Blitz Kids (23 page)

As part of the nation’s collective war effort, these long nights and hard work were one small cog in the mighty wheel that had seen Great Britain survive its darkest years. But for all his efforts, not everyone was impressed. As he later recalled: ‘All this may have been good for the war effort, but it didn’t exactly help my studies. However, I did manage to pass my school certificate and went on to the Sixth Form.’

By January 1943, John, aged seventeen, was on a collision course with his headmaster. While the youngster was proud to be a fireman, his headmaster had chosen to offer his evenings to another branch of civil defence. As an Air Raid Warden, the headmaster searched for those breaking the blackout laws. One evening his rounds took him to the fire station where his pupil was on night duty. Banging at the door, the irate headmaster shouted that a light was showing from the building. As the door opened, the headmaster was confronted by a fireman who swiftly replied: ‘Piss off!’ Frustrated by the response, but not waiting to pursue the matter, the headmaster walked off, displeased
by the sight of his teenage pupil smirking from behind the fireman. It was a brief victory for John.

The following morning he was called into his headmaster’s study where he was berated for dedicating his time to his fire duties, rather than concentrating on his studies. The pupil found it difficult to understand the headmaster’s reasoning: after all, in less than a year he would be called up for military service where his schoolwork would be irrelevant. Deciding he could not agree with the headmaster, John interrupted: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on, Sir?’ Shocked, his headmaster replied: ‘If that’s how you think, then you should join the Army!’ Taking the bait, John asked if he could borrow his headmaster’s telephone, called his father at his work and asked: ‘Dad, is it OK if I join the Army?’ Receiving his assent, he left school, travelled to Leeds and volunteered at the local recruiting office. He was then sent home to await notification to commence training. The following day he returned to his school and told his pals: ‘You can call me Private Longfield.’

At the outbreak of war, there was a rush of young men volunteering for service. However, with the Army wanting to control its intake by calling up men according to their age group, officials tried to limit volunteers. With the pre-war Army having increased through the call-up of territorial units and members of the reserve, followed by the conscription of the nation’s twenty-one year olds during 1939 and early 1940, it could not cope with an uncontrolled rush of volunteers. Attempts were made to encourage would-be volunteers to wait their turn. That said, the volunteers kept coming.

At the start of the war no man under nineteen years of age could serve overseas, while the minimum age for conscripts was twenty. However, the Army soon found it had a wave of keen
eighteen-year-old
volunteers, who were legally old enough to join the Army but not old enough to serve overseas. Another source of volunteers was from among the even younger boys who ignored the age restrictions, including youths as young as fourteen.

The Army had a long tradition of accepting ‘boy soldiers’ – at one
time it was drummer boys and buglers who started their careers as children. By the 1930s the Army continued to recruit boys as musicians and for training in technical trades. However, the threat of war ended the recruitment of boy soldiers, since the Army needed men to serve overseas. The end of the training schemes for boys meant the ambitions of some who dreamed of a career in the Army had been thwarted. They longed to be soldiers but suddenly, with war underway, they would have to wait to ‘do their bit’.

One such would-be soldier was fourteen-year-old Ted Roberts. Raised amidst the slums of London’s King’s Cross, Ted was eager to join the military. His late father had been a veteran of both the Boer War and the Great War. Both his brothers were already overseas as regular soldiers. Left alone at home with his mother as war began to engulf Europe, he was ready to serve. There was just one problem: ‘In my heart, I wanted to be in the Army as a career, but then the war broke out. So you couldn’t join up on “Boy Service” like you could in the 1930s. So I just joined as a man.’ He also had to change his preferred unit: ‘I loved horses and intended going in the Household Cavalry or the Royal Horse Artillery. But when war broke out, the horses became tanks and no way would you get me into a “sardine tin”.’

In early 1940, with six months to go until his fifteenth birthday, Ted made his way to his local recruitment office and said he had come to volunteer for the infantry:

With the paper work completed, Ted returned home to await instructions to report for training. Ted was lucky to be accepted: had the recruiting sergeant asked to see his identity card, he would have
been thwarted. All under-sixteen year olds had a brown ID card, whilst adults carried them in green. Whilst it was simple to change the date of birth on identity papers, changing the colour would have proved impossible. Three weeks later papers arrived telling him to report to the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a unit with a long and distinguished history that considered itself to be among the elite of the British Army.

Despite his youth, Ted Roberts knew that his mother would not try to stop him. She had been a soldier’s wife and had two sons serving in the Army – how could she expect her youngest boy not to follow in the family career? As Ted recalled: ‘My mum knew that if I wanted to join I was going to join. She didn’t want me to – but she accepted it.’

It was easy to see why the Army accepted underage volunteers. In the rush of new volunteers and conscripts they were simply lost in the crowds. With the country desperate to create a modern army capable of defending the island from invasion, resources were fully stretched. As the historian David Fraser later wrote: ‘there was conscripted every resentful or maladjusted misfit, provided he pass the simple medical test imposed’.
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In summer 1940 almost 300,000 men were conscripted into the Army in just three months. Seeing the country’s desperate plight, it was little wonder so many recruiting sergeants turned a blind eye to the forged documents and smooth faces of eager young volunteers. Furthermore, most pre-war soldiers were familiar with the recruitment of boys, with many NCOs having originally joined as boy soldiers.

There was also a division between regulars and conscripts, with regulars bewildered by the lack of enthusiasm initially shown by many conscripts. Army life was generally perceived as dirty and brutal, suited only to those unable to secure any other employment. The High Command was sufficiently aware of the lack of enthusiasm on display by conscripts that it even produced a training film,
The New Lot
, showing how even the most reluctant civilian could become a good soldier. But veterans could at least recognize their own keenness in the volunteers, regardless of age. The experienced NCOs and officers saw that the youngest volunteers were unaffected by the wave of pacifism and anti-militarism that had gripped the nation in the preceding years. In many ways, the teenage volunteers were the perfect recruits: too young to be affected by the Army’s negative image, young enough to
be swayed by the notion of glory and old enough to endure months of hard training.

Around 600 boys of eighteen and under volunteered each month during 1940 and 1941. To cater for them, it was decided to create a series of ‘Young Soldier’ battalions. These were designed as training units for the eighteen year olds who had no intention of awaiting conscription. The plan was for ‘Young Soldiers’ to remain with the battalion until the age of twenty then, fully trained, they would be transferred to their parent battalions as other men of their age group were conscripted, creating a cadre of potential NCOs to guide their contemporaries through basic training. It was with high hopes that some greeted the establishment of these units, with one officer reporting to the War Office: ‘These battalions are the means of training and disciplining the youth of the country for after the war or for the final victory.’
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These units, given the designation of ‘70th Battalion’, proved to a great lure. However, there was one problem: significant numbers of the volunteers were far younger than they claimed.

As envisaged by officials, would-be soldiers could serve in the Army Cadets from fourteen to seventeen, then they could join the Home Guard for one year until they were eighteen, then volunteer for a ‘Young Soldiers’ Battalion. As the President of the Board of Education acknowledged, the policy was aimed both at preparing boys for military service and: ‘securing that boys, after leaving school, should be kept under some measure of discipline and supervision.’
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At first the Army had lobbied to allow under-eighteens to volunteer, with the intention of using them to man air defence positions in the UK, freeing up older conscripts to go overseas to fight. Churchill had supported the scheme, hoping it would help bring potentially wayward youths under control: ‘Under present conditions, with little discipline and many opportunities for earning high wages, boys of this age were in grave danger of becoming demoralised.’
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However, this was dropped in favour of utilizing Home Guard units as anti-aircraft gunners, with the Cabinet discussing lowering the Home Guard recruitment age to increase its strength.

The government preferred to keep the boys working in industry and training part-time as cadets. During 1941 there was even discussion of making pre-conscription military training compulsory. With around
220,000 boys between fourteen and eighteen already undergoing training in cadet unit, there was a further 1,159,000 who took no part in military training. Compulsory recruitment was rejected on the grounds that the Army was hard pressed to cope with the men it already had, without trying to train hundreds of thousands of boys. As was noted, there were too few qualified instructors available, with senior officers admitting that indifferent leadership and training might prove worse than none at all. Furthermore, as was admitted by the War Cabinet, compulsory military training for boys would arouse: ‘considerable, if not violent, opposition from certain quarters’.
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Once in barracks, Ted Roberts adapted to a new life surrounded by youths, some of whom were four years his senior. It was a world where there were plenty of ‘tough guys’ with something to prove. Ted was certainly not alone in being under the official recruitment age of eighteen, but he was among the youngest of the boys who had been accepted: ‘It was hard being so young. And I still had to have my fights with the other people. You always had a few who were on the bolshie side, but you had to stand up for yourself.’ Since he had been an enthusiastic visitor to his local gymnasium, he was at least prepared for the physical side of the training, even if the weight of the Lee Enfield rifle was a shock.

Ted was largely unconcerned about living amongst boys and men years older than him: ‘I enjoyed every minute of it. The only people I didn’t like were the ones who put you on these stupid charges.’ The finer points of discipline were his one difficulty with Army life: he was happy to follow orders and train to the best of his ability but he hated being shouted at for no reason. He was promoted four times, but each time lost his stripes after an altercation with his superiors. It started whilst in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Falling asleep after a twelve-hour guard duty, he failed to shave before parade and was sent before his company commander: ‘The punishment was cold water baths for five days. The sergeant got up each morning to make sure I got in that bath. I had to sit in it for five minutes until he let me out.’

As war came closer, the battalion was sent out to guard ‘vulnerable points’ – including radar stations – from invasion. The country was desperate: there were no bullets for a fifteen year old’s rifle and little real hope of holding back an enemy invasion force. As he later recalled: ‘Since I had no bullets, if the Germans had come – I’d have
had to talk them to death.’ He remained with the training battalion for six months until news of his true age somehow became known to the authorities and he was discharged. His brother – serving in the Royal Artillery – was brought to the barracks to escort him home: ‘I didn’t like it. But I couldn’t do nothing about. I couldn’t make a fuss, I had to accept it.’ The situation was particularly galling since he knew some of the other boys were younger than him.

The question of the age was a difficult one. Many recruiting sergeants were happy to turn a blind eye to teenagers well below the age of eighteen coming to their offices. Even senior officers admitted to the problem, without taking steps to remedy underage recruitment. As the Secretariat of the Army Council reported: ‘It is the natural tendency of youths to pretend that they are older than they really are.’
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One battalion reported discharging 100 underage recruits. The 70th Battalion, Royal West Kents reported having to send home forty-five boys who were found to be underage, including fifteen-year-old Stan Scott. The headquarters of Southern Command even requested that the age limit be dropped to seventeen: ‘in point of fact, many boys now serving improperly are below this age’.
7

Every young man beginning military service went through a certain rite of passage. As one later recalled, joining the Army was like the initiation rite of some primitive tribe and ‘the shedding of adolescence for manhood’.
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Whilst this was true for all recruits, it was doubly true for the boys who joined underage. They underwent this initiation, not as their duty, but out of a sense of willing and eager defiance of the rules of the tribe. They were breaking the rules in order to join organizations that prided themselves on making sure their members obeyed the rules. Perversely, it was these youngsters who were prepared to break the rules that were often happier to accept military discipline than conscripts who waited to be called up.

As the situation settled down and it had become clear invasion was no longer imminent, there still remained a core of youngsters intent on serving their country before they reached the call-up age. As a result, many youngsters who were thrown out of the Army for being underage simply signed up again and joined other regiments. Stan Scott and Ted Roberts were among those who failed to be disheartened and returned to the recruiting office to re-enlist for training.

For Stan Scott, the decision was easy. He was keen to be a soldier and, since the Army was desperate for recruits, why shouldn’t he serve? Furthermore, he was bored by the lack of interest shown by his fellow members of the Home Guard:

After a lecture on their new machine-gun, Stan asked the instructor a number of questions. Afterwards, he was told: ‘You want to learn about it? Well, you can carry the poxy thing!’