War on Wheels preview

During the Second World War the British Army underwent a complete transformation as the number of vehicles grew from 40,000 to 1.5 million, ranging from tanks and giant tank transporters to jeeps, mobile baths and offices, and scout cars. At the same time the way in which the army was provided with all it needed was transformed – arms and ammunition, radio, clothing and places to sleep and wash.

War on Wheels is the story about the men and women who achieved this extraordinary feat.

The following extracts from the low resolution pdf publisher's proof give a flavour of the book which is of 65,000 words and 120 images divided into these chapters:

The Beginning
The British Expeditionary Force
The UK Motor Industry
The Depots and Mechanisation
The Desert War and Italy
Preparing for D Day
D Day and the battle for Europe
The Far East

It was published by The History Press on 8 September 2016 and is available from all good book shops and direct from The History Press

The Beginning

Had you been a passenger on the omnibus from Nottingham railway station to the little village of Chilwell on a wet November morning in 1934, you may have seen a tall, heavily built soldier fidgeting as he sat, his eyes scanning all that they passed. In his pocket was the letter from the War Office instructing him to visit the site of a former shell filling factory. In his mind there could well have been wild imaginings: a fully mechanised army, light years from that which he had experienced in the four dark years of the Great War. He had been asked to see whether the site could be right for the first Royal Army Ordnance Corps Depot specifically for motor transport and, if so, how he would create it.

Pegasus Bridge

Stan Carter had boarded a landing craft at Tilbury loaded with 200 tons of ammunition destined for the Airborne Division which had flown in by glider to take Pegasus Bridge.

The job of Ordnance Beach Detachments was to follow on quickly behind the assault troops and set up ammunition dumps just behind the beaches ready to issue ammunition to replace that used in the initial assault.

The 21st Army Group was to invade three beaches: Gold, Juno and Sword. Each beach had attached to it Ordnance Beach Detachments and Ammunition Companies. Advance parties came ashore within an hour or so of the first assault troops and created sector dumps just off the beaches. The main stocks were anti-tank and anti-aircraft ammunition, Landing Reserves, stretchers and blankets for casualties and survivor kits. These latter were complete changes of clothing and kit for soldiers who experienced a ‘bad’ landing. Landing Reserves were designed to supply troops with spare parts for the first four weeks and comprised 8,000 cases calculated to maintain a brigade.

Stan had been promised a dry landing but in the event was offloaded into 5ft of water some 15 yards from the sand. To make matters worse his job, with one other, was to pull a handcart to carry the ammunition from the craft up the beach to the dump, and all under mortar fire.

Accounts of other landing craft laden with ammunition talk of DKWS being used to transport across the beach. I noted, from the War Diaries of Brigadier Readman at Chilwell, that right up to D Day there had been a problem with supplies of DKWS. Perhaps Stan’s craft drew the short straw and so ended up with the handcart.

Just as Stan made it up the beach the first time, the Bren carrier next to him ran over a mine and some of the resulting shrapnel embedded itself in Stan’s thigh. He didn't remember pain, rather the need, with his mates, to get on with the job. The ammunition was duly stacked and issues made, again all done under fire from German mortars only yards in front. Stan recalled that once on the beach all the good intentions to keep records of issues went out of the window.

A mortar hit an adjacent petrol dump and burning petrol spread toward the ammunition. Stan spoke of his Captain’s bravery in putting out the fire with his bare hands, an act which cost Captain Thompson his life. The wound in Stan’s thigh couldn’t be left and so he was taken to the field dressing station and from there back to England. He did return to France and his story continues later in my book War on Wheels 

Photograph by permission of the RLC Museum

A shortage of published material

I have been working on War on Wheels for nearly two years and have amassed some fascinating material.

Some of this will be included in the book, but I have set up a new blog waronwheels.org for stories that came too late.

I was recently asked about COD Donnington, which is now MOD Donnington. COD Bicester and COD Chilwell are shadows of their former selves. Some have gone altogether: COD Feltham and COD Greenford to name but two. They were all hives of activity in WW2 and the immediate postwar years; thousands of young people all working with the focus of winning the war. One of those stories of WW2 that has never been told. It needs to be.

COD Chilwell with thanks to the RLC Archive

How I found the story

I discovered the story in some albums my Mum had kept. I had always known the albums were there, but I’d never really looked at them.

They were of my Dad’s war.

My Dad, Major General Sir Leslie (“Bill”) Williams, had been Controller of Ordnance Services and Director of Warlike Stores. The albums in total are about three feet thick; they’re scrap books really, with press cuttings, copies of speeches, many photographs and all kinds of documents from menu cards and invitations to formal reports - all about the Royal Army Ordnance Corps whose job it was to supply vehicles and armaments, indeed everything soldiers need part from food and fuel. I supplemented what I discovered in the albums with research at the National Archive, British Library, the National Motor Museum and Imperial War Museum, including listening to many accounts of their war by RAOC men and women.

The story I found was no small beer; the army went from, in 1934, having 4,000 vehicles left over from WW1 to holding some 1.5 million in 1945, ranging from giant tank transporters and trucks, to tanks and armoured cars down to motor bikes and utility vehicles.

At the same time the way in which the Army was provided with all it needed was transformed: arms and ammunition, to say nothing of radio, clothing and places to sleep and to wash. For D Day, some 375 million items were packed ready for the invasion force to use.

The driving force behind mechanisation was the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and the 250,000 soldiers, ATS and civilians who worked in over one hundred massive depots in the UK and in the theatres of war worldwide.

I have now built on this research by exploring the lives of some of the leaders of the RAOC and this story is told in Dunkirk to D Day. These were some truly remarkable people living in an extraordinary time; many fought in two world wars, a thought that even now I find hard to grasp.

The very first tank

On 21 January 1916, the first ever shot was fired on waste ground in Lincoln from a prototype tank manufactured at Fosters in Lincoln. This was the beginning of the realisation of the dream Winston Churchill had had of providing an effective shields for infantry advancing over no mans land toward the enemy trenches.

2016 is thus the year when the invention of the tank will be marked in Lincoln, although 2015 was the year chosen by the Tank Museum at Bovington.

The first tank was Little Willie.

Little Willie, at Bovington Tank Museum

This was then developed into the Tank known as Mother, although sadly none exist today. This was developed into a slow strong tank that ran over trenches and barbed wire and was untouched by machine gun fire.

 WW1 tank at Bovington Tank Museum

From this the War Office went back to Fosters to develop a faster tank.

Lincoln film maker, Andrew Blow and Military Historian, Richard Pullen, will talk about the social and engineering history of the tank on 18 October 2018 at the Lincoln Drill Hall in a Commemoration of Lincoln in WW1.

I write about the story of the tank in the context of the overall effort to equip the army in part of Ordnance, the prequel to War on Wheels. I say part, since the tank was but one a very many vehicles with which the British Army was supplied in the process of mechanisation. My first draft of the Lincoln Tank in War on Wheels drew on an account in the book, The Churchill Factor. Richard Pullen has a much more detailed and engaging account in The Landships of Lincoln

Tank recovery in the desert WW2

More of the story can be found on the Lincoln Tank Memorial website, in Richard Pullen's book The Landships of Lincoln, Andy Blow's DVD and their Facebook page

The role of women

The role of women was massively important as was apparent from an article in the fortnightly publication by the Army Bureau on Current Affairs entitled, The Women Bogey. This sought to bolster the argument in favour of women retaining after the war the more prominent position in the workplace that they enjoyed during hostilities.

Newspaper articles appeared regularly emphasising the crucial importance of the work women undertook in the Ordnance Depots, to say nothing of Royal Ordnance Factories, manufacturing companies and indeed just about every walk of life.

On 15 June 1942, The Yorkshire Evening Post reported on the role of the ATS at Chilwell which had the largest such unit in the country. The Chief of the ATS stressed that ‘it has never been the the aim of the ATS to turn girls into mere weak imitations of men. Girls are individualists and throughout the organisation there must be the individualistic touch.’ The article highlighted the range of tasks undertaken: machine shop, drawing offices, stores and, of course, the 14 cookhouses that keep the depot operating 24 hours a day. ‘More specifically women undertake the Articisation of tanks bound for Russia and the Desertisation of those bound for Africa and the East. To counter the effects of condensation in tanks being delivered to hot climates, a ball of lime is suspended inside. All parts are ‘sozzled’ with oil and grease.’ Not surprisingly the article finds ATS who in their former lives were in the public eye such as the first woman to cross the desert on a motor cycle and who later competed against men in Army trials. No wonder men were scarred.

A similar theme emerges from The Sunday Times on 1 November 1942 of a visit to ‘Woolwich-in-the-country’ described as being in the north but more probably Donnington in Shropshire. The special correspondent tells how, ‘in that radiant summer of 1940 when the sunshine seemed to mock our anxieties as France tottered to capitulation’, he visited a ‘new Woolwich buried in the countryside many miles from London.’ He marvelled at the size of the place but also the many innovations that had been introduced adding that, ‘the American authorities were so impressed by ‘Woolwich-in-the-country’ that they sent an ordnance expert across by bomber to study its methods.’ In relation to women he wrote:

'There are girls wherever you turn and most of them are in the ATS…in one of the huts in the training section a slim 18 year old ATS corporal was lecturing officers, soldiers and ATS on the identification of wireless components…later in the instrument repair shop a good looking young woman with sergeants stripes pinned on her overalls paused for a moment from measuring thousandths of an inch to talk rather diffidently about her civilian studies at five British and foreign universities and to admit that she was a BSc Edin (First Class Hons)…in terms of facilities he saw the hall with  a loan collection from the National Gallery on show.'

The work of the ATS prompted an exchange that paints a contrasting picture of the time.

Early in the war, Dame Helen Gwynne Vaughan was the officer commanding the ATS at the War Office. Betty Perks’ diary tells that she was a ‘real old battle-axe’ with many pre-conceived ideas about women and their role in the services. Many of the younger ATS at Chilwell pleaded to be allowed to wear trousers whilst driving army vehicles, firstly because they were warmest and secondly because it was very difficult to sit in an army vehicle in a tight skirt without showing ‘everything’! Dame Helen wouldn't hear of it - she was horrified that her young ladies would even suggest such thing. A cartoon of a ATS girl climbing into a lorry revealing frilly knickers changed her mind.

The idea of joining the ATS and working with the RAOC was not always attractive at first sight. Margaret Sherman, for one, was not at first inspired:

'We were given our posting instructions and gathered round with excitement. A lot of us had hopefully asked for London District or South Eastern Command. Would we get it? Mary and I heard with a good deal of dismay that we were going to a Central Ordnance Depot somewhere in Northern England.

Perhaps it won’t be for longer than the initial three months,” Mary said comfortingly. “Ordnance, who’d want that?” I said with the nightmare vision of millions of issue and receipt vouchers. I didn’t know then that the only thing I’d hate about Ordnance would be leaving it.'

The ATS did change lives. Gwendoline Walker joined up in 1942 and after initial training had to sit an intelligence test. She was summoned by the senior ATS officer at COD Derby and asked what job she wanted to do. She replied that she had thought of becoming a cook. Her grandparents had been in service and this was the life she had expected to lead. She had left her job in a shop and without telling her parents had ‘escaped’ to join up. She remembered the shock at the officer telling her that she had a high IQ and could do anything she wanted. She had no idea what an IQ was, but suggested that she might work in stores. She went from Derby to Greenford and was a very effective store-woman before moving toward clerical work and accounting after the war. ‘The ATS was where I found myself.’

You can find where to buy War on Wheels by following this link

What the depots did

An ordnance depot must have been like a vast ‘Amazon’ distribution warehouse, but without computers. Delivery wouldn't be by courier who’d leave card if the customer was out; it was by soldiers often under fire and always under pressure. This is how wartime leader, Bill Williams, described their work.

'The fighting and technical equipment of the British Army consists of half a million different bits and pieces. These are made by many hundreds of different manufacturers scattered all over this country and overseas.The maker of a wireless set, for example, does not make the valves which go with it, or the batteries which work it. The maker of a gun does not make the carriage on which it moves, or the sights and the hundred and one intricate items of technical equipment, without which it cannot be fired. Somewhere the incomplete equipment has to be brought together.

Even the tanks come to us with empty hulls into which we fit the armament, the wireless and the vast array of fighting and technical equipment before they can be issued as fighting tanks.

A 25-pdr. gun is only a headline to newspapers. To a Central Ordnance Depot it is 2,000 different pieces, plus another hundred accessories. If any of these accessories are missing, if one maker falls behind in his production programme, if one case is packed for Libya and an essential part left out, this 25-pdr. gun cannot be used.

A key role for the RAOC was to estimate the likely requirement for both original equipment and spare parts. This would depend on ware and tare but also on estimated casualties from enemy action. With motor vehicles in particular this must have been well neigh impossible. Bill continued for his press conference audience:

You can see there the orders coming in from the War Office, the formations and the overseas theatres of war. We use teleprinters for speed and accuracy. You can see the tanks, the guns, the packing cases leaving the depots for Libya and Russia and India and even America. Codes and symbols tell the initiated their destination, and ensure that the right packages are loaded on the right ship.

Let us suppose that certain packages of vital accessories for a shipload of guns are loaded in another ship, and that particular ship in the convoy is sunk. It means that the guns will be useless when they arrive in the theatre of war.

You can see women and men whose job it is to keep an accurate record of all the bits and pieces they deal with. You can see others undergoing their infantry training for defence of the depots and for service overseas. You can see tanks being tested and fitted for service. You can see repairs carried out. Ordnance depots are towns in themselves, humming with activity alive for twenty four hours every day.'

Had you tuned into the BBC Home Service at 7.00 or 8.00am on Saturday 19 July 1941, you might have heard a slightly different story in a recorded piece by Richard Sharp about his visit to an Army Supply Depot.  It was the very old story of the Crimea and how an Army Supply Depot managed to send a shipment consisting entirely of left boots. Sharp makes the entirely valid point that, with a 20th century depot handling some 97,000 different items, the potential for mistakes is increased exponentially. Sharp marvelled at how the new depot was equipped: its own electricity plant, telephone exchange, furnaces and print works, but then said this:

All this is very nice and comforting, of course. It’s good to know that we have all this stuff, particularly when you remember that it’s only passing through, a sample of what thousands of factories are pouring in to be distributed to the troops, but - the depot that issued that shipload of left boots was a big place too, no doubt. What about the efficiency of this place? The printing press prints two million pieces of paper a week. Think what muddles you could make with two million pieces of paper?

The answer came from a Lieutenant Colonel in charge of organisation and planning. This officer’s approach was simple, bring to bare that skills learnt from industry. Things like planning routes so that lorries both go out from the depot full but also return full. The lorries covered a million and a quarter miles in three months and so the savings in petrol alone would have been huge. It was not just petrol; rubber was in short supply and so all road journeys had to count. It wasn’t just transport, the way transactions were routed through the depot make a huge difference to staffing requirements. The Lieutenant Colonel estimated that better procedures had saved 55% in costs. As the war entered its fourth and fifth year, this would matter not so much because of money but because there simply were not the people available and labour saving became very much the order of the day.

The depots were throughout the UK. The image is of the main stores at COD Chilwell

Take a look at the Facebook page

Story Terrace blog interview

I was delighted to have been asked by Story Terrace to be interviewed for their blog. Here is the link

This is some of the interview

Your first book, War on Wheels, is set to be released in September 2016. Can you tell us a bit about it?

How long have I got? This was a labour of love. My Mum had kept albums some three or four inches thick of her’s and my Dad’s war. Five years after she died, I opened them and was entranced. I found a man I hardly knew. He was Bill Williams aged then 45 and brimming with energy. When I, as a very young teenager, knew my Dad he was seventy and terminally ill. Bill couldn’t have been more alive. He had been given the job of setting up a massive depot that would handle 

the vehicles that would give the British Army its wheels. Of course it wasn’t just him; some 250,000 soldiers, ATS and civilians were involved as they pressed ahead with tasks that had never been done before. Some failed, but they learned from their mistakes. They laboured long and hard and created a vast organisation that in the end triumphed. The story had never been told before. The vast enterprise would never happen again.

 If you could choose any person in history to do a Story Terrace project with, who would it be?

William Smith Williams published the Brontes. He and his brother came to London in the late seventeenth century, their family having been for generations ‘dealers in hides’ just outside Oxford. As well as publishing some of the greatest writing in the English language, William Smith Williams and his wife produced some remarkable progeny: Anna Williams who in 1870 was Professor of Singing Music at the Royal College of Music and Sir Arthur Lowes Dickinson who was a founding partner of Price Waterhouse in the USA to name but two. I would love to write their story.

I now have!

The context of army mechanisation

I have been asked to give a talk about War on Wheels and, as is so often the case with writing, I was totally surprised by what came out. A draft at this stage:

To talk about the mechanisation of the army in WW2 is, in a sense, wrong since, as we know well in Lincoln, it had begun in the Great War with the tank, the first of which we made here in Lincoln on Tritton Road. But there were also lorries, motor bikes and ambulances but not many of any and the main form of transport certainly for supplies was the train from the base depot up to the relatively static front line.

After the war had ended the overwhelming feeling was that it should never happen again and so little thought was given to further mechanisation, indeed there was little resource to spare. The conventional view was that all that was needed were light vehicles and weapons to keep the empire in check, in northern India for example. There were military thinkers like Liddle Heart but no one paid much attention to what they had to say.

It all changed in the mid 30s when the Baldwin government initiated a low level of rearmament. Much of this was related to the air and much was very forward thinking. There is a story of Sir William Rootes, whose group produced Humber and Hillman cars, on tour of the middle east receiving a phone call asking if he would set up a shadow factory ready to manufacture aircraft parts. He said yes. Similar conversations took place with Lord Nuffield, Herbert Austin and other industry leaders. An infrastructure was to put put in place to ensure that Britain could manufacture the aircraft it might need.

It was wasn’t just aircraft; it was the tank and other heavy vehicles. Again there is a story of the remaining very few Great War tanks being taken to Woolwich which was the then base of the RAOC. It was somewhere to put them. But elsewhere thought was being given to the development of the tank from its Lincoln origins. In Russia they had overcome the literal headache of suspension; all too frequently tank drivers would knock themselves out when their vehicle went over large bumps. The technology was developed further by a man called Christie in the States and  the Nuffield group took it forward into production in England in a line of models that would include the Crusader. Vickers, the mainstay of tank production, developed their offering further with the famous Matilda.

All of this though is background, I take the start of the story as a cold November day at Nottingham railway station. Interestingly the same start is taken by the historian who wrote of the contribution of the British motor industry to the war effort. On this cold day a rather large soldier stood impatient for the omnibus, in his pocket was a letter from the war office instructing him to visit the site of the old ammunition factory at Chilwell, to consider its suitability as the centre of army mechanisation and to come up with detailed proposals. The man was temporary lieutenant colonel Bill Williams.

The site was overrun by brambles, the sheds were open to the elements, the massive underground storage area was intact, above all it was in the right place, close to Coventry where the vehicles would be produced.

In his mind's eye was a vast distribution business that would received vehicles from numbers of manufactures and then distribute them to the countless units that would need them worldwide. It would also need to hold spares for each vehicle and have the engineering capability to maintain and adapt.

It was clear to him that no one in the army had this expertise and so he wrote to all the motor companies to pick their brains. The response was warm and his visited Humber, Vauxhall, Morris but also the big lorry producers Scamell and AEC. He visited the competent manufactures: Dunlop would play a big part in the story. It wasn’t just motor expertise, it was distribution, so letters to Marks and Spencer, to Harrods and Woolworths. This was radical. He had the support of his boss and pressed ahead pestering officials at the Treasury to release more and more money - it was raised from a poultry £20,000 to £1 million by the time it was finished in 1938.

VJ Day at seventy

It was all over; for many it had been over since 8 May when Victory in Europe was declared.

I remember being in a tiny church in the Vale of Belvoir in Leicestershire in May 2005 and talking about Victory in Europe in the sermon I preached. After the service, when most people had left, I asked the churchwarden for his memories of VE Day.

‘We had no idea it had happened.’ He went on to tell me that he had been a prisoner of war in Japan and he and those who had survived with him had spent their years oblivious to anything that was happening outside their camp, unless the camp commander chose to tell them.

For the last year I have been researching a book, War on Wheels, about the mechanisation of the Army in WW2. It is about the many thousand soldiers, ATS and civilians who worked in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, my father’s Corps, and who were responsible for giving the army its wheels. As part of this I looked hard at the war in the Far East. My researches took me to the archives of the Imperial War Museum where I read accounts of the fall and surrender of Singapore and Hong Kong and then the first hand accounts of some of those Ordnance men who survived their imprisonment. I remember sitting at the desk holding the typed and handwritten sheets of paper telling of just what human beings are capable of doing to each other. It was a sacred experience.

I decided that these accounts must be in my book both to honour those men but also to offer to my readers a whole picture, warts and all.

A short while ago I came upon a piece on television about two old men, one a former PoW and the other one of his guards. We saw them shaking hands and smiling. The former PoW said quite simply, ‘you could go on hating until you die, but what is the point?’

It made me think hard about whether I should change my mind and, in the interests of reconciliation, remove the offending passages.

I have decided to leave them in. It is, for good or ill, part of the horror of war. I have said more than once that politicians and others sadly need reminding of these horrors before they send our young men and women to fight.

We have moved on, but I believe we must remember, I think, for two reasons. Firstly, for those men and women who gave up their lives and endured so much for our sake. Those I have read about weren’t soldiers by choice. Many were store-men or mechanics or clerks. They were caught up in a maelstrom; they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They conducted themselves with enormous bravery and dignity. We must never forget them.

The second reason is that it was, as I said earlier, human beings doing unspeakable things to other human beings. We see reminders every day that this is not a thing of the past. If we stand up against anything, surely it must be this.

Tanks for Russia

On 22 June 1941 the German-Russian pact came to an end and Russia joined the war against Germany.

Both Prime Minister Churchill and the Minister of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook, placed a high priority on making materiel available to the Russians notwithstanding the relative insecurity of the British Isles.  It follows that supplies to Russia were an important feature of the Donnington depot’s work, as John Bull magazine reported:

'Ah, here was a man just back from Russia. He braved the Arctic seas and the German dive-bombers to take tanks  to our  Allies. With the thermometer  at more than forty below freezing, our ordnance lads worked twenty-four hours a day to clear the ships before another convoy arrived. It was dawn at 10.30 a.m. and dusk at three - so they had to work with lights on even with " Jerry " overhead. And men of the RAOC manned the light anti­ aircraft guns.

'And here was another man from Russia. He had gone to teach the Russians all about our tanks and the multitudinous spare parts accompanying them. “Loveable” was his word for these people. They surrender their  cold reserve slowly, and then become the friendliest people in the world.

'As one instance of the all-outness of Russia in the war effort, he said that women are being sent into the munition factories to work alongside their husbands. When they have learned the job themselves, their menfolk go into the army. Yet the one ambition of the woman is to learn as quickly as possible, and of the men to teach them with all speed.

Another story about tanks for Russia concerns Brigadier de Wolff at Donnington who used the knowledge that he had gained of Russian ways in WW1 to smooth the process. All in chapter 4 of War on Wheels.

Bill Williams, wartime leader of the RAOC, died on 7 August 1965

This is part of the obituary, written by Major General Sir John Hildreth, that appeared in the RAOC Gazette in September 1965 telling something of Bill's achievement for the RAOC, The Army and his Country.

'Without him and his drive and determination, I doubt whether the RAOC [and I would say the RLC] would exist today. Many things went wrong in those early days, enough certainly to daunt the spirit of a lesser man, but not Bill Williams. Many people, Corps and Regiments wanted to take over for themselves those stores and equipments of their particular concern. Some to a limited extent succeeded. It was only Bill Williams's audacious determination, first to put right what had gone wrong and second to hold the Corps together as a successful entity that prevented the wholesale distribution of our job to others....

'I found it exhilarating to serve someone who really knew his job - and mine, and most other people's, and who also knew what he wanted done and by when. He was a great leader, probably the greatest the Corps had known. Some found him harsh - and he had to be, for we were at war and only the best was good enough...He would not allow any Officer to call for a junior to explain any facet of the functions for which he was responsible. If he did not know the detail himself, he was "out"!

'And yet, with this detail on his mind, he had the widest vision of any of the big issues of the day...

'He was asked to visit India and to advise on the best way to reorganise Ordnance Services there - a prodigious task for one unacquainted with that country. Nevertheless he picked the wood from the trees and clearly and succinctly told Field Marshal Auchinleck and his Staff exactly what was to be done to put things right - and it was done....

'When, before Normandy, spares for American tanks could not be obtained from that country because of the policy to provide tanks over spares, he went there and talked to the factory workers of our difficulties in maintaining their tanks in battle. He asked for, and got, additional production effort from the workers which, not only maintained the output of tanks, but gave us the spares as well...

'He is reputed while over there to have persuaded Mr Kaiser to build an extra ship to carry the spares over and I can well believe that he did, too...

'He was without doubt the greatest DOS we ever had and he was one of the greatest of all Corpsmen. So long as history records the activities of the RAOC, so long will he be remembered and honoured among us. With his death an era is passed. For those who lived through it, it must always remain a glorious era. For those who come after it should remain forever an inspiration’.

Bill was born in South London in1891. His father died when Bill was 14, forcing him to leave school and take a job as an office boy. I write of the remainder of his life in Dunkirk to D Day. 

MacRobert's Reply preview

Writing MacRobert's Reply was a remarkable experience, talking to Don Jeffs and reading Phil Jeffs' own research, but then digging further into the accounts of many other people of their experiences of war.

My research has taken me deeper into the MacRobert family story and I am indebted to Marion Miller for her remarkable work, From Cawnpore to Cromar: The MacRoberts of Douneside. I have looked deeper into XV Squadron and am indebted to Martyn Ford-Jones for the books he wrote, in particular Bomber Squadron: The men who flew with XV. and the archive he maintains. I have explored the story of the Stirling bomber and Jonathan Falconer’s book Stirling Wings. Anyone exploring Bomber Command during the Second World War would be the poorer had they not read Bomber Boys: Fighting back 1940-45 by Patrick Bishop or Bomber Command by Max Hastings. The administrative staff of XV squadron maintained detailed records of operations and the National Archives have digitised these and made them available. I am grateful to both but also specifically to the National Archive for the records of Lady MacRobert’s correspondence with the Air Ministry on which I have drawn extensively. Finally, I say thank you to the Imperial War Museum for making recordings of the recollections of veterans and to the veterans themselves for telling their stories.

My generation has been truly blessed not to have been confronted by such horrors.

We can though be proud of what our parents' generation did; we can also warn our children's generation of what war actually means.

In my work on War on Wheels, I have found instances of individuals, groups and businesses raising money for the war effort. The MacRobert's Reply is more than one such instance, since it was substantial, enduring and told the story of great commitment by a grieving mother. The result today is the MacRobert Trust.

Put very briefly, Lady MacRobert lost all three of her sons in the early part of the war. Inspired by Spitfire Week, she gave to the RAF a cheque for £25,000 (£700,000 in today's money) to buy a Stirling Bomber.

The story that followed was about the young men who flew the aircraft and its successors. It is their story that I am now beginning to explore in collaboration with the son of one the surviving crew members, Donald Jeffs, and Story Terrace.

The story of MacRobert's Reply is remarkable in so many ways. I do hope that you find reading it as rewarding as I did writing it.

The book is now available to buy on Amazon. You can find it by following this link .