FORWARD AREA BURMA TRAINING

     In the meantime my buddies Len Brown and Alec Cox had gone to A & B flights to work on the tarmac and service the aircraft as they came in.  Later during my stay at Risalpur I did the same thing, servicing the radio on Hurricanes.  It was sure hot work and sometimes we tied cloth around our knees so as not to burn them when kneeling on the wing of the aircraft.

Late in October I had my first mail from home, since June 8th before I had left the UK, and boy was it ever good to sit in a quiet place and open it up.  It was fun to go through the letters over and over again.  Like reading a book and bringing Victoria back to me as mom told me so much about everything that was happening at home. It was at this time that I learned that my brother Eric who had joined the RCAF after training as a fitter, had now gone on to aircrew as a Flight Engineer and was  flying with 429 Squadron, first on Halifax bombers and later the Lancaster.  He completed 30 trips over enemy territory and survived the war.

I had a change from the flights when I was moved to the acc. room, this is where all of the batteries are charged for the aircraft, hundreds of them.  It was quite a job checking them, topping them up with distilled water etc.  Very boring though.  From there I went back to the Operations

Room, far more interesting, and then one day out of the blue I was put on a course in preparation for Forward Area deployment (Burma).  I was assigned to take a ground defence course. 

  It was quite an eye-opener for me.  We were taught bayonet fighting, unarmed combat, firing Lewis and Sten guns and grenade throwing.  From my teenage years of being a fairly accurate baseball pitcher I found it difficult to lob the grenade.  I wanted to hold it a little longer and throw it directly at the target area.  My instructor said he didn't care how accurate I was, he wanted it done "by the book."  My lobbing wasn't all that accurate and secretly I thought to myself, if I ever have to use one of these bloody things, I am going to throw it like I would a baseball. 

The course was a nice break from our routine.  The most interesting and scary part was the hazard course.  Here we had to crawl on our stomachs under wire 18" above the ground, while carrying our Sten gun.  While we were doing this there were Army chaps on either side of us with machine guns FIRING BLANKS.  A cross-fire over the top of us.  As noisy and scary as it was, it was actually quite easy to do once it was set in your mind the ammo wasn't real.  We were in tropical kit, but with slacks instead of shorts.  The neat trick was not to get your shirt caught in the barbed wire above.  This made one really hug the ground.  We wore steel helmets of course and a sure sign you were too high was when you heard the scrape of your helmet on the wire.  This too could be a bit of a bind because some of us had a sort of camouflage netting over the top of our helmets.  Boy, you sure pulled your head in quickly, like a frightened turtle, and dropped your arse which you felt was stuck up as high as Mt. Everest, and a neat target.   We crawled across this course in columns of from four to six and each column consisted of five or six guys.  Leading a column had an advantage. Anywhere behind the leader you had the fear of being kicked in the face.  Anywhere in the middle of the column you had the guy behind constantly urging you on while you hoped the guy in front didn't kick you in the face.

Then one day on the course, we received a rude awakening.  We were to do it again.  We at first thought why?  We have already done it a few times.  Then the 14th Army sergeant spoke very seriously to us.  "Lads," he said,  "I want you to pay attention to me. LISTEN! When you crawl through this time, that will be LIVE AMMO, flying over your heads.  UNDERSTAND!  LIVE AMMO!"

I can tell you, this quickly changed the mood of our group.  Taken out of 10 as tops, our bravado plunged to about minus 3.  

Our crawl commenced.  The machine-guns opened up immediately. There seemed to be a very distinctive and different sound to the firing this time which was mingled with tracer bullets which we could easily see in front of us.  We were very, very careful how we proceeded.  We just hoped the machine-gunners were cracker-jacks at their job.  No one got hurt and soon our course was finished. TO BE CONTINUED