the battledress pocket that was supposed to hold his First Aid kit – fortunately he was never injured. But it was not until he was winding down to retirement some 40 years later that he felt compelled to begin the organisation, revision and research necessary for the completion of his memoir.
By the time the work was completed he had written half a million words – five times the length of this book. It was a happy coincidence that much of the research was done at the Public Record Office in Kew – a short walk from where I lived at the time.
It was one of the great disappointments of his military career that when there was an urgent need for bomber crews to begin, finally, to carry the war to the enemy, he was the only one among his group of colleagues to be turned down, which he always assumed was because of his schooling. In many ways it may have turned out to be a blessing, not only because it probably improved his chances of survival – Bomber Command had a less than 50% survival rate – but also, if he had been accepted, we would have been deprived of this fascinating and moving account of Walter’s war.
Albert Jones February 2008
Gun Crew
Introduction
G.H. Bennett
The Second World War witnessed a steady growth in the number and use of Special Forces units such as the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and Popski’s Private Army. The harsh climate and special nature of the battlefields in the Middle East were the cradle for emergence of units such as the SAS and LRDG. It took a special kind of soldier – highly self reliant, physically and mentally tough – to operate in the desert with minimum levels of support. Most special units were short-lived expedients to address particular tactical circumstances. Their personnel were renowned for their toughness, skill and ruthlessness. Their leaders, such as David Stirling of the SAS, would establish considerable reputations for their tactical vision, soldierly qualities and powers of leadership. By their very nature, Special Forces were lightly equipped. Whether for reconnaissance purposes or surprise attack, Allied Special Forces relied on speed, surprise, camouflage and evasion.
In 1943, the war shifted dramatically as German forces in North Africa were defeated and Allied landings took place in Sicily and then in Italy.
Italy changed sides in the war, and the failure of the German offensive at Kursk signalled that the tide had turned on the Russian front. An Allied second front in Western Europe was eagerly awaited, especially as the progress of the fighting in Italy proved disappointingly slow and costly. From Western Europe to the Russian front and the Mediterranean, it became clear that the Germans had shifted to a defensive stance and were busy fortifying their positions. Raiding by lightly armed Special Forces remained an option in areas such as the Balkans where the enemy’s hold was tenuous, but even here it was recognised that it might be worthwhile to provide raiding forces with at least a few heavy weapons. The British Army was perhaps a little behind others in this respect. The Americans, the Germans and the Italians had recognised the need to have heavy weapons that could be transported across even the most difficult terrain. They developed both weapons and special units that could operate with heavy weapons in the most mountainous regions of Europe.
The decision to form a Raiding Support Regiment in 1943 to supplement the firepower of British raiding and Special Forces was recognition that Allied Forces were about to fight on fresh battlefields set amidst landscapes that held their own particular tactical and material challenges. The regiment would be divided into five troops armed with mortars, heavy machine guns, American-made 75mm howitzers (designed for mountain use) and extremely rugged, Italian-made, anti-tank guns. The regiment was made up of volunteers from Middle Eastern Command, and it would never see action as a whole. Parts of the unit would be sent to support Partisan forces off the coast of Yugoslavia in February 1944 while the rest of the regiment stayed in Italy. Later, elements of the regiment would fight in Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. In 1944 the regiment would become embroiled in the Greek civil war as it fought house-to-house against the forces of the Greek Communists of ELAS. When the fighting in Europe ended, the Regiment was prepared for deployment in the Far East. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrender, came before the regiment had deployed. Instead it found itself heading back to the United Kingdom where it was demobilised. The Raiding Support Regiment was short-lived and all but forgotten in most of the post-war accounts of fighting in the Mediterranean.
One of the members of the regiment who would return to the United Kingdom in 1945 was Bombardier Walter Jones. He maintained a diary throughout the war, even though this was against King’s Regulations. Going to considerable trouble to hide the diary, he would use it in the 1980s to write down his memoirs.
Jones, who had been working in the City of Liverpool since he was 14 and was at the Liverpool Cotton Exchange in 1939, had joined an artillery unit of the Territorial Army three months before the outbreak of war. In so doing, the 5 feet 8 inch, 9 stone 9 pound 19 year old went against the wishes of his mother and father. His father had served in the King’s Liverpool Regiment in the First World War and was not keen to see one of his sons following in his footsteps with a war looming in Europe. Joining the 66th Anti-Tank Battalion of the Royal Artillery, Jones felt an immediate sense of disappointment:
“There were no anti-tank guns to train on, nor any other weapons for that matter. No equipment whatsoever! Neither were there any professionally qualified army instructors. Officers and NCOs… were being selected and appointed on the strength of interviews, which fortuitously threw up a few middle-aged, time-served Reservists who had hastily answered the call to return to the colours… Emerging with rank from the interviews however, were many incompetent misfits possessed with insufficient credentials for leading men into a cinema, never mind a war.”1
The outbreak of war did not bother Jones. It offered the young Liverpudlian the chance to impress his mates and girls with his uniform and also the promise of some very new experiences. He later confided, “1939 was a lark: a novelty so dramatically removed from the mundane, prospect-less and repetitive routine of the office.”2
Jones spent the winter of 1939-1940 in training in the north-east of England. The horrors of war were for a time hidden beneath the false quiet of the ‘phoney war’ and the fun of being away from the routine of office life. Then in June 1940 elements of the regiment were unexpectedly moved to Rugeley in Staffordshire. Jones found himself tending to the needs of Dunkirk evacuees in a tented city on the edge of the town. Jones recalled “listening to these men knocked the bravado out of us: their stories frightened us. Singing ‘Rule Britannia’ was not going to be enough, after all.”3 As the Battle of France gave way to the Battle of Britain, with the Regiment moving to Bawdsey in Suffolk, the war got steadily closer to Jones. The threat of enemy invasion seemed very real. On one occasion an enemy aircraft attacked the truck that Jones was driving and he was witness to several dogfights between British and German aircraft. After witnessing the devastation of Liverpool and Coventry in late 1940, he volunteered for aircrew duty as a “positive opening towards taking part in the war.”4 His educational background and lack of qualifications (having left school at 14) meant that he was not accepted for aircrew. He remained with the Royal Artillery, spending much of 1941 on the coast of Sussex waiting for an invasion to break the monotony. It was not until news that the Regiment was to embark for the Middle East in early 1942 that Jones felt his desire to see action would finally be realised.
Arriving in May, the Regiment took no part in the Battle of El Alamein. Thereafter the German Afrika Korps was in retreat and on its way towards ignominious defeat, caught between the British and the Americans in Tunisia. Cut off from replacement tanks and fuel supplies, the Panzer Divisions of the Afrika Korps became shadows of their former selves. Jones felt as though the war was in danger of passing him by completely as thousands of men in Middle Eastern command awaited redeployment
