During the day there was a story that suddenly, on one of our wireless sets, a German had been heard asking for information. The Signaller recognised the accent and said, “Fuck off, Fritz.” The answer was instant, “Alright, English bastards, Off.”
Thank God. Naafi today! A tin of fifty fags. With trembling hands we pounced on them and soon we are wreathed in smoke. I notice three brass hats with maps walking to a position behind our guns; one carried a shooting stick. He was a tall dignified man with lots of medal ribbons (or were they laundry marks?). I watched as he placed his shooting stick behind him and sat down. There was a pause, then the whole shaft of the stick disappeared slowly into the muddy ground, leaving the owner on his back. Guffaws from us all. The Colonel rose to his feet and shouted, “It’s not funny.” There was a great chorus back, “Oh yes it is.”
Alf Fildes has been bed down, he’s got the squitters and we keep our distance. Gunner Roberts and Gunner Ferrier sleep next to each other; now, Roberts talks in his sleep. Somewhere in the wee hours he says, “You’re next, you’re next.” Ferrier, half asleep, says ‘Alright’, gets up, gets dressed and goes on guard.
OCTOBER 23, 1943
Today non-stop firing. In the Command Post there’s hardly time to light a fag in between Fire Orders. A party of our linesmen have nearly been driven mad; they have been reeling in what was an old telephone line. They went on reeling in for two miles only to discover that another battery was in fact reeling it out. Harry comes back on M truck and says, “We’re all bloody mad, fancy two bloody miles of reeling in a line and another sloppy lot are laying it out. Good job we caught ‘em up, otherwise we’d be the other side of the bloody Alps by now.”
The mosquitoes are so bad that an official complaint has been made to the MO and now three engineers with spray guns are going round squirting the countryside and our dinners; it helped a little, but far too late. The mosquitoes had left, why?
“They couldn’t find any space between the bites,” says Fuller, whose face resembled a side of beef with scabs on.
Some of the lads’ scratches went septic and they were daubed with some pink stuff that made them look like Indians in war paint. They came dancing from the MO’s tent with war whoops.
OCTOBER 23, 1943, NIGHT
Command Post: I sat on a much-treasured wooden box, in front of me a telephone, a message pad, the panel control of the Tannoy; this last mentioned connected up a loudspeaker to each gun. Through this you relayed the orders. You would pass on the Command Post Officer’s orders.
Me: Take post!
A Sub: A Sub answering.
B Sub: B Sub answering.
Me: Angle of sight ‘something something’ degrees, Range 15,000.
The subsections would then all answer back the orders to acknowledge.
The OP spotting fall of shot would come back. “More three degrees or add 500 (yds”) and so on till you hit whatever it was.
On this particular shoot, we were trying to silence Nebel-wurfers. Six o’clock we get the BBC news. The Russians have broken through between Dneiperpertrovsk and Che molk, large bridgehead created threatening Kiev. Goodski!
As we listen, the Naples sirens go, at once the Ack-Ack opens up. We duck through our canvas wall and see the sky alive with tracer. It was one of the entertainments of war, a sort of early television.
“See anything last night?”
“Smashin’ air raid on Naples.”
“Are they going to repeat it?”
We can hear the distant drone of Jerry planes approaching. We sit tight as they fly overhead, a short sharp burst of MG fire and a plane bursts into flames, immediately, a fiery coffin in the sky plunges a thousand yards south of us, hits the ground and explodes. The grapevine was soon through, a Jerry!! Great! It crashed near 18 Battery, a hundred yards from the Battery latrine, where the occupants had flung themselves to the ground, shattering their meditations. It was 8.30, my relief was Signaller Thornton. He saunters in.
“Evenin’ all, see the fireworks?”
I bid Lt. Wright goodnight.
“Thanks for the help, Milligan, leave the pencil, it’s the only one we’ve got.”
I pushed into the dark, and stumbled towards where the Ten Line exchange was. Behind the canvas blackout flap I hear Edgington struggling with the calls.
“Just a minute—er—wot?—hold it, sorry sir—I oops! I gave you the wrong line—hello 19 Battery here, who? Just a minute—blast, what the—” buried by 18 Battery.
“See? 18 Battery again,” says Chalky White. “They get all the fun.”
Gunner Devine is passing with a bandage on his hand.
“There’s a curse on 19 Battery,” he says solemnly.
“A curse?” queries Edgington. “What is it?”
“Fuck ‘em,” said Devine, a great Liverpudlian grin on his unshaven face.
“That is indeed a terrible curse,” says Bombardier Milligan. “I wonder who put it on us.”
“It’s ‘Jumbo’ Jenkins, ‘ees the bleedin’ curse on us,” said White.
“Fuck him,” said Devine.
“See? There goes that curse again,” says Edgington.
Edgington borrows Fildes’ guitar, and off duty, we have a little sing-song in our dug-out.
“Ahhhh! There you are,” says a voice followed by the body of Sgt-Major Griffin. Our much-beloved Welshman has that half evil, half benign smile on his face. Before we can dive for cover, he says, “You, you, you, and you,” all the while pointing at me, “we’re moving, lads.”
A great groan rents the air.
“Oh, cheer up now,” he says in a mock cheery voice, “the King is going to let you all have a nice shovel on loan for the day.”
More terrible groans.
“We are going to make some nice little holes in the ground for our guns.”
We are all packed off in a three-tonner. We drive through Sparanise, badly shelled and bombed, some buildings still smouldering. The inhabitants are in a state of shock, women and children are crying, men are searching among the ruins for their belongings or worse, their relatives. It was the little children that depressed me the most, that such innocence should be put to such suffering. The adult world should forever hang its head in shame at the terrible, unforgivable things done to the young…despite all this the lads strike up a song.
“Bang away Lulu, Bang away Lulu, Bang away good and strong, What you gonna do when you want a blow through and yer Lulu’s dead an’ gone”
…a line of German prisoners go past, our wheels splatter them with mud, as usual we give them the full treatment of raspberries, two fingers and Heil Hitler salutes. They don’t even bother to look back, they trudge on, all in step.
“Lucky sods, it’s all over for them,” says Gunner White.
The new position is a small flat area, about a couple of miles north of our last position, behind a railway bank, with rising wooded ground behind us. Again we are to use a dried-up stream bed to install ourselves. It’s very much like the last position. My diary describes the day thus:
EVENING: ON FORWARD RECCY, NICE DEEP STREAM BED (DRY) FOR ALL PERSONNEL. MOST OF NIGHT SPENT DIGGING. CAN HEAR MORTARS PUTTING UP SOME HOT FIRE. SLEPT LIKE A DEAD MAN, AWOKE AT STAND-TO 4.30 AM. WE ARE STILL DIGGING. NO JERRY SHELLING TODAY (ONE OR TWO ODD ONES MAYBE). WROTE TO MUM AND DAD. HEAVY ACK-ACK BATTERIES MOVING IN AROUND US.
BSM Griffin, seen here with a broken arm caused by over-saluting and drink.
OCTOBER 26, 1943
No sleep. Feeling tired. During the day the guns arrived and spread themselves about in their unexplainable pattern, two were ahead of us and two behind us with their backs to the wood. The Command Post was not to the liking of the Major.
“He doesn’t like it,” said Chalky White. “Nobody likes a Command Post, you don’t see soldiers goin’ around sayin’ ‘I like Command Posts’.”
“He says it’s not big enough.”
All hell is let loose, Ack-Ack start blazing away, we all go h
ead-first to the deck, a swarm of MEs roar over the position at nought feet. We hear the Major shouting, “Tommy Guns…Tommy Guns.”
A laconic voice, “Tommy Guns is on leave, sir.”
Edgington first to rise to his feet. “Any questions?” he says.
He knelt over me, made a sign of the cross and then started to feel my pockets for fags. I am notoriously ticklish, and using one hand to tickle and convulse me, the other had withdrawn my fags. There followed a friendly struggle during which Major Jenkins appears and says, “What is going on, this isn’t a nursery, Bombardier, you ought to know better. Get these men on with the digging.”
I jumped up and Yes-sirred him on his way. He’s back before we stop giggling. “Did any of you men fire at those planes?” he said.
We admit we didn’t. I explained. “It’s not easy to shoot down planes with shovels, sir.”
“You will keep your side arms within reach, next time I expect to hear a volley.”
“Very good, sir.”
In an hour the planes flew over, and we let fly. The Major is running up, waving his arms. “No, no, bloody fools, they’re ours.”
“Don’t worry, sir, when they fly back again, we’ll apologise,” I said.
He didn’t know how to take me, he stood there clenching his fists, his face a mask of frustration.
It was a mixed day of planes, one moment Jerry, then the RAF, then Jerry. The Ack-Ack boys took no chances and fired at the lot. The Major was nearly out of his mind by day’s end trying to co-ordinate all our efforts for maximum retaliation. Late that night, we hear him mournfully playing Schubert’s Serenade on his clarionet. Smudger Smith on A Sub Gun answered it by howling like a dog. The Major sent Woods, his batman, to find out who the offender was. As fast as he silenced one howl, another one would start somewhere else; the pay-off was an actual farm dog behind us who took up the howling, and nobody could stop him.
Oh that night! Had we not learnt our lesson of not occupying empty stream beds, gullies etc.? No, we hadn’t, so and lo! it raineth. By morning we had all learnt our lesson of not occupying etc. etc., and were mud covered and ankle deep in it. The Major, with memories of the Somme, orders a mile of duck boards. Meantime we attempt to scrape the mud off, we carve it off with a jack-knife like dough. Sgt. Donaldson dries the mud with a blow torch and breaks it off with a hammer, but not before setting his trousers alight! The duck boards arrived, in white pinewood, which stood out like a mark for all Jerry planes to bomb. Sure enough, the day after, there is a sudden roar of planes, Ack-Ack guns shooting everyone up the arse, Jerry machine-gunning for all his worth, all of us running in all directions, down holes, up trees, behind walls, under lorries, all in a split second, we looked like an early Keystone Cops movie. Major Jenkins had emptied his Webley pistol at the raiders and dropped it in the mud.
“Listen, all you lot.” It’s Sgt. King talking in his clipped nasal cockney voice. “These duckboards ‘ave been adjudged as too ‘conspicious’, therefore we must go a-tramplin’ on them until they match the rest of Italy.”
The rest of the day we spend stamping in the mud and then stomping it on to the duckboards.
“If my mother knew I was doin’ this, she’d go and shoot Churchill.”
“How?” said Gunner White looking down at the brown sea, “how can we get out of this before we all go stark ravin’ bloody mad?” He looked up to heaven and said, “God, save us from all this fucking around.”
The position became known as the Wembley Exhibition.
“I’ve got a culinary surprise, lads,” said Spike Deans.
He has just come off Command Post duty, the hour is 0600; none of us are pleased by the awakening.
“Why, in God’s name, do we, the innocent of this parish, have to be aroused at this unearthly bloody hour?”
Deans taps the side of his nose with his finger, but nothing falls out, he gives a sly wink.
“It’s to the lucky one’s advantage tonight. In funkhole No. 3, I will be preparing a repast that I am willing to offer at five fags a go.”
There is a general stirring at this announcement.
“What’s the grub?” says bleary-eyed Edgington.
“Never mind what it is, it will be better than what the cookhouse give you; it will be served at 2000 hours, there’s enough for five portions.” So saying, he exited.
“Five fags is a lot to swop for a dinner,” I said.
“Yer,” says Birch, “supposing we don’t like the grub, do we get the fags back?”
A guffaw from White follows, “You’re joking, if I know Deans ‘e’s only doin’ this because he’s short of snouts.”
“I’ve had enough of compo grub, I’ll chance it,” says Edgington, arising from his mud-encrusted blankets.
“Me too,” said Bombardier Milligan. “I’m trying to cut down on fags, and build up on food.”
“I’ll help you cut down on fags,” says Gunner White, who is pulling on a pair of underpants so ragged that they looked like lace, “I’ll smoke yours fer you.”
Through the day we got that which the farmers in the Sahara were dying for; it poured, it trickled through every aperture, the rim of my tin hat was a hanging ring of pear-shaped watery pearls. A merry game! Turn your head, see if you can make them run around the rim without letting any drop off.
A Catholic priest visited us this evening and asked if anyone wanted Confession and Holy Communion. I nearly went but since the war started, my belief in a God had suffered a reverse. I couldn’t equate all the killing by two sides, both of whom claimed to be a Christian society. I was, as Gary Cooper would say ‘kinda mixed up inside’.
Talking of mixed up inside brings us to the Deans evening gastronomique. He had cooked it in half a kerosene oil tin, which now sat over a fire of diesel. “It’s got curry in,” he warned.
Edgington, White, Birch, Bdr. Fuller and myself sat expectantly squeezed into the dug-out.
“Right,” said Deans. From the tin of boiling water appears a giant suet roll which he has boiled in the sleeve of an old vest, he places it on a piece of wood. “First!” he said. We all hold out tins. He cut a slice of the roll, from it oozed a curry stain gravy with what looked like thin french beans and Dobies’ Four Square tobacco. With the first mouthful I let out a scream. It was like eating raw chillies.
“Too hot is it?” enquired Deans.
I lay rolling on the ground begging for water.
“I’ll break it down a bit,” he said, and started mixing in hot water, turning the whole thing into a ghastly-looking death grey.
“What’s this stringy stuff,” said munching Edgington.
“That?” said Deans. “It’s grass.”
There was a shocked silence. Edgington, his mouth still open with shock. “Grass?” he said, “GRASS??”
“Now don’t get angry,” said Deans, “it’s grass but specially selected.”
“Yes,” Edgington said, “specially selected for idiots like us! I’m not givin’ you five fags for bloody grass. I mean, I can graze free with the bloody cows.”
“Look! if you think you’ve been diddled, OK, but answer the question; until Trotsky ‘ere—” he pointed to Edgington “—asked what it was, you were all enjoying it, weren’t you? Believe me, in the Alps Maritime, this dish is considered a delicacy.”
It did taste OK really, and by now the cookhouse would be closed, so basically we had no option.
“But,” Birch added, “we should have been given warning.”
“I wanted there to be an element of surprise in it.”
“Oh, we were fucking surprised alright,” said White, who then broke the bad news. “And I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said. “I haven’t got any fags.”
“You sod,” said Deans.
White grinned. “All life is six to four against,” he said.
A head pokes in the dug-out, it’s Ben Wenham.
Spike Deans waiting to steal a lorry.
“The news is on in the Command
Post.”
We all rush there to hear the BBC Announcer saying, “Heavy rain and conditions under foot, are slowing the Allied advance in Italy.”
“Good heavens, it’s raining here then,” said Edgington, putting on an idiot grin. “It’s strange—he never mentioned it.”
“Mentioned what?”
“He never mentioned that in Italy we’d had curried grass for dinner.”
I was on CP duty from eight-thirty. The weather had stopped the war. There was no firing save a few pre-planned harassing fire tasks. I wrote a letter home, then played Battleships with Lieutenant Wright, a slight, dark-eyed, gentle-faced young man, who looked as out of place in a war as Quasimodo in the Olympic high-jump finals. (Supposing he’d won?) We had the 22 Set beamed on to Allied Forces Network, now operating from Naples. I remember that night how nostalgic I got when just before midnight they started to play Duke Ellington—Riverboat Shuffle! Outside I went knee-deep in water and did my own Riverside Shuffle back to my dug-out. My bed was raised on two large empty 8lb potato tins. Edgington was awake, writing a 10,000-page love letter to Peg.
“Still up?” I said.
“No,” he said. “It went down an hour ago.” He took the fag from his mouth. “I’m drawing on my last reserves of energy.”
“Very quiet in the Command Post,” I said as I slid my muddy boots off. “I beat Mr Wright three games to nil at Battleships.”
“If that gets around he could be cashiered,” said Edging-ton.
I pulled myself wearily under my blankets. (Hadn’t I better rephrase that?) I fell asleep leaving sexually frustrated Edgington trying to work it out in writing. He certainly had a lot of lead in his pencil.
OCTOBER 27, 1943
REGIMENTAL DIARY:
Infantry pushing forward all day, we are bombarding and firing Y targets. Some slight enemy retaliation but not much.
Good news! We are allowed to write home and actually tell our families that we are in Italy. Oh hooray.
Memoires 04 (1978) - Mussolini, His Part In My Downfall Page 8