ĆŪŃæ“«Ć½

The following excerpt comes from ā€œAn Ordinary Manā€ written by Edward Mitchell and is the first of three parts of his remarkable story, told here in his own words.

After training as a Military Police Officer, Edmund ā€˜Mitchā€™ Mitchell was stationed in Regent Park Barracks, London at the beginning of September 1939.

Everybody thought the war was not far away, but we continued to do our duties in the normal manner. The British Prime Minister had given Adolf an ultimatum to get out of Poland which the Germans had invaded, that was Sunday 3rd September 11 a.m. and at that date and time all the section of Military Police crowded round the radio in the Mess to hear Chamberlain say, ā€œfrom now on we are at war with Germany.ā€ It didnā€™t affect me in anyway, as I had been trained to be a soldier in the Guards and really I suppose I was looking forward to the excitement. The only thing, I hoped that it wouldnā€™t keep Peg and me apart ā€” how wrong I was.

Soon after this announcement the air raid warning was sounded and the C S M ordered us all down into the basement and we had to sit there with our gas masks on. The warning didnā€™t last long and we all went up when the ā€˜all clearā€™ was sounded and went outside in the square to see what was going on. We thought Jerry was al over London in airships, but they turned out to be barrage balloons sent up on long cables to keep the enemy aircraft away. They eventually were put over all big cities but turned out to be pretty useless.

Things around our section were beginning to buzz now war was declared. One extra duty was traffic control outside the Duke of Yorkā€™s Barracks in Kingā€™s Road, Chelsea. I wore big arm sleeves while on this duty and you needed to be on your toes with buses flashing by and staff cars coming and going in and out of the gates. We were told to give preference to Army vehicles and got some choice remarks from some of the bus drivers for holding them up. I did two hours on and two hours off traffic control when detailed for this duty, and you need those two hours off as my arms began to ache at the end of the stag (duty).

One evening our Company Sergeant Major (CSM) called us all in the mess and said we were being formed into the 4th Division Provost Coy and our strength would soon be made up to over 100. This was a shock to us as we were a happy section and all this would now change. Change it did, very rapidly men began to arrive, they were mostly ex-Guardsmen and AA men who Iā€™d seen on the two week course at Mytchett. There wasnā€™t room for them all in our barrack block and most of them were in big houses on the edge of Regentā€™s Park. Things were chaotic, some of the AA men didnā€™t even have a complete Army uniform, and they were still wearing their AA leggings and breeches.

4th Division Provost Coy consisted of HQ and four sections. Each section consisted of one Sergeant (Sgt), two Corporals (Cpls), and 12 Lieutenant Corporals (L/Cpls) and I was put in Number Two section. We had no transport at Regentā€™s Park until each section went to Guildford in Surrey and was issued with one truck and one brand new BSA motorcycle to each man in the section. These motorcycles were very modern with twist grip throttle, not like the old BSA I had learnt to ride at Mytchett. These machines were ready for the civilian market but, on the outbreak of war, had been taken over by the Army and sprayed with a light brown paint, with an Army number in white on the petrol tank. The ride from Guildford to London was hair-raising, as many of the men had very little experience of riding a motorcycle let alone in the London traffic. All but one of the whole company arrived safely, the one who didnā€™t had a very serious accident with a London bus and we didnā€™t see anymore of him. I thought the motorcycles and trucks all lined up on the square looked very impressive and we wondered where we were off to next. I didnā€™t get caught for much duty and went over to see peg at Ilford as much as I could, as I had the feeling I wouldnā€™t be able to do this much longer.

The ā€˜black outā€™ had now come into effect, and no lights were allowed anywhere after dark, and it made it very hard getting about. We now had four Officers posted to our company, one Captain and three Lieutenants. They were from different Regiments and Corps, as the Military Police in those days had no Officers and these might as well have stayed away as the Coy could have been run much better with our CSM, who had now been promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM), and the rest of the Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOā€™s).

One morning around the 4th September, we were all paraded in the square and told that we were moving the next day, but not informed as to where we were going, and that evening we were confined to barracks. I was annoyed as I could not get over to Ilford to say good-bye to Peg, so I wrote her a letter to say Iā€™d be over as soon as possible.

Next morning about 9 a.m., we all paraded in sections and were inspected by our new Commanding Officer (CO). I think the only oneā€™s who were properly kited out were the regulars who were at Regentā€™s Park before the war broke out. Some had peaked caps, some side caps, AA men had still got half their AA uniform on. Oh boy, if Hitler could have seen us heā€™d have invaded the British Isles straight away. We were given the order to start up, and the row we caused was amazing, as we all kept revving up our new machines, until the brand new shining exhaust turned blue. At last the CO got into his brand new Austin P.U. and led us all out of Regentā€™s Park and that was the last I saw of that place.

Our convoy went out of London through Reading and Newbury and we ended up on the dockside at Avonmouth near Bristol. Hello, I thought, we are off abroad somewhere, and all I could think of was France, as I didnā€™t think anyone would be for the middle rank from Avonmouth. All the vehicles were parked in sheds beside the dock and, that night, we boarded a Southern Railway Cross Channel Steamer. The Military Police were given some rooms at the rear of the ship; there were quite a considerable number of other troops aboard. The civilian crew came around dishing out life jackets, the ones that broke your neck when you jumped in the sea, bloody awful things they were, great lumps of hard cork round your neck.

We set sail about midnight and long before we got out of the Bristol Channel, everyone was sick. That boat was even worse than previous crossings. When we rounded the tip of Cornwall, and made for St. Nazaire, for this is where we ended up, the boat all but went under. It tipped and bunked and rolled, I thought the end of the war had come for me, but as dawn broke, we sailed into the mouth of the Loire and things began to steady up and by the time we sailed into St Nazaire, we were all up on deck to see the welcome the French had to give us. There were crowds on the dockside cheering and waving their French flags and Union Jacks. Men on the decks started throwing packets of Army biscuits and tins of corned beef to the crowds, until one tin of corned beef caught a French dignitary smack between the eyes and he was the first casualty. The British had caused this and we were sent among the troops to stop the bombardment.

It didnā€™t take us long to get off that old tub, and we were marched to some sheds and given a bale of straw and a palliasse and told we would wait here until our motorcycles and trucks arrived, that were coming over on a transport ship. The sheds near the docks were a kind of transit camp and the food was lousy. The cooking facilities were very primitive but we were there for a lot longer than we expected, as our vehicles were put to the bottom of the Bay of Biscay, by a German sub. So I reckon our very rough trip over had saved us the same fate.

Each section, now we were in France, was given a French policeman to liaise between us and the French civilians, our chaps name was Felix. We hung around at St Nazaire about ten days awaiting our new trucks and BSAā€™s and I thought what a waste of all those lovely motorcycles down on the sea bed. I was still a L/Cpl and went out to the town with L/Cpl Vaughton, who Iā€™d done my training with at Mytchett. We went into several French fisher folks houses and I saw how poor they were, most houses had mud floors or red brick tiles. The furniture was very old and scarce, but they were very kind and gave us bread and bowls of coffee. Most women were dressed in long black dresses with a lovely lace headdress.

At last our transport arrived and we started on our long drive across France to near the Belgium border. I had another lovely brand new BSA and took great care not to get the exhaust too blue from revving up. We travelled by day and slept in farms and warehouses. We had to draw our own rations and do our own cooking in Sections which was a lot better. We went North of Paris to Lens, a coal mining district with mostly Polish people who had come to France after the First World War. We stayed here about a week and started to do duty on the streets and brothel visiting. Around Lens were quite a few British troops and it was a large industrial area.

The people here were very hostile to the British troops and we were told they were mostly communist and not to speak to them. We did a few training exercises and manoeuvres and we were told we were now part of the 4th Infantry Division, and the Section I was in was posted to the 11th Infantry Brigade, the whole Division would soon move up to quite near the Belgium border. At this time Belgium and Holland had not declared war on Germany and what a bloody great mistake that turned out to be, as when Hitler wanted to advance, he didnā€™t declare war, he just went in ā€” and thatā€™s exactly what happened in their case.

When we did start to move to the Belgium border, we moved at night without lights and our friends around Lens put great tree trunks and logs of wood in the road and the leading bloke on motorcycles went ā€œarse over titā€ in the dark, and called those frogs some names. We went up through scenes of bitter trench warfare made in the last war. I found myself with the rest of the Section at a place called Tourcoring about 2 miles from the Belgium frontier.

Our section got a good billet in the centre of the small town, in a large old fashioned French house. We had to sleep on our ground sheets but we were on dry floor boards and downstairs we had a good kitchen and rooms for eating. We started our usual duties visiting out of bounds cafes, street patrol DR, and an extra one, frontier duty, which was mainly to stop squaddies nipping over the border into Belgium. Also when the Brigade or Division did manoeuvres, we had to go and do mainly traffic control and convoy work. I settled down in Tourcoring OK, there was a good tram service to Lille and Roubaie, but I didnā€™t go there very often as Tourcoring had a very good heated swimming pool and plenty of good cafes for a meal, and at that time my pay enabled me to have several good meals in cafes a week.

This story continues in part two.

Ā© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.