CHAPTER 6: OFFICER CADET
In February 1941 I was posted to 122 OCTU (Officer Cadet Training Unit) at Larkhill. There followed six months intensive training to fit me for the duties of an artillery officer.
Larkhill is in the middle of Salisbury Plain, three miles north of Stonehenge. It is a military encampment midway between the villages of Amesbury and Shrewton. It is the Mecca of gunnery, and the home of the prestigious School of Artillery.
In the middle of the encampment was a vast parade ground, exposed to the bitter winds that sweep over Salisbury Plain in winter. For our living quarters, the familiar Nissen huts were set out in neat rows, each housing a course of thirty-six cadets. Another set of Nissen huts served for our indoor instruction. A gun park displayed the first 25 pounder that we had ever set eyes on. The Nissen hut for our squad was on the fringe of the camp, on the boundary of the experimental air station at Boscombe Down, from which weird and wonderful flying machines would take off on precarious flights.
The war did not stand still during the next six months. Destructive air raids continued to devastate London, the last and worst being on May 10th, of which more later. The centres of many other cities, including Bristol and Southampton, followed Coventry into total annihilation.
Hitler invaded Russia in operation Barbarossa on 22nd June. British land forces, still crippled by the Dunkirk evacuation, took little part in the war with the spectacular exception of the campaigns in Africa. In Egypt and Libya, a British army of modest size, led by the Seventh Armoured Division, which I was later privileged to join, advanced across the desert to defeat and capture far more numerous Italian forces. Soon after, Hitler sent Rommel’s Afrika Korps to bolster the faltering Italians and to reverse the tide of war.
An officer-cadet was a hybrid form of military life. The warrant officers and NCO's who trained us called us ‘Sir’. They managed to compress into that three letter word a remarkable blend of contempt and loathing. We were more sympathetically addressed by the commissioned officers who drilled and lectured us. Perhaps they remembered their own recent experience in OCTU. Most of the training was about the technical aspects of gunnery and the various roles of officers at the gun position, command post, and observation post. Other lessons covered tactics and signalling, together with the inevitable ration of square-bashing. Lecturers on military law taught us that if you couldn’t charge an awkward soldier with a specific offence, you could always charge him under Section 40 of the Army Act with conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline. Officers were vulnerable to a charge of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. As an officer you should never arrest or come into too close proximity with a soldier who was drunk or violent. This was to avoid the risk that the soldier might strike you and so lay himself open to a much more serious charge. So you called for a sergeant to restrain or arrest the errant soldier (or for the sergeant major in the case of an errant sergeant).
A variant of parade ground drill was to test our ability to give clear and audible commands. ‘It should come from the stummick' said the sergeant major. We were paired off and lined up on opposite sides of the vast parade ground. You shouted orders at your opposite number at the same time as everyone else was doing the same thing. You marched him right, left, and about, hoping that he could still hear you against the competition. Some unfortunates were last seen marching relentlessly into the distance, receding further and further from the orders of their commanders. I acquitted myself with credit, and to this day — making sure it comes from the stummick — can speak comfortably to an audience in a large hall without the aid of a microphone.
In our signal training we had passed the age of the semaphore. We learned the Morse code and the use of the Addis lamp to signal in Morse by short and long flashes. Similarly with the heliograph, reflecting sunlight from a mirror — a more reliable method in India than in the fitful sunshine of Wiltshire. In the real war, we were to depend on communications between the forward observation posts and the guns, and between the guns and the various headquarters to the rear. The signals unit laid lines (telephone wires) if there was time. In mobile warfare, there wasn’t time, and we depended on radio. Up to about ten miles, radio could transmit speech. On the rare occasions when reception was too poor for that, Morse could be used, and despite our OCTU training an artillery officer would normally depend on his signaller to translate.
We were introduced to the workings of the internal combustion engine. We were taught how to immobilise our transport so it would not be driven off by parachutists or infiltrating enemy. We learned to drive on three-ton lorries, jerked into life by a starting handle. You held the starting handle with your thumb the same side as your fingers: otherwise your thumb would be dislocated when the engine backfired as it often did. When you changed gear downwards, you had to ‘double declutch’, as the synchro-mesh gear box, if invented at that time, had not been installed in Army lorries.
Survey work figured prominently in our training, It is always helpful to know where you are when fighting a battle (a battle is something that takes place at the corner of four maps). If you stayed in one place for more than a few hours, your guns would be ‘surveyed’ in. We learned to locate ourselves accurately by triangulation if there was time, or by compass and rangefinder if there wasn’t. Triangulation involved taking bearings to three objects that were identifiable on the map, and drawing lines backwards to intersect in a point. Often the objects were churches. During my time in the artillery, churches played a more important role in my life that they have done before or since.
A more absorbing game was played on the ‘sand table’. This was a mock-up, on a sand table, of a landscape with hills, villages, bushy-top trees, and tanks and other enemy targets. Under the elevated table was a grid, and a member of the training staff who could translate your firing orders into a puff of smoke that would come through the sand table at the point where your firing order would have landed a shell. Your first order was based on a rough guess of the range and orientation:
‘Four three hundred [meaning four thousand three hundred yards], three degrees!’
Your hypothetical shell lands short of the target and to the left. You order a correction within a second, if you are any good.
‘More one degree. Four seven hundred!’
(You are aiming to ‘bracket' the target’ and have deliberately overshot.)
‘Four five hundred!’
You have overshot again.
‘Four four hundred!’
Getting close with your ranging round. Close enough to bring in the whole troop.
'Four three fifty — three rounds gunfire'
The enemy target is now assailed with three rounds of fire from the whole troop. I was rather good at this game and used to enjoy it more than anything else we did. For one thing, its relevance was obvious (which you could hardly say of square-bashing or signalling with an Addis lamp). it did not fall to me to order much observed fire in battle, but at least you knew what the enemy artillery was up to. When one shell landed a hundred yards in front of you, and the next a hundred yards behind you, you prepared to dive into a slit trench when the next one (or four) came whistling over. And, as soon as you could organize it, to move your troop into a different position, as we were to do in the battle of the Voltumo.
My fellow cadets were a congenial lot. Bob Skelton had come with me from Shoeburyness — still reciting Milton's sonorous verse. I enjoyed the company of Doug Brown, a tall slow-spoken northerner who was a long distance lorry driver in civvie life. A good-looking man called Nicholson, himself an actor, was the nephew of the celebrated character actress Margaret Rutherford, famous for her role as the spiritualist medium in Blithe Spirit. There was one man to whom I took a strong dislike, a conceited loud-mouthed fellow from Scunthorpe, who gave me a lifelong distaste for that inoffensive town.
BLITZED
On May 10th 1941 the Luftwaffe, under a ‘bomber moon’, launched their most destructive raid on the capital. Fifteen hundred Londoners were killed, and eighteen hundred seriously injured. The House of Commons was burnt down, Queen's Hall (my favourite concert hall) totally destroyed, Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London were damaged, and a quarter of million books in the British Museum were burnt. A third of London streets were impassable, every main railway station except one was blocked for weeks. And my boyhood home in northwest London was reduced to rubble by a land mine — a sea mine dropped by parachute that did not penetrate the ground but exploded on impact causing the maximum damage by blast.
Servicemen were granted forty-eight hours compassionate leave when their homes were bombed. I hitch-hiked — the normal method of transport for men in uniform — to London and found my way through the wrecked streets to our house. There I helped my father salvage the few of our possessions that survived. Our home and the houses on either side were utterly destroyed — none was occupied at the time. One man was killed: he lived across the road and died when he was hit by a fragment of ornamental iron chain from our front garden.
Most of our possessions had vanished without trace, either pulverised by blast or removed by the civil defence men for their own use. There was no sign whatever of the grand piano, or of the family photographs which adorned it. My room had been upstairs at the back of the house. Some of my belongings had slid into the back garden, relatively unscathed. Most of my books survived, some bearing the scars of war. My cherished collection of cigarette cards, including the leading cricketers of the 1930's neatly slotted into a leather album, had vanished completely. The post-war government paid ‘war damage compensation' to the owners of bombed houses, so we were able to rebuild the house a few years after the war.
Map showing location of bombs hitting London
MIDSUMMER LEAVE
Later in the summer we spent more time on military exercises, swanning around Salisbury plain, siting non-existent guns and shelling imaginary enemies. The bleak and windswept plain of winter became a summer paradise of rolling grassland, rich with abundant wild flowers of chalk and limestone. Delightful valleys, bubbling streams, unspoiled villages with harmonious names — Winterbourne Stoke and the appropriate Winterbourne Gunner — lent variety to the downland landscape. I recall vividly a rest break in a summer exercise when we relaxed on a smooth green lawn slanting from a rural pub (which had recently been an enemy headquarters) down to a clear winding stream.
At midsummer we had a week-end's leave. I was invited down to the country home of Jennifer Morris, the nearest approach to a girl friend that I had when I left Cambridge in summer 1940. A Girton undergraduate, she was the most attractive student of her year. I met her at a meeting of CUSC (the Cambridge University Socialist Society) before I resigned from the Labour Party because of their illogical opposition to conscription. She had fair hair and a neat profile, with an English Rose type of beauty. Jennifer was nicknamed Nine Men's Morris, not on account of promiscuity — perish the thought — but because of the number of her admirers. Her parents owned a country house overlooking the river at Henley-on-Thames. Her father was the Town Clerk of Westminster and had chaired a committee on local authority housing standards: the Parker Morris standards held sway for forty years until reduced by Margaret Thatcher.
Sir Parker took us for a row on the river. He cut a distinguished figure in military style — he won an M.C. in the first war — and sat very upright in the boat. I wonder if he was reviewing me as a potential son-in-law: in the event he need not have worried. At that time Jennifer's attentions were not seriously engaged, either by me or anyone else, though she wrote to me regularly throughout the war. Later, at a Fabian summer school, she met Roy Jenkins, then a gunner officer like myself, but better looking (at that time) and more ambitious. They married in 1945 and both pursued successful careers. Roy became one of the leading and most courageous politicians of his generation as well as a distinguished biographer. Jennifer worked in a wartime aircraft factory and became a local trade union leader. She went on to a career in public service, culminating in the chairmanship of the National Trust.
It was a lovely summer evening. I elected to sleep in the garden, on a camp bed. Next morning came the news of Hitler’s invasion of Russia.
PASSING OUT
Nearly everyone passed out successfully from the OCTU. Two weeks before the passing out parade we were told — the whole squad — that we would be posted to anti-tank regiments, not the field regiments for which we had been trained. We found this bitterly disappointing after five months of dedicated commitment to field gunnery - all this would now be utterly wasted. We were given a crash course in anti-tank gunnery with the two-pounder pea-shooters. It was difficult to work up any enthusiasm. Apart from siting your guns, all you had to do was to point your gun at enemy tanks and pull the trigger. There was an art in choosing sites, which should provide as much cover as possible, and enable you to fire in enfilade (from the flank) preferably after the tanks had already penetrated the FDL's (forward defensive localities). It would obviously be more dangerous than being a field gunner, but I do not think that this was an element in our dismay.
On passing out we were interviewed individually by the Commandant of the OCTU. Lt.Col. Delahaye was a slightly built man from the Territorial Army who had the unusual background of putting up for Parliament (unsuccessfully) as a Labour candidate. He read out to me the report that had been compiled on my performance. It was quite a good one, but with reservations.
‘I see that you have been critical of the training programme. What do you think we have got wrong?’
‘All that square-bashing, Sir. I can’t see how it helps us to win the war.’
‘Hum. I shall add my own comment to your report— Thinks for himself
‘Thank you, Sir’
Unfortunately, thinking for myself was just about to land me in a whole load of trouble. I had the effrontery to write to the Commanding Officer of the regiment to which I was posted. I explained that I had a degree in mathematics and had been fully trained as a field gunner. Could I please be transferred to a field regiment when there was an opportunity? I did not know that the Colonel had recently been transferred from the command of a Survey Regiment: he had even more reason to deplore the waste of his training and experience. Predictably, he gave me a severe dressing down for my presumption. If the Army needed more anti-tank officers, who was I to question it? Who, in fact, did I think I was?
Later it became clear that he told the Major of my battery to give me a hard time and knock some sense into this conceited young man. Major Geoffrey Armitage needed no encouragement to give new subaltems a hard time, and observed his instructions to the letter.