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Muddling Through

To read the history of the Second World War, one might suppose that the planning and build-up to D-Day was not only an operational miracle but an organisational triumph with everything timetabled and calculated down to the last drop of petrol and the individual packet of hard biscuits. Sad to say, although the staff work might have been meticulous, what followed was all too liable to human cock-up - as My Friend Harry knew only too well.


After all his training, first as a tank driver and then as a tank troop commander; after all his invasion-and-pursuit exercises across the south of England in Montgomery’s Third Division; after all the practice in landing Churchill tanks from invasion craft on to the beaches of the Isle of Wight, what happened? He, with a number of other Armoured Corps officers, was suddenly detached for infantry training at Dunbar -- the impression being that there was a surplus of tank officers because fewer than expected had been killed in Africa and Italy. But if the feelings of tank officers converted to infantry officers ran high, how do you suppose a whole lot of sailors felt when they were abruptly told they were being turned into soldiers? For answer, turn to those octogenarians still living in places like Aldershot, Colchester, Tidworth, Barnard Castle and York who were there when the riots left shopping centres wrecked. You won’t find the details in official records or in back numbers of the local papers, for the censor’s blue pencil was working overtime.


As it so happened, My Friend Harry never did get transferred into the infantry, but, very sensibly, most of the unwanted tank officers eventually became attached to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps which had, with equal suddenness, found itself responsible for moving armoured vehicles from one regiment to another. This task had, for ages, been the responsibility of the Royal Army Service Corps. No more, though. Having made the Service-Ordnance swap, the ‘planners’ suddenly realised that nobody in Ordnance could tell a Churchill from a Sherman or, indeed, a Bren carrier from an armoured command vehicle. Nor had any Ordnance drivers ever had to drive a tank transporter, and certainly not a tank. See what I mean about ‘organisational triumph’?


With D-Day looming ever nearer, the ‘planners’ suddenly realised that there were no depots where hundreds and hundreds of tanks could be held pending issue to fighting forces. Solution? Stick ‘em along the roads or into woods. Terrific. Harry got a call from Ordnance HQ to say he was CO of a tank depot at Wilton, near Salisbury. They gave him a six-figure map reference and instructed him to depart forthwith. When he arrived at the map-reference point, he found two bell tents, four latrine buckets, four camp beds, one trestle table, 20 blankets, one phone resting on the grass at the foot of a telegraph pole, no food, one Sergeant, one Lance-Corporal and six private soldiers. lt was raining steadily.


A despatch rider roared up from Southern Command HQ, then based in Wilton House, the residence of the Earl of Pembroke. The message was that a train-load of Bren carriers had just arrived at Wilton station and why wasn’t he there to shift them? Off they marched to the station. Sure enough, there was a train-load of Bren carriers. All had been tidily dropped by crane into high-sided trucks by the Ordnance lot at Chilwell, Notts. Trouble was, Wilton station had no crane, so how was My Friend Harry to get the carriers unloaded? Use his initiative?


He did. He had the whole train load re-consigned to Chilwell. Then he went to Wilton House, had a blistering conversation over the phone with the R.A.O.C movement officer and then took his saturated soldiery off to the Pembroke Arms for refreshment. Later, he contacted the ever-helpful Royal Engineers chap at Wilton House and, next day, a mobile crane was at the station for Harry’s use.


Harry set up a lot of roadside tank depots in the next few weeks and he finally wound up at the huge depot at Merstham, Surrey, near Dorking, where hundreds of armoured vehicles were prepared, and waterproofed, ready for the invasion. They were run up in convoy from Merstham to various London docks and there left for loading into assault craft. As Progress Officer, Harry’s job was to ensure that the convoys were made up of the correct ‘mix’ of vehicles. After D-Day, he and a Captain Shrapnel (relative of the inventor of the shrapnel shell), of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, made periodic visits to the Normandy beaches to decide which of the abandoned vehicles were readily repairable and have them shipped back.


It was on June 13, 1944, that My Friend Harry and the rest of the Merstham depot had a unique experience. Heading toward them at low altitude and very high speed was a tiny aeroplane, the like of which they had never seen before. Single wing, no propeller, a sheet of flame from the back and a throbbing roar. What they were seeing was one of the first three V1 flying bombs to arrive from the Pas de Calais. It thundered overhead, suddenly fell silent and then plunged into the ground about a half a mile north of the camp. An enormous explosion was followed by a narrow pillar of dense black smoke.


Merstham turned out to be on the standard flight-path of the V1’s. Most carried straight on to land in Croydon or the metropolis, but 20 more fell in or around the camp. One of the earliest to hit the depot arrived on the 14th, the second day of the V1 operation. It dived into open ground near the perimeter, took off the roofs of huts, shattered glass but caused no deaths or injuries. As nobody at the depot knew what these things were, a call was at once put in to War Office. The order from Whitehall was: Do nothing. Touch nothing. Place guards at 100 yards radius of the impact spot. A team of specialists will reach you in an hour.


The boffins, on arrival, requisitioned 100 reliable soldiers to make an inch-by-inch search of the whole area. Everything found, however small, to be placed on spread tarpaulins. At that time, nothing was known of the operation or construction of the flying bombs, so anything that could be recovered was desperately needed. There were soon exclamations of astonishment from the scientists as treasures like a gyroscope, a small airscrew, yards and yards of fine wire, an undamaged glass sphere and so on were deposited on the tarpaulins. And prominent among the assorted items was a large dry-battery.


They chattered over everything, but were especially intrigued by the battery and advanced all manner of learned theories as to its function within the bomb. What silenced all the lofty theorising was what they saw on the underneath of the battery. There, on the base, was a label: Merstham Wireless and Gramophone Centre. Propr. W. Jenkinson. It was an old high-tension radio battery thrown out by some untidy householder! The boffins had their tarpaulins bundled into their lorry and headed off back to Whitehall.


..........


There is an intriguing addendum to the V1 experiences at Merstham. My Friend Harry, as a schoolboy, had become fascinated with the latest wonder of the age: wireless. To the astonishment of family and friends, to whom, as to most others, wireless ranked as a black art, he rabbitted on and on and on about variomeners and condensers and transformers and anodes and cathodes and this and that and then began making sets that actually worked. Clearly a glittering scientific career lay ahead. Well, it didn’t turn out quite like that, for just about that time he became aware of girls ...


The wireless bug wasn’t actually dead, though; only dormant. Just after D-Day, when Harry was escorting a convoy of tanks to the London docks, one tank broke down in Canning Town. While he was awaiting the arrival of the rescue transporter, he idly glanced into an electrical junk shop-and saw with delight some little tins of crystals, a throwback to the early Twenties. He was even more delighted to see a heap of crystal-detectors, some variable condensers, terminals, catswhiskers and so on. Straight away he marched into the shop, bought up all he could see plus a big roll of cotton-covered copper wire. He was going to make another crystal set just like the one he’d made as a schoolboy.


Back in the billet at Merstham, he wound a basket coil on a cardboard disc, not knowing, of course, what wavelength range it would cover. He mounted it and everything else on a discarded ration box, strung up an aerial between nearby trees and used a trenching tool as an ’earth’. With a headset liberated from a tank, he tried his luck. It worked! Martial music came through to his utter amazement -- and to that of his friend Capt. Shrapnel who was sharing the headset with him. They were even more agog when the music suddenly stopped and a chap started shouting -- in German! The he stopped and his ecstatic gabble gave way to a sound which Harry, in Merstham, knew only too well by then. It was the heart-stopping throb of a flying bomb. Harry’s lash-up crystal set had picked up a launching site in the Pas de Calais.


It transpired that before a V1 was launched, there would be a short burst of oompah music from a German band and a chest-thumping exhortation from a PR type in the Wehrmacht. Harry’s Doodle Detector, as it was instantly dubbed, was the sensation of the tank depot and plans were evolved to time each V1 departure and check it against its arrival over (and, occasionally, on) the depot.


Alas, such precise timetabling was never generated, largely because Harry and his chums at Merstham were working all day and most of the night getting armour to Normandy and had little time for anything else but a few hours’ sleep.


After four or five days of magical reception, the Doodle Detector suddenly fell silent. It seemed that the R.A.F. had paid a visit to the Pas de Calais.


Why Doodle Detector? Because, by common consent in the south of England, the V1 flying bombs almost instantly - and inscrutably - became known as doodlebugs.

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