For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II

By Dr. Richard Campbell-Begg and Peter Liddle

An amazing collection of eyewitness accounts of the British experience in World War II. First-hand narratives are drawn from every rank of the army and every corner of the conflict to create a moving and illuminating story of the greatest war of this century.

Fascinating, moving, frightening, sometimes comic, this selection of eyewitness accounts has been edited into chronological order to form a magnificent oral history of the British and Commonwealth forces at war.

We follow some 60 interviewees from the Army, RAF and Navy from 1939 to the Battle of Britain, the Desert War, the fall of Singapore, the Italian campaign, D-Day, to the occupation of Germany and the war in Burma. We hear from fighter pilots, nurses, gunners, commandos, Chindits and paratroopers. Their experiences on land, sea, in the air…and in some cases as prisoners of the Germans or Japanese are unique testimony from some remarkable men and women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Dec 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9780007555826

Book preview

Introduction

It is the sheer scale of the Second World War that most of us, however keen to grasp its course in outline and the interrelation of its geographically and sometimes time-separated parts, find daunting. In terms of its time-span, its land masses and oceans that were the scene of prolonged conflict, its nations, races and peoples committed to or drawn into the conflict, its human and material cost, the statistics of the Second World War challenge the capacity to comprehend.

At one and the same time, the link between the Eastern Front and its Stalingrad, North Africa and its El Alamein, the Arctic, Atlantic and Mediterranean with their sea-lines, the aerial bombing offensives, Home Front war materials production and civilian morale, is clear, and yet it is only retained in a collective sense by the most self-disciplined mind. As we write this we can almost hear the protests of readers, ‘Have they not heard of the Pacific War too?’ To which we make response that indeed we have, and this book will certainly not fail by under-representation in that respect.

While the editors of this book have no grand ambition to succeed where few have attempted and success is rare – achievement in conveying a worldwide vista of warfare – they believe that in reducing the unmanageable scale to one of individual participants recalling the part they played in key events, general or special circumstances, major campaigns or battles, they bring the reader as near as he may wish to be to living through the challenge of World War from September 1939 to August 1945.

This book had its roots in the first meeting of the editors in Leeds in 1993. The rescue of the evidence of wartime experience was the main subject on the agenda. Retired New Zealand doctor and public health specialist Richard Campbell Begg, a naval officer in the Second World War, had responded to a New Zealand newspaper appeal by British historian Peter Liddle, keen to draw attention to his work in rescuing the evidence of wartime experience. At that stage Peter was the Keeper of the Liddle Collection, a world-renowned archive of personal experience in the First World War, based at Leeds University. Over some years he has been turning his attention to the Second World War, and has already achieved a substantial collection of material of personal involvement in that war, so much so that since the original meeting with Richard it has been necessary to set up a separate collection, which is also housed in the city of Leeds as a Second World War Experience Centre with charitable status and its own Trustees, staff, Patrons and Association of Friends. Peter has left the University and feels highly privileged to have been appointed the Director of the Centre, which continues to grow and flourish.

The New Zealand doctor had travelled to Leeds, his recollections had been recorded on tape by interview and, with personal accord quickly established, the possibility of association in the rescue work was discussed. It was not long before Richard, in his responsibilities growing younger by the day, was recording men and women resident in New Zealand. The friendship between Richard and Peter developed, with the doctor travelling not only through much of New Zealand in the work but returning to Leeds on three further occasions fuelled by an increasing awareness of the importance, urgency and fascination of the work. He had found that there were few areas of British and New Zealand service experience in the war not covered by one or more of the people he was meeting. So graphic were many of the tapes, and so wide their representation of air, sea and land service, that it was clear the material invited being shared with a wider audience than that of researchers in an archive.

This book grew as a result of a decision to draw together, as appropriate, the most striking of the testimony. It contains extended recall of the experiences of 53 men and one woman. Most theatres of war are represented from beginning to end of the conflict. This is the story of the war by those who were in it, given spontaneously without rehearsal 53 or so years after the event. For most, it was the first time anyone had asked them to relate their experience and had then been prepared to sit and listen, sometimes for hours on end. With remarkable lucidity and recall, with humour, sometimes with emotion, even distress, thoughts and descriptions of events long ago were vividly expressed.

With most theatres of war covered, and with the three Services and the Merchant Navy represented in many ranks, from those quite senior to those very junior, it has been possible to present a chronological story but also one from differing perspectives. In the book, as the war progresses, we sometimes meet for a second time those whose story in a different theatre and from a more junior rank has already been presented, and this may bring the reader to a still closer identification with the memories of some of those whose story is told here.

Each chapter has a contextual introduction so that the wider scene from which the particular vignette is chosen is properly made clear. The book is largely the written expression of oral testimony. As such there has been a little editing to clear away ambiguity, any lack of clarity through imprecision in the words as spoken. In the main, grammar has been left as expressed.

In the first chapter, what the ‘Phoney War’ was like for the ordinary soldier is made clear, and just as clear, the drama, confusion and swirling events from the German attack that would leave him evacuated from Dunkirk or St Nazaire or captured. Naval operations in the North Sea, including the first battle between battlecruisers, when HMS Renown engaged the German ships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau are next in line for recall. For the Battle of Britain and related developments there is graphic record; vivid descriptions of London burning, Coventry blitzed, aerial dogfights, crash landings and parachute descents, and a wealth of detail including men recalling their treatment after serious burns.

The story now moves to North Africa and the great campaigns fought there. There are two chapters devoted to this, separated by those dealing with the operations in Greece and Crete, both ending in defeat and evacuation. The parachute and aerial landings in Crete, in which the Germans suffered heavy losses, are dramatically recalled. We then move to the Italian campaign, with the first successful Allied landings on the Continent, at Sicily, documented by many men who were present on land, at sea and in the air, then the dearly bought and narrowly achieved landings at Salerno and Anzio and the battles around Cassino, the hard slog to the north and eventual victory. Events in the Mediterranean, including the epic convoy ‘Operation Pedestal’, are covered, as are other naval engagements, bombardments and action by British forces operating from the island of Vis in support of Marshal Tito’s partisans and, not least, the valiant defence of Malta and air and sea operations from that island.

With Japan entering the war, there is experience of the military defeats in Malaya to relate, the surrender at Singapore and, not least, a vivid account by a destroyer officer of the sinking of the battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse by Japanese air attack. That officer’s ship was sunk shortly afterwards at the second battle of the Java Sea. There follows a remarkable account of the brave determination of a nurse escaping from Singapore as the Japanese entered the city. She experienced the bombing, then the sinking of her ship. She swam to an island, caring for wounded there, then, one step ahead of the Japanese, she travelled all the way across Sumatra, where the Japanese finally caught up with her. There is coverage of subsequent events in South East Asia at sea and in the air, and eventually the recapture of Burma, including a graphic account of Chindit operations in that country.

Meanwhile, in the Arctic, there were the Russian convoys, including the disastrous PQ17, with which three of the contributors were involved, and later the sinking of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst. There is material on naval events in the English Channel and the Atlantic and the increasing air attacks on German-occupied Europe. D-Day itself, then the advance through Northern France into Belgium, Holland and across the Rhine into Germany, have many contributions from all three services.

Returning to the war in Asia, where the tide was running against the Japanese and the British Pacific fleet was in action, there are accounts of this and what it was like having a kamikaze aircraft attack and crash on your flight deck. The New Zealand Air Force was now in action in force in the South Pacific and there is an interesting story to tell here.

Finally the prisoners of war, both in the Japanese theatre and in Europe, tell of their experiences in captivity, hardships and lighter moments. The sinking by an American submarine of a Japanese freighter with 800 prisoners under the hatches, and the frightful ‘death march’ back into Germany from Poland, provide sombre reading. Those in Japanese hands were perhaps saved from imminent execution by the dropping of the atom bombs. The comment of one of these men, ‘forgive but never forget’, provides a fitting finale to this chapter and a book written with respect for all the men and the woman mentioned, and the generation which they represent.

Richard Campbell Begg

Nelson, New Zealand

Peter H. Liddle

The Second World War Experience Centre,

Leeds, UK

CHAPTER 1

The ‘Phoney War’ in France and its aftermath

Britain had pledged support for Poland in the event of a German invasion, and when this occurred on 1 September 1939, Britain and France were soon at war with Germany. By prior agreement with Germany, Russian troops entered Poland on 17 September, and by 5 October Polish resistance was largely at an end. Hitler, his peace overtures to the West spurned, wished to make an early attack on France, but the weather, the hesitancy of his Generals and finally the loss to the Allies of the initial plans for the attack, resulted in delays.

William Seeney, an apprentice printer from Ealing, London, was quite convinced a war was coming, so, in 1937 at the age of 17, he joined the Territorial Army:

‘I became a member of the 158 Battery of the 53rd Brigade, Royal Artillery. We were at training camp in Devon somewhere in 1939, must have been the beginning of September, when war was declared. As Territorials we were now fully involved. We didn’t get home, we went direct from training camp to a place, Abbeyfield outside of Reading, where we were inoculated, etc. It was evident that the authorities had decided to get people overseas as quickly as they possibly could, so we were among the first to go.

On the morning parade, it must have been maybe one day, two days, after war had been declared, those who could drive a car were told to declare themselves. Not too many people drove in those days, but a dozen or so did and we ended up by driving a whole lot of rather antiquated and requisitioned vehicles, with the members of the Battery on board, to Southampton, where we eventually boarded a transport which took us to Cherbourg.

We arrived in Cherbourg and there was a lot of confusion – we were hungry but no food had been laid on. The officers in charge were told to march us out of town and they obviously had a destination – we knew that eventually – and as it so happens it was a farm and we marched for about 8 to 10 miles, still nothing to eat – we’d had nothing to eat since the night before and this was well into the following day.

William Lewis Seeney

We eventually arrived at the farm and they’d obviously just kicked out the pigs and the sheep and the cows and tossed in a few bales of hay, and we were told to make ourselves comfortable, but still no food. We were told to organise ourselves into small units and half a dozen blokes would get together and that was their mess. Well, we had money – after all, we’d still been working, or had been a couple of days ago – and we did just as we were asked to do, and we chipped in, in these little groups, and we made a list of the things we’d like people to buy for us for food – then the truck took off for Cherbourg. So we had a sort of meal eventually and it was the same the next day until they got things organised. One thing that tickled me, on our march to our farm – we passed some blackberry bushes and the British Army broke ranks and picked blackberries.

However, the time arrived to leave. We were only there for a couple of nights, which was just as well, because the rats, you see, they’d never been so happy in their lives with all these bits and pieces around and we were quite happy to get out of the place. We marched down to the siding by a railway and there we got on to a train, and the train – you may not believe it – they’d obviously got these carriages out from the sheds, had them parked away from the last world war and they were still marked with 40 men and 8 horses – it was marked on the side of the bally trucks. They just had sliding doors and they tossed on a couple of bales of hay and we were told to get on board and the train took off.

Eventually, after many delays because we were being constantly shunted off the main line to let regular trains through, we arrived at Epernay, which is about 30 or 40 kilometres west of Rheims. There we disembarked. We had no weapons at that time but we camped alongside the station, just for the night – not so much camped as bivouacked – we just had to get our heads down. Then another train came along and there, lo and behold, were our guns and our transport.

We had difficulty in getting them off the trains but time passed, and eventually we got everything off the train and we moved off once again going east towards the Ardennes. Eventually we were to the right of the British Expeditionary Force [BEF] and up against the French on our right in the Ardennes The nearest village was Aguilcourt, and there was another village called Guinecourt, and there we were told to prepare. You’ve got to remember we were there for battle and there we were running around in circles, digging in, waiting for things to happen, and there was infantry floating around and nothing happened.

Of course in the Battery itself, things had to happen. First of all we had no cooks, so it was a case of saying, You, you and you, you’re the cooks. It’s hard to believe this, isn’t it, and we’re supposed to be at war! The interesting thing about all this really is, we’d been trained to fire a gun. Now, basically, that’s a very simple operation, but the important job – and I learned this and it took a long time to learn it – we’d never been taught to be soldiers. This was very important. Well, obviously to be a soldier you’ve got to be trained to be a soldier, not just to fire a gun. In my view that’s the simplest thing in the world, and all the things that go to make a soldier we just didn’t have – we’d never been trained to do it. We’d never been trained to kill people. I mean just think, we were soldiers – we’d never heard of a killing ground, and as for being killed yourself, blimey, that was the last thing you thought about.

Time passed, nothing happened. We’d been under canvas all this time, and just before winter began to break we got a number of Nissen huts and life became a bit more comfortable. Christmas came and the usual festivities and nothing happened apart from the recce aircraft overhead. They were there all day and every day – German, French, British, they were always there.’

Another 17-year-old who joined the Territorial Army in 1937 was William John Campion, a railway clerk from Liverpool. His introduction into France was rather more leisurely and comfortable:

‘During 1938 and ’39 there was always talk of war, so later in 1939 – and war was obviously imminent – I wasn’t surprised to receive notice that my regiment, the 59th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery, had been mobilised and I was required to report with full kit on a certain date, 1 September. I went along there as ordered, and met all the other crowd who were being bussed out to Tarporley in Cheshire, where we spent the next month receiving new equipment, new uniforms, and, as far as time permitted, continuing our training both as a regiment and as individuals. We were there for a whole month and then, about 1 October, we took train to Southampton and then across to Cherbourg. We arrived there early in the morning after a dreadful crossing.

Then, later that evening, we were on the train travelling south or south-east. Anyway the train took us as far as Laval, fortunately a proper train, not the sort the French soldiers travelled in, with was it 40 men or 8 horses? The train took us to Laval, and at Laval we met our own vehicles which took us on to the small village of St Jean sur Mayenne – Mayenne is a tributary of the Loire. It was a beautiful spot. It was at that little village that I had my first experience of champagne and Camembert cheese – one I liked and the other I couldn’t eat. We stayed there only one night and we then set off on a three-day journey up north where we eventually arrived at a little village of Chaemy in the Pas de Calais in the old First World War battlegrounds.

Once we’d settled into billets – it was a small village, we were scattered in all sorts of places, small cottages, and men were even billeted in the morgue – our first job after that was to dig gun pits on the Belgium frontier, a small place called Ask. So that was 5am reveille, our task digging gun pits and Command Post, back at 7 and next morning up again at 5.30. Our guns were 6-inch howitzers, which are pretty big things and take big holes, so it was some time before we got that job finished. When it had finished, we were in the middle of a very cold winter and life was a bit hard, but not to be compared with trenches in the First World War.

William John Campion

Our little cottage had an outside pump where the ice had to be broken off every morning, and also two cesspits, but our time in Chaemy, again, was made up with training. We had one special day when we were taken to see the Vimy Ridge Battlefield and Memorial. I don’t know whether this was to give us an idea of what to expect particularly; we found it most interesting, but we were young and had plenty of optimism, so it really didn’t teach us much about war.

The nearest town to Chaemy was Lille, a big industrial town. We were only allowed there once a fortnight, and in Lille there was very little in the way of entertainment for troops. I can’t remember seeing a canteen – we used the estaminets and cafes for a meal – but there was one other place which always struck me as being very interesting. For one thing being so unlike the English people’s conception of such a place. France, as everyone knows, had what, I think, were called maisons de tolerance. They were illegal really, but the French Government just turned a blind eye. These were the brothels, and the ones I’m thinking of weren’t mucky places. They were big houses, and when you went in there was a big room. There would be a bar and a small band, a three-piece band. The girls there would dance with any man who wanted her, and if the men didn’t want anything else that was fine, but it would help to occupy an hour quite well, and Madame, who ran the place, was a disciplinarian who insisted on the highest standard of conduct, so you see we didn’t always misbehave ourselves. We stayed in Chaemy until February, then we moved up to a suburb of Lille and were billeted in a girls’ school and we just kept on the everlasting training.’

Meanwhile Lance Bombardier Seeney tells of a shooting accident that resulted in what must have been one of the first British casualties of the war.

‘On this particular evening, it was New Year’s Eve as a matter of fact, there was a party going on. The boys were drinking in one of the huts and one of the men left the hut, obviously to go and relieve himself, and the guard, he just pointed his rifle at this chap and pressed the trigger. The silly so and so had a round there, pressed the trigger and shot this poor chap straight through the head – killed him stone dead immediately.

The following day after this tragedy I had to go with one of the drivers into Epernay to collect a coffin. In Epernay we picked up this coffin and a Union Jack and then we were told to go to a convent which had been turned into a hospital for when the casualties would be coming into that area. Anyway, this other fellow and myself, we wandered to a shed, which we’d decided must be the mortuary, and by this time the Battery MO turned up. We dragged the coffin in and we just stood by. This poor chap was lying on a table, dead with his boots still on, and the doctor told us to get him into the box, and this was the first time that I had handled a dead body. This other chap and myself, we picked up this poor fellow and put him in the box, and of course the box was too small, and if you can imagine in this eerie light – no electricity, just an oil lamp – pushing this poor chap, just as well as we could, into this box and then getting the lid on and screwing it down, and the following day the poor chap was buried. And I might add he was buried where we were. It’s understandable why the French, in that area anyhow, were very anti-war – it was just one huge cemetery after another from the First World War, thousands of crosses in all directions, and this began the new cemetery with this Number One, with this poor chap who had been killed in such tragic circumstances.

The Phoney War continued and, like all soldiers, we settled down to making the best of what was available. The way of living became quite easy; the spring came along, the weather became pleasant and we settled down to a nice easy war; we also had a few days leave back in the UK and the war generally was almost forgotten. But all the time those people in their recce planes above were busy day in, day out.’

The assault, when it came on 10 May 1940, involved simultaneous and overwhelming attacks from the air, with German forces advancing through Holland and Belgium. British and French forces deployed into Belgium but were soon forced to withdraw. In the meantime a major and unexpected attack by German armoured panzer divisions, advancing through the Ardennes, overcame troops guarding that sector, disgorged into France and soon reached the Channel coast behind the British lines. This, and the surrender of the Belgians on 27 May, resulted in the evacuation of the bulk of the British army from Dunkirk, completed by 4 June. France signed an armistice, on German terms, effective as from 25 June.

Lance Bombardier Seeney awoke to the fact that the war was on:

‘. . .and we were getting an awful drubbing. It was fairly evident that the Germans were very much aware of where we were, and that’s not surprising – I mentioned the recce planes – and we were very severely damaged at that time. There were quite a few casualties, but that was the way it was – it was war, and also, what was so astonishing, almost immediately the roads were chock-a-block with farmers and people coming in from the war areas and retreating towards Rheims, Epernay and the south. It was the audacity of these German aeroplanes – there was little opposition, and also remember that at that time a gaggle of 50 bombers seemed enormous. I know it was nothing like the enormous numbers towards the end of the war, but 50 bombers on the way to bomb. . . And you must remember that, as far as I was concerned, they were coming to me, little Willie. Obviously they were covering an area and they seemed to move towards the south-east, towards Rheims, and there was bombing all the way round there. And then they would come back and they would do this hedge-hopping, coming very low, and the rear gunners on these bombers having a grand old time just shooting up everything in sight. Once again it included me, and I wasn’t a very good soldier – I was quite happy to keep my head down.

Unfortunately, because of the easy way we’d been living, we’d been a bit careless and one of the bombs destroyed all our GTVs – that’s Gun Towing Vehicles – all in one swipe. We had no way of moving our guns. Also, an interesting part about this question of transport was, because of the very heavy winter that we’d passed through – and remember we weren’t accustomed to such things as freeze-ups in big motor vehicles – many were damaged with iced-up engine blocks and so on. They’d been sent back to the Service Corps people for repairs so that at that time there was a huge shortage of vehicles available to move people and things about – they were still being repaired – and I was told that this was a general situation throughout the BEF. In our case we were just one troop of four guns, and we lost their mobility in one swipe. Once again it was panic stations; nobody knew just exactly what was happening. We had certain targets at which we fired, but it was all a bit half-hearted; I suppose it was just a show of strength. After two or three days of this odd situation, news came around that we were going to retreat, we were going to retreat south of the River Aisne, which was in our area. That was fair enough; we seemed to think that would be a good idea, soldiers being what we were – we weren’t all that good. But, unfortunately, we couldn’t take our guns with us, so we just took the blocks and ammunition that was available, we blew that and off we went. We left fairly early in the day, crossed the river and continued till the evening, and there we stopped and there we were, a half battery of the Royal Artillery with no guns. We were a bit stupid.

This is rather an interesting one. They issued us with Boys rifles, and whenever I mention Boys rifles people just simply don’t know there was such a thing, but these things were called Boys rifles. I don’t mean boys and girls – it was just the initials of this particular rifle and it fired a .5 bullet. In other words it wasn’t like an ordinary rifle and the recoil was pretty severe, so it was necessary to get on your stomach and use it in that way. These Boys rifles were considered to be anti-tank and, when you think about it, the whole thing was once again, at that particular time of the war, pretty pathetic.

We were given a silhouette of these various German tanks and there were crosses marked on them to tell us that was the place to fire at to put them out of action. There was no question of destroying them, but we could stop them – but you needed to be a brave man. Well I know that the very thought of just waiting around for a tank to turn up so you could get a shot at it didn’t appeal to us very much. We were split up into small groups and we were told to lie around and destroy these tanks when they arrived, which they didn’t, which was just as well.

As I mentioned early on, in the first stage of retreat, we stopped and bivouacked and got ourselves comfortable and then somebody suggested – the other half of the Battery were in the area – we should borrow their GTVs and get back and retrieve these guns. Well, of course, that seemed to be a very good, bright, very dashing thing to do, and then of course the question was volunteers – You, you and you, the usual drill – and I found myself one of the people on the way back to where we’d just come from.

By this time, when we re-crossed the Aisne towards Guinecourt, the French had moved in with anti-tank weapons on the south side of the Aisne and were waiting for the Germans, who were close by, to arrive at the river. So our Officer decided we couldn’t hope to pick up the guns, so we backtracked and eventually rejoined our unit.’

For John Campion, manning the guns outside Lille, events following the abrupt ending of the ‘Phoney War’ were equally memorable:

‘Then on 10 May the Germans invaded the Low Countries and all was feverish activity. Infantry, light tanks were ordered up immediately to beyond the frontier. We didn’t move until three days later when we were ordered up to a place overlooking Louvain. It was intended to be part of the defensive line of the River Dyle. We got the guns into position but immediately we were ordered back; we kept going backwards with various stops until we reached the town of Templeuve, just outside Lille, so we were practically back in our old country.

There was one little incident which interested me when we were moving back from Louvain to Templeuve. We were passing through Brussels and saw a most unlikely sight: there were cavalrymen, like our own Horse Guards, but with blue cloaks, blue uniforms, plumed helmets and with beautiful black horses, and not a flicker of emotion on their faces. I couldn’t decide whether they were waiting to surrender to the Germans or just waiting to see what would happen, but anyway we carried on and eventually reached our next gun position in Templeuve. It was there we had our first casualties, not very severe, but it reminded us that this was a war. We had our Command Post in what should have been a wonderful place – it was a winery with a well-stocked cellar with all of the shelves filled with all kinds of drinks, but, not being much of a drinker, I wasn’t able to take much advantage of it.

During our three days in Templeuve, I think we managed to at least frighten the Germans. From the LP [look-out post] Germans were seen digging what appeared to be gun pits. Because of the situation, ammunition was rationed and we had to get permission to fire on the Germans, but when we did we couldn’t tell whether we killed or injured any, but we do know we sent them flying.

We stayed only a few days and then we had to start moving again. This time we moved to Flers, which, again, was only a short distance from Lille. After leaving Flers we started meeting the refugees. We also benefited from two factories which had been completely abandoned and full of cigarettes and chocolate, which we didn’t feel too guilty about taking. It was on this move that the refugees and the Army were hopelessly mixed, and a British ambulance driver stopped us to find out if we could tell him where the nearest aid post was because he had a load of wounded. We couldn’t, so he just had to drive on.

We pressed on and eventually went into harbour [rest and recuperation] for a day, and then later that day our CO was given orders to destroy the guns and vehicles and send the men down to the beach. He was a Territorial Army Officer and not a Regular, so he had no hesitation in refusing. So he took himself off to Headquarters, probably Corps Headquarters, and said, I’ve got a good regiment, well trained and good morale – give me something to do. So he was ordered to take a position on the defensive line around Dunkirk, so we were ordered back to Dunkirk and eventually arrived. There again it was complete pandemonium – soldiers, some officers, French and Belgian, who had no further interest in the war, looting our vehicles; one of them stole my trousers, which had my personal diary in the pocket.

Eventually we got our orders and dug our guns in, did the necessary survey, set up the Command Post and then we just had to sit and wait, but the few days that were left had a certain interest. A French colonial cavalry troop had decided to abandon their horses in a field next to our guns. They took all their bridles, etc, unsaddled them and went off on foot. Soon as our chaps saw this, as many as could grabbed a horse, re-saddled them and rode up and down the village going to collect their meals, etc. However, I couldn’t get a horse so I got someone to teach me to ride an abandoned motorcycle. We’d been living on preserved rations until then, then our cooks found some pigs on a farm, with no farmer around, so the next two or three days we were living on pork, which was done with fresh vegetables.

There were four light tanks which had been abandoned by the French Army, so we looked inside and found that from their ammunition racks only one shell was missing; it was hard to believe it had been fired. Our position was on the rearguard, which we expected would result in our being taken prisoner, because Churchill, at the time, had said that it wouldn’t be possible to get everybody out. In many ways we were better off than the men who had been rushed down to the beach and to the port to be taken off as best they could. The road past the guns was one of the main routes down to the coast, and as time went by the troops leaving that way thinned out until they were just mostly British infantry marching down in proper military order. We also used them to give us an idea where the Germans were so that we could pick our targets.

In fact, life became quite quiet for a little while, but then the Germans found our gun position. We’d seen a plane flying overhead and after a while it went away, and then the shells started coming. It was getting a bit hot, in the dangerous sense, so we surveyed an alternative position about 300 yards away, moved the guns and started firing again. When we fired, the Germans fired back on our old position. When they did that we stopped firing and, fortunately, we were able to keep them fooled until we actually left that place. In our alternative position we found a concrete pillbox, and that housed our Command Post. We had taken in a young mother with her baby, who was in a state of hysteria every time a shell exploded, but fortunately her father was there who kept an eye on her. Her cottage had been hit by a shell, and the three of them had got away safely, but our concrete pillbox was really the only safe place for them, for which they were extremely grateful.

This went on till 1 June when orders were given from BEF Headquarters for the whole BEF to cease fire and move off down to the beach to be taken off. The orders were, artillery would cease fire at 10pm, infantry at 11pm, and between 11 and 12 there would be a small mobile force just keeping a watch. So we destroyed our guns by smashing the breech blocks with heavy hammers. That was the best we could manage, but they would have been useless after that.

Then we started making our way down to the beach carrying the guns’ dial sights – that was the other essential, not to let a dial sight from the guns fall into the Germans’ hands. As we marched down, all gunners – we were more like staggering – we heard infantry marching, marching to a light infantry pace, and it was the Guards, probably a platoon of Guards. One passed us like a shot out of a gun. As I told myself at the time, they had the energy but they hadn’t been throwing around 100-pound shells for a few days.

We got down to the beach and the sailors started coming in with lifeboats. I had to go into the water almost up to my shoulders, and I suddenly found somebody holding on to my hand. It was our signal sergeant; he was rather short and if he’d tried to stand on the seabed he would most certainly have gone right under. He couldn’t reach high enough to get hold of the gunwale of the boat, but he had some strong sailors there to lift him in. I was half in and half out when an officer decided to play the hero and ordered everybody out simply because he’d heard a big cry of Take shelter! from the opposite side of the boat. Actually the sailors were very rude to him and continued hauling people in on my side. That is just by the way. We got out with very little interference, shells occasionally falling on the beach, but otherwise there was little danger.

We got away on I think it must have been a minesweeper, an old ferry boat which used to operate between South Wales and Dorset; it was called the Glendower, the name of a Welsh patriot way back. The sailors hauled us aboard and put us in a room. I was in with half a dozen other men, just in what looked like an alcove with a curtain across it. Bread was handed out to everybody and then, a few minutes later, a bottle of rum was passed round. So we got away and without any unpleasant incidents, and then we landed in Harwich. The wounded were taken off first and then we were all given a good feed on the dockside.’

Meanwhile Lance Bombardier Seeney had been hopelessly cut off from the main British Expeditionary Force. He recalled that:

‘We had no idea really what was going on and we got on our trucks and wandered off towards St Nazaire and, after a few days, we eventually arrived there.

What we weren’t aware of at that time, Dunkirk had happened and it was all over and the French had already asked for an Armistice, and for two days we’d been wandering around in France, the northern parts of which the Germans really had control, but the French themselves were in such a muddle, they weren’t in a position to stop us. We continued on – where we got the petrol from I’ll never know – but we did and we eventually arrived at St Nazaire, and that had been heavily bombed early on in the piece. Much to our surprise, there was a boat pulled up in the harbour by the quay and it turned out to be the Phillip N, God bless it, a collier which was actually on its way, of all places, to Gibraltar. However, it had been stopped and turned back and asked to go into St Nazaire to pick up the remains of some British troops.

Well, I suppose there were about 100 to 150 of us. There were men from the Air Force, Army, you name it, there we were on the deck of the Phillip N, a collier, and we took off. Fortunately the weather was beautiful and, of course, once again I remember the full moon and thought, gosh, all these U-boats hanging around and there’d be the odd bomber. . . But, for some reason or another, which is so difficult to explain, this one little boat with all these men on board, with no real self-defence – except we did have some Bren guns with us and we tied them to the railings – and we did this, that and the other thing to give ourselves some sort of cover, which might have helped, but I doubt if it would have been a lot of good. However, it gave us something to do.

There was the problem of food, and somebody had the sense to toss in crates of tinned food, but mostly it was apricots; we had stewed apricots for a day or two but the biggest problem was water. One must remember it was only a small boat, probably with a crew of five or six, and it really became a problem. By the time we arrived into the Bristol Channel, they were aware that we were in trouble with the lack of water and the barrier was opened, the anti-submarine barrier, and it was opened and allowed us to continue up the Channel and we eventually arrived at Swansea late one evening. It must have been three days later – goodness knows, it was a long time.’

Pilot Officer James Hayter saw it all from the air. He remembered:

‘When the Blitz started we were doing low-level flying, low-level bombing on mainly the bridges of the River Meuse and convoys. We had big losses, we lost most of our aircraft. At the end of the collapse in France several of us were told to go to various airfields where our armament boys were, pick up our bombs and they’d re-arm us. We were told by the Adjutant, because all our senior officers had gone back to England, we were told to pick our own targets, which we did. We finished up at Nantes and I’d lost all my tail part except for the steering elevators and the rudder, which were damaged, and we asked for petrol from the French, which they refused to give us, so we took off and, as my engine cut out, we landed at Manston. We were tired and hungry and I remember saying that we thought our senior officers had let us down, and I received a ticking-off, which I felt ill-deserved.’

James Chilton Francis Hayter

Bernard Brown was another Royal Air Force pilot involved in operations over France during those fateful days:

‘During the evacuation of Dunkirk I was a Pilot Officer and I was detailed, on one occasion, to go out to Ghent in Belgium to try and find the British Army because they didn’t know where they were. So I knew about the British Army, how extremely dangerous they were, and it was necessary always to fly at least 3,000 feet above the Army, because they would like as not give one a pannier of 303 and you’d see the shells coming up and curling down behind the aeroplane – they were very bad shots. But anyway, I did find the British Army and I found the Germans too, and they were busy riding along quite happily in their trucks and they didn’t fire a shot. So that was that little episode.

Then while the Dunkirk operation was progressing, they discovered that there was a German artillery unit in a chalk pit in Calais firing at the British Army, so they decided that we should go along and drop some bombs on them. So the Squadron – I think there were about nine of us – we left from Manston in things called Hectors, that they used to use on the North West Frontier of India to keep the people there in order. Anyway we had two bombs loaded underneath the wings and on the way over across the sea I thought I’d better try the guns, which fired through the prop. I did all the necessary bits and pressed the button and there was a mighty bang, and the next moment there was petrol in my face. I had actually ruptured the main fuel tank. I released the bombs and turned what I thought was back to England – I could barely see because the petrol was burning my face. Fortunately I had my goggles on and I flew in a general westerly direction.

Eventually I saw land, and by this time the engine was nearly sort of stopping, but I switched over then to the gravity tank and as the petrol sort of drained away from the aeroplane, no more petrol was in my face and I saw this land and I saw the Heme Bay Golf Course. I was pretty good at landing an aeroplane in those days, so I popped it on to the golf course, then got the map out and found out where I was. So I turned round and away I went, took off again and landed back at Manston, which was just up the road. At a subsequent investigation, when I got back to base, they discovered that the split pin on the front of the machine-gun, which operated a gas-operated thing, had not been fitted and the piece had blown off and gone right through the side of the aeroplane and into the petrol tank, a great big hole 3 or 4 inches across. The other Hectors were all right and had come back. They thought I had been shot down.’

Bernard Walter Brown

CHAPTER 2

The Battle of Britain and the Blitz

‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

Winston Churchill

On 1 August 1940, Hitler, finally accepting that no compromise peace was possible with Britain, ordered the destruction of the Royal Air Force as a prerequisite to the invasion of Britain. So the great air offensive started in earnest on 13 August, commencing with attacks on fighter airfields and radar installations on the South Coast. By the end of August many aerodromes had been badly damaged and the heavy loss in fighter planes had become almost unsustainable. Pilots were very tired and morale was slipping. Goering then decided to switch his main effort to day attacks on London, which gave Fighter Command the respite needed to revitalise its effort in fulfilling and expanding its defensive and offensive capabilities. From the end of October 1940 the aerial Battle for Britain could be said to have finished in Britain’s favour. Hitler’s aim of destroying the RAF had become completely unattainable. Heavy German bombing of cities, with considerable damage and disruption, continued until 16 May 1941, then the air armadas were withdrawn to the East, where Hitler had another role awaiting them. The invasion of Britain was quietly shelved.

One of those who fought in the Battle of Britain was Alan Gawith, a New Zealander, who was accepted for a short service commission with the Royal Air Force and commenced training in the United Kingdom in June 1938:

‘I managed to complete my training and was posted to a Blenheim Night Fighter Squadron when all I really wanted was to get into a Hurricane or Spitfire Squadron. It was No 23 Squadron based at Wittering Airfield, not far from Peterborough. In many ways it was a pretty leisurely and enjoyable life, but I wasn’t what I would call the least bit well trained by the time the war started. Those months of September/October 1939 were busy months for me. I was a Pilot Officer, busy all during the day for long hours on the adjutant’s job and trying to get a bit of flying in, and I had become engaged to my New Zealand girlfriend a few weeks before the war started and we decided to get married because she was caught in England and couldn’t get home again. That meant getting the Station Commander’s permission, which was quite an experience, but he granted us permission and even went through and shouted [treated] us immediately after the wedding, on 4 October 1939. My wife had got herself a job as a landgirl on a farm not far away and she carried on with that and I carried on with my work.

Alan Gawith

My work as adjutant terminated at the end of October and the flying went on, mainly searchlight co-operation at night and training, practising, getting some hours in, getting experience during the daylight. Life was pretty busy, particularly because we had to keep crews on standby every night in case of enemy activity, which didn’t start up for many, many months. We were busy expanding, forming more squadrons and, with shortage of crews and aircraft, we were doing stretches of perhaps seven, eight and nine nights consecutively on standby in the hangar or flying. Not a great deal of spare time during the day after one had caught up with a bit of sleep, eaten and so on, and I didn’t see a great deal of my wife during that time, but as the winter wore on and the weather was getting colder I felt that I couldn’t leave her struggling with milking cows twice a day in those sort of conditions, so we got digs in the village of Wansford. I was living out from then on, which meant that I missed out on the mess life, which is half of the fun of the war really, and I had the extra responsibilities. However, we got by.

Nothing much happened until, oh, we got radar, airborne radar in June 1940, which was pretty useless but still we had to practise to try and make it work. It was in June 1940, I think, that we had our first combat as a Squadron, when both Flight Commanders, Spike O’Brien and Duke Willy, had combats and managed to shoot at two enemy aircraft, not using radar but by visual sightings. Unfortunately O’Brien’s aircraft got into a spin and he tried to get his air gunner out of the aircraft with difficulty and eventually got himself free, but the gunner had met the prop on the way out and was killed. I think we lost two aircraft that night, but I think we got two enemy aircraft so we were all square. It wasn’t a very satisfactory start to the Squadron’s war.

The Battle of Britain then came on and, of course, the Day Squadrons were thoroughly occupied. We were in No 12 Group, which was the backup group for Sir Keith Park’s 11 Group, which really fought the battle in the south. Our job then became care of the convoys around the coast of Norfolk. The Day Squadrons had been doing those patrols and the enemy were raiding the convoys quite regularly, sinking ships. We used to start before dawn and I can remember many occasions when we took off in the dark and flew up into the dawn, long before it was daylight on the ground. In some convoys we would often find a ship or two sinking but no enemy in sight. We patrolled for month after month. It wasn’t dangerous, simply because we never seemed to be there when the enemy was there and we couldn’t quite understand that, but there wouldn’t have been much point in patrolling at night.

On 13 August my son was born. I’d just got my wife established back at home from the hospital with our infant, and on 11 September I got a call to say that I was to report back to the Squadron immediately. The Squadron had been posted to Forde airfield, which we’d taken over from the Royal Naval Air Service just south of Arundel on the coast of Sussex. So I had to desert my new family, leave them in the tender care of the landlord and landlady, and disappear down to the South Coast where we landed on a very small airstrip about 800 yards long with our Blenheims, which were used to longer fields.

We hadn’t been established there very long before the attacks came in from the coast. The enemy would swoop in about dusk and machine-gun the camp. We lived in wooden huts whilst there, and we’d guard our aircraft. Two or three times we had those attacks and, of course, nothing much we could do about it. We were in the front line at last; there were one or two casualties and we had one or two aircraft destroyed, and we found what it was like to be under fire. You get machine-gun fire when you’re in the mess and you sort of burrow under the carpet – it’s as simple as that. Bullets whistling through these wooden walls made one duck. However, we survived those all right.

We saw the battle going on, the day battle up above, and we knew what the base squadrons were tackling. We didn’t know a great deal more than the civilian population; we could see what was going on, and we heard from pilots who came in and our pilots who visited base squadrons nearby, Tangmere Airfield and others. We knew, as the time went on, how grim things were; Fighter Command was strained to the limit. Sir Keith Park – he wasn’t Sir Keith then – was not getting the support he needed from his friend Leigh-Mallory to the north, who insisted on holding his squadrons back until he’d got them mounted into wings of three or five squadrons. The Hun doesn’t wait for that sort of nonsense. Park’s theory was to attack every time; even if he only had three aircraft, they would get out and do their best. It’s amazing how much a single attack by a small number of aircraft diving down through a lumbering flotilla of bombers, shooting down two or three of them on the way through, is effective in diverting the attack or splitting it up, and Park never missed the opportunity. He’d get aircraft from somewhere and make sure that the Hun got some sort of reception.

Of course, we were aware that everybody’s nerves were getting frayed when the attack on the airfields was at its height. We weren’t getting the same plastering as they were getting at the sectional airfields where the Day Squadrons were. Biggin Hill, Tangmere, Manston and others were getting it all the time. It was not the actual bombing so much as the constant day and night attacks, and nobody was getting any sleep. It was the exhaustion that was wearing out the aircrew, the ground crew, the controllers, the WAAF staff, everybody. Had that gone on for another week I don’t think Fighter Command would have survived, and there was nothing to stop the enemy coming across except Fighter Command’s air supremacy. However, it’s doubtful to me whether we had air supremacy, but at least with the help of radar and the system that had been set up by Dowding in the few years before the war, and the systems like the short service commissions getting in young fellows from around the Empire, then the British, mainly British, getting them trained just before the war, that was the only reason that Britain survived, I think, the Battle of Britain. It wouldn’t have survived if Hitler hadn’t made the mistake of switching the attack away from the airfields and concentrating on London; it gave the airfields a breathing space and the aircrews, everybody, time to get a little bit of sleep and catch up and get operational again.

Then I think it was just after that, when the Huns thought they had Fighter Command finished, that late in their raid a big wing from 12 Group arrived. When the German pilots saw this, their morale suffered accordingly. By this time the enemy had started night raids on London, and there was much more enemy night activity for the night fighter squadrons, and we were often out every night patrolling, more or less, across the track of the bombers, because radar hadn’t reached the stage where it was making too many interceptions and there was more chance of combat by visual sightings. There was one night, when we were patrolling at about 20,000 feet across Southampton or that area, and there was a huge blaze in the sky, it seemed like at least 100 miles to the north, and it was a good night, and what I was watching from that distance was the blitz on Coventry – we read about it next day.

Because of that, it was decided that the Squadron should mount layer patrols from 20,000 feet down to about 12,000 feet at intervals – four aircraft at intervals of about 3,000 feet. The first pilot off was the Sergeant Pilot, I was Number Two, the Squadron Commander, who was then Squadron Leader Haycock, was Number Three, and I forget who was Number Four, but it doesn’t matter because he didn’t take off. The weather started to close in and Sergeant Dann was first and I was listening to his report about how he was in cloud at 5,000 feet, 7,000 feet, and the controller kept asking him and he kept saying he was still in cloud, and he got up to about 10,000 feet. Sergeant Dann obviously wasn’t happy, so the controller called him back to base and asked me where I was. I said I was at 10,000 feet by then and still in dense cloud; he kept me going up and reporting periodically while he tried to get Sergeant Dann down.

Meantime the Squadron Leader had taken off. He listened to the radio, and kept under the cloud, which was about 3,000 feet when we started and was down to about 1,500 feet; then the Squadron Leader decided the sensible thing was to get back on terra firma, so he landed. Then the controller was fully occupied trying to get Sergeant Dann down, but as there were hills in the region of several hundred feet not far from base, the controller couldn’t get him to come below the cloud to land. I had plenty of time to think, well, I’ve still