2nd Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment

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Recorded Interview 2
by
Pte. Alfred Raymond Mason 466698
2nd Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment

 

.....The Japanese came up to our perimeter one night and they would start throwing grenades into where we were, and the following morning we patrolled the area and found the empty boxes they'd been in. Where we pull the pin out of our grenades before throwing them, they used to bang it on their chest or something hard, to prim then, then threw it.

.....The Vultures, they are horrible looking things, really large terrible things, and of course they used to come down and feed off whatever was going, they used to clear up the places, they used to eat the dead and what have you, and that sort of thing, when we couldn't get to bury them, and that's the sort of thing that went on; terrible to see you know.

.....Being in the signals I had to look after communications; a severed land line was severed by a shell and off course it had cut us off, from the brigadier in-charge to the forward troops, so it was my job to go out and repair that line, I took a reel of wire with me to repair it, I can always remember it, I'd got it on a kind of iron rail, with an angled on, and as I was running it out behind be it was making ruddy noise, of course there was no way of stopping it unless I unrolled it by hand and it'd take ages, but anyway I got away with that. Anyway I was sitting there repairing the line; I should have had a couple of men with me, to protect me while I was doing the job. Well of course we didn't carry a rifle, I had a pistol, and I had this pistol on me knee just encase and of course I heard this rustling coming towards me, and I thought, if I'm going I'll take one or two of them if it's possible, I'd got me gun ready, but fortunately it was some of our men out on patrol; lucky for me it wasn't the Japs.

.....I remember being an O.P. on this hill, and the Japs were over on the other side. There was a paddy-filed in-between, where they grow and cut all the rice; their fixing up their 4" Mortar and of course I was lying there, and the sun was glaring down on me, and my face is right down as far as I can get it, onto the earth as you could do, and your perspiring quite heavily, and that's you, for a couple of hours, then you got relieved and somebody else took over, and of course you had to keep down and you couldn't move freely, you were just watching what they were doing, and passing it back to H.Q., what they were doing, and you could see them, digging in with their 4” Mortar, and what have you, on the other side of this valley and then they were also on the other side of the hill, keeping your head down so they didn't see you and of course the sun was blaring down, you're lying with face on the earth, and the perspirations going into the earth and getting onto your face, but that was the least of our worries as long as you kept your head down. I had a bottle of water and I had to use that sparing, because drinking with your head on one side. I can't remember having anything to eat, we used to go, well not days, we used to go quite a lot without food at all, but when we got back to where we could put down, you could get something to eat, but most of the time you were going hungry if you can understand what I mean, but that's how it was. You just lay there and you watched what was going on and passed a message back, you got the phone right there, where they were digging in and setting up 4” Mortars, for us, to shell us and things like that, and of course you kept your head down, because if they spot you there, they of course had been in Burma for quite a while, and they'd got all the vital ground zeroed in, they could pin-point a place, they know the ground.

 

 

 

Pte. Alfred Raymond Mason

Pte. Alfred Raymond Mason

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