Into the Army

Into the Army

It was early in 1939 when World War II ceased to be probable and became inevitable, that the entire male staff of the General Office of Ipswich's Public Health Department volunteered for the Territorial Army.

There was Jimmy Punt and Tim Haste, both in their early twenties, who carried out mysterious accounting duties beyond my understanding. There was Roy Brown, about my age and, like me, a Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector (nowadays they're called Environmental Health Officers!) and there was me. As I was still several months short of my eighteenth birthday I had to attend the recruiting office armed with my father's written permission to volunteer.

Looking back, what seems extraordinary is not so much that we should all have decided to join up as part-time soldiers, but that Mr Herbert Walton, Chief Clerk, should have encouraged us to do so. He must have realised that even if, by some miracle, war didn't break out, he'd lose the whole of his male staff each year for a fortnight in August, when we would disappear to a T.A. camp.

We joined the 58^th Medium Regiment RA. However, as a result of the flood of volunteers they were already at full strength. Consequently we were transferred almost at once to the newly formed 67^th Medium Regiment. The 67^th comprised two eight gun batteries of 6in howitzers each divided into two four gun troops and a Regimental Headquarters unit. Regimental HQ and the 232^nd Battery were manned by volunteers from Ipswich. The 231^st Battery HQ also consisted of Ipswichians but the personnel of 'A' Troop came from Felixstowe and district while those of 'B' Troop were from

the Woodbridge.

We four from the Health Department found ourselves in Regimental HQ destined, so it seemed, to be clerks, quartermaster's assistants, signallers, despatch riders, observation post assistants and so on. Not that it made much difference at first. We had no guns and no uniforms.

At an open-air 'drum-head service' (actually a recruiting exercise with ecclesiastical blessing) held in Ipswich's Christchurch Park shortly after we had volunteered, we 'new boys' had to wear our Sunday suits with a red T.A. brassard on our left arms.

Our uniforms arrived eventually. They weren't the rather dashing tunics, riding breeches and spurs that, because the RA was a 'mounted regiment', the veterans of the 58^th had been wearing when we volunteered. We were issued with the new baggy battledress with a big 'poacher's pocket' in the front of the trousers and with a 'fore-and-aft' forage cap.

We learnt the words of command, and how to march, wheel, turn and halt, in column of three. We were lectured about Army organisation, about the difference between a howitzer and a field gun, about fuses and charges, trajectory and ranges, and about the theodolite, called 'a director' in the RA, used with the gun's dial sights to aim at an out-of-sight target. In August we went for a fortnight's camp at Roedean near Brighton (just in front of the famous girls' school) and were introduced to our guns – ancient iron-tyred howitzers with limbers, that may well have played a part in the defence of Mafeking.

We returned to Ipswich to find the Health Department in turmoil. War was imminent. We had to help set up first aid posts and emergency medical stores. We had to black-out office windows. The phone had to be manned day and night, the duty officer having a long list of phone numbers to ring if 'the balloon went up'. In those days we fully expected the war to be launched with massive air-raids and believed that the emergency services would have to deal with gas as well as with high explosive and incendiary bombs.

It was really something of a relief when, the day before war was actually declared, I received a communication telling me that 'His Majesty has been graciously pleased to embody the Territorial Army'. I was to report to the drill hall, in uniform and with full kit, forthwith. My parents, having bade me a fond farewell as I went 'off to the war' in the morning, were somewhat surprised to see me trail home again, still with full kit, in the evening!

Having called us up, the army clearly hadn't much idea what to do with us. Those of us who lived in Ipswich were billeted in their own homes, our parents receiving a billeting allowance. Other billets were found for those who lived elsewhere than in Ipswi ch.

During those first few days of call-up we marched through the town to impress the local civilians, carried out gun drill with those ancient howitzers, dug slit trenches on the gun park between Ipswich's West End Road and the river, and filled sand bags to protect buildings (like our drill hall!) vital to the war effort.

Which of these activities I was engaged in when war broke out, I don't recall. As I heard someone say on the radio recently, 'If I'd have known I was making history I'd have paid more attention'. However, I have every reason to remember clearly one personal event of that day. Jack Thompson, a close friend of my schooldays and my days of angling along the Gipping, had also joined the TA with me. He too was living in his own home in Waveney. On parade that morning he told me that a couple of teenage girls from Wanstead County High School had been evacuated from their homes and were billeted next door to him. 'They're good lookers', he assured me. 'I'm taking one of them out this evening. Could you take care of the other one?' Well yes, I could – and I did. We stayed in touch throughout the war and were married immediately after my release from the Army in April 1946. Our marriage endured for 60 years but, sadly Heather's life came to an end just three months after our Diamond Wedding celebration in April 2006.

Heather (then Heather Gilbert) as I first knew her. There was two an a half years difference in our ages (I was just eighteen, she was three months short of sixteen) but I think that we knew at once that we were meant for each other.

I kept a copy of this picture in my wallet until, as POW in germany, I received another of her aged 19.

At that stage in the war, soldiers under nineteen years of age weren't allowed to serve overseas, except as volunteers and with their parents' consent. The 'immatures' as they were called were drafted away. They included both Jack Thompson and my former colleague Roy Brown. Jack finished up in India and Roy, I believe, became a member of the garrison of St. Helena.

I volunteered to stay with the regiment ('better the devil you know than the devil you don't') and persuaded my parents to consent. Though I was over twenty before we did eventually go overseas, as a result of volunteering on that occasion, I was always the youngest soldier in the regiment.

In March 1940 with new rubber-tyred guns fitted with the latest Probert Sights, we departed from Ipswich to Wotton-under-Edge, among the Cotswold foothills in Gloucestershire. Here we made preparations to join the British Expeditionary Force in France. We spent a fortnight at a firing camp at Redesdale in Northumberland and were granted a week's embarkation leave.

Then came the fall of France and the evacuation of Dunkirk. It was clearly not our destiny to become part of the BEF.

In Gloucestershire the two batteries of the 67^th were separated both from each other and from Regimental HQ. I went with the 231^st (Felixstowe and Woodbridge) Battery and worked in the Battery office. Our next move was to be back to East Anglia, though not a part of the region with which most of us were familiar. Here the battery itself was split into its two constituent troops, I went with the Woodbridge-and-district 'B' Troop to Elmdon, near Saffron Walden, in Essex.

Here our four guns were dug into heavily sand-bagged and camouflaged gun-pits on the estate of a large manor house. Duxford Aerodrome was our target. We were constantly ready to blow it to smithereens if, as seemed more than likely in the summer of 1940, it was the subject of a German airborne invasion. Our sleeping quarters were in an ancient private chapel within the estate. We slept between the pews on the gravestones of earlier occupiers of the manor house – but we slept none the less soundly for that.

There was no airborne invasion and, in the autumn of 1940 we were moved to Buckinghamshire, part of a strategic reserve, ready to repel invasion wherever it might occur on the south or east coast. B Troop had very comfortable quarters in the empty Peterlee Manor, just outside Great Missenden. Here we stayed during the bitterly cold and snowbound winter of 1940/1941. It was here too that I decided that I hadn't joined the army to shuffle papers in an office.

Someone else was willing enough to take the job on (the troop clerk was, after all, exempt from fatigues and guard duties) and my request to become a member of a gun team was granted. I was assigned to No 4 gun, commanded by Sergeant Peter Harris of Woodbridge, with Lance-Sergeant 'Busty' Taylor as his second in command. Also in the team were Bombardier Mumford, Lance-Bombardier Bloomfield, and Gunners Derek ('Dick') Pulford, who had been the manager of a seedsman's business in Woodbridge, 'Ferret' Hawes from Orford and Jim Palmer from Ipswich, with whom I was to stay not only while in action in the Western Desert, but through the long weary years as a POW. There were others – there were ten to a gun team – but I don't recall their names.

Some time in the New Year we left our comfortable billet in Buckinghamshire and travelled to Etchinghill in Kent where we prepared to shell Folkestone and the nearby beaches if the enemy landed there. Perhaps, if I went back to Etchinghill today, I'd find it a delightful rural spot. I remember it though in early 1941 as being a bleak and muddy hamlet (a 'Cold Comfort Farm' if there ever was one!) with no church and no pub.

We didn't stay there long. In the spring we moved to Sevenoaks to settle, under canvas, in Montreal Park. Here, while remaining in readiness for invasion, we went on constant exercises as we prepared to go overseas. I qualified as a 'gun-layer' and, although I can't pretend that I enjoyed guard duties and cookhouse fatigues, I certainly never regretted my decision to become 'a real gunner'.

Towards the end of July, after another embarkation leave, we entrained at Sevenoaks Station. A cold and uncomfortable night of travel found us on the dockside at Avonmouth, where we embarked on the New Zealand steamship 'The Rangitiki'. We sailed that very evening, stealing out of harbour after dark and creeping northward through the Irish Sea to join our convoy in the Clyde.