate and disfigure the Germans.

As a D-Day Dodger my father had a special perk of not getting out of the army until July 1946. He left Italy only when the Croat partisans had been kicked out of Trieste.

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