Blitz Kids (25 page)

Whilst many underage volunteers, such as Ted Roberts and Stan Scott, faced the ignominy of being discharged from the Army when their true age was discovered, others were allowed to continue their training. Ron Leagas was sent to train with the East Surrey Regiment and immediately felt that everyone knew he was underage: ‘No one said anything, but there was an atmosphere where I was treated differently. The Sergeant always called me “son”, he never said that to anyone else. He was careful to show me how to do everything.’ After five weeks the matter came to a head when his commanding officer received the inevitable letter, sent by an aunt, revealing his true age. He was called into the office and asked: ‘It’s come to our attention that you are not as old as you say you are. What do you have to say to that?’ Ron kept up the pretence, telling the officer he had been born in 1923. He was told: ‘I’ll give you a chance. You can leave now if you want, because you are not old enough to be in the Army.’ Although he realized it was pointless to argue about his age, he pleaded with the officer: ‘But I’ve joined and I want to stay in.’ He was lucky. The officer simply stated: ‘You do? You want to stay? Well, good luck then.’ Then the sixteen year old was ushered out and allowed to continue his training.

At the end of his training, Ron requested he become a driver. His motivation was simple: he already had driving experience and had enjoyed it. At the age of fourteen he had taken a job as a driver’s mate. Since the driver often turned up drunk for night shifts, Ron had driven the lorry around London. As he saw it, he had been an underage driver in Civvy Street so he might as well be an underage driver in the Army.

For the first three months after joining the Army, Fred Walker threw himself into his training. Then, hardly feeling like a fully trained soldier, he and his mates were told to pack their kitbags and be ready to leave. As they marched back through town to the railway station crowds lined the roads, cheering them on and throwing cigarettes. It seemed they were being celebrated as they made their way to war. The reality was hardly so exciting: ‘All we did was go by train to King’s Lynn where we were guarding aerodromes. It was a Wellington bomber station. We were lucky. The Germans never attacked our
aerodrome.’ With so few fully trained personnel available, the Army couldn’t spare any men from the front-line units to guard what were known as ‘VPs’ – Vital Points. Instead, the ‘Young Soldiers’ – including so many who had falsified their age to join the Army – had their training curtailed to mount guard around the country. Following the bombing of Coventry the 70th Battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment was sent into the city to help clear the damage.

Serving with the 70th Battalion of the Royal Suffolk Regiment, Stan Scott found himself guarding an aerodrome in East Anglia. Upon arriving at the RAF base, they discovered it had recently been raided. There were wrecked planes around the airfield and the guard hut had been destroyed. He soon discovered why the enemy attack had been so effective: the air defence consisted of four Lewis guns mounted together. With the British Army so short of weapons, Stan Scott was told that they were to defend the airfield with an assortment of equipment:

His was a common experience. Initially, many of the ‘Young Soldiers’ (YS) battalions could only provide the most basic uniforms and equipment to the volunteers. In one YS battalion, a sixteen-year-old recruit recalled being issued a Canadian Ross rifle, a battledress uniform but no gaiters and a service respirator. He was lucky: the rest of his mates were issued with civilian gas masks in cardboard boxes, which were carried on a length of string. Others in the unit were initially issued with Wellingtons instead of boots. Some complained of receiving First World War uniforms and equipment, some of uniforms
bearing obvious signs of repair. The boys joked that some even had bullet holes in them. In the 70th Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment, C. T. Framp recalled: ‘Out on the march we resembled nothing so much as a ghost battalion of 1918.’
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Serving with the 70th Battalion, Essex Regiment, J. McGeouch later wrote: ‘I often wonder to whom the webbing had initially been issued and whether or not he had survived the Great War.’
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The use of YS battalions to guard aerodromes and carry out other duties was not universally popular. Whilst there was a need to protect such locations in the event of invasion, sending the ‘boys’ out on such duties before they were fully trained undermined their training. One War Office report described the duties given to these keen volunteers as being of the ‘deadening kind’. It was felt that they caused discontent and cramped ‘the style of youngsters straight off the streets and bursting with energy and enthusiasm’.
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That said, the duties gave the boys an opportunity to fight back whenever airfields came under attack. The 70th Battalion, The Essex Regiment manned anti-aircraft guns defending North Weald aerodrome. Between summer 1940 and early 1941 they were regularly attacked. Indeed, nine young soldiers were killed and a further sixteen wounded during one raid.

The training missed by the boys guarding aerodromes was of scant concern compared to the major issue troubling the War Office. During 1941 a series of reports were carried out to ascertain the quality of officers and training staff in the YS battalions. It was widely recognized that the first weeks of a soldier’s training left an indelible imprint upon him: if he received poor instruction he was likely to remain a poor soldier. The results of the survey were not encouraging. In many units, ageing officers with a limited concept of modern warfare were in charge of training the keenest young men in the entire Army. They were often of low mental and physical quality, lacking in leadership qualities. Many were in their forties, veterans of the Great War who were in a ‘fixed groove’ with limited knowledge of modern weapons and tactics.

One regiment described 60 per cent of the officers as being unsuitable, whilst one commanding officer was described as lacking, ‘the drive, initiative, and experience necessary to make a real success of a unit in which he is supported by subordinates of indifferent training and experience’.
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Another battalion was reported as having
five officers who had last undergone military training in 1919. In the words of a senior officer, the commanding officer of one of his training battalions was, ‘physically incapable of entering fully into the training and games of the youngsters’ and ‘merely a bad example and a bad influence’. As the officer noted: ‘Modern youth has little respect for grey hairs, and should be led by youth.’
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One officer trying to command a battalion of teenagers was reported as arthritic and in one battalion thirteen officers were returned to their parent units as being unsuitable. The commander of one battalion went as far as to describe his subordinate officers as ‘misfits’, with one company commander being ‘useless’.
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It was an officer of his training battalion that caused Stan Scott to receive an early transfer from a YS battalion to a regular unit. Whilst on guard duty he was confronted by the wife of his company commander who requested to be allowed to enter the camp by a side gate. He spoke with her briefly, then broke the rules by admitting her to the camp. The next day he was called before the company commander for daring to talk to his wife. The officer told him: ‘If I had my way, I’d take off my jacket and give you a bloody good thrashing.’ Stan rose to the challenge: ‘Go on then – try it and I’ll show you what a boy from Tottenham can do!’ The enraged officer threw him out. Within minutes, Stan had returned with a letter requesting a transfer back to his original regiment: ‘That paper hardly touched his desk. Straight away he gave me a rail warrant and orders to go to Deal to join the Royal West Kents.’

It was not just the officers. Many of the NCOs were also unsuitable. One commanding officer rejected an entire batch sent to him. Another rejected six from a draft of ten, telling his superiors they were ‘obviously unsuitable’.
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In the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire regiment (the ‘Beds and Herts’), the standard of NCOs was described as ‘deplorably low’.
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One sixteen-year-old volunteer later recalled the low standard of some of his instructors:

In other units, recruits were genuinely pleased by the quality of their instructors, being impressed by the experience of veteran soldiers. Stan Scott found himself being trained by a veteran sergeant-major who earned his respect. One night the sergeant-major caught him entering the camp after ‘lights out’, by crawling under the perimeter fence. The sixteen year old was expecting to be put on a charge but gave an honest answer when asked where he had been: ‘Over the road for a pint.’ The NCO told him that he had given the right answer, since he had seen him in there. Stan was sent back to his hut and no more was said of the incident.

The issue of ineffective staff meant that unsuitable volunteers caused disruption. In one report sent to the War Office, it was noted that the ‘boys’ would feel let down by the Army if high standards were not achieved: ‘We did not give them a fair start-off as the COs were below standard, and many of the officers and NCOs quite useless. The small number of young criminals exercised an influence out of all proportion to their numbers owing to inefficient NCOs.’
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The types of boys joining the Army were a genuine concern to all involved in developing the scheme to produce what was hoped to be the next generation of NCOs. As the headquarters of Eastern Command reported to the War Office, at the start recruiting officers had accepted young volunteers: ‘without reference to birth certificates, moral character, police records or criminal tendencies, large numbers of boys whose inclusion among lads of an impressionable age had a deplorable effect on discipline.’
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The Black Watch complained that many of its young soldiers were criminal types from the slums of Glasgow and one Scottish commanding officer had to discharge a gang of what he described as ‘razor slashers’.
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One volunteer noted the unexpected friendship between a ex-student from Balliol College, Oxford, and an ex-borstal boy. Private, later Captain, Collister noted: ‘The average soldier in our battalion was 18 to 19, had left school at 11, had a spell in a reform school, or possibly a Borstal, had had intermittent employment, and had seen enlistment as a heaven sent opportunity for escape and subsistence.’
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Another volunteer, C. T. Framp, described some of his fellow ‘young soldiers’ as: ‘anti-police, anti-authority and, not to put too fine a gloss upon it, anti-social’.
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With so many volunteers coming from the cities, the High
Command received reports that many of the boys lacked physical strength, due to having been raised in poverty and having endured poor diets. Southern Command noted that many of their ‘Young Soldiers’ were not genuine volunteers, but boys who had been bombed out of their homes in London and needed somewhere to go, complaining that many of these were ‘hooligans of low mentality and discipline’.
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Elsewhere it was reported that many of the boys were orphans who left children’s homes to volunteer. In Stan Scott’s unit there was one youngster who, having volunteered for the Army, had changed his mind and was attempting to get thrown out. His chosen method was to refuse to wash and to wet the bed every night. Another boy who changed his mind attempted to give himself ulcers by drinking polish.

The senior officers of the 70th Battalion, Beds and Herts were concerned that too many recruits were ‘boys of the Borstal type’ who were a bad influence on the good lads: ‘I have heard them described by various people as dirty, lazy, insubordinate and thoroughly bad soldiers’. In an uncharacteristic display of disloyalty, the commanding officer of the training centre even told former officers of the regiment that the presence of teenage criminals meant they should not send their sons to the 70th Battalion of the Beds and Herts. The Welch Regiment reported problems of theft, blamed on the ‘young gangsters’
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who had been recruited.

Whilst the types of youngsters volunteering for service caused initial concern, the situation soon settled. In late 1940 it was decided that all ‘Young Soldiers’ with criminal records would be discharged. The Royal Norfolk Regiment reported that a number of the recruits had come from Borstal or reform schools but gave no trouble and that two of the worst offenders became the smartest lads in the unit.

Despite the problems with the character of some volunteers, the units were useful for the assessment of potential officers. There were suggestions that such recruits should be segregated from the training units. However, this was dismissed by the High Command, which recognized it needed officers who understood the men they would command. By allowing them to undergo a full period of service as ‘Young Soldiers’, they would mix with boys from all classes, learning about all the varying types of men in the Army. Only after completing
their time in a 70th battalion were those who had shown potential sent to an officer selection board.