2nd Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment

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Wounded Behind Enemy Lines
by
Pte. Charles Thomas Edward Smith 5350789

 

.....I was a member of C Company 2nd Battalion The Royal Berks. I was called up on the 29 January 1942, aged 19 and went to Brock Barracks, for basic training at Reading and in Norfolk. I travelled all over the place. After basic training I embarked from Liverpool in February 1943 aboard the Troopship Strathmore, I believe, arriving at Bombay where we were all transported straight away up to Deolali, it was tented, wherever you looked there was tents, all over, flat based landscape.

.....At one point I don’t know when but there was a mix-up, because we got sent up into Burma and we had travelled so far out and then got recalled again, and we finished up back down at Deolali.

.....Those who lost their lives when I got wounded was, Hackett, Private Hackett and Butler.

.....On the 26 December 44 we were on patrol and went in behind the Japanese lines and on our return we got ambushed. I know there was three killed and two wounded to my knowledge. We put up flares, and brought down a barrage of 25Ib shells on their position, also smoke as well. Corporal Tivey, he got up and ran to where I was, I was by a tree, and no sooner than he got down, they opened up with their machineguns and it came down right between the middle of us, nether were wounded, but in the end I did get wounded.

.....To be honest I didn’t feel anything, I felt a bang, but I didn’t know until I looked down and saw I had a gaping hole in my leg, I did my own dressing, using my field dressings and both field dressings went into the hole, as though there was nothing there to support it. I finished the bandaging and used my putties around the wound to keep it all in place. The trouser acted like a guttering and in the time I was there the trouser leg just filled up with blood. I laid there all night, till the next morning, seven or eight o’clock in the morning.

.....I laid there all night, and the next morning we started our advance again and I called out, I thought they were bloomin’ going to shoot me, because the Japs, always called out names, and what have you. The sergeant sent two men back to get a stretcher and he waited until they came back and no sooner they got back he said, ‘Come on, well carry on.’, and as I said before, the poor bloke got shot, exactly where I had been laid up all night. I could actually hear the Japs talking during the night; they were that close to where I lay wounded.

.....I was taken into the Field Dressing Station, and I was in there two days I think, and there I met Major-General Rees. I was took by ambulance to an airstrip and then flown out. I finished up at Assam and that is where I was operated on. After a few days a nurse was talking to me and I happened to say to her, ‘Should I have some lumps in me groin?’ and she said, ‘Let me have a look.’ No sooner had I said that I was down in the theatre, what you call it had set in, gangrene.

.....We went from there to a hospital in Chittagong, and there I met Lord Mountbatten’s wife. We were later put on a boat and taken down to Madras. We were then put aboard a hospital ship, a coal burner, when I was in the Red Sea I had my plaster taken off for the last time, that’s when I saw the hole in my leg was still there. I thought, that’s the end of my football and everything. They looked after us well, during the voyage home.

.....We landed at Southampton, and they said, ‘You will be taken to your nearest hospital.’ We got on the train, and I finished up in Bradford, and I was up there about a week and after being discharged travelled back down. I had to change transport at different places with me kitbag and what have you. I finally got to Thatcham, where I was living at the time. A bus pulled up that was going passed where I lived, and I asked if he could you give me a lift up to the top of the hill? he said, yea, get on, and dropped me outside my door, and went in and got my mother and father.

.....When I was in hospital, who should come in, but Corporal Tivey, he’d been shot through the chest, and he stopped there for so long, and they done him all up and sent him back to the front again.

 

 

 

Pte. Charles Thomas Edward Smith
Pte. Charles Thomas Edward Smith

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