Previous chapter: I return to my unit
December 1942 onwards
Our next encounter with the Germans was a bit more arduous because we found ourselves back in a situation very much like EI Alamein where our chaps were out picking up mines to get through minefields to get at the Germans who were actively defending themselves and there was a lot of stuff flying around, shells, anti-tank shells, everything under the sun and a lot of our vehicles got hit.
We had some “International” half-tracks by this time and some ‘White” Scout-cars, both armoured, although we were to find the armour was practically useless on them. Anything that exploded nearby usually punched a hole straight through the armour which was only about a quarter inch thick and the piece of armour that got knocked out seemed to do more damage than the shrapnel itself would have done if it had had unimpeded access to you. So we weren’t very impressed with the armour but they were very good trucks for getting about in, as they would go anywhere and you could carry a lot of stuff in them.
On these half-tracks, we used to carry cans of water or petrol across the backs of these trucks in racks of two gallon cans with the old screw tops, the old fashioned ones, we hadn’t really got down to being issued with Gerry-cans. A shell had just missed the back of one of our half-tracks and travelled clean through this rack of cans, about six of them across the back all locked in and padlocked. The padlocks were all intact. The rack looked completely unharmed but every can had disappeared completely out of it, whipped out by some anti-tank shell I suppose, so that was a piece of luck.
On another of our “White” Scout cars, a small anti-tank shell went clean through one of the front tyres and punched a hole about an inch and a half across, I suppose. You could look straight through the tyre and straight out the other side but strangely enough the tyre didn’t deflate. We found out later that these wheels, American of course, had a steel disc inside the tyre to keep the walls up and it would in fact stand being completely deflated by a shell and still be usable. When we tried to get this wheel off, we found that there were no spare wheels issued with these trucks, so we had to try and repair the thing and put a new tyre on. We couldn’t get the nuts undone that bolted the wheel together, they were done up with something more powerful than any spanner we had. In the end we said: “well it is standing there let’s see how far it goes”.
Eventually, apart from driving round the battle area for some time, that truck drove all the way back down to Cairo on this tyre with a hole in it and appeared to be none the worse for it so I thought full marks to the Americans for making a truly run flat tyre. We had “run flats”, as they were called, on our vehicles but they weren’t able to stand much usage without setting the tyre on fire. Our “run flats” consisted of a large section of rubber inside the tyre sitting on the rim so that if the tyre was deflated instead of going down onto the rim it came down onto this three or four inch thick band of rubber. Of course you could still drive it although the tyre still looked flat, but the problem was that if you drove any distance at all the heat generated in the tyre with the massive flexing of the side wall became so much that the tyre would burst into flames. So I wouldn’t have said they were a great success.
The mechanics were kept busy rewiring and rejigging quite a bit of the vehicles because when the shells burst nearby it’s amazing how many little bits of shrapnel manage to get inside the engine compartment and chop the oil pipes, petrol pipes, water pipes and electrical wiring and it all had to be jury rigged to keep these trucks running, so there was some pretty ingenious gadgetry put to work.
I felt very proud of myself because I rescued one truck that we would never have thought was possible to get to move again. That one had run over a “Teller” mine with the back wheels. These “Teller” mines were much more powerful than anything we had and it had blown the twin rear wheels clean off the truck, taking with it the axle drive shafts, the half shafts – about four feet long bolted through the centre of the hub into the middle of the axle – together with the outer “Timken” wheel bearings, locking nuts and all the rest of it and both tyres and tubes on that side had both disintegrated, just disappeared off the wheels. That made things easier in a way. With an ordinary screw bottle jack under the axle with something for it to bear on firmly, I screwed the axle up so that I had room to work on it out of the ground. Cleaned it all up, using a file taking ages over it, restoring the thread on the axle tube because the nuts had been forcibly dragged straight off the thread without going through the business of unscrewing them. Of course this had not done the threads a lot of good but I managed to get them up to the point where it was possible to restart the nuts and get them back on again, which I did. I reassembled the hub and put the half shaft back in, went and got a spare wheel down off the truck and bolted it on using nuts from the front and I was all ready to drive it out. It started, ran, I popped it into gear, four-wheel drive, and out she came up out of the hole as good as gold. I was really chuffed.
That truck continued to work with just one rear wheel on each side and it went from where we were then, to some place north of Marble Arch and all the way back down to the canal zone to the base depot at Moascar [near Ismailia] with a load. [Over 900 miles] I had it placed in front of me and followed it when we were making that long journey and I could watch it. The two back wheels were no longer in line with each other vertically. Both had a good deal of lean out on them where the explosion had bent the axle tube slightly and that in itself must have put quite a strain on the differential unit with the shafts going round oscillating a bit as they went, but she made it.
Ironically of course the minute we got down there, when we had unloaded and sorted ourselves out a bit, we had to take these trucks to the REME depot near Cairo where they were going to repair or rehabilitate or otherwise. When they saw our trucks they simply grabbed a piece of chalk, walked along writing “BLR” on most of them including this one of course. That meant scrap them. “Beyond local repair” it meant, which meant nobody could repair it in Egypt so it’s got to go. That was the purpose of our returning to Moascar because we were so short of equipment, so denuded of vehicles that we had to be completely re-equipped before we could go again.
We fitters were requisitioned by REME to go and help them work on the vehicles in the workshops. We spent several weeks working in these big army workshops and making acquaintance for the first time with ATS girls who were trained as mechanics. Quite a surprise because we hadn’t seen any English women for a long, long time. They naturally kept themselves quite aloof and I couldn’t say as I blame them but we could always look. I found they were completely useless as mechanics because most of the stuff we were working on required quite a lot of muscle power to undo nuts and bolts and so on with great big spanners. These girls just didn’t have what it took. They had to get somebody to undo the head bolts, wheel nuts or what ever it might be because they just did not have the strength to do it. This was my first encounter with female labour in the motor trade.
*******THIS IS THE END OF DAD’S TAPES**********
Unfortunately, Dad died before dictating any more. If he hadn’t been such a perfectionist, spending so much time on correcting what he’d written up to now, he might have finished it.
From Africa, he took part in the invasion of Sicily (July 1943), before the unit was recalled to the UK in late October 1943 to take part in the invasion of Normandy.
The next pages describe Dad’s experiences on D-Day. He wrote this some time before the previous pages for a Hampshire County Council book called “Hampshire and D-Day“, published in 1994 for the 50th anniversary.