The Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby

Alex Bowlby

• Publisher: Leo Cooper
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781473817500
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

The classic memoir by an infantryman in the British army during the Second World War, "a book to bring a shiver to the most grizzled veteran ( The Sunday Times).
In 1944, having distinguished itself in the North Africa campaign, Rifleman Bowlby's battalion of Greenjackets was sent to Italy. But instead of being used in the specialized role for which it had been trained, most of the battalion's vehicles were taken away on arrival, and the riflemen were told that they were to be used as ordinary infantry. Stripped of its hard core of regulars, the battalion suffered one disastrous defeat after another until its hard-won reputation fell in tatters.
This is a memoir that captures "quite extraordinary realism in this worm's eye view . . . the sweating, slogging, frightened infantryman in conditions of extreme stress and horror" ( The Sunday Times).

Chapter 1

On the Road

IN between Alexandria, where I had joined the Battalion,* and Capua the war-bug got to work. It affected everyone. We were like small boys waiting to play soldiers. And yet as soon as ‘D’ Company landed it demanded a home-leave. A great crowd of cheering riflemen charged through the olive-grove brandishing sheets of paper and shouting ‘Up the Oicks!’ The cry was taken up till the whole grove echoed with it. When it stopped there was a great burst of laughter.

‘What on earth’s happening?’ I asked a rifleman.

‘The lads want a home-leave before they go into action,’ he said. ‘They know they won’t get it, but it’s their way of showing they haven’t forgotten Tunis. They’re getting up a ’round-robin’ to give to the Company Commander.’

The Company Commander received the petition with his usual urbane kindness and ‘D’ Company got on with the war.

The incident reminded me of the time I saw the 1937 regulars arrive back from North Africa. An hour before they were due all the training-camp’s N.C.O.s went to ground. When the regulars arrived I understood why. The men swarmed on to the square, swinging their belts like clubs, and yelling, ‘Where’s the fucking R.S.M.! Come out and fight, you fuckers!’ It was the healthiest sight I had seen for a long time. I never dreamt that within six months I should be in their Battalion, or that I’d have the luck to land in Mr. Lane’s platoon. Most of its riflemen had spent two and three years with the Battalion, and as sailors carry the sea, so they carried the Desert. ‘We’re an Alakefak* lot,’ they told me, not that I needed telling. Their casual air of independence stuck out a mile. Brown as Arabs they moved with the relaxed assurance of successful poachers. Their accent and wit alone marked them as Londoners. Although they hankered for the Smoke they missed the Desert. Cockney Arabs, with a touch of the sand. Mr. Lane had also been in the Desert. His warmth, dash, and sense of humour made itself felt in whatever the Platoon did. We loved him. Sergeant Meadows and Corporal Baker, M.M., were in support. Meadows, a soft-spoken Scot, used the carrot; Baker, five foot one tall, the stick.

During the first three weeks of May the Battalion prepared to go into action on the Adriatic front. ‘D’ Company concentrated on route-marches. The Platoon had its own repertoire of songs, ‘Lili Marlene’ being way out in front. In the Desert the Battalion, in common with other 8th Army units, had made a habit of using captured German weapons against their previous owners, eating any German rations that came to hand, and singing ‘Lili Marlene’. There’s something deeply satisfying about capturing a song, particularly when it’s about a girl. Unlike some units who apparently just sung the song in English, leaving it dripping with sentiment, the Battalion had given ‘Lili’ the works. They had stripped off the schmalz and turned her into a tart who liked it. This was only to be expected from a regiment who had altered the third line of the regimental song, ‘England’s Glory’ so that it went

‘The Riflemen are going away,
They won’t be back for many a day,
They’ve put all the girls in the family way
To fight for England’s Glory.’

We had sung ‘Lili’ on every march since I had joined the Platoon. We knew it backwards, or we thought we did. On one particular afternoon we were returning to camp after practising a river-crossing. Messing about in boats had turned out to be as delightful as Kenneth Grahame makes it out to be. And lying on the bank watching other people do it was even better. The Platoon celebrated with a tremendous cock-a-hoop ‘Lili’. We’d pinched the enemy’s song, pinched his girl in a way, and we flung her back at him like a gauntlet. In the middle of the second verse the song got out of control. One moment we were singing it, the next it was singing us. It took over like an automatic pilot. For the first time in my life I lost all sense of self. I was inextricably part of the Platoon and they were part of me. We were all one. Nothing else mattered. I grinned hugely at my neighbours and they grinned back. In triumph. They’d felt it too. After we’d stopped singing we marched the last hundred yards to the camp in silence. On a route-march we sang and talked and sang again, but not on this one. Everyone had sensed an inexplicable happiness and no one wanted to break the spell. At the time it was a mystery, but a few post-war years of a family grand-guignol helped me to unravel it. As I discovered that peace can be a much more disturbing business than war and that the near-loss of one’s own sense of self under pressure more terrifying than fear of death in battle I began retreating to memories of the war, and the happiness and security it had brought me. It was then that I suddenly felt I understood what had happened on that march. All of us knew that within a few days we would be in action. Any one of us might be killed. Yet none of us gave it a thought. And because we didn’t, because in those great, triumphant shouts we challenged not only the Germans, but the death they stood for, we lost, if only for a moment, the need to protect ourselves. We had let go.

In that last week of May ‘D’ Company was at its peak. So were the other companies. The feel of the Battalion must have delighted the C.O. The old grudges of Tunis had blown away and the enemy was at hand. The powers-that-be chose this moment to shift the Battalion to the other side of Italy and take away its vehicles. The general who decided that the whole of Italy from Cassino onwards would prove the wrong sort of country for motor-battalions had a case, but it was unfortunate that this official reason for the disbanding of motor-battalions should be quickly followed by a detailed account of an incident that had happened to our own 5th Battalion, who were already operating as a motor-battalion in the Cassino area. A tank-regiment had sent five tanks across a bridge. The bridge came under fire. Three White scout-cars belonging to the 5th followed up the tanks, but the leading vehicle got knocked out in the middle of the bridge. The remaining two Whites withdrew. The tanks across the bridge reported they were being attacked by bazookas. The tank C.O. asked for the 5th’s scout-cars to cross the bridge so that their crews could deal with the bazookas. The 5th’s C.O. said that the shell-fire was too heavy. Whilst they were arguing the bazookas knocked out all five tanks. The Divisional General happened to be a tank man. As far as our battalion was concerned one motorized balls-up had cost us our vehicles. The 1st Battalion lost theirs too. But not the 5th. They were to still operate as a motor-battalion. This infuriated us. Apart from being responsible for the shake-up the 5th was a territorial Battalion with less than a year’s battle experience and nothing much to show for it. They had been in the Division longer than the other two battalions, hence their privilege. ‘That bloody shower!’ was the 3rd’s way of describing the 5th. A wit amended this to ‘the Mobile Bath-unit’. The name stuck.

After immediate regimental pressure the 3rd and 1st were allotted more Bren carriers than the normal infantry establishment. The motor-companies ceased to exist. Instead of four fifteen-hundredweights a platoon there was one. Drivers and mechanics became ordinary riflemen, and R.A.S.C three-tonners took the place of the fifteen-hundredweights. There was something infra dig about being carried by the Service Corps. Men who had fought their way all over Africa had developed a keen sense of independence and one-upmanship. This was destroyed overnight. In the Battalion re-organizations that followed Mr. Lane went to a carrier platoon. We did our best to accept this as just one of those things.

The Battalion arrived at Capua on May 25th. From then onwards it was at twenty-four hours to move operationally. Cassino had fallen on the 11th, the Adolf Hitler line on the 25th. The Division was waiting to exploit the break-through. On the 28th we got the wire. We were moving off at 8 a.m. the following day.

The prospect of action roused the platoon. And I had something else to get excited about. It happened to be my twentieth birthday, and when the post-corporal arrived with the Platoon’s mail eight out of twelve letters were for me, along with a pound of Dunhill’s ‘Royal Yacht’. After I had had four letters in a row there was an outcry. When I explained there were shouts of ‘Sweet seventeen, and never been kissed!’ and ‘Leave’ im alone, ’e’s a big boy now.’ (This from Corporal Baker.) The parcels did it. I burst out laughing and didn’t stop till I reached my bivouac. Who could have had a better start to a birthday? After reading my mail I lay down under an olive-tree, and filled my favourite pipe. This had caused something of a sensation. Its size and shape had drawn comparisons with a two-inch mortar, a saxophone, and a lavatory bowl. To me it had become a talisman. As I lit it a piece of raw tobacco fell in my eye. The pain was explosive. I leapt to my feet and clapping both hands to the eye ran round in circles. My performance mystified the Platoon – ‘What’s he at? ’ they shouted – until Sergeant Meadows caught hold of me, and found out. Whilst he removed the tobacco Corporal Baker remarked that when the Germans saw my pipe they’d ‘pack it in’.

We spent the rest of the day packing stores and equipment. Everything except our bedding and mortar-bombs, which were to travel on the fifteen-hundredweight, along with Sergeant Meadows, was stowed on the three-tonner. We then practised getting on board ourselves. We needed to. The first time we tried it only half the Platoon could squeeze in. After a lot of re-packing all twenty-four of us made it.

That night I sat outside my bivouac chatting to O’Connor, a thirteen-stone publican from County Cork (by way of Shoreditch). He gave the impression of being as firmly rooted as the trees around him, a comforting one just then.

‘The first time you were in action, Paddy, were you afraid of running away?’ I asked him.

O’Connor chuckled.

‘Yerrah, I’dsay!’

‘Did you feel afraid of being afraid?’

‘Now don’t start worrying, Alec. I’ll look after you.’

‘It’s funny, you know. I feel excited and afraid at the same time.’

‘You’ll be all right’

We grinned at one another.

O’Connor turned in, suggesting I do the same, but for some time I sat looking at the stars, trying to find an answer.

The first thing in the morning O’Connor went to scrounge some tea from the cooks. He ran back shouting ‘They buggered off! Ernie Cross and Joe Bates. Them and three others!’

O’Connor enjoyed the incredulous shouts of ‘No!’ (Cross had been my section-commander, and Bates had also belonged to it) then added: ‘They took a three-tonner full of food and petrol with them!’

Everyone laughed except Baker. When Rifleman Cooper shouted ‘Good luck!’ Baker snapped his head off.

‘Turn it up, Titch,’ said Cooper defensively. ‘If they’ve ’ad enough now’s the time to pack it in.’

‘We’d be well there if everyone said that!’

‘Sammy’s right,’ said Phillips. ‘Better it’ appens now than in the Line.’

‘Better it ’appens nowhere!’ said Baker.

O’Connor had the last word, as usual.

‘Yerrah,’ he said. ‘I bet the C.O.’s doing his nut!’

The desertion of Cross and Bates reminded me of the times I had just avoided a beating at school whilst others hadn’t. I had the same guilty feeling of excitement. The ethics of desertion had a deeper pull. They were so unexpected.

During breakfast a Corporal Swallow arrived to take over command of my section. He had never been in action and the Desert men knew it. His barrack-room style of giving orders cut no ice with them. They just grinned. Swallow blushed.

When the Platoon boarded the three-tonner Humphreys came into his own. He and two others who had just joined the Battalion had belonged to a 1st Army unit, and had come in for some heavy ribbing from the Desert men. Humphreys thrived on it. He wore his beret as if he were still wheeling a barrow, and one look at his face made you want to laugh. When the three-tonner began revving-up he let fly a tremendous ‘Moo!’ As we moved off ‘Moos!’ and ‘Baa-ahs!’ were passing down the length of the company, and on into the next. This delighted us.

The Battalion joined the Brigade convoy, which joined the Divisional convoy, which joined a Corps convoy; the result was reputed to be twenty miles long. Its official speed was 8 m.p.h., the actual one nearer 5 m.p.h. The main roads had been mined and, nose to tail, we meandered up country lanes. These were picketed with warning notices of ‘Dust is Death – watch your dust’, the enemy being in the habit of shelling dust clouds. We watched our dust all right. The gap between the three-tonner’s tarpaulin and the tailboard sucked it up like a vacuum cleaner. We let down the flap-end of the tarpaulin but lack of air soon made us open it again. We tried taking the tarpaulin off altogether – an awkward job on the move...

Table of contents

• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Foreword
• Front
• Chapter 1 On the Road
• Chapter 2 The Night Attack
• Chapter 3 ‘This is Nothing’
• Chapter 4 Cantalupo
• Chapter 5 Cuckoos at Perugia
• Chapter 6 Interlude
• Chapter 7 Six Men and a Spandau
• Chapter 8 Captain Kendall in Command
• Chapter 9 The Cardinal’s House
• Chapter 10 Bless Relaxes
• Chapter 11 The Gothic
• Chapter 12 Orlando
• Chapter 13 Flowers of the Forest
• Chapter 14 ‘The Ox shall be buried’
• Epilogue Return to Monte Lignano