In fact the invasion camps were in an area of tight security. Just before the invasion, should the enemy have got wind of where they were, and how many troops were concentrated in them, they might have guessed that invasion would be soon and also to some extent where it would be. Part of the success of the invasion of Europe was due to surprise. The south coast at the time was packed with troops, and all service personnel were routinely asked not to reveal their whereabouts when writing to those out of camp. Civilians had had drummed into them the slogan “Careless talk costs lives”. There were exclusion zones along the coast which people had to observe and only enter if they had relatives or business there.
Anthony Colgon, born 1920, left Southampton on D-Day.
“At D-Day there were nets for scrambling ashore or to go to the beach in small boats. I looked out of the landing craft at the beach and thought, ‘You won’t get out of that!’ But we’d been to Sicily, so we thought we knew what to expect. We came … we trained down at the Red Sea, but they couldn’t risk damaging the landing craft [on exercises]. But when it was Sicily, it was the real thing. Eventually, when we went up to the beaches in Sicily, we didn’t get much opposition: 29 miles before there was any.
“Then we went through Sicily, fighting all the time. Heavy casualties all the time. Got to Messina. After two or three weeks they invaded Italy, but our brigade landed at the toe of Italy to try and get behind the Germans. When we landed, this was the third time [third attempt to land]. We were ahead of the Commandos. I was in three-inch mortars. We set up in the dark and didn’t see we were alone - no mine-clearing had been done, etc.”
By contrast, landing on D-Day was much more organised but more terrifying. They all knew what to do and where they were to do it. Mine-sweeping had usually been done and there were beach marshals to organise who went where.
Glider parts, stacked ready for transport by sea, in the aftermath of D-Day
THE NAVY
Like the Army, the peacetime Navy had to make a rapid adjustment to the necessities of war, especially in view of early setbacks such as the loss of HMS Hood and HMS The Prince of Wales. Given the presence of Portsmouth and Southampton, the story of the Navy and the story of Hampshire between 1939 and 1945 are forever going to be intertwined.
A war-time love story: Mr Ronald Wilson of Upminster, born around 1925
Mr Ronald Wilson writes that his ‘Hampshire at War’ story is a love story. “I met my late wife Eileen when we were both at HMS Dragonfly, Hayling Island, in 1945. I was an ordinary AB [Able Seaman], having been medically graded Grade 5 and unfit for sea. Eileen was a Wren, stationed at the Suntrap Home building across the road. It had been a home for handicapped children.
“My wife was in Combined Operations from 1945 onwards. She worked on HMS Victory while back in barracks at Portsmouth. I had been on LCTs. In 1943, I was up in Scapa Flow on boom defence. We had anti-torpedo nets strung round the capital ships, and at each corner of the metal netting, which had a draught of 20 feet, was an LCT. I was on one of them.
Suntrap, Hayling Island: a contemportary postcard
“I came back to Southampton in 1943 to prepare for D-Day. Then in 1945 (I was 20) I had to go into hospital, the Royal Naval Hospital in Portland, with a serious ear complaint and was graded B5. I wanted to go back to sea - nobody likes being in barracks - but the doctor said that if I got ill again at sea and was away from medical attention, I may have died.
“So I went back to Portsmouth and met a friend who was a ship’s cobbler down at Plymouth. We had known each other when we were at school. And he said, ‘You can mend shoes.’ It’s true I have always been good with my hands. I applied to be a ship’s cobbler and it was granted. I did it and after a very short time I was sent to HMS Dragonfly on Hayling Island to be a ship’s cobbler. Part of HMS Dragonfly was where my Eileen was stationed. It was at the Suntrap Home.
“There was a fully equipped shoemaker’s shop - for the handicapped children, you know - and I started work. About the time the war ended, who should come in to have her shoes mended but Eileen! I looked at her and I fell in love.
“I had not had much contact with women. (I had been in action in the Navy. I had been bombed as a kid.) I couldn’t ask her to go out with me, I couldn’t find the words. But my mate got so fed up with my talking to him about this girl, he said, ‘If you don’t ask her out, I’ll ask her myself!’”
So Ron plucked up courage to ask and they went out together. But, he recalls, she said to him, “I’m sorry, Ron, I can’t feel the same about you as you feel about me.” He tried to forget her, then wrote a letter (a copy of which he showed to me) to say he was broken-hearted. So much so, he says, that when after this he used to play the piano at parties, he could not play sad love songs without weeping. He played for his brother’s wedding.
“Eileen and I didn’t see each other again until 1946,” he recalls. “She lived nearby at Hackney Wick, Plaistow, and her mother came to see my mother and said that she thought Eileen would like to see me again.” He says he was still heartbroken at 21 and he thought, “I can’t go through all that again.” So he told her mother that he would meet her outside West Ham United football club, but was purposely late. “I thought I’d give her every excuse to have second thoughts,” he adds. “But she waited.”
They were engaged a year later and married. “And we had such a wonderful life,” he recalls. “We had three children, two girls and a boy. We were not lucky, we were blessed! God blessed us. When she died I said, ‘I’ve never looked at another woman since I met you. I didn’t fancy anyone else.’”
When I first spoke to Ron in September 2002 it was eight months since Eileen died. “We stayed together, man and wife, friends, shipmates and most importantly we were lovers,” he said. “We spent 53 years and five months of wonderful life together up to the day she died, 28 January this year. She was 78.”
After he spoke to me, Ron was having a mass said for Eileen at the Hayling Island Roman Catholic church where she used to worship as a Wren all those years ago, he told me. It was a year since Eileen died and he misses her very much. When she was stationed at the Suntrap Home, her officer used to ask her if she was going to mass and if she said, ‘No, I’m on duty,’ the officer would tell her to go anyway.
Even in home waters, service in the Navy was subject to many dangers and pitfalls of war-time life. This is illustrated vividly by the experience of Phillip Bradley of Beaumaris, Isle of Anglesey
Phillip Bradley was a Petty Officer in the Royal Navy. He recalls an accident in about 1943, off Sandy Point. One of the LCMs was returning from firing practice back into Chichester Harbour and hit the sand-bar at low tide. In a strongish wind, the boat turned over. The lieutenant was thrown clear and swam ashore over to the Point. The COPP depot raised the alarm: both the mechanic and stoker were trapped inside the engine room. They banged on the hull to indicate they were alive, then both tried to swim out. There was a shield around the gun turret; the mechanic managed to get clear but the stoker was trapped under the shield and drowned.
However, not everything was doom and gloom. His unit got involved in the testing of some rather high-tech gear intended to be used in the event of a landing on hostile soil.
This group was from the main repair base at the yacht yard in Mill Rythe where the mechanics changed engines. Light relief was provided when LCMs broke their moorings once, during a gale and high tide, and had to be collected from Emsworth main street.
Phillip Bradley was involved in experimental trials with the Hedgehog. Spigots were fitted inside an LCA in four banks