Previous chapter: Front line to Cairo and back again, several times
November 1943 to June 1944
We spent three years in the Middle East backing up the Eighth Army including Wavell’s offensive, then finally the siege of Tobruk and then the battle of Alamein and then we cruised across to Sicily. From there we were suddenly told we were going back to England and we knew very well by then that the reason we were going back was to take part in the second front, which had been heavily publicized.
When we were told we were coming home from Africa to take part in the second front the general feeling amongst the troops was, “What the hell do they want us for? They’ve got all those millions of troops in the UK, why don’t they use them?” We had mixed feelings, partly a kind of pride to think that we were good enough to be asked to spearhead the thing and mainly I think the feeling of disgust that we should have to go through it again after three years out in the Middle East and all the things that we’d been through, some a lot worse than I ever saw.
We knew what we were going back for and all the time we were in England training we knew exactly what was supposed to be going to happen. We were going to get on some ships and ride across and land on the beach which was going to be very hostile and full of Germans and we were going to be flung straight into it. This I think was very demoralizing, to know that all this was going to happen to you. It was different entirely to the attitude we had when we were out in Egypt because there we went on from day to day doing the things that cropped up every day whatever they might have been . We didn’t spend months agonizing about it and reading in all the newspapers about how terrible it was all going to be and that casualties would be at such and such a level. Nothing to induce you to go at all.
We got home, had leave after three years away and then were called back to Ely in Cambridgeshire, a most God-forsaken spot in the middle of the winter and freezing cold. We went on training exercises to put bridges over various rivers. Then we went to Inverary on Loch Fyne and did landing craft exercises. Suddenly the whole brigade of troops up there, of which we were the engineers, came down to Fawley in Hampshire and we stayed there from sometime in March until just before D-Day getting used to the equipment. A lot of it was American and we were issued with quite a lot of vehicles we’d never seen before, International half-track armoured cars and stuff like that which I found great fun to drive about in. And I had a motorcycle all to myself which was also very handy when it came to popping off out from the camp.
We practised waterproofing our vehicles so that they would be able to come ashore in water up to two or three feet deep. This was a job that everybody hated, having buckets of a kind of putty and slapping it on all the parts of the vehicle that were likely to be affected by water without upsetting the running of the engine etc. We did a dummy exercise going over on landing craft to Studland Bay, entirely different craft from the type we finally went to France in. I was driving an International half-track, the last one on as it were, pointing towards the bows. Behind me was a Sherman tank and we all knew what we were supposed to do when the gate went down: we were to drive straight off. I was all switched on to do this, wearing my steel helmet in the approved fashion. When the gate dropped and the vessel hit the beach the tank behind me had failed to put any hand-brake on and it came rolling forward and the tracks of the tank exactly fitted the steel bumpers on the back of this half-track so they climbed up the back of the half-track which lifted the front about four feet in the air and there we were stuck and could not get off the landing craft. So eventually they backed the tank up and I came down with a crash and off we went.
We found out straight away that this waterproofing was not as simple as it appeared because we had to take the waterproofing off the vehicles as soon as they landed because the engines started to give all sorts of troubles if you left it on too long. I found that half the chaps, when they pulled the wires out of the ignition, stuck them back in the wrong holes, so half the vehicles wouldn’t start again. I and some other mechanics spent a happy hour sorting out the spark plugs and getting the engines to run. Nobody thought this was quite the right thing to do during an invasion. More lessons were learned.
We then went back to Fawley and eventually ended up on the road outside the oil refinery, the road down to Blackfield, and I found myself parked outside a house where the lady was devoted to bringing us out cups of tea all day and we sat there and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, having the admiration of the locals etc., until we suddenly got shifted again out into the Forest somewhere near Brockenhurst on an empty piece of forest where we spent another 24 hours and then off to Hursley Park near Winchester where the IBM place is now.