Blitz Kids (50 page)

From New York the crew was sent across the continent to San Francisco to pick up their new ship. Once again, they had a delay before she was ready:

After a fortnight combining work and leisure, Arthur and the rest of the crew returned to the docks, the Red Ensign was raised on the ‘Liberty Ship' and, loaded with 10,000 tons of cargo and twelve US Army officers, they headed off across the Pacific.

For teenager Alan Simms, too young to drink when ashore in the United States, life was a precious commodity that had to be enjoyed whenever possible. He and his fellow apprentices had to ‘fiddle' their papers to ensure they could get served in bars: ‘We used to worry – you never knew if you'd get torpedoed, so we used to spend our money on drink. We thought we'd better enjoy ourselves in case we got torpedoed on the way home.'

While the young British sailors enjoyed life in port cities, some ports were more violent than others. Big cities were a great adventure but sailors were often confined to areas populated by other seafarers and dock labourers, and trouble often brewed. Bill Ellis witnessed this violence whilst waiting in Baltimore for his ship to be repaired:

Whilst in Gibraltar Boy Bugler Robin Rowe received good advice from a shipmate. He was warned to avoid fights with American sailors. It was not the sailors themselves he should worry about but the US Navy shore patrolmen who carried heavy nightsticks and lashed at anyone connected to fights, even bystanders.

Bill Ellis had similar experiences in a Scottish port: as well as feeling like outsiders in overseas ports, the boys of the Merchant Navy had to get used to British ports in places they might never have seen had it not been for the war. While it was easy for men and boys of all nationalities to blend in among the crowds in London, some of the smaller ports were more insular. Bill remembered his time based at Greenock in Scotland:

After the fight had broken up, a soldier approached Bill and asked him if it was him who had punched the ringleader in the back of the head. Bill denied it and the soldier replied: ‘That's my brother. But we're not going to do anything now. We'll be waiting outside for you.' Bill asked a local girl to help him get out without being seen. She put on her long, loose-fitting coat and he crouched down behind her, hiding in the folds of the coat, walking through the crowds past the gang who were looking for him. However, she soon betrayed him to the gang, who chased him up the street. Eventually, he got away and returned safely to the ship.

The next week Bill returned to the dance hall, this time with a larger group of men from his ship:

One of the blokes with us was a hard nut – he'd worked in the circus before the war. They announced someone was going to sing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland'. So my mate stood up and shouted, ‘You can keep your “Bluebells of Scotland”. There'll always be an England!' We had to go out through the fire exit – running for our lives.

After being sunk by a submarine in the Atlantic, Christian Immelman landed at Cape Town in South Africa. The crew's rescuers sent them by launch to the quayside where they expected to be met by a reception committee from Shell. There was no one there to meet them and not a soul to be seen:

The next morning he took the opportunity to send a cable home to his parents: ‘Ship sunk. Arrived Cape Town OK.'

When Albert Riddle arrived in Cape Town in 1941, he was stunned by the reception received by British sailors: ‘The people were wonderful to us. They lined the dockside with hundreds of cars and the people grabbed us as we went ashore and took us out for the day.' The best part was that the South Africans were able to write home on behalf of the boys. Albert knew his parents would appreciate some knowledge of his whereabouts: ‘My parents were baffled – they'd never even been outside the village and suddenly they get a letter from South Africa! They didn't believe it. They'd never even been to Plymouth!' By the
time the letter reached his parents, he was far away in Singapore, after the sinking of HMS
Prince of Wales.

The foreign ports had another advantage. They were a fantastic location for shopping trips, making merchant seamen very popular when they returned home with their 25 lb-allowance of food that was available in foreign ports but rationed in the UK. In Buenos Aries merchant seamen were able to purchase pre-prepared boxes of food, designed to provide a selection of goods unavailable at home, including luxuries like tinned ham. As one recalled: ‘I would go home with it and Mother would open it up! Fantastic.' The ports of the world offered the teenage Arthur Harvey shopping opportunities of which he had never previously dreamed: ‘You could get suits made in India, if you had the money. I got measured in the morning, and the suit was ready by teatime. I also got my shirts handmade.' On his first trip to New York in 1943 he purchased clothes for his baby sister and bought nylon stockings to impress his girlfriends back in Portsmouth.

Neutral ports were also a good place to barter. British seamen who had goods to sell or exchange took items ashore to see what they could get. Ex-
Vindicatrix
boy Bill Ellis remembered a wartime visit to Seville:

When the Spanish soldiers guarding the docks realized he was going into town to trade, they stopped him and demanded cigarettes as a bribe for allowing him to leave port carrying his trade goods.

Sailing the world was an eye-opening experience for all the boys. They not only learned how to enjoy themselves, but also about the iniquities of world. Bernard Ashton sailed with men of all nationalities, who lived and worked together without concern. On one trip to Australia he was shocked when his friend was refused service in a bar.
The seaman, from the streets around London's docks, who Bernard thought of as ‘a real Cockney', had been singled out for his black skin. And in the southern ports of the United States, Bernard watched in disgust as policemen beat the feet of black men sleeping in the streets.

One of the least popular ports was Murmansk in northern Russia. It was just fifteen miles from the border with German-occupied Norway, making it uncomfortably close to the front line. Most of the British seamen thought the town cold and dull, with few facilities for them. However, not everybody felt the same. Some appreciated the efforts made by the Russians to entertain them. Jock Dempster, who arrived in Murmansk as a sixteen year old, later described the facilities:

The one thing that set the seamen apart from others was that they were able to bring things home. They brought home new suits from Indian tailors, food from South America, rum from the West Indies, toys from the United States and cloth from around the world for wives, mothers and girlfriends. Most importantly, they returned home dressed in a manner that set them apart from their contemporaries. Bernard Ashton recalled returning home after his epic journey that had seen him buy,
then lose, two sets of fashionable clothing when his two consecutive ships were sunk: ‘I arrived home in my new American suit. And I had patterned socks. Imagine that in a mining village in 1942! If only I'd come home with my blue-striped beach suit, panama hat and two-tone shoes from Puerto Rico!'

In summer 1944, with the coming of the long-awaited ‘Second Front’, many of the soldiers who had volunteered whilst underage finally saw their chance to go to war. In many cases it had been a long wait: Ted Roberts, a volunteer aged fourteen, and Stan Scott, a volunteer aged fifteen, were both now nineteen. Fred Walker, who had joined the Army aged sixteen, and taken part in the Dieppe operation before he reached the call-up age, was now a twenty-year-old veteran of Sicily and Italy. Even his mate John Tupper, who had been just sixteen at Dieppe and who had also fought in the Mediterranean, had finally reached the age of eighteen. They were part of a force that was largely untried, most of whom had only experienced war during the Blitz.

Underage volunteer Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes spent the final six weeks of 1942 undergoing basic training at Berwick-upon-Tweed, where he
celebrated
his seventeenth birthday, before being transferred to the 70th (Young Soldiers) Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry. The unit trained incessantly, spending their days marching at high speeds and their nights on guard duty. Bill recalled the marching songs he and his fellow young soldiers sang as they tramped through the lanes of North Yorkshire: ‘We are the good ol’ DLI. We’ll meet the enemy by and by,
every man in the regiment is willing to do or die – Cor blimey.’ However, Sykes was less than certain about the emotions of the song: ‘I don’t remember being willing “to do or die” for anyone at any period, then or now.’

However, the proximity of death at any time in the infantry soon became apparent to him. On exercises, live rounds were fired to give the youngsters an idea of what it would be like in battle:

Whilst training, Bill noted:

In Autumn 1943 part of the battalion was detached to act as reinforcements in the Mediterranean. This spurred Bill on to make a move and so, partly attracted by the higher rate of pay, he volunteered for the Parachute Regiment. After a brief, but intense, series of exercises in the Yorkshire Moors, designed by the battalion commander to toughen up the ‘Young Soldiers’ who had volunteered to be paratroopers, Bill was transferred to the 7th (Light Infantry) Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, joining them at their Physical Training Depot at Hardwick Hall in Chesterfield on 9 September 1943 for six weeks of physical training designed to ‘toughen them up’ for service as paratroopers.

Having passed the initial course, he was then sent for parachute training at Ringway outside Manchester. Whilst a constant stream of volunteers were ‘returned to unit’, Bill progressed from tower jumps to a balloon and then finally to an aircraft:

Bill was one of the survivors, qualifying as a paratrooper just in time for his eighteenth birthday.

Eric Davies, who had joined the 1/5th Queen’s Regiment in North Africa, then served in Sicily and Italy, was now a nineteen-year-old ‘veteran’. Having returned from the Mediterranean, the battalion began to absorb newly conscripted men. In the four short months that he had been in action, Eric had gone from lance corporal to sergeant and seen the full fury of war. He was determined to do all he could to protect the new arrivals by passing on knowledge that might save their lives: ‘We kept at it morning and night, trying to instil into them that training was the best way of staying alive.’ When they practised working alongside tanks, the veterans taught them to stay safe, pressing home the dangers of standing too close to the lumbering steel beasts. They gave tips on house-to-house fighting; how to stay under cover and not reveal themselves to the enemy; how to dig and cover slit trenches; how to crouch when advancing; how to recognize the sounds that spelled danger. Though Eric was just a year older than the men he was helping to train, he had much to offer.

Among the conscripts listening to these lessons was Bill Fitzgerald. His previous experience of war had been with the Army Cadets, training to defend London’s Paddington Station. Now he was an eighteen-year-old infantryman about to join the spearhead of the invasion. After basic training he joined the 1/5th Queen’s Regiment. At first he was unsure about being transferred into a veteran unit but soon realized the advantages: ‘We felt proud when we sewed on the Desert Rats flash. The veterans were a well-hardened bunch. They’d been through it all. But they were really good – they looked after us. They had to teach us what they knew. They wanted us to be able to watch their backs.’ Also joining the Queen’s Regiment at this time was Ron Leagas, who had defied his parents to volunteer as a sixteen year old in 1941: ‘It was awkward to join the 7th Armoured Division like
that – mixing with all the veterans. I found them all right but there was always an atmosphere between us. Some of them had contempt for us, because we hadn’t experienced anything – but it wasn’t our fault.’

The advice Bill Fitzgerald and his mates received was something they had not been taught in the Army Cadet Force. The new-boys listened as the veterans passed on their advice: ‘Don’t hesitate or you are dead! If you see one, fire. Don’t think about who he is or what you are going to do – if you hesitate, he’ll get you first.’ They asked about hand-to-hand fighting: ‘Try never to get to that point. Shoot them before they get that close. If you can see them, shoot them. They might be bigger and stronger than you – you fall over and they’ll put a bayonet in you.’ It was not just the conversations that helped:

As time passed, Bill realized the value of being put in a veteran unit: ‘We didn’t realize what was going on, but we needed to be mixed in with the veterans. Without them, us eighteen year olds would have gone into action and we’d have been wiped out.’

By 1944 the latest batches of soldiers preparing themselves for war was a generation of boys born in the mid-1920s, many of whom had been schoolboys at the outbreak of war. Their teenage years had been marked by war, thousands were former members of the Army Cadets and Home Guard who had taken their first steps in military life as they were hastily assembled to ward off invasion. The youth of this latest batch of fighting ‘men’ was shown by the fact that some had been schoolboy evacuees in 1939. Among them was Bill Edwardes, who had first heard news of the declaration of war during his first church service as an evacuee.

Aged fourteen, and living in Wales with his mother and her aunt, he told them he wanted to get back to London. With the Blitz having subsided, the family returned to London where he found work:

By March 1943, he was frustrated by life on the production line. The hours were long, the work boring and repetitive, but there were few opportunities for boys whose education had been curtailed by war. With austerity measures affecting everyday life, and little to do except go to the cinema or the pub: ‘I was bored to tears with going to work every day. I wanted some excitement: and I got it!’ He voiced his frustrations to a friend: ‘I said, “I’m fed up with this.” He was seventeen-and-a-half. I asked if he was registered for service, but he said they hadn’t called his group yet so he was going to volunteer for the Army.’ For Bill Edwardes, it was a sudden decision: ‘Right, I’m coming with you.’ After work they made their way to their local recruitment office and offered their service, with Bill going through the traditional routine of adding more than a year to his age:

On his way home he cashed the postal order and brought a packet of cigarettes. Arriving home, he broke the news to his mother. Shocked, she asked why he had done it rather than wait for his call-up in eighteen months’ time: ‘Mum, it might be all over before I get a chance to join in.’ Knowing that she could march him straight back to the recruiting office and reveal the truth, he asked what she was going
to do. She was honest in her answer: ‘No. If that’s what you want to do, go and do it. You’ll never be satisfied otherwise.’ However, as he later admitted: ‘Many’s the time after, when the situation wasn’t too good, that I put my hands together and said, “Mum, why didn’t you tell them? I don’t want to be here!”’

He underwent primary training in Maidstone, with the Royal West Kent Regiment, where he had to learn the ways of the Army. At first it was difficult; standing out as the youngest, most fresh-faced of the new recruits – and being recognized as underage by most of the others – Bill soon learned the need to stand up for himself. At first he faced bullying by one of the conscripts in his barrack hut:

Apart from learning the basics of soldiering, he also needed to learn that being a soldier was about more than marching and firing rifles. On one occasion he was slouching past the company office with two of his mates when he heard a booming voice: ‘You three, come here at the double!’ It was Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM) Tasker, a small but fierce man, with a tremendous reputation. ‘In my office now!’ The three recruits doubled into his office in the expectation of some punishment:

Then the RSM reverted to type: ‘Get out of here! Don’t let me see you slouching like that again!’

Having overcome the bullying, Bill Edwardes proved the RSM right and became determined to remain an infantryman, rather than opting for one of the other arms of service. At the end of primary training he was called into the company office and told he had been selected for training as a signaller. He was swift to reply: ‘Oh no, sir, I want to go into the infantry.’ However, as he later realized: ‘What a bloody fool I was!’ Back in London on leave he confirmed that the ageing RSM had been right. He was proud to be in uniform and swaggered through the streets. The uniform meant he was no longer a child: at home he was no longer the baby of the family, even if his mother did cry to see her little boy dressed in his khaki. When he met up with his old mates some thought he was crazy to have volunteered when he could have been living in London and working in a factory. But Bill knew that he had grown up, whilst the others still seemed like children: ‘I walked up Holloway Road thinking I was Jack the Lad. I went and had my portrait taken, and being the lad I was improperly dressed with my collar open.’ Bill Edwardes was then transferred to the 1st Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment, where he joined C Company. The following months were a whirl of activity as the troops underwent heavy training in preparation for the inevitable invasion of Europe. For sixteen-
year-old

Bill, the training was hard-going since he lacked the physical strength of the older men. In sessions where they alternated between marching and running, Bill struggled to keep up and was seen by his officers to be in difficulty. To remedy the situation, he was sent to a special training camp where under-strength recruits were put on a special diet and training regime to increase their strength and stamina. It worked: after two weeks Bill returned to the Worcesters and rejoined his company.