Archive: “National Service”
Our company commander had a fixation with camouflaging the vehicles, so that they were not visible from either the ground or the air. Accordingly, we had to make hessian windscreen covers, which could be rolled down to prevent reflections from betraying our hiding place. We also had to cut long wooden poles, which were carried […]
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In September of 1955 we Mortar Platoon drivers, along with our trucks, were told we would be attached, for the purposes of a coming exercise, one to each of the rifle companies. I was assigned to “B” company and duly reported for a company briefing. I was told that I would be required to provide […]
Read more »When on guard duty, patrolling the camp areas, one was equipped with a whistle, a torch and a pick-axe handle. This last item was known in military parlance as a “pick-helve” and was painted an army dark-green. It will not be difficult to understand that to patrol the camp area in the small hours, when […]
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The Battalion Provost Sergeant was an Irishman who went by the name of Paddy Hannafin. It is true to say that he was an even more unpleasant and unpopular man than one could reasonably expect, even of the Battalion’s policeman. Although I never heard it for myself, his greatest claim to fame was his instruction […]
Read more »Whilst on the R.A.F. Escape exercise, I came to know a chap whose surname was Dixon. He was at that time employed in “B” company as an officer’s batman and, as is often the case with men assigned to that task, was a young man of a shy and rather timid nature. I found him […]
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Whilst on collective training exercises, on the Luneberg Heath training area, we sometimes used an enormous camp known as Hohne. This, reputedly, had been the barracks which housed the guards who were employed at the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, during WW2. This melancholy relic of the Nazi regime was situated only a few kilometres away, […]
Read more »In early April of 1956, the battalion moved, en masse, from Minden back to the UK. On the day we were due to leave we had to vacate the barrack rooms, in order that they could be officially handed over to the vanguard of the South Dorset Regt. This meant that the whole of the […]
Read more »I have just come across this recording of Last Post being sounded and it brought back a very moving memory. I must point out that I am not, and never was a military man. I tolerated my National Service because I had no option, but, as my writings here show, it provided me with a […]
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In 1994 we, Susan, Lee, John, Sarah and I took a fortnight’s holiday in Rastenberg, an area which had formerly been part of East Germany. It had been agreed that we would drive up to Minden during this holiday, so that I could revisit the barracks and town. We made an abortive first attempt at […]
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When I left school at the age of fifteen, I went to work at a local garage. There I learnt to serve petrol, to squirt grease into the various points on the underside of a car and how to get cold, filthy and thoroughly miserable. I also learnt how ignorant, selfish and despicable an employer […]
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