7. Training in England

  United Kingdom
  November, 1944 - December, 1944

We were on board the Samaria for 11 days before we landed in Plymouth, England. During the trip my company was assigned to KP duty. This was an advantage and not a chore. Since there were so many troops on board it was not possible to serve them all three meals a day so they only received breakfast and dinner. Those of us on KP got three meals and since there wasn't anything else to do on board ship anyway, KP was very good duty. The mess area was not nearly as clean as in American messes but the food was pretty good considering the number of meals that were served each day.

During the trip to England, the convoy had very good luck. There was only one time that the escort ships seemed to do anything out of the ordinary. About 3 days out of England one of the escorts took off and dropped a couple of depth charges. Except for that it was a very quiet and uneventful trip - fortunately. By late 1944 the German U-boats were not having nearly as good a time of it as they had had earlier which we didn't know then. We were just glad that they didn't show up.

I did not get seasick during the entire trip. I guess I was a natural born sailor. Even on all the trips that I have taken on ships since then, I have been very fortunate and have never been seasick. One poor fellow in my squad got sick before we left harbor I think and he was in his sack for the entire trip. The closest I came was when other people near me got sick - that almost made me sick.

It was just a short two to three hour ride from Plymouth to our billet at Tidworth Barracks. Tidworth was a permanent army base for the British army. We traveled there on one of the types of trains that you see in the English movies. It had compartments seating about six people in each. We had a beautiful view of the English countryside because the train didn't go very fast for some reason.

Tidworth is a small town to the southwest of London. It is on the Salisbury Plain where Stonehenge is located. I do not think we passed too near Stonehenge and I don't think I had even heard of it when I was there. I'm sure I would have tried to visit it if I had known about it. I guess my education of foreign places was lacking.

Tidworth Barracks had quite a few permanent buildings, which were named for places in British Army history like Delhi, Jellilibad, etc. The infantry of course got it again since we were bivouacked outside of the Barracks in pyramidal tents. The good billets inside went to the tankers, artillery and administrative personnel.

It was cold in England in November and December 1944. The weather was mild, with not much rain or snow, but it was damp and clammy most of the time. It was not very comfortable sleeping on canvas cots in this kind of weather. The tents housed eight men each so we were pretty snug inside. The flaps around the bottom did very little to keep out the cold or the wind. We were issued some mattress covers to use so we filled them up with straw, which helped a little to keep the cold out but not much. I think we would have been warmer on the ground because the cold air could not get under you there.

During our training, we were selected to give a demonstration to troops of the 101st Airborne Division showing them how armored divisions operated. They were one of the divisions that had participated in the 'Market Garden' fiasco planned and executed by the 'ferocious rabbit' Montgomery. They had only been back in England for about six weeks and were training the replacements that they were receiving.

The demonstration consisted primarily of riding around the countryside on the backs of the tanks to show how we did it. The men of the 101st were not too impressed needless to say and voiced several comments to that fact. After we had completed the demonstration it was suggested that they might like to try a ride on the tanks. As soon as the tanks were out of sight of the reviewing officers, they took off through some pretty rough terrain and tossed most of the airborne troops off. After retrieving them, no more was heard of their opinions, which they probably still had but did not voice to us anymore.

The English people were very nice to 'us Yanks'. The English servicemen were not quite so nice. They had a standing joke that there were only three things wrong with the Yanks: they were over paid, they were over sexed, and they were over here. We got to go into town a lot and we visited the pubs and with many English families nearby. We drank more tea than beer much to our regret. I don't think there was a single night that went by without someone getting up to go to the bathroom. Tea was worse than beer for that. Regardless of what time of night you were up, you could also see people from other tents out there too.

In addition to going to the pubs we occasionally were able to have dinner with an English family. They were short on rations but they still shared with us and we would take them extra rations from out mess if we could acquire them. We also went to a few dances where there were ATS and Red Cross girls. ATS was known as 'Any Time Soldier' but I think it stood for 'Auxiliary Training Service'.

I think it was during the week of my birthday in 1944 that I got a pass to London. It was for 48 hours and we were billeted in Red Cross facilities close to downtown London when we got there. I did get to see some of the sights during the daylight hours but it was fairly hard to get around after dark because of the blackout, especially if you were not familiar with the area. I got to see Picadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square and many of the other historic sights in London.

The really exciting part of our trip to London was when a German bomb came down a couple of blocks away. It blew up late at night while were in bed and was close enough to break glass in the windows, rattle the walls, and almost shake us out of bed. We really didn't know at the time what had happened and thought it may have been a bombing raid. I was never sure whether it was a bomb, a V-1 rocket or a V-2 rocket.

The countryside around Tidworth Barracks looked much like the English moors that you see in the movies. There were a few isolated groups of trees around but it was mostly open plains. This made it fairly good country for training tank troops. We probably did more riding on the back of tanks here than we did during the entire war. We certainly did not have that kind of training in Louisiana where it was almost all infantry training.

We also did our best to ruin the countryside during our training. It looked pretty badly after a group of tanks went racing around spinning their tracks and in general chewing up the land. The half-tracks also added their bit to the havoc and devastation. Our training went on almost daily during the entire time we were in England.

The Ardennes Campaign started on December 16, 1944. Shortly thereafter, we began making preparations for shipping out. Our equipment was going with us on this trip rather than being sent separately. The extra jeeps and trucks were a problem because they were not allowed to take any vehicle that was not authorized in the T/O & E - Table of Organization and Equipment - and they would have to be left behind.

We continued training while we were waiting to ship out. A good part of our time during this period was also taken up in testing and checking out our tanks and half-tracks. I heard that many of them had been on a transport that had been sunk in the harbor and been reconditioned and assigned to us. I do know that they were in pretty bad shape. When we first picked up our half-track the most we could get out of it on level ground was about 15 miles per hour. There was definitely something wrong with it.

Some of the equipment acquisition consisted of stealing it from motor pools and other units. Some of our drivers would take a junky half-track to a motor pool on some pretense, exchange it with a good one sitting in the supply line, and driving out another gate. We wound up with some pretty good equipment this way. Some extra jeeps and trucks were also acquired which came in handy in running around England. This moonlight requisition process was not even frowned on by the officers - in fact I think they encouraged it. I do not think we were allowed to take the extra vehicles with us on the ship when we sailed for France - we could take only the number we were assigned.

There was a large theater sitting just outside of our bivouac area on the plains. It looked like something out of the movies because there was not a thing around it. It was just sitting on the side of this small hill. It was called the 'Hippodrome' - what else? - and they had movies which we could attend when we were off duty. I was surprised to find that the English allowed smoking in their theaters. Since I smoked quite a bit then it was nice to be able to light up during the movies.

The only movie that I remember seeing during this time was 'Up In Arms' with Danny Kaye. They didn't change the movies very often so we went to see it at least three times. In fact, it was the last theater movie that I remember seeing until after the war was over. We did get to see an occasional old movie provided by Special Services wherein we got to sit on our helmets in the cold if we were so inclined. I had seen most of them before and they were very forgettable.

Final preparations for shipping out to France were being made during the last week of December. It took quite some time to transport the entire division to Southampton and load the ships to go to France. While we were in the process of loading in Southampton, we heard a rumor that a ship carrying troops from an infantry division had been torpedoed in the English Channel a few days earlier. There were only rumors however because the army did not release that kind of information.

Note:The rumor was true. A troopship, the Belgian ship S. S. Leopoldville, had been sunk on Dec. 25, 1945 only 6 miles from the French coast and considerably more than 800 men had been killed. For political reasons, the information had been covered up for over 50 years by both the British and Americans. It was second or third only to Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the cruiser USS Indiannapolis in loss of American lives in a ship sinking in WWII. You would think that would make the news but it didn't probably because it was a terrific screw-up of a joint operation of Americans, French, and British. You can barely find any reference to it even today.

I think my unit sailed from Southampton either on December 31, 1944 or January 1, 1945. We landed at Le Harve, France and it took us several days to get our equipment off-loaded and to get the units reorganized and ready to leave. The weather also changed dramatically when we crossed the Channel. The temperature seemed to drop thirty or forty degrees and it was very cold and snowy in France.

There were two things that I remember being impressed with as we landed in Le Harve. First, we had been following the war for years in the papers but that was nothing compared to our first look at the bombed out buildings in France. It had been six months since the Allies passed through Le Harve and many of the buildings were still in a shambles. London had been bombed repeatedly in the early stages of the war but the British had apparently repaired much of the damage because it was not nearly as apparent as that in France.

The second thing I remember was how cold it was. England in December had temperatures in the thirties and forties since their weather is much milder because of the Gulf Stream moving warm water north to their coast. France in January, 1945 had temperatures ranging from zero or below to the twenties. We were more aware of the cold because we were outside all the time of course but it was much colder also. Many years later I heard later that the winter of 1944-45 had been the coldest in Europe in 50 years