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Description: | Wordprocessed ts account (47pp, written in 1969 with note added by son in 2003) entitled 'A Flixton Boy Goes to War', covering his enlistment, training and service with the 2/6th Battalion Manchester Regiment, recalling the declaration of war (4 August 1914) and his enlistment, bidding farewell to his parents, embarkation for the Western Front and daily routine, brutal drill instructors particularly at Etaples, packages from home, guard duty in the mental ward of a military hospital, training as a Lewis Gunner, cooking beef in an Aldershot Oven, Zeppelin raids, the issue of box respirators, his regrets over enlistment, his decision not to visit a brothel in Bethune, their move up to the front line and first casualties, the deep mud in the trenches at Guinchy, the high value attached to the rum ration, the shooting of a German prisoner in No Mans Land, aerial warfare observed, life out of the line, lice, two weeks hospitalised with German measles, the Battalion's move up to the River Yser for an attack which is cancelled, shelling with mustard gas and temporary blindness from exposure to it, guard duty in sand dunes by the North Sea (September 1917?), their march from Poperinghe through Ypres where they witnessed a major air battle (3 October 1917), the Third Battle of Ypres (October 1917) which saw the Battalion reduced to 50 men, hazardous fatigues digging fortifications, the arrival and 'proving' of a new subaltern, impromptu Christmas dinner (1917) which involved spending three weeks pay on a pork chop and eggs, adoption of a 'live and let live' arrangement with the Germans at Hargicourt, te German spring offensive (21 March 1918) and their orders to retire, being wounded in the leg and carried to their new position, his evacuation to a hospital in Rubery, Birmingham, via an American hospital in La Havre, being visited by his mother and the girlfriend of one of the men who had carried him back who is now missing, his subsequent service with a Reserve Battalion at Filey which he despised, his application to the RAF and training at No 7 School of Aeronautics at Bath as an observer, the announcement of the Armistice and his swift demobilisation (4 February 1919), with a postscript of thoughts on Americans, tanks and witnessing prisoners being killed in cold blood.
Cataloguer AJC | Publisher: | http://www.iwm.org.uk | Subjects: | 2/6th Battalion British Army Manchester Regiment | Source: | Imperial War Museum | Creator: | Milner, Harry | Identifier: | http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/o... | Go to resource |
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