of opportunity, the chance to get into battle at long last, opened up for Jones in a rather unexpected way. His military career moved in a very different direction and at a very different pace: for the remainder of the war he joined the Raiding Support Regiment.
Later in life Walter Jones, at 66 years of age, would rediscover his wartime diaries. Urged on by his three daughters, and by a desire to show his younger brothers Harry and Bert the kind of war he had had, Walter Jones began to write. He was also impelled to write because so little attention had been given to the activities of the Raiding Support Regiment. His memoirs were written with the benefit of his diary, on which he would draw heavily, records from the National Archives in London, and on various secondary accounts. At his death on 8 August 2001 the memoirs remained unpublished and in various stages of drafting. The task of editing has involved considerable reworking of the paragraphing to get the memoirs into book form. Beyond this, the words are those of Walter Jones, unless explicitly identified otherwise.
G H Bennett, Plymouth October 2008
“I was about to join, the Raiding Support Regiment (RSR) was made up of alcoholics, criminals and misfits, whom other units in the Middle East were glad to be rid of.”
Chapter 1
Joining The Raiding Support Regiment
The fateful notice had appeared on the order board. Volunteers were required from Middle East army personnel for special service operations ‘behind enemy lines’, an essential condition being an undertaking to submit to training as parachutists. Recruits were sought from all ranks and from across the whole spectrum of skills and trades, although a preference was stated for those experienced in handling small boats and horses or mules. Heroics didn’t enter into it. Futility, boredom, purposelessness and a simple, understandable desire for change eventually prompted my application, and I was not untypical.
These appeals for volunteers had appeared before but were usually so specific in their requirements as to seriously limit the number of qualifying applicants, whose rare and valuable skills self-snookered their requests behind the ball of a Commanding Officer’s regimental possessiveness. The difference this time was that only obvious rejection by a selection board could baulk the application. So other dissuasive measures at retention were tried. I was offered Sergeant status. But the appeal of action at last – and cloak and dagger, adventurous action at that – appeared to offer greater fulfilment than promotion and I have never regretted my decision. Well, perhaps never is untrue.
Three weeks later, on 13 November 1943, I was back again in Beirut’s transit camp for the momentous interview which would decide my future Army activities. After years of trying to become involved in the action, selection for the avenue most likely to lead to it was positively anticlimactic. It seemed that only hints at lies were necessary to secure my acceptance. What did I know about small boats? Well I had been born and bred in the port of Liverpool hadn’t I? Had I any experience of handling horses or mules? Hadn’t Aintree racecourse been on my very doorstep? And didn’t my mother actually work for its owner, Mrs Topham?
Lord Haw Haw, that traitorous perpetrator of propaganda for Hitler, is reported to have said on the radio that the newlyformed regiment I was about to join, the Raiding Support Regiment (RSR) was made up of alcoholics, criminals and misfits, whom other units in the Middle East were glad to be rid of. As usual there was a modicum of substance in the information Germany had scooped up in espionage’s most fertile territory, the Middle East. Certainly, recruitment was hardly discerning. The Beirut interviews were a classic example of going through the motions. I cannot recall anyone being rejected: perhaps it was thought that parachute training itself would be the ultimate eliminating criterion.
In fact the Beirut interviews were not the casual affairs they had appeared to be… At the time I was quite unaware that recruitment was taking place almost simultaneously for the Long Range Desert Group (in its new, airborne special operations role) and for the Special Boat Squadron. I have no information to support my theory but I feel sure that these two units had the pick of the specialists in their particular talents and aptitudes, leaving the RSR, like the German propaganda broadcasts stated, with what was left of the pickings – the misfits. Adding weight to this presumption was the earlier call for interview of two of my friends: they had both previously been on a signaller’s course and had duly returned qualified as wireless operators. As it turned out, five other members of my regiment were also selected for RSR. So it was that the trundling train, transporting the successful volunteers from Aleppo in Syria to a transit camp at Haifa in Palestine on 25 November 1943, carried more hope and expectancy than remorse or resignation.
A vehicle arrived the next day and took us a few miles north along the coast to an obviously freshly created tented-camp near the German-Jewish seaside village of Nahariya, the first headquarters of the brand new Raiding Support Regiment. It was the first time we had heard the name of the newly formed unit, the novelty of which was – almost literally – sickeningly imposed on six tentative young men in search of unifying stability, by the dismaying chaos and indifference of our reception. We could hardly be expected to make allowances for the uniqueness of the situation. But we should have. What other regiment had been formed without even the nucleus of an existing administration? The ‘suspicious stranger’ syndrome was instantly evident among us in a way that one might expect… only in a transit camp full of alien (to each other) servicemen. Each of us later confessed to a deepening unease during that first day in the RSR. Similarly though, we each found little difficulty in rejecting any notion of backing out, although we knew that we were permitted ‘second thoughts’ at any time up to the successful completion of seven training parachute descents from a plane. Two shillings, a day’s extra pay for a trained parachutist, was the ostensible incentive given for wishing to ‘sweat it out’.
Day two at the camp was even more demoralising than the first. Having learnt that the new Regiment’s establishment comprised five “Batteries” – an Artillery term – I imagined wrongly that as a gunner my niche would be found in either the Anti-Tank Battery or the Mountain Battery of 75mm gun-howitzers.5 Neither Battery wanted me. I found myself allocated to the Anti-Aircraft Battery, whose mightiest weapon was the 0.5 inch Browning machine gun – an infantry weapon which could be utilised for air defence by the provision of a mounting pedestal.6 That ‘could be’ is significant: the pedestals were still being pleaded for (to British Military Headquarters in Cairo) in mid-January 1944, and did not arrive until a few days before ‘C’ Battery left Palestine for an unknown destination on 27 January. But then, what good were mountings without Brownings? They had not arrived until Christmas Day! Such was the start of the RSR. Muddle, uncertainty, recrimination and secrecy. No weapons, no equipment, no premises – not even for trench latrines.
Adjacent acreage was occupied by the newly mustering Special Boat Squadron, formed from volunteers and remnants of the Special Air Service, which, having been formed in the Middle East, had mostly been sent home to start training and recruiting for the bigger things to come across the English Channel. The SBS camp confirmed my notion of its elitist status over the RSR: their communal premises were hutted structures. Cookhouse, mess rooms, canteens, latrines and medical room; all were solid brick constructions.
Training had to be concentrated wholly on the physical aspect of preparing for parachute jumping courses, and to that totally absorbing objective our energies were enthusiastically directed. It was one compelling feature of those first two weeks of December 1943 and the only one, it seemed, that the Regiment was adequately equipped for at that time. Rightly or wrongly, we regarded the hardship as an essential, perhaps deliberate, part of that training. The roughest country was found for a progression of forced marches with loaded packs and small arms over 9, 12 and 15 miles on alternate days, always finishing with a swim in the still Mediterranean from the excellent, sandy beach at Nahariya. Non-marching days were crammed with strengthening and agility exercises. Assessing things after a week, preoccupation with physical fitness obscured almost everything else from my mind. Camp discomfort, equipment scarcity, the random dispersal of even the few friends
