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This story is taken from an interview with Mr Harry Cookman at the Dublin WW2 Commemoration, and has been added to the site with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was Jim Lynne, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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So I told the recruiting officer in Queen’s, Belfast, and he said “yes, well if you go down to the barracks, I agree the training will be as good as you say it will be, but it’ll take you longer to get the commission.
I said “I have the training, I’ll probably live longer.”
That’s why I’m here today.

It was very good training. I’ve never regretted it. It was very very hard going. At that tie an Irish Gds RSM had taken over from the Inniskillings RSM who had retired on 31st Dec, and so he kept the sparks flying on the barracks square. We had some very good training. Really tough training. And when I finished my training, those people who passed all the tests got a week’s leave. And I qualified for that.
An interesting thing was, when I came back they hadn’t recorded that I had an extra day’s leave to come south. And there was noone else in the squad being trained from the south, so they had no idea I would be coming back a day later than the others.
And so when I walked into the guardroom the cpl said to me “look at the board over there”, the AWOL for Absent With-Out Leave, and my name was at the top of it.
I said “Here’s my pass, you have a look, I’ve still got an hour and a hal;f before it ends.”
He said “that’s strange”
I said “I went down south, I’m entitled to an extra day”.
“Oh yes, that’s right.”
At that point the sgt came in. he said “cookman, of all the things! You’re doing so well!”
I said “sergeant, have a look at the pass”
He said “you’re right. Someone’s made a mistake. There’ll be some red faces in the morning”.
So in the morning the sgt major came in, round about half-past 7, and he said “the sgt’s been telling me about that. I really am sorry about this. I don’t know what the company commander will say. He’ll be in in a few minutes”.
A qtr to 8, he called me into his office. He said “I’ve really got to appologise for this. I expect you’ll be telling your father. “
I said “I won’t be telling him that today. I might be putting it in a letter sometime,.”
He said “I have some good news for you. The first thing is, just over a month ago they gave your dfirst stripe ona page.”
We used to say — acting, unpaid and unwanted!
And so he said “as from the day you got the stripe, I’m giving you the back-pay. On top of that, you see this?” he picked up 2 stripes, which were together. He said “as from today, you’re now a corporal. Now I want you, since we’re so short of NCOs, and you’ve been doing so well helping the NCOs train the squad that’s being trained in. I want you now to help out with this new squad, which starts off training as of today.”
So they won’t be doing much work today as they’ll be getting things sorted out for themselves. But tomorrow morning, I’d like to see you getting busy,. Have a word with the sgt who’s going to be in charge of it, and work out the programme.”
That was it.
From then on, everything worked along nicely, We got the squad trained, and so the week when we were due to finish and go on leave, the Co commander said “when they’re due to come back from their leave, you are to take them over to England. I can’t say where you’re going. “
“It’ll be out to Burma, because the Japs have attacked the oil wells. “
He said “I’m glad you’ve followed the news up”
I said “I’m in the army now. You’ve got to!”
He said “I couldn’t agree with you more, but not many people are interested in what’s happened. Over the past coulpe of weeks we’ve been having to send a lot of our spare people over to England, and they’ve been sent straight away out to India, and then to Burma. So I don’t know whether you’ll be taking the squad you’ve helped train out there. But we’ll see what happens.”
I got a Movement Order to take them over to Stranraer, and I was told to report to the RTO there. And he gave me another Movement Order to take them down to Manchester, and to report to the RTO there. And so from then onwards I went from Manchester to Birmingham, Birmingham to Bristol, Bristol to Exeter, and then at Exeter I got a movement Order down to Weybridge in Cornwall. And I was changing over trains again, Southern Railways down to that part of Cornwall, and so we got the train.

We were already late getting to Cornwall, Held up for the air-raids. So we didn’t arrive down at Weybridge until 11 o’clock at night. And the porter at the station said “if you’bd been 2 mins later I’d have gone home and you wouldn’t have got off the platform”.

That’s how it all started from there.
The next morning, after we’d spent the night in a field, we were told we were going to be trained as commandoes!

And so that’s what we did. When we were fully trained and we’d learnt an awful lot from the sgt about it, we started making minor raids across to the Brest peninsula. Escorting the engineers who needed to collect any info they could about the german radar station there because they were sinking so many of our ships off our south coast here in Ireland.

So each time we went over on the darkest dark nights, we went in. we didn’t see any Germans about. And they were ready to go, they gave a bird-whistle. We got up from where we were sitting or standing, and down to the ASR launch which was our means of transport. That shot across the channel at 90+ mph, so we were back onto the coast of cornwall again. We did that 3 times. The third time I had a feeling that the germans would realise what was going opn. So I told my lads “now, be very careful tonight. If you see anything that looks like someone moving, let me know and I’ll assess it from there onwards.”

The engineers went in. we were keeping watch. Round about 4am the morning star came up. I was looking around to see it was there, the position it was meant to come up in the sky, and there were some clouds there. I thought to myself “there’s a cloud covering it, and I can’t see it just yet”. After a while I was standing lookout out into the now-getting-a-bit-lighter darkness, I saw a glimpse of something about that sort of size in the distance. I thought “I wonder what that is. It could be a button”. Something in the ditch. I looked over my shoulder, and I saw that the cloud had come away from the morning star. And the light fropm the morning start was shining directly at that little glimmer a couple of hundred yds away. So then I got used to the light there, and I saw it was a figure standing there. So I said tro my No2, who was standing on the ground dealing with the ammunition — I always travelled around with as bren gun as well as my rifle, so he was sorting out the magazines for the bren gun in case we had to use it.
So I said “someone there’s coming towards me”.

And you know the training we had to deal with a German who has a bayonet on the muzzle of his rifle? You watch out for it. So he came straight at me. And when his bayonet was a matter of inches away from my stomach, with my clenched fist I hit the muzzle of his rifle as hard as I could. My knuckles ached after it. He went down on the ground, because he was holding it with such amount of strength that it threw him off-balance and so he fell on the ground. And his head was quite close to my No2, and so he pulled back the elbow-piece on the back of his helmet, and hit him really hard on his spine, and there was a grunt as he went out.

Just as that was happening the bird-whistle sounded, and so we got moving. But his bayonet — the loose part of my battle-dress sleeve caught onto that, and the fleshy part just by my elbow, that’s where it caught the skin. So I put my field-dressing on, because it was already bleeding a lot. So I went down to our first aid post, which in those days was the size of a telephone box. The doctor and the orderly would be standing,. But the orderly was just starting to go, because he’d heard a whistle and he was picking up all the bits. And the Dr saw me and he saw my arm and he saw the blood coming down my hand as the field-dressing was only stopping the blood on the cut. The blood had come down before. And he said “let’s have a look”. And so he took the field-dressing off. and he said “in Canada — the first thing I can see is that you’re an athletic type. To stitch any physical part of the body, because it always causes a lump. What we do is, we put this lint on” — and he put on this large piece of lint, and plastered iot tight. Then he made up a sling, put my arm into the sling, I picked the remainder of my stuff and we went off for the ASR launch. And that’s how we got back.
So I was the only one, after the 3 expeditions across, who left some blood in France!

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