What Did My Family Do In WW2?

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening to We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Sign up to our Patreon to receive bonus content, live streams and our weekly newsletter with money off books and museum visits as well.

Speaker 1 Plus early access to all live show tickets. That's patreon.com slash we have ways.

Speaker 2 This special episode is brought to you by Ancestry and the question we get literally more than any other is how you actually trace a relative through the war. Where you start.

Speaker 2 And the truth is, you begin in the same place we do. You start with ancestry.

Speaker 1 It's where the real stuff lives. Prisoner of war questionnaires filled in the moment a bloke stepped off a truck.

Speaker 1 Operations record books with scribbles, the weather, the odd line about a bicycle going walkabout, and the war diaries that tell you exactly what a battalion was doing at half past nine on that particular Tuesday.

Speaker 2 And even if you're new to family history research, Ancestry does so much to help you piece together the stories of your ancestors. A name leads to a unit, a unit leads to a diary entry.

Speaker 2 Suddenly, you're not looking at history from a distance, you're right beside them, watching their war take shape.

Speaker 1 These records have also shaped today's episode.

Speaker 1 We followed a few threads that you can explore yourself with an Ancestry Family History membership, uncovering surprises, tiny details, and those little lines that can completely shift a story.

Speaker 1 It's an invaluable resource and it underpins everything you're about to hear.

Speaker 2 You can follow along and start exploring your family history at ancestry.co.uk forward slash new year.

Speaker 1 Aktung Aktung, welcome to We Have Ways to Make You Talk with me Al Murray and James Holland, of course. And Jim, we have got We have got our hands on something really fantastic here, haven't we?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, honestly, it's very rare, I think, that you come across a genuinely new resource.

Speaker 2 And obviously, I've known about ancestry for a long time, but I've just thought, well, it's all bursts and deaths and kind of, you know, looking up your great, great, great, great, great uncle, who in my case was a yeoman farmer called Josiah the Wrestler.

Speaker 2 Josiah the Wrestler. Yeah, yeah, he lives in Staffordshire.

Speaker 2 But that's what I thought Ancestry was for.

Speaker 2 Josiah Holland. Josiah Holland, the wrestler.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've got a mental image of sort of people wrestling in haystacks and stuff.

Speaker 2 Yeah, looking very white. Yes.
But sinewy

Speaker 2 with straw

Speaker 1 and what's fantastic about ancestry is that i mean they basically they've kind of got everything everything yeah and and we'll talk about what we've found and we'll talk about what we've looked at and and

Speaker 1 one of the first things i did i looked up my family which is obviously what people are going to do yeah right and i have a fair idea of my family history um second world war family history so the first thing i looked up was so my my father's father my grandfather rafe when he was in the political warfare executive there is a photograph of him somewhere dressed as a major right because sometimes they'd be sent on these um uh political warfare jobs and they'd have to dress up as a soldier yeah so i put him in to see if he'd actually been gazetted as a major and and he was never gazetted as a major he's never so so pwe quite clearly we're up to skarduggery and he was impersonating an officer in the british army it would seem So that's quite interesting.

Speaker 1 Then I looked up my other grandfather, I looked up James,

Speaker 1 who fought with the Oxford Bucks at Hazelbrook with

Speaker 1 the Bucks Battalion. And what's interesting is they are rolling out all of the everyone's service records and they're not quite complete, but I did find him in the casualty lists, right?

Speaker 1 Where he is switched from missing to known, killed. But what's really interesting about this, because all of these records, the thing to remember is all of these is someone at a typewriter,

Speaker 1 banging them out as quickly as they can you know

Speaker 1 all that right in the initial report casualty report they get his initials wrong because there's a gap between my my grandmother knowing he's missing and knowing he was killed because that's the other thing these records it just it sheds light not just on the people but on the process on the bureaucratic muscle yeah yeah yeah behind the whole of the and so and his initials are in wrong and i wonder if that delayed

Speaker 1 it makes you think it makes you think gosh yeah yeah, because also they're going through so many people, they don't know where everyone is, they don't know what happened to everybody.

Speaker 1 They're piecing together the disaster of BEF's battle in May, 1640. Yeah, you know, all these disparate accounts and bits and pieces coming in, and his initials are wrong.

Speaker 1 And maybe that's enough to delay you're reaching home. Isn't that? I mean, I was just really struck by that.
Yeah. And that's the first thing I looked at.
Yeah, amazing.

Speaker 2 On here. Do you remember

Speaker 2 the death certificate of Den Brotheridge? Yes. First man

Speaker 2 supposedly to be killed on d-day probably wasn't actually he was first person to be mortally wounded it's not the same thing but his death certificate is on the 8th of june not the 6th that's right in portsmouth in portsmouth yeah because they bring his body back or something no i think they bring his belongings and it's where his belongings get registered

Speaker 2 Because he's definitely

Speaker 1 buried in Ronville, yeah. And he'll have gone into a...

Speaker 2 But again, I think that's a clerical error, but that's on the death certificate. And it also says died of glider wounds.
So I think what happens is he gets wounded.

Speaker 2 Then he's taken to one of the broken gliders, which is the temporary RAP. And that's because it's in sunken ground, so it's below the normal ground level.

Speaker 1 And he's in the pile of bodies, he's in the basic, in the line of bodies.

Speaker 2 He's in the line of bodies. His head's bashed in because he's got a net wound, so he obviously looks rubbish.

Speaker 1 But what I found so interesting is you get into this and you get a feel for the administrative sinews

Speaker 1 that are running this entire war effort. And

Speaker 1 the names are in there.

Speaker 2 You will find

Speaker 1 your family names or not, you know, in the case of my other grandfather, he's not in there, which, which, which tells you something,

Speaker 2 tells you something else.

Speaker 2 Process of elimination.

Speaker 2 I mean, the interesting thing is, I've been all around the world looking at archives, and I've gone into loads of them, and some of them are really, really good, and some of them really are a bit chaotic, to be perfectly honest.

Speaker 2 So, you can just digitally get all this up, download it yourself, put it onto your own Dropbox or whatever cloud file source you use. Exactly.
I mean, I had no idea. I had no idea that that was

Speaker 2 so I am genuinely very, very excited to know that suddenly I've got this at my fingertips when I didn't have that before.

Speaker 2 And it means also that if you suddenly, you know, say I'm following a story of someone, let's say, you know, someone at casino and I want to look at what happened to them, I can just immediately go on and look him up.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 If you've got someone's service number, but also if you've got their names, their date of birth, place of birth, nationality, and if you've got their service number, better still, if you know a squadron, if you know a regiment,

Speaker 1 the search engine here will basically

Speaker 1 triangulate that person and find them in the information.

Speaker 1 But I mean, the other thing is, the other thing you start to realize is,

Speaker 1 and it goes back to my point about the administration, the bureaucratic level of the Second World War.

Speaker 1 I mean, how many people know prisoners of war were then filled in a questionnaire when they were liberated? These can be, you know, I'm all right,

Speaker 1 I was wounded.

Speaker 1 They can be quite sparse, or they can be super detailed and we we've got one here um which is this captain john lothian nick nicholson um who was captured on the 4th of april um 1942 in the bay of bengal and liberated in uh uh mukien in august 1945 jeez so three years a prisoner three years in prison born on the 1st of october 1913 um army service um 31st of august 1933 so he's a regular And he's from Warminster.

Speaker 2 And actually, the vast majority of Japanese prisoners of war were captured in 1942.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So capture.
And this is his questionnaire. So

Speaker 1 the categories are capture, award data. Yep.

Speaker 1 Then there's war crimes, nil. Camp conditions, nil.
He hasn't filled that in. Camp finance, nil.
Casualties, nil.

Speaker 1 But there is this absolutely amazing story of him getting away from Singapore that leads to his capture.

Speaker 2 So what unit is he in?

Speaker 1 He is in the HQ Malaya Command. So he's a headquarters soldier.

Speaker 1 About midnight on the 15th, 16th, February 42, after the surrender of Singapore, Lieutenant Hallows, Gordon Highland, Highlanders, ADC to General Keith Simmons, and I took a 12-foot dinghy from the yacht club beside the harbour and made off in the direction of St.

Speaker 1 John's Island. The following afternoon, we crossed the Singapore Straits, the Dutch Islands.
Our intentions were to pick up a trading junk somewhere in the Dutch Islands to take us to Java.

Speaker 2 These lands they're not going to hang around and get picked up by the Japanese.

Speaker 1 No, thank you. On one of the islands, we met and joined up with 10 British and Australian officers and four other ranks.

Speaker 1 We had a little money between us and used some of it to purchase a 22-foot boat from the natives. In this, we continued through the islands and reached Moro on the 18th of February.

Speaker 1 On Pulau Nuk Moro, Messar, we discovered a camp of escapees who were being evacuated by launches up to the

Speaker 1 Inigiri River. This is all typed.

Speaker 2 This is printed up off the website. It's for real.

Speaker 1 They advised us to continue up the river in our own boat, which we did, carrying a good supply of food given to us by the evacuees. They keep going, they get caught,

Speaker 1 they run out of food, they split the party up, they get into different boats, they bury the radio they've got with them because they haven't got any batteries left, and then finally

Speaker 1 they're picked up. This adventure comes from when he sets out in February and isn't picked up till April.

Speaker 2 So he's, you know, blaming.

Speaker 1 When it became obvious that no further evacuation ships were reaching Padang, Lieutenant Colonel Warren, Royal Marines, who was in charge of British troops at Padang, decided to send a small party to attempt to sail to India.

Speaker 2 Yeah, quite right, too.

Speaker 2 So he's in the Bay of cool.

Speaker 1 Exactly. But I mean, this is absolutely, you know, this stuff is amazing.
And

Speaker 2 there are

Speaker 1 endless prisoner of war questionnaires that have been filled in. And also, you've got the Japanese camp records as well.
So they're their records of everyone,

Speaker 1 everyone who came through the camps.

Speaker 2 Well, I've got to say, one of the things that I really enjoy about doing the research for books is the kind of investigation.

Speaker 2 You know, it's a kind of, you're like a detective. And you're trying to piece things together and you get little leads and you go down these little rabbit holes.

Speaker 2 Usually you have to go to an archive to do this. Yeah.
Increasingly people have digitized stuff, but only a limited amount, I would say.

Speaker 2 For the most part, you've got to roll it with siege, go to wherever it is, Germany, America,

Speaker 2 Q in London or whatever, and just go through it. But the fantastic thing about this is you're given such a head start.
Yeah. With this.

Speaker 2 I mean, honestly, I can't even begin to tell you how many hours I've spent photographing bits of decrepit paper of war diaries over the years. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then you've got to organize, you know, while you've done that, you might have sort of 427 photographs from a war diary of 1944 of the Royal West Kent, for argument's sake. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Then you've got to organise it all. You've got to download it.
You've got to reduce the file size. Then you've got to convert it into a PDF to make it all useful.
All that takes a huge amount of time.

Speaker 2 Whereas now, they've done it all.

Speaker 1 They've done it all. Yes, they get picked up while they're trying to sail to India by the Japanese.
And then he's in Chang'e

Speaker 2 for four months.

Speaker 1 Then Haito in Formosa

Speaker 1 for nearly a year. Yeah.

Speaker 1 For 11 months.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 he goes to Japan. He ends up in Kyushu.
So, I mean, this is hardcore stuff.

Speaker 2 It's amazing how much they move him around. They're absolutely determined that the Allies aren't going to get their hands on them.
So they just move further and further and further and closer.

Speaker 2 And some of them, like General Wainwright, remember him? Yes. The American General Wayne surrenders

Speaker 2 on Corregidor in May 1942.

Speaker 2 He ends up in Manchuria or something. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 What I really loved about this is so an old mate of mine, right? Yeah. He used to tell stories, and he's Australian, he's Tasmanian.
His father was from Glasgow, emigrated to... Just like Errol Flynn.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Just like Errol Flynn.
Emigrated from Glasgow between the wars. to Tasmania.
And then when the call came, comes back to join the Royal Air Force.

Speaker 1 Ends up in 407 royal canadian air force squadron the demon squadron right and and my mate dominic is so proud of his dad being a you know he was in the demon squadron mate you know they they always they always push their attacks home and all this sort of stuff and we used to talk we used to talk a lot about um about this and he had his logbooks and 407 were coastal command squadron right so they're engaged in attacks on merchant vessels they're doing a bit so

Speaker 1 hunting hudsons for a lot of it but one of the big things he used to talk about is how that for the Bremen thousand-bomber raid, they were drafted into that to make up the numbers.

Speaker 1 And he had his dad's logbook with his plot to Bremen and back. And I thought, well, all right, then, I'll look up the Demon Squadron.
And this is the amazing thing. It's the RAF ORBs.

Speaker 1 In the drop-down menu,

Speaker 1 you just keep going

Speaker 1 till you get the squadron you want, right? It's quite extraordinary. And

Speaker 1 their records, it's relentless. Merchant vessel strikes.
They're going out. They're looking for submarines.

Speaker 1 They're looking for downed air crew, you know, people who've ditched. And it's this endless, relentless tempo of operations.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that really sticks out is it's their anniversary, right?

Speaker 1 On the 29th of May, 1942, the Airman Squadron anniversary party took place during the evening.

Speaker 1 It was unfortunate indeed that so many of both air crew and ground crew could not attend owing to these operations. So they're out on ops, right? But actually, the background to that is Flying Officer

Speaker 1 Race and crew of Flight Sergeant Clark, Sergeant Summers, and Pilot Officer Robinson were on this operation and failed to return.

Speaker 1 They were last seen making through Intense Flak to attack an enemy merchant vessel. The loss of Flying Officer Race leaves this squadron with only one of its original bombers still flown.

Speaker 2 Flown

Speaker 1 WB Cooper. So at the same time as they're celebrating their squadron anniversary, there's no one left alive.
With the squadron. Jeez.
Well, there's no one left alive.

Speaker 2 And what was your friend's father's name?

Speaker 1 Sharp.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 1 So then there's the description of going on the Bremen raid.

Speaker 2 But listen to this.

Speaker 1 During the month, this squadron has set up an all-time record for damage caused to enemy shipping. A minimum of 83,000 tons of enemy shipping has been attacked.

Speaker 1 during the period since April the 10th, 1942.

Speaker 1 And this is the 31st of May, they're writing this. So

Speaker 1 intense operational pace. Coastal Command attacks on enemy shipping.
We don't think of that, do we? No. If we think of Coastal Command in any context, it's U-boat hunting.

Speaker 2 But they're all the time going over to Norway, aren't they?

Speaker 1 It's relentless, right? Several of our crews have successfully attacked three ships each during this period. With the exception of the very new arrivals, all crews have made claims.

Speaker 1 The previous record in Coastal Command was also held by this squadron when, from September 1st to December 1st, 1941, this squadron was credited with damaging 150,000 tons of enemy shipping.

Speaker 1 Stick that in your U-boat

Speaker 1 campaign pipe and smoke it.

Speaker 2 Since this squadron... We've so got to do a series on Coastal Command.

Speaker 1 It's completely nuts. Anyway, so this is the tempo of operations they're running at, right? But then, oh, they've got to go to Bremen to make up the numbers on a thousand-bomb raid.

Speaker 1 And in that, I found my friend Dominic's dad.

Speaker 2 Great. What was he doing?

Speaker 1 Early in the morning, all squadron personnel began to suspect something big in the wind, but all efforts to get the story from the wind commander proved fruitless.

Speaker 1 But basically, of the 11 aircraft of this squadron which took part, and it goes on about how they're flying 12,000 feet above white clouds, which obliterated everything.

Speaker 1 So they're flying, they're going to Bremen, they can't see a thing.

Speaker 1 Same old story.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah. The following six crews successfully reached Bremen and dropped their bombs on the city.

Speaker 1 So there's Pilot Officer O'Connell's crew, Flying Officer Hosier's crew, Pilot Officer Arnett's crew, and these are all five-man crews. Flying Officer Taylor's crew, which includes Sergeant Jay Sharp.

Speaker 1 Fabulous. My pal Dominic's dad.

Speaker 2 That's amazing.

Speaker 1 Although, owing to cloud cover, it's impossible to discern what damage had been done, although the crews reported explosions were seen below the crowds. And several flares are reflected.

Speaker 1 So they were attacking submarine and shipbuilding base in Bremen.

Speaker 2 To be fair, that wasn't the point of the thousand bomber raid. No.
It was just to do it. It was to do it.

Speaker 1 It was to show it could be done, right? Um, and it's the it's the third one.

Speaker 2 I still wish they'd done it in 1940.

Speaker 1 It's the third one of the war, so you've got you've got Cologne, Wilson, and then Bremen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because I've been corresponding with Dom to ask it, to ask him, basically, to get his act together so that we can do his dad-on-family stories, because it's a good story.

Speaker 2 It's a great story. Do you search up 407 squadron?

Speaker 1 I just found the squadron.

Speaker 2 You did that first, yeah.

Speaker 1 Find the squadron, and then just go through it. You know, scroll down.

Speaker 2 You haven't looked him up as personnel yet?

Speaker 1 No, I wanted to. What I wanted to do was look at the squadron record and see if he was recorded in it.

Speaker 1 Because obviously one of the differences with the RAF and say the Army is not everyone in an infantry section, you know, B section put in that attack or A company, and here are all the people in A company that afternoon.

Speaker 1 You never get that, whereas you do get the crews. So you do get pretty much who's in every aircraft.

Speaker 2 Okay, so what you're looking at is you're looking at the diary of events. Yeah.
But there's also a different...

Speaker 2 So the orbs are so the orbs are like the battalion war diaries yeah they are effectively the diary but they're called the operational record book yes so you have a record of events and you have um something else and i can't remember what it is and one of them is just a list of what crews and what they're doing and what what sortie they're doing yeah and then the other one is more detailed which is one you've got there yeah yeah which specifies it so the key thing with the orbs is to look at both of them yeah

Speaker 2 for each squadron yeah and and so see the records and also just go through the whole month because what it will also do is

Speaker 2 invariably I'll have a kind of roster of what pilots and what aircrew are available and what who aren't and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 And it's signed off by the squadron leader at the end of each month and blah, blah, blah. A bit like they are on the

Speaker 2 individual logbooks. Yeah.
I mean, it's quite fascinating.

Speaker 1 But it's absolutely fascinating. And to see that recorded,

Speaker 1 obviously, what you really get here, though. you get a real sense of the squadron's pride in itself.
Yes. You get a real sense of it

Speaker 1 as a functioning, as an organism. So the fact that there's an anniversary, but these are the crews that are left.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so you get a sense of the toll of the operations, but also their pride in what they've achieved, and also the multinational nature of the squadron as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 I mean, all these all these battalion war diaries and um and ships logs, there's fewer ships' logs because a lot of them were destroyed after the war.

Speaker 2 Um, but but um, the ORBs and the battalion war diaries, they're really interesting because it they just vary so much depending on who's writing it, yeah. And

Speaker 2 sometimes it's the adjutant, sometimes it's the intelligence officer, um, But they do vary.

Speaker 2 And it depends on how worthy the writer wants to be.

Speaker 2 But some of them can be just absolutely brilliant.

Speaker 1 So this is the getting ready for the Bremen raid. Great excitement prevailed when eventually 11 crews were informed that they were going on a bombing raid and not a shipping strike.

Speaker 1 And disappointment was seen on the faces of those crews who were told they were to stay at home. It was not until briefing took place that we found out what our target was to be.

Speaker 1 And there were shouts of glee from all those present when the group captain announced we were going to obliterate Bremen.

Speaker 2 Amazing, isn't it? Amazing. Collective gung-hon-ness.

Speaker 1 You're right there in the room with it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And I, um, and that was just

Speaker 1 following my nose,

Speaker 1 pure curiosity. Yeah.
Looking at the 3,000 bomberades, when are they? Cross-referencing them with the diary

Speaker 1 and then landing on this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's one of these things that is incredibly addictive. You very quickly get into it.
Yeah. Hours of fun to be had digging around.
So, should we take a quick break?

Speaker 2 Because I've also been looking at something as well, which is

Speaker 2 takes me back to Sicily.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So everything discussed in today's episode has been sourced from Ancestry's records. And Jim, we have with us Simon Pierce from Ancestry, who's a military genealogist.
So he knows everything.

Speaker 1 He knows everything, basically.

Speaker 2 Simon knows everything.

Speaker 1 But more importantly, he knows how to find out everything. So, Simon, we've had a lot of fun looking at what we can do on Ancestry.

Speaker 1 In fact, and Jim, to be honest, has been sort of blown away by it, really, after decades of research.

Speaker 2 Completely, yeah, it's been absolutely incredible.

Speaker 1 So, Simon, have you used the archive yourself to find out stuff about your family?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I've been with Ancestry now for 10 years, but using it long before then, and I've used it to look at my military ancestors from the Second World War, from the First World War, from Callipoli right through to the Burma campaign.

Speaker 3 And yeah, it's really helped to bring to life the military experiences of my family members that I never got to meet, never got to ask these questions, but the records opened up all new avenues of research and kind kind of brought to life their service, really.

Speaker 2 So where should beginners start? Because this is the point, isn't it? It's getting going. That's the slightly bewildering bit.
Once you get into it, it's fine, but it's just getting started.

Speaker 3 Because we have so many different military records, whether it's a service record or a POW questionnaire or a war diary, it can be challenging to know where to start.

Speaker 3 And often I hear people say, oh, I had a parent or grandparent or an aunt and uncle that served, but they didn't really tell me very much. And I always say, speak to a family member.

Speaker 3 There's usually someone in your family who might have a story, a photograph, a letter, you know, know, some of the clue just to help you.

Speaker 3 But we have on ancestry, and you've probably seen that the British Army service records for the Second World War, a great place to start because we're uploading more and more of these service records that provide a wonderful insight into somebody's service history right from enlistment through to discharge.

Speaker 3 So that's a great place to start.

Speaker 3 I would say as well, it is worth creating a family tree because the more information you enter into ancestry, the more dates, locations, people will start giving you hints.

Speaker 3 We'll say, okay, this service record or this POW questionnaire or this operations record book might be related to your family member, to your ancestors.

Speaker 3 So it's worth creating a tree because that will help you with sort of, it's quite intuitive. It will hold your hand if you like and make suggestions as you go on.

Speaker 3 And each record is just one piece of the puzzle. So when you find one, it's not the end of it.
It's just leading you on to another one. And that's what's so exciting.

Speaker 3 You never know where it's going to take you next.

Speaker 1 That, that, that, um,

Speaker 1 personalizing this great big event, which is, you know, the Second World War, people were involved in it whether they liked it or not. So that's the other thing.

Speaker 1 You will have a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-uncle, great-aunt, whatever, who somehow got caught up in this because that was the nature of the event.

Speaker 1 That makes it maybe something that you can relate to and you can relate to them. And I think it's an incredible tool, isn't it, Jim?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it really is. It's absolutely fabulous.
I mean, I've really been completely blown away by it, to be honest.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you, Simon.

Speaker 1 Thanks to Ancestry

Speaker 1 for offering us yet another, and everyone out there, yet another exciting tool for researching the past and bringing the past to life.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to Weird Ways of Making You Talk with me, I'm Murray and James Holland, where we are, well, we've found this amazing new toy to play with, Jim, which is the Ancestry Resource.

Speaker 2 Yep, I have no idea. I've got to say, this is a genuine revelation.

Speaker 2 I've crossed an archive Rubicon from which I will never be going backwards.

Speaker 2 And we saw it. This is absolutely amazing.

Speaker 2 Well, so in the first half, I talked about how you put a surname in, or you put a name in, date of birth if you've got it, a unit if you've got it yeah and it and it'll it'll it'll go ping into the into the mass of billions of data and then the ancestry engine will bring back the person you're looking for yeah which is which is amazing and i did that with my grandfathers and then with a with a i went looking for my uh for your mate's father my mate's father without you without even using his name i managed to find him in the squadron operational um uh report so i mean you've you've got you've got an iPad i think we might be doing some something live here semi-live yeah what have you found him well i've gone to uk world war ii war diaries and this is on the ancestry site yeah yeah on the ancestry site 1939 to 1946 and i've looked up the seven royal marines all right okay so it's the royal marines commandos and they land at burkino yes and you do you remember when the canadians land the hasty peas land yes and it's a burkino peninsula yeah and they're going up the up one side and they go up to try and clear this house and when they get up there they find the marine commandos are already there yeah yeah and they come up from the other side yeah that's them it's these guys but after that they sort of twiddle their thumbs a little bit they haven't got transport yeah there's enough transport it's a that whole problem they've front-loaded in sicily if you remember yeah with infantry at the cost of transport yes one of the reasons why they're so slow but suddenly they're called upon to fill a hole because what's happening is the the multiple brigade is is is pushing upwards so they've tried to do this big the fifth division have tried to do this big sweep and 50th division across the catania plain on the east coast because that's the shortest route to Messina.

Speaker 2 But they've hit this stumbling block. They've got the foothill, the hills of Mount Etna, Mr.
Bianco and Paterno and all that kind of stuff. And they can't cross the plain.

Speaker 2 This is where Hedley Verity gets mortally wounded on the attack on whatever it was, the 19th, 21st of July. This is the last attack.

Speaker 2 Remember, they have to get across the Primazoli Bridge. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So they get bogged down there. So then they're going to try and loop around a little bit further west where the hills start to rise out of the Catania Plain.

Speaker 2 But what happens is you've got there's the east coast of Sicily there's any up 51st Highland Division yeah is going up that and they're going up towards Sfero

Speaker 2 and the Gabini yeah

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 uh the Gabini um airfields

Speaker 2 and they're going to get across the river Daitano yep

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 231 Malta Brigade are on their left-hand flank, also pushing up, but they're starting to diverge under Roy Grafie. Uroy Urquhart, of course.
Under Roy Urquhart, yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 Later, commanding first airborne at armor. Exactly that.
So they're diverging. So, seven RM Commando are brought in to fill that gap.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So suddenly they're off and they're sent northwards to a place called Bekeri. And do you remember Bakeri is where they have that? Isn't that where they have that

Speaker 2 shooting with the 45th Division? Yes, yes. Because they've now taken over the 45th

Speaker 2 US 45th Infantry Division's turf.

Speaker 2 And in this war diary, added to it, is an essay or a report by Colonel F.W. Dewhurst, commanding.

Speaker 2 And he's talking about all the problems they come up against. And they get to Bukhari.
And he says, the first problem in the town was the supply of food and water.

Speaker 2 Transport was made available to fetch flour and a supply of petrol arranged to grind the local corn.

Speaker 2 A water point was established and the old town troughs dating from 1565 were cleaned and made fit for use.

Speaker 2 All firearms were collected in, undesirables apprehended and some semblance of local government registered through the mayor and his clerk.

Speaker 2 A proclamation of Allied military government was read from the balcony of the town hall at 08.30 hours on the 18th of July.

Speaker 2 I mean there's a lot going on just in that paragraph, isn't there?

Speaker 1 Yeah, well I can hear some sappers working very hard and not getting the credit.

Speaker 2 Well, I can hear. But also, you're getting a picture, aren't you, of a.
What that's basically pointing out is this is a backward place.

Speaker 1 Well, and the vacuum that comes with the collapse of one form of government, I suppose, and what you need to do to get things back on an even keel. And you've got to do it all really, really quickly.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because you've got supply lines. Before absolutely anything else.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You need clean water, don't you? Well, they're given.
So the strength of the battalion on resumption of its infantry role was 30 offers and five 30 officers and 560 ORs.

Speaker 2 So, so these are lightweight battalions. So, a normal battalion would be 845 men, divided into three companies, ABC, each about 130 strong or whatever, four companies rather.

Speaker 2 And then a company headquarters. These are Royal Marine Commandos and Para battalions.
They're a bit smaller.

Speaker 1 They tend to be triangular.

Speaker 2 They tend to have three companies rather than four. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, that's kind of.

Speaker 2 They're also three companies.

Speaker 1 That's interesting.

Speaker 2 So the transport consisted of three Jeeps, 11 1500 weights, which are not very big. That's my old Bedford.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Three three-tonners and five carriers. The remainder, having been left in Africa, was not expected in D plus 40.
Well, D plus 40 is the 21st of August.

Speaker 2 Campaign's over after D plus 37. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the battalion was ordered to join Corps HQ, then about 60 miles inland, hitchhiking and ferrying forward as best it could.

Speaker 2 The first stage was about 40 miles to Bukeri, a small town in the high hills between Palazzolo and Vitsini.

Speaker 2 So, the interesting thing, so that's where they are when they have this problem with supplies.

Speaker 2 But this is super remote. I mean, Sicily's an island, of course,

Speaker 2 but it's still pretty big. I mean, it's about 150 miles wide, something like that.
And trust me, when you're in that area, this is just

Speaker 2 seriously brutal conditions. I mean, this is July, it is absolutely broilingly hot.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You've basically, most of you have had to march from Pekino in this, there's very little shade. There's very few trees.

Speaker 2 There are trees, there's olive graves and all the rest of it, but there's not a lot. And this is a kind of sort of rolling, undulating countryside that just looks bleached and parched and brutal.

Speaker 2 And this is also a society that in essence hasn't really changed in centuries. Yeah.
You know, this is rural. It's agrarian.
It's the old Contadino system of sharecropping. It's a really tough

Speaker 2 hard life.

Speaker 1 And when people talk about the Mezzagiono, you know, the southern part of Italy, this is the extreme of the extremes of that. Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So they're going to come to this town and everything's going to look, you know, there's going to be dried effluents on the streets.
There's going to be no sewage, no running water.

Speaker 2 This is going to be pumping water from wells. It's that kind of thing.
Troughs that go back to 1565. And I think think that, you know, I'm reading between the lines here.

Speaker 2 It's basically saying, and it feels like it's still in 1565 in this village. I mean, that's the kind of underwritten thing here.
So it's just fascinating.

Speaker 2 And it's just a reminder that it's not just, it's not just about confronting the enemy. It's also about just the practicalities of, right, off you go.
You go up there then.

Speaker 2 Out comes the map. Off you march in this incredibly heat, you know, hot and hostile conditions.
And this is a very, very vivid.

Speaker 1 But also flip it round, Jim. If you're the people in that village, this is a science fiction invasion, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 1 People with radios and people with you know carriers and carriers, and it's a proper collision of eras. Yeah, and you think of these are these are hairy-ass commandos from wherever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the other thing.

Speaker 2 Well, and needless to say, it doesn't stop in Bukeri because before this work was complete, orders were received from the 30 Corps to advance to Mineo to undertake the defense of corps headquarters.

Speaker 2 The position was that 231 Brigade were advancing towards Adjira.

Speaker 1 Yep, yeah. Visimolt's Brigade.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're 1st Canadian Division further to the left while 51st Division were on the Ditana.
Yeah. Ditano, attempting to cross towards Paterno, which is a nestle.

Speaker 2 So you go over this saddle of hills. It's where the 51st Highland Division Memorial is.
It's quite a hike to get up there now. It was built immediately after the campaign.

Speaker 2 So that's where they did, well, this is where we were, so we'll put it here. But actually, it's really hard to get to.
You've got to go down a track, then walk across fields and get onto a bridge.

Speaker 2 And there it is. But anyway, from there, you can look down to Sperro.
And Sfero is a railway halt, tiny little village. And there's a very famous picture from Sicily of the 51st Highland

Speaker 2 Division. infantry crossing the railway line.
You see them crouching, they've got their bayonets on.

Speaker 2 They've still got the 13-inch sword bayonets and they're in their shorts and they're crossing the railway line. There it is.
That's Sperro.

Speaker 2 And that's where the Detano is just beyond that. And so they've got to get across Svero, get across the Detano, and then get up onto the foothills of Paterno.

Speaker 2 But every time they advance, they're being overlooked by the enemy, of course. So that's where Paterno is.

Speaker 2 Thus, the two wings of 30 Corps were on divergent axis, and a dangerous gap was appearing in the direction of Cata Nuova, through which infiltration of enemy armor or paratroopers might threaten the left flank of 51st Hun Division or the security of corps headquarters.

Speaker 2 So that's their job. They've now got to kind of push up, but they've done the hard yards.
So they they have to move up. So the plan was as follows.

Speaker 2 Y Company with one anti-tank gun under command was entrusted with the primary task to block the road at Lenoreto. The remainder of the battalion would make a silent night advance.

Speaker 2 B company left, S Company right, A in the center. So they are four companies here

Speaker 2 and rear to exploit through when the crossing was gained. The bridgehead was to be established over river, railway, and road opposite a farm and a feature known as Massa Palato.
So there you go. Wow.

Speaker 2 Yep, the Massa is these little

Speaker 2 dikes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Flooding, anti-flooding dikes. The advance was to be made over ground that had been cursorily wrecked.

Speaker 2 Uh-oh.

Speaker 2 Just before dusk from the slopes of Mounty Turchisi. But the carrier commander of the Gordons had reported that no enemy was south of the river.

Speaker 1 Oh, had he?

Speaker 2 Anyway, basically, they have to get onto this high ground.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, it's just a nightmare. At dusk, 200 hours, A and Y companies move forward to occupy the pass, also U.
O,

Speaker 2 which was the base for the attack. At 21.30, so 9.30, the advance began, Y Company leading the way to establish the roadblock.
The attack was timed for 0200 hours, 20th of July, but the difficulty...

Speaker 1 Are they going to have trouble getting to the start line, Jim? Basically, every infantry attack, they went to the bottom of the battle.

Speaker 2 The difficulty of the ground made the battalion late on the start line. Oh, not again.

Speaker 2 Anyway, they have an absolute nightmare. And meanwhile, all had not gone well on the road across the pass.
Okay.

Speaker 2 It was a poor track, which hadn't been properly recorded because they're new to it. Yeah.
Which had never been used for mechanical or motor vehicles and crumbled rapidly at the edge.

Speaker 2 Two Portees carrying six-pounder anti-tank guns and a carrier went over the edge edge and crashed into the deep ravine.

Speaker 1 The Portee is a lorry with a six-pounder on it, isn't it? That's the Portee. Yeah.
So they used to stick it on the back of...

Speaker 2 They were those Austins, weren't they? They've fallen off the back of lorry. James Shopland's got one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it looks like a solution, but evidently it wasn't. This, though, is part of the Allied problem, and in fact, actually, the German problem, when you're trying to fight...

Speaker 1 you're trying to fight this mechanized warfare that you've perfected for fighting in basically fighting in Europe europe in flanders yes right with modern roads and petrol stations and the like and you and then you come to sicily and discover that actually it's still in medieval times yeah that's the problem yeah go on carry on because yeah

Speaker 2 well quite uh first light found the companies in the bridgehead in an exposed position oh no

Speaker 2 dominated by razor ridge and the picker indira the ground was very hard and entrenching tools proved quite inadequate for digging in where we heard that before?

Speaker 2 Some cover was obtained from the railway embankment and the banks of the river, but all these positions could be infilated from the Picker in Deka ridge.

Speaker 2 The companies came under very heavy fire from an assortment of German weapons, self-propelled guns, multiple mortars, including Nebelwerfers, heavy MGs, Spandaus, and 88mm guns firing airbursts.

Speaker 2 OPs from the high ground directed this fire, which is beyond the reach of any of the battalion support weapons. Snipers also took their toll.
In other words, they're in the doo-doo.

Speaker 2 Well, they're trapped at the bottom. Sun's come up.

Speaker 1 They were late to their start line. The attack didn't go in as hoped.
They found themselves at break of day, somewhere they can't dig in basically on an exposed slope.

Speaker 2 I mean, with insufficient wrecking beforehand.

Speaker 2 It's sort of all it can be. You can be special forces all you like, but.

Speaker 1 Well, and this is one of the interesting things, isn't it? Is you're still made of

Speaker 1 flesh and bone, no matter how

Speaker 1 natty you might be.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, it continues. The anti-tank guns from the ridge near Massapalato destroyed an 88mm gun.

Speaker 2 Oh, finally. But were put out of action

Speaker 2 by concentrated mortar fire. Three-inch mortars could not reach the enemy from south of the river and therefore moved in their carriers over the crossing.
The carrier bellied down on the approach.

Speaker 2 The other three got into action, but from such exposed positions that they were soon knocked out. The above account might well be compared with an article in the Army Quarterly for April.

Speaker 2 A Sicilian diary by Lieutenant Colonel Munro, the Queen's own Cameron Highlanders. This battalion covered almost the same ground as 7 RM and faced the same problems.

Speaker 2 So it says, Among the writers' comments were the following.

Speaker 2 One, it is useless to attack a position unless you can be quite certain you can get anti-tank guns up for consolidation within half an hour, or, if the attack is by night, by dawn.

Speaker 2 The problem of positioning anti-tank guns in the dark is a difficult one. Well,

Speaker 2 I should coco.

Speaker 2 Tanks in hold-down positions are invaluable to cover the readjustments of anti-tank guns, which are bound to be necessary at dawn.

Speaker 2 Two, in any sort of hard ground, the entrenching tool is inadequate for consolidation.

Speaker 2 The extra burden of picks and shovels must be accepted as it is the only way of ensuring that men have tools in their hands when they need them.

Speaker 1 Ain't that the truth?

Speaker 2 Yeah, doesn't feature in the official history, that assault. It's just,

Speaker 2 but I just thought it was fascinating because there's so much going on there.

Speaker 2 You know, the nature of the terrain, the difficulty, the kind of the problems of being made to attack when you haven't properly reconnoited the ground, you don't really know what you're doing, you're dependent on hearsay from someone else to just go, oh, yeah, yeah, the enemy are on there.

Speaker 2 Well, they weren't maybe a day before when you were there, but they might be now. And the problems of attacking when the enemy's got the high ground.

Speaker 1 But also the core issue that you need to line up your anti-tank defense for when the counter-attack comes because there will be a counter-attack.

Speaker 1 And I think we've talked often on the podcast how,

Speaker 1 you know, by 1944, that's all squared off and worked out.

Speaker 1 That you, that, that, that what you do is you're using the German counter-attack to get the Germans to offer themselves up to your artillery, essentially.

Speaker 1 But they're not, they're not there yet, are they?

Speaker 2 And just picture the scene. You know, you've got this little track.
It's basically a goat track.

Speaker 2 And everyone knows that this is just a bit too narrow and a bit too rough, but they've got to do it because they've got to get there. Orders are orders.
It's dark.

Speaker 1 These anti-tank 40s are improvised vehicles. They're not all-terrain vehicles.

Speaker 1 I mean, they're lorries with a gun

Speaker 2 on the back. But even the carriers go over the edge as well.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, you know, this is a road that is not fit for purpose for carrying, you know, it's designed for mules and for little horse-drawn carts.

Speaker 2 You know, little wooden wagons. It's not designed for heavy metal

Speaker 1 models. So tell us how you found that again, Jim.
So, so what, what, you go on to Ancestry and what did you do?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I went up to war diaries. Yeah.
And then just put in 7 RM. At the end of this, I'm on page 11 of 239.
Right, okay. So, you know, I've got a long way to go.

Speaker 1 It's interesting because he files that report. Who then reads it? Because he's got recommendations in there.
And, you know,

Speaker 1 who reads it? Do they then pass those recommendations on? Or do they say, well, he's belly aching again? You know, is Montgomery's crew going, oh, Commandos, don't belly ache? Supposedly fantastic.

Speaker 1 And here he is, belly aching about the conditions. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 2 All this stuff.

Speaker 1 And it's all there.

Speaker 1 You can go find it on

Speaker 1 Ancestry.

Speaker 2 It's absolutely amazing. It's absolutely amazing.
Honestly, what a resource. And here you are.
You've got UK D-Day war diaries and photographs, 1944. You know, just pick on that.
There you go. Wow.

Speaker 2 Bingo, off it comes.

Speaker 1 It's not just war diaries, though, is it, Jim? Because

Speaker 1 there's a casualties category. So you can, it's basically, it's not just the officers, because that's one of the...

Speaker 1 arguably one of the issues with researching this stuff.

Speaker 1 These reports are written by officers. They tend to lead with mentioning the officers

Speaker 1 inevitably. And if you've got a service number, but

Speaker 1 you don't even need a service number, you've been a bit better.

Speaker 2 It's like all these things. The more you've got,

Speaker 2 the better.

Speaker 1 But I mean, the casualty records will take you to who's been injured, and that covers everybody.

Speaker 1 That's not just, again, that's not unlike the diaries which are officer-led, you know, because the officers basically, one of the things about the Second World War is the officers do mark their own homework a little.

Speaker 1 And other ranks, though, if you go into the casualty records, you'll find them there.

Speaker 1 And you'll find what happened to them, whether they're mentioned in dispatches, what awards they get.

Speaker 2 There's also US records on here. Yeah, yeah, by the way.
Yeah, amazing. So you can look up US service personnel and all sorts of stuff.
It's absolutely incredible.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I'm just looking at looking at Dan. UK military service records, 1939 to 1959.

Speaker 2 Westminster England World War II records 1939 to 1945.

Speaker 1 1939 to 1959. That's conscription, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Yes. UK World War II audio, 1939 to 1945.
UK recommendations for honours and awards.

Speaker 1 But this is the thing, though, because it's national service,

Speaker 1 there aren't very many people around from the Second World War, but I think there's enough grandparents who did national service still kicking around or a fair...

Speaker 2 Yeah, a fair slice of them.

Speaker 1 So if your grandpa was at Suez or whatever... or in Cyprus or or later, his national service record

Speaker 1 he will pop up in there. Obviously, those are all the wrong war, and we're not interested in any of that stuff.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 But it's all there if you want to if you want to look at it.

Speaker 1 Because one of the things we have we've had a lot of fun with on the podcast is the family stories thread where people have sent in their family stories, we've read them out.

Speaker 1 But what we can do now is like take those people's names and feed them into the ancestry matrix and see what they come back with.

Speaker 1 Because that's the other thing is so much family history about the war in particular or any form of service is kind of word of mouth, It's kind of offered as

Speaker 1 family legend and family

Speaker 1 L O R E lore.

Speaker 1 And yet here

Speaker 1 you can actually place people. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And there's also direct links on this website that take you straight to the search engine of the National Archives as well.

Speaker 1 If you were to be doing Sicily now, you'd be using this, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm about to start on the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's right here.

Speaker 2 I'm going to get weaving.

Speaker 1 So basically get yourselves over to ancestry.co.uk and weave a like a a promotion with them slash new year.

Speaker 1 What this might also mean is you don't have to speak to any of your family over the holiday period because you're too busy on your laptop looking up your family.

Speaker 1 So maybe we're actually going to help people in that way too. What's not to like?

Speaker 2 What's not to like?

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening, everyone. Cheerio.
Cheerio.

Speaker 2 Well, a big thank you to Ancestry for supporting this episode and letting us dig around in their records out.

Speaker 1 If you want to do the same, it's all there. War diaries, logbooks, POW forms, service records, the whole shooting match.

Speaker 2 And to be honest, Ancestry makes it so very easy to get started and make lots of discoveries.

Speaker 1 To start exploring your family history, head to ancestry.co.uk/slash new year.

Speaker 2 That's ancestry.co.uk forward slash new year.