In the morning a truck came to pick us up. It was from the R.E.M.E. Workshops attached to 97th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment Royal Artillery, a pre-war Territorial Battalion of The London Scottish. They wore the Kilt, Hodden Grey, and wore Glengarries. "Which Army?" I asked. "Eighth Army." After all this time I had arrived into the action, and not searchlights!
The truck took a whole day to get to the other side of Italy, near to the Port of Bari, going through mountain roads, across dry river beds where the Germans had blown the bridges, with minefield tapes either side, through places like Crotone, Catanzaro and many small villages.
I was only in the Bari workshops for a few days and was then attached out to the gunsite of 319 Battery as Technician for the Radar Control Crews. As the R.E.M.E. Technician I was the only one who really knew the workings of the equipment, even though I was not allowed to have a manual and had to rely on memory. The Workshops were always several miles in the rear and were in fact in possession of all the manuals, which they could destroy in good time. Everything was secret, and the equipment itself had built in explosive charges for destruction.
A set consisted of a transmitter which sent a pulse up into the sky and if this contacted a plane it would return to the receiver and show up as a 'blip' on the timebase of the tube. Receiver and transmitter were always a fixed distance apart and were linked by a multi-strand control cable, so that the operators could turn the units, by hand, in phase with each other. When the pulse returned the operators would follow the 'blip' to determine range, height, angle and speed, but they would ignore it if it showed an I.F.F. signal (Identification Friend or Foe) which all British planes could send.
If it was a hostile (enemy plane) the gun crews would be told and all the data was transmitted automatically to their predictor which would work out where the plane was likely to be when the shell arrived and also set the fuse to explode it at the right moment.
After the War ended I found out that one of Marjorie's tasks in her Radar Unit was to test and install the I.F.F. units in the Lancaster Bombers.
Both pieces of equipment were very large, weighing over 5 tons. The receiver had to house four men, sitting in a row, but only one in the transmitter. There were over forty-five radio valves in each one, and two of those in the transmitter weighed about twenty pounds, almost as heavy as gas valves. On each there was an array of aerials going up over 20 ft. To provide electricity there was a diesel generator, and there was a Leyland Matador 20 ton lorry to do the tow when we had to move. We were therefore very mobile and could dismantle the sets, pack all our personal kit, bedding, tents etc., and be away in about two hours. Nowadays a radar set doing all these functions and more, much better, could be carried in a small van and require only one operator/ driver. In fact, later on we 'won' an R.A.F. Light Warning Set about this size, but it could not control gunfire, merely pick up an approaching plane up to 100 miles away without giving accurate measurements of range, height, angle etc.
I discovered that I was with this particular battery because they also had a 'Maggie', a radar set which also incorporated the searchlight type of equipment with which I had worked. This 'Maggie' had been in Crete or Greece and had been damaged in the evacuation. In spite of all my efforts and back-up from better experts from the workshops, we never got it to work satisfactorily and in the end we 'lost' it.
The Radar Crew were all fairly intelligent men since the unit was basically from the City of London. Philip Cooke was nearly fifty years old and was a stockbroker. I can't remember many other names, George Adams was a tall curly headed Jew, Sergeant Eric Eve, Sergeant Johnny Lee and Arthur Hounsome are the only names that come to mind.
There was a night crew and a day crew covering 24 hour watch. Local Infantry kept well away from us because the masts were visible for miles and attracted too much German attention. In addition 3.7 inch A.A. guns don't go 'bang' or 'boom' - they go 'crack' being high velocity, and other troops reckoned their sleep was disturbed too much. The newspaper picture in the Scrap Book is one of our Battery's guns.
While I was on the gunsite at Bari I caught jaundice and had to be flown back to hospital in Sicily - the first time I had been in an aeroplane. The hospital was full of jaundice, malaria and dermatitis patients, the latter being mostly vehicle mechanics, drivers and tank crews who were always messing about with diesel oil.
It took about three weeks to cure the jaundice, which turned most of my skin yellow and the eyeballs went brown. The diet was fat free, chicken, bony fish and oranges, which was the recognised cure, plus tablets. So I went back, this time by boat and train to the Battery to find that they had really been in action. The Germans had bombed the harbour and destroyed a number of ships, one of which was an Ammunition Ship. Its explosion had severely wrecked the town and there had been hundreds of casualties, sailors, soldiers and civilians. Our A.A. had shot down several bombers.
We moved up to Foggia to protect the American airfields which were now near enough to bomb the Rumanian oilfields. Africa and Sicily had been too far for them to return after the mission.
It wasn't very exciting for us except one day when two convoys came through the town centre from opposite directions. One was a British Tank Regiment and the other was American Air Force. The Military Policeman at the crossroads was an Italian (they were now on our side) and after a few minutes the vehicles were totally mixed up. There was a lot of noise, bad language and mayhem, so the Italian Policeman wisely left the scene at the run and completely disappeared. As bystanders we thought the whole affair hilarious.
A few days after that the rains came and we thought we were back in England. It was very wet and very cold. The warfare became static, because even in Italy winter can become rather tough, although it does not usually snow except in the mountains and in the North.
Just before Christmas I went back into the Workshops in Barletta and spent some time with Jimmy James wiring up caravans captured from the enemy with lights, cooking and heating equipment, for use by Commanders. We had previously done one for General Montgomery before he went back to England to command the Normandy Invasion.
On the other side of Italy the Fifth Army, mostly American with a few British Divisions, had got bogged down in front of Cassino. They had made two big attacks in early 1944, including a large daylight bombing raid from Foggia Airfield, which destroyed the Monastery of Montecassino and most of the town below, but had failed. In February part of the British Eighth Army, including our Regiment, moved westwards over the mountains to take over the sector, and relieved the Fifth Army who concentrated on the coast road.
The New Zealanders tried a big attack, which failed. 97th H.A.A. were in support of them and I was on gunsite again. We were designated as 'Army Troops' and did not belong to any particular Division, so when the Poles took over and made the final successful attack we were in support of them.
There was not much German air activity so our guns were used as Field Artillery, shelling strong points, houses, 'Moaning Minnie' (multibarrel Minnenwerfer Mortar Batteries) etc. The Radar was used on the latter to track back the shells to where they had been fired from. The 3.7 inch A.A. gun was high velocity, and with its sophisticated fusing was highly accurate over long distances. Our lofty aerial array was very visible and attracted German attention from time to time.
By the way, we didn't call Germans 'Fritz' or 'Jerry' but 'Teds' short for the Italian word 'Tedeschi' meaning Germans. "Look out, there are Teds about, just up there, watching you."
Our generator was always in use from early evening onwards and we were able to have lights in the tents and the dug-outs (which had ammunition boxes filled with earth as roofs). The receiver had a test point which was on the same wave-length as London B.B.C. so the operators were always tuned-in quite illegally to the News and the other programmes, particularly music. So in spite of attracting Ted's attention we were reasonably popular amongst surrounding troops who came visiting to hear the radio.
All sorts of people came. New Zealanders, Maoris, Indians, Free French, Black Senegalese, Algerian Goumiers. Eighth Army was a very mixed bag in Italy. The great majority were British but almost every country fighting against the Germans had some sort of unit. In addition to us there were also Brazilians, Greeks, Poles, a Jewish Brigade, some Russians and, of course, Italians.
The Goumiers were the strangest. They were Algerian or Moroccan Mountain Arabs, and brought their families and their goatherds with them. Goats were more important than wives and so when they were on the move through the minefields the wives went first, then the Goums, followed by the goats and the children. They were paid a bounty for killing Germans on their night patrols on the evidence of how many pairs of ears they brought back. This made white Allied troops very nervous because German ears are not all that different from ours. It was also thought that they went round the battlefields cutting off ears they hadn't killed for. When they were on the move the goats travelled in the trucks and the women walked behind!
I wrote this little piece in an hotel in Tenerife while a man was playing the piano very beautifully in the foyer below me. I bought him a glass of Brandy and had a few words. He turned out to be a German, so I had a quiet look at his ears. They were not much different from mine.
There was another large American daylight air raid on Cassino while we were there. They managed to miss it again in spite of their marvellous bombsight, and killed a great number of our Indian soldiers about ten miles away. The ambulances came back past our gun park. How they could miss was beyond belief, Cassino Monastery is an enormous white building on top of the highest mountain in the area - no other mountain has a building on top.
I knew that the Royal West Kents were somewhere near us. They now belonged to 78th 'Battleaxe' Division and had taken part in the invasion of Algeria. I took a short walk and found them resting up by a roadside just prior to going up into the line, but I only found one man I knew, the Sergeant Major, who told me that some of my old mates had been killed, and others put into other battalions in the same brigade.
I think that God has always looked after me. He led me to Marjorie, away from the West Kents, and also saved my life in Italy, but at the cost of someone else's. One of the other batteries wanted a Radar Technician rather urgently, and they wanted me to go over there, but I was not about, and so Sid Oldrieve was sent up from Workshops. Sid was killed that night by a German shell - it might have been me.
In May 1944 the big attack went in and the Poles captured the Monastery, but with 1100 casualties. It was the first time they had been able to fight the Germans since Poland was overrun in 1939 and they had a lot of old scores to settle. They weren't very careful. These particular Poles had been interned by the Russians and in 1942 they had been freed by British diplomacy and had come down through Persia, Palestine and Egypt to be trained and equipped by the British and to form a new force within the Eighth Army.
The rest of us chased the Germans up beyond Rome and sometimes our battery moved two or three times a day. Rome had been declared an Open City by the Germans, and although the Allies were supposed to bypass it, some American units went in there but the American General Mark Clark would not let any British troops in for at least a week.
While we were resting up one day beyond Rome we heard on our 'Radar Radio' that the Normandy Invasion had started that morning. Ever since then the British Eighth Army became known as 'The D-Day Dodgers' and there is a poem in my Scrap Book taken out of our newspaper, 'Eighth Army News'. The Houghton Weavers often sing it on the radio these days but with slightly different words. I sent them a photo-copy of the original via B.B.C. Manchester after the first time I heard them sing it.
Some of the British Divisions which landed in Normandy on 'D-Day' had come back to England from the Eighth Army because of their battlefield experience - 7th Armoured (Desert Rats), 50th Northumberland, 51st Highland Division, known as the Highway Decorators because of their Divisional Sign H.D. which they put at the roadside wherever they went.
Our Regiment stopped at Lake Trasimeno, north of Rome, and we were at last able to go there and see the sights. It was full of Americans, and the same thing applied as when they first came to England - overpaid, oversexed and over here. While we were at the Lake quite a number of us had had upset stomachs, and one day when I went off for a little walk to track down a very nasty smell I found the cause - a shot-up German Tiger tank in an olive grove and a couple of dead Germans in a wheatfield, so I buried them.
We always had to be careful of booby traps. Tomato plants were in fruit at that time of the year and Ted had a nasty little anti-personnel bomb which looked just like a tomato and he used to hang it on the plants. Another thing he did was to bury a small booby mine underneath potato plants so that when the thieving British soldiers dug them up for a nice treat instead of the usual dried or tinned potatoes there would be some casualties. One day we went swimming in a small lake and our truck hit a large mine. No-one was hurt but I got a piece of something in my eye, nothing serious.
Being a Scottish Regiment, although the majority of the gunners were English, we had a piper who used to play in the evenings. It was very nice to relax and listen to him, and other troops used to come around and listen, all nationalities, and even Italian peasants. I don't think that Ted was at all appreciative of good music because sometimes he would send a few shells over or even a plane, and we would have a few casualties. Maybe it was not the pipes he objected to, just a general feeling of hate!
As ex-infantry I was more familiar with the machine gun than the Radar crews who would be in the cabins most of the time or getting some sleep after a duty, so it was normally me who had a go at a plane. I don't know if I ever hit anything. Our 3.7's certainly hit some of their spotters and high level bombers and had a good tally of kills.
The entry in my diary (which we were not supposed to keep, as being of help to the enemy) for 27th July 1944, says ...... 'Lads saw the King.' It was not generally known at the time that he had come out to the fighting zones during the War. The previous day our Pipe Major, Jock Speirs, took our pipe band over to where he was holding a Medal Investiture. John Clarke, Secretary of Monte Cassino Veteran's Association has told me that he himself was also there in the Black Watch Guard of Honour, and that he had seen him once before in Tunis just after the end of the African Campaign.
I previously mentioned that while we were at Cassino our Radar was used to track German Mortar shells back to where they had been fired, and at London Scottish H.Q. in 1990 I met up with one of the operators from our Sister Battery who had been involved. He also told me that he was asleep in the next slit trench when their Radar Technician, Corporal Mockeridge, my counterpart, was killed by a direct hit from a German shell. When I went back to Italy on holiday in 1990 I found his grave in the Commonwealth Cemetery at Cassino and photographed it for the Regimental Record. His name is on the Roll of Honour Plaque in the Hall at H.Q., 95 Horseferry Road, Westminster.
After our rest at the lakeside we were on the move again and went back east over the mountains (we had to ditch some of our beds and other possessions to reduce weight on the trucks) and resumed our artillery role, chasing 'Teds' up the Adriatic coast through places like Ancona, Pescara, Rimini, Riccioni and Cattolica. These places were only small fishing villages then but now they cater for British holiday-makers and are built up with multi-storey hotels, souvenir shops and discos.
We had to bypass the tiny State of San Marino, which was neutral, and only about as big as Dunstable. At times we must have been firing over it. We were supporting the Greek and Jewish Brigades round there. They have their own cemeteries on the hillside near Rimini, which I saw a few months later.
In November 1944 97th H.A.A. was broken up while we were at the Rimini Front. The guns and radar were sent to another H.A.A. Regiment, and our older men (it was a London Territorial Unit and some of them were over 40) were dispersed to non-combatant duties, mainly in Southern Italy. The younger men were transferred to Infantry in the 1st Battalion, and finished up in Austria alongside the Russians. They were involved in the controversial forcible repatriation of the Cossacks and White Russians who had been in the German Army, and also of the Yugoslavs who had fought against Tito. At the 1990 Poppy Laying Ceremony at Westminster Abbey I got into conversation with a man wearing a Royal West Kent cap badge who told me that my former West Kent mates, who I had briefly come across at Cassino, had been involved in the same affair. As for me, I returned to my R.E.M.E. Workshop Unit and we all went south to Pontecagnano near Salerno. In one of my albums there are some postcard views of that area which I bought at the time. When I went back to Salerno on holiday in 1989 I took some snaps of the same places.
There were heavy 'latrine rumours' that we were booked for the Japanese front. Some former R.A.F. Radar and Wireless Technicians had been transferred into the Army and joined us there. A great shock for them in more ways than one! One of them was Frank Lawrence, tall, dark and handsome, who came from Southend in Essex, and found Army life to be very different from soft airfield life in the U.K. We were to be together for about a year because the Workshop Unit was re-allocated to the 8th Polish H.A.A. Regiment and we went back up north to the same front we had left a few weeks before.
Although the Poles had British equipment and knew how to operate it, they were not allowed to know how it worked and so Frank and I went out to gunsites with them, two Englishmen amongst hundreds of Poles. The rest of the Workshop was always about twenty miles behind us. We did not very often see our mates except when we went back for pay and supplies. Occasionally the Staff Sergeants would come out to us with secret modification circuits and sometimes Jimmy James would come with them.
Frank and I played football for our Polish Battery - one of them had played in the National team before the War. The Poles always wore their hair-nets when they played and looked quite odd. They were rather vain about their appearance. They were a mixed crowd. Some came from East Poland and had been interned by the Russians who overran Poland in 1939/40. They had been released through British Diplomatic intervention in 1942/43, and had travelled south through Persia and Palestine to be equipped by the British Eighth Army.
Other Poles had escaped through Dunkirk and Norway and had been in Scotland where some of them had married Scots girls. The rest had been captured by the Germans and forced to serve in the German Army, and as they were recaptured by the Allies in Italy and France had come back into the Polish Army.
The three factions were always quarrelling. There were knife fights and one or two of them were killed in them. Often when we were playing football something would be said out of place and a head butting fight would start - like goats. Frank and I would sit on the ground and keep out of the way.
They had some funny eating habits. Although they drew the same food rations as the British, they cooked and served differently. For instance, they always made tea for the whole day at breakfast time and we reheated it as and when we wanted to. I shall always remember my first meal with them. We lined up to dip into the various buckets and billycans - nothing different in that - and I saw some small dumplings, which was unusual because we never had those in the British Army. So I got a good helping of bully beef stew, potatoes and dumplings and poured gravy over the lot. There was a great deal of hilarity amongst the Poles, and I discovered the reason a few minutes later. They were not dumplings at all but prunes in a pastry case for dessert. Very funny, but they only caught me once with things like that. Frank was very fastidious about eating, and suspicious of everything after that.
They very rarely ate potatoes, but carted them away and distilled them into Vodka - very potent and the cause of many of their squabbles. It was all understandable - they had had a hard time and were miles from their homes which had been flattened either by the Germans or the Russians.
Otherwise life was much the same as in the British Army. All the Poles were keen to learn English because they did not want to return to Poland while the Russians were there. Frank and I used to give them lessons, and of course those who had been in Scotland already knew a 11tt1e but spoke with a strange Scots accent, which we tried to correct. We picked up some Polish words, how to count and other things, but they said "don't bother, there won't be a Poland to go to."
The advance went on, past Bologna, Faenza, Forii, Imola where the Grand Prix Motor Circuit now is, and had almost reached the River Po when the War ended. Although the rest of the Eighth Army crossed the Po, the Poles were not allowed to go any further. There was a political decision about this because the Russians were now in Austria and very near. The Regiment went back south, near to Rome, and our British Workshop Unit was detached and sent further south to the Naples area.
I have never seen any of the Poles I knew. There are a number of Poles and Ukrainians in and around Dunstable who go to the Polish Catholic Church in Albion Street, which was the first Roman Catholic Church here and was given to them when the new church in West Street was built. I have spoken to some of these men who are rather bitter, not because they have never been able to go back to Poland personnally, but because the Poles who actually fought for the British Eighth Army in Italy were sent back there to live under the Russians in spite of not wanting to go. They wanted to settle in England. The history books blame Harold MacMilian who was British Commissioner in Italy and later Prime Minister, but I expect that the real decision was made somewhere else, probably between the Russians and Americans.
At Naples we worked on re-equipping tanks and armoured cars with electrical and radio equipment because there was no longer any air activity requiring Radar. These were to be sent to Asia, and there was talk of us going there, but the War with Japan came to an end when the two Atomic Bombs were dropped. The easy going Eighth Army life also came to an end - it was back to guards, drills and wearing proper uniforms instead of the mixture of South African, New Zealand, American and British which were commonplace. The Germans helped out with the guard duties. They were armed with pick handles and did a good job of keeping out Italian sneak thieves - they didn't like Italians all that much - reckoned they had let them down in Africa, Sicily and Italy itself.
Some of our men had been away from England for four or five years and arrangements were made for leave back to the U.K. on the basis of first out, first back. It was all highly organised and I knew that my date would be in late November, so I wrote to Marjorie telling her to make arrangements for our Wedding. We had always written to each other two or three times a week all the time I was away, but now things were coming to a certainty.
At last I was on my way home, through Villach and Klagenfurt in Austria, Domodossola in Northern Italy, through the Alps, Calais and the English Channel. It took four weeks to get to London and Cheshunt, and then train to Holywell and my Marjorie.
There had only been one slight demur from Mum, which was about me converting to Roman Catholic since Marjorie was Roman Catholic. Our Huguenot background may have had something to do with it, but we were never real churchgoers - 'Hatches, Matches and Dispatches' was about all, although I had been in two church choirs, at Waltham Cross and Cheshunt. Aunt Bet was the only one who went regularly to church.
I think Mum's real worry was about too big a family - she had seen quite a bit of hardship in her own family, which was very large, and at one time we had had some Catholic neighbours with a very large brood who were always hard up. I happen to know that two of the boys became surgeons and one of them was to become internationally famous as a heart specialist, although I have never seen him since schooldays.
In fact Marjorie and I had decided on six children, but it wasn't to be - while we were living at Cheshunt she had a miscarriage. I never knew if it would have been a boy or a girl.
Before I went overseas I had decided to become Catholic and took instruction from the Army Padres and went to Mass whenever I could. The Poles were of course Catholic. But I couldn't take Communion until I came back to the U.K. and was received into the church by the Priest at St Winefride's in Holywell, who then married us by Special Licence on December 3rd 1945.
Mum and Dad came up, with cousin Jeanette who was about fourteen years old, I think. Brother Stan was my best man, and Marjorie's bridesmaid was Yvonne Hammond, a local well-to-do girl who was her best friend. Marjorie was still in the W.A.A.F. and brought three of her pals with her - Nancy Silverthorne, Pauline Hughes and Olive Tooby. Aunt Marie and Uncle Cyril came over from Ormskirk and gave us the silver fish servers for a wedding present. The two permanent guests at the Victoria Hotel, the Misses Woods, gave us the large green flower bowl.
Trains were rather infrequent and so after the reception at the Kings Head opposite the Victoria, Father Stan took us all to Rhyl Pavilion where we saw a Play. As it was December we were about the only people in the audience, but we didn't care. The incidental music was played by three old ladies in long dresses - that's about all I remember. So does Jeanette!
The sun came out and shone on us in the Church. It was a good omen for a long and happy marriage. It shone again on Marjorie's coffin 43 years later in St Mary's Church, Dunstable. We spent our honeymoon at Aunt Ruby's house in Irvine, Scotland, where I had often spent weekends with one of my mates in the West Kents when we were stationed in Paisley.
I only had a month's leave and had to go back to Italy. Work in the Base Workshop had slackened off, and every week a fresh batch of men went back to the U.K. for demobilisation. During my leave I had been back to the Gas Company to see what the future held, and had been told that the Institution of Gas Engineers were arranging concentrated courses for trainees like myself whose careers had been interrupted, and that this could be arranged for me if I wanted, which I did. So while I was back in the Army I went on every revision course I heard about, including one at Perugia University, run by the Army Education Corps, and brushed up on Maths, Physics and Engineering subjects. My job as a Radar Technician had included some of the relevant theory so it wasn't too bad. I also went skiing up in the Italian mountains at L'Aquila.