Bill Sanderson's Wartime Experiences -Part 5 - The End of the War

The last operation we did was Lake Commanchio, in North East Italy, lots of flooded country with dykes. A couple of days before, we’d been practising crossing these dykes in small collapsible boats. It was freezing. It was the first time I’d ever had rum in the field. At the end of the day the sergeant major was there with his jug of rum. Of course, when it came to the real thing we didn’t use the boats. It was generally the way that things worked, entirely different to the way things had been planned. We didn’t get very far. Some of the fighting troops up front ran into trouble. We were pulling our guns along this dyke in a boat all night. We had a bit of firing and some trouble with mines going off. Then we heard this mechanised sound and saw all these ‘fantails’, amphibious troop carriers. Our blokes had secured the bridges and the army was going across. We picked up some casualties, Germans and British and stretchered them down.
That was the end of our active service.

We had some time guarding prisoner of war cages. There were some really young ones in those, fifteen and sixteen year olds, Hitler youth.

When we got back to Naples the troopship that took us back was the Caernarfon Castle, one of the ‘Castle’ boats that used to do South Africa before the war, nice boat. We got aboard and we, Pat and I, got chosen as butchers again, to help the butcher out in the galley. We help out each day. We’d get the same food as the crew, which was a lot better than the troops got. We didn’t have to do any physical jerks or any of that nonsense. We got a bottle of beer a day as well. So we had a good trip back, five or six days. We came up Southampton water, we thought, cheers, we’re back home. I ‘d been away two and a quarter years. The first person we saw was a Yank with his girl on the end of the pier. If you’d have heard what those remarks were! We landed and went to Basingstoke from Southampton into what used to be a mushroom farm, wooden huts. Then we were sent on leave. Whilst I was on leave, the war in the east ended. We were moved about every two weeks after we came back from leave, here and there, all in Hampshire. They didn’t know what to do with us. They’d say “Farmer so and so wants so many today.” And we’d go to this farm and be cutting worzels all day. Get the top of the worzel, pull it up and just whip the topping off and drop it ready for the next one. We got about two bob a day and a sandwich and a bottle of beer at lunchtime.

You had your demob number. The long servicemen went first. The actual Commando went to Hong Kong. When I finally got back to Scarborough, I remember coming down Commercial Street and there was a sign in the glass door saying welcome home. I had to walk past and collect myself before going in.

Postscript:

Bill was too young to vote when he joined the Marines. He voted for the first time in the1945 elections and, like many of his comrades, voted labour expecting to see a change from the class ridden pre-war Britain he remembered. In June 1946 he was demobbed and returned to Scarborough. He got a job as a fireman with the Fire Brigade. He met Ruby, a Scarborough girl at a Christmas dance at the Olympia ballroom in 1946 and fell in love with her. He rejoined the Marines in May 1947 when she turned down his first proposal of marriage. They married in 1948. Because of the Korean War, Bill’s four years in the Marines were extended to five and he finally returned to civvy street in 1952.

Bill and Ruby have been married for 54 years. Their first child Paul, born in 1949, died from meningitis shortly before the birth of their second, (young) Bill in 1952. Karen was born in 1954 and David in 1956. There are five grandchildren: Jack, Will, Matthew, Maisie, and Leia.

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