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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Deb Roach of the CSV Action Desk with ĂŰŃż´«Ă˝ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Bill Evans and has been added to the site with his / her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'

At 18 I was called up into the navy .

Left the farm to join the army—but was called to the Royal Navy.
I Did six weeks training as a gunner, sent up to Newcastle and put on a ship. I was with Atlantic convoys on escort duty, escorting the merchant ships. That was 1943. The U boats were at the worst—30-40 ships were being sunk—we were escorting them, but not enough to keep the uboats back.

I did three trips to America, with three different convoys. Only attacked the one convoy, got the other two over. This was six to eight or six weeks at a time. We would get shore leave once we got there, we might be there a month, so sometimes we got a couple of nights a week. Once I was a guard on the bottom of the gangway—a shipmate brought an American friend back, they were both drunk—the American man got awkward and threw some powder in my face since I wouldn’t let him pass. We got in a fight, and we were all three arrested—I was put in the clink. The next night my captain came to get me. It wasn’t even a cell, it was like a cage with chicken wire—there were many of these kinds of “cells” with all kinds of men who’d been arrested. I was just doing my job, I couldn’t let the man pass, he wasn’t allowed. The Americans used to call us Lymies, sometimes we had fights in the pubs! We did have some fun on our shore leave.

On the ship--We had four hours on and four hours off, we were being attached by planes. We had two men to a gun. One of us would load, and one would shoot. The atlantic was cold, in the winter and very hot in the summer. The speed of the convoy was 5 knots, we had to go as slow as the slowest ship on the convoy. We had about 80 to 100 boats and sometimes as few as six escorts. We would go Nova Scotia first, then to New York, the rest of the convoy was loaded there, when we came out on our way home—go back to Nova Scotia and get the boats loaded there. On the way back to Britain, we would get hit more—since we were carrying the wartime supplies—tanks, vehicles, it was all new equipment—you would see it flying up in the air. Military vehicles, supplies, whatever was on the boat being hit, would be lost, along with all or most of that boat’s crews. They never stopped the convoy if a boat was hit, we couldn’t stop to help, we could only send a destroyer back the next day to see if there were any survivors. If we stopped the convoy, we’d lose more boats and more people. It was very rare to find any survivors the next day.

When we would get back to Britain, we’d refuel and turn around and go back. We’d leave the boats we had escorted—who’d survived the convoy to be unloaded, and pick up a fresh lot of 80-100 empty boats to fill up again in Nova Scotia and New York. Sometimes we’d get a week’s shore leave and I’d try to get home to Ludlow—but it didn’t always work out. I was in the forces for a total of 5 and ½ years.

I was taken off the ship and then taken to our depot in Devonport, and after a few weeks, still as a gunner, I was put on a landing craft—not sure how long, eventually they loaded us, the troops and equipment, and we were anchored off the Isle of Wight. No one knew on board what was happening, it was all hush hush—this was in June of 1944. We were anchored of the Isle of Wight for a week. All the troops were sick, because they weren’t used to the boat. They were sleeping on the deck, we were all over loaded. On June the 5th, about midnight, we had orders to sail, and then the Captain was the first man to know. He was given his orders in an envelope, but couldn’t open them until he was out to sea. He opened it, and told us we were headed to Normandy. We set sail around midnight June 5./6—we were in Normandy the next morning. Everywhere you looked, about 20 miles—the sea was black with ships—you couldn’t see any water anywhere, it was full of ships. The troops came off the ship at 6:00, all the equipment. This is when all hell broke loose. The first action I heard was the US and UK battleships, aiming over us and hitting the coastline. Then the troops came off. We did have some action on the guns. All across the shores, the Germans had built big bunkers, and there was about 60 yards of unprotected beach, and this is where our troops had no cover, they just had to keep going. They got shot, and the next wave would just go. We would provide cover with the guns. The first day we got in about 6 miles. The fighting on the beach or near the beach took about 3 or 4 days. I was there about a fortnight—unloading troops.

One of our jobs was to pluck out the dead soldiers from the water, they ones who didn’t make it to shore—their big back pack kept them afloat—the bedding at the top floated. We used a boat hook—on along pole, to catch hold of the pack, and pull them up onto the ship.

After my fortnight, I came back to Southampton. I did about 20 trips back and forth—new supplies and new troops.
After about 3 months, they took us off at Southampton—took us off the ship and back into my depot in Devonport. We were there about fortnight, and one morning they lined us all up, gave us letter—transferred me to the army. Went for six weeks infantry training, had a weeks’ leave, and we thought we were going to reinforce the losses in Europe (by this point we were about half way to Germany), but I was sent to India.
On our way to the war in Burma, but the Americans dropped the bomb in Japan, that stopped the war. We stayed in India, I was on riot duty in Lahore in Pakistan.
Eventually I left India in 1946, came home and got demopped in the beginning of 1947 and that was the end of my war. Then I got married to Edith, the lady who waited for me to come home from the war.

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