I was next sent on an Officers' Course to England (Bromley in Kent) with Sir Basil MacFarland, a rather successful businessman and later Mayor of Londonderry, and a hotelier also from Londonderry called Robert Maxwell, and we were taught (?) how to be Battery Officers. It was an amusing experience and one of the highlights of it was when we visited a nearby large army camp and spotted some Southern Irish army officers in their darker green uniform while we were walking though the camp; whereupon Sir Basil 'called us to attention', and then 'make ready to charge '... We didn't, of course, nor did the Irish officers know what we were doing.

     Our training on average took up about 3 hours a day, otherwise life went on fairly normally, catching up with work in the office. Everyone was aware that war was inevitable. We got our 3 inch anti-aircraft guns in the summer of  '39 and started to learn how to operate them. We were moved down to Kinnegar near Holywood on the other side of the Lough, where we were lodged in a smelly big house called St Helen's, which had been unoccupied by humans for quite some time, hence the smell. I suppose there were about 100 of us. I also remember Robin Reade being very affronted when one of the officers, Cunningham by name, took his boots off in the Mess! This Cunningham deserves some fame for having marched 100 of his workers in Gallaher's cigarette factory to Dunmore Park where they joined us as a body and, in fact, I commanded them for the first year of the war. They were a fine body of men, but Cunningham did not stay with us. Perhaps the incident of his boots told against him'.

     'They also missed the excitement of one of our first Calls to Arms when, still billeted in the smelly house outside Holywood, and alongside the real Regular Army barracks, we spotted an airoplane coming straight down the Lough towards us, which we immediately assumed was an enemy aircraft and gave the order to 'Fire!'. Fortunately we had not yet been issued with ammunition because it turned out to be one of the Short Brothers aircraft coming into land on the dock strip. We did not have any men to command until early in 1939, by when we had some idea of what we were supposed to do, though not necessarily how to do it, and this shows how wise that was! Also how wise it was that our next orders were to go to a Firing School in Bude in Devon, where we would learn how to fire our guns.

     Curiously enough, in order to go to Devon, we were all innoculated for Overseas Service, and I remember being amazed at the number of men who were scared of the needles when they were lined up, and fainted in droves! However, they recovered and off we went to Bude and fired our guns. The weather was appalling. We were encamped on the top of a cliff with our guns pointing straight out to sea and the tents behind them being blown to shreds; eventually we had to strike camp. I had been having dinner in the town, so it seemed must have been most of the men, though slightly more merrily, for when Robin Reade and I arrived back at the camp we found the men so full of alcohol that they were either lying happily unaware of the shredding tents around them, or standing in a befuddled haze doing nothing about them. We moved them down into Boarding Houses in the town with the help of two or three friends and several non-commissioned officers who showed their merit that night were later commissioned as officers in other Units, among whom were Harry Porter, after the War to become Colonel in the T.A., and Jack Baillie who as a Captain, was taken prisoner by the Japanese at Singapore, which he survived to become a Regular Gunner Colonel after the War.  The little hotel I was billeted in was very comfortable, and the daughter of the house fell rather heavily for a very good-looking officer of ours called Stewart Pollock. He, however, had other interests and so she befriended me! Not very seriously, though my friends were only slightly less apprehensive about her than they had been of an A.T.S. waitress at Deepcote, to avoid who I had to be reported 'Killed in Action' shortly after we got to France.

     The Phoney War, as it was called before the Germans moved across the Maginot Line, was really a lot of fun. Our new Padre, Cuthbert Peacock, scoured the country and got us all turkey for Christmas and managed to give us a very joyous festival. In the New Year, we were moved to a Reserve Area between Deauville and Trouville and this was extremely pleasant because, although the famous big hotels were all converted into hospitals and there were no guests, there were still a lot of people living in the towns who were most welcoming to young British officers. Robin Reade, of course, immediately found a beautiful girl and a less attractive, but still very nice, friend for me and we took them out singing and dancing a lot. My girl was french Jewish with stunning red hair, called Jill Goudchoux, and great fun. Robin's romance became serious and he eventually became engaged to his beautiful and well-born fiancée and bought her a ring. I was more cautious but still enjoyed a very pleasant social life, the Goudchoux were extremely rich (I think the father made airoplanes) and they entertained us a lot in their beautiful villa in Deauville; however the War suddenly hotted up and brought all this to an end. We were posted to a little town called Abancourt, near Rouen. The Germans had attacked and both French and British were retreating, we had been taught to recognise different makes of plane and although I was not at all confident of my knowledge, it soon became necessary to put it to the test. I don't know if I can claim to have been the first Ac-Ac Gunner to open fire, but I must have be one of the first.... and it was a German plane.

     The roads were now crowded with refugees and we waited for the army to come back to us to make a stand. Robin and I had put our beautiful field boots into a 'bonier' in Rouen to be mended, but alas when we went to collect them we found the french had evacuated the city and all the doors and shops were locked up. Robin Reade wanted to blow the door down and get his boots out, but I'm afraid I was more conservative and felt we would not need them if the Germans captured Rouen. It was pretty miserable and wretched for the refugees who were wounded and hungry and frightened and I did not feel I cared much about the future of a pair of boots. I heard that my fiend Jill, who was of course half Jewish, had fled with her family to the south of France, as had most of the Jews from this region, who could afford to for they were very much at risk.

     Our regiment was now ordered to Calais to join in the defence of that city before a possible evacuation. We had already had about 40 of our lorries taken from us and sent to regiments in more serious need, so it made this move very difficult, anyway, in the event, the Germans got there before us and as our ammunition was designed to explode in the sky and would have been no good against tanks, we were now told to turn left and head for Dieppe. I remember this especially, for some of our men helped themselves to radios and equipment from an evacuated hospital which had been a golf club before. This was no doubt very reprehensible behaviour, looting, but did not seem of great importance and the Germans were only a day behind us, however the Military Police chased us all the way down the road and made us return the things, just in time for the Germans to enjoy them.

     Eventually we were ordered to take up a gun site position of the south bank of the River Seine where the remains of the Army hoped to make a stand, if and when the Germans turned south, Dunkirk and Calais having both fallen into enemy hands by now, though we did not know of the great Rescue Operation that had gone on."

     Our men had not been at all sorry to leave behind one part of their equipment, and that was the radar sets. There was an unstoppable rumour in the regiment that working with radar rendered a man sterile, and so they parted with these pieces of high-tech with the greatest happiness and I had the happy job of blowing them up with their own pre-arranged charges. The men were not at all pleased later when they were issued with another lot.

     We were given leave soon after our escape, and it was marvellous to be able to relax completely. I think we must all have slept and slept and slept, for few of us, and certainly not I, can remember anything at all about that leave.

     We were soon moved on again, with 3.7 guns this time, to defend London. This great city was ringed about with many Ac-Ac Regiments; we were sited at Wimbledon, the Windmill Site, a lovely peacetime area no doubt, but by August 1940, completely covered with Nissen Huts and Gun Sites where we manned the guns day and night, and were once again supplied with radar equipment and a team of rather scruffy looking, but intelligent boffins came down to tell our men how to work it. They were very good and knew exactly how to teach our men who very soon became proficient, but the equipment was still in its early days of invention, and was not able to give us height on the incoming aircraft though it could give us bearings. But without height, this was not much use and the searchlights all round us seldom seemed to be able to pick up the planes so, as the Gunnery Officer, as soon as I got a bearing I had to try and assess the height by listening and trying to decide if it was flying at 4,000 or 6,000 feet. Naturally, we often guessed wrong, but we blasted off pretty well all night and although we could claim few successes, we were told that the noise we made at least gave moral support to the people living through the raids.

     We were on Wimbledon Common all through the period of the Battle of Britain and we saw the amazing packed formations of enemy aircraft attacking London, and the famous defence made by our R.A.F. fighters taking them on. It was to devastate London and then, after the heaviest raids, we saw London burning furiously. We did eight hour shifts at the guns, sometimes reduced to four while one officer slept on a bunk in the underground command Post and the other one took the duty, waking his pal up at the agreed time, and them collapsing immediately into deep sleep. We became oblivious of the noise of our guns firing almost continuously, and the moral of the civilian population was quite marvellous.

     One time I noticed one of our Lieutenants (to us 2nd Lieutenants, a full Lieutenant was a very senior officer, at least 30 years old and much to old to worry about such things!) sleeping in his bunk with his tin hat place over his private parts while the Germans were bombing us. However, on another extremely wet night, when the German planes were coming over very low, we were agreeable surprised to hearing this same elderly officer exclaim, I hope the fucking fellow's cabin leaks!', and we all agreed with his sentiments.

     After this period of intensive action, being a mobile regiment, we were given a period of duty in Middlesborough where I commanded Guns at West Hartlepool on some very unattractive salt flats, but as this area was not being bombed at this time and the local people were extremely friendly and hospitable to us we had a reasonably happy time. I even found a girl who could dance well!

     After Aberdeen we had our mobility further tested by being ordered back to Dorset, to Hinton Saint George, where Colonel Dearden appointed me to be his adjutant, and here we had another test of mobility in being ordered to Norfolk and back, without our guns. This was called Operation 'Bumper' and we had another one up to Hexham in Northumberland which was appropriately called Percy', finally, our last tour of duty before we went abroad was on the East coast of Lincolnshire where we camped in a very pleasant park of a stately home near Skegness, while each person had a brief leave and we awaited news as to what ship we would get sent to and from what port. As the Adjutant I was responsible for this security, and having had a salutary lesson myself on 'careless talk', 1 was perhaps a bit too fussy and worried when I discovered some of our married officers had told their wives we were waiting to embark, but I comforted myself that as none of us knew where we were going it could not matter very much. In any case, we were only there a short time before being entrained to the Clyde " (lucky they had learnt to be mobile!) " where we embarked on the Belfast built S.S. Britannic. None of us had ever been on board anything larger than the Liverpool steamer, so we were tremendously excited when we received a message before boarding from Winston Churchill saying that 'in the First War the troops had saved their country under appalling conditions of discomfort and that we must be prepared to do the same', but when we found our quarters we realised we knew why he had sent the message!

     Five thousand troops embarked on this ship. We officers were in two-berth cabins, eight of us to a cabin, and we had to 'rotate' in strict order, otherwise there was no way of running our lives. I soon decided that to get up very early was the best solution with regard to 'ablutions' and then discovered it was a tremendous advantage for a bridge player as there were only very few tables available and they had to be booked before 8am. It would have been awful on such a long, crowded trip not to have been a bridge player, for apart from a fairly good library, there was little else one could do of interest in such a confined place.

     In addition to our regiment, there were about seven hundred Sherwood Foresters and fifty Canadian nurses. These quite plain looking women were immensely sought-after by the officers, for they were pleasant and friendly as well as being 'women'. I decided, however, that I did not think it worth queuing up for their company, and would rather stick to bridge than waste half an evening hoping for a dance. Drink was appallingly cheap, which was lovely but it did mean that some people took too much, and 'some people' in this case, included my Colonel, Frank Dearden. He hit the bottle extremely hard, as did the O.C. Troops, who was an Irish Colonel named de Stacpoole who was finally put off the ship at Durban.

     We still had no idea where we were going, even when we reached Durban. We had a code number, 0702 4n, and that was our destination, others also had codes, but different and no more idea than us ... but we all had topees! We took a route far out into the Atlantic with a large escort of Royal naval ships, including the battleships H.M.S. Rodney and Nelson. Our convoy included many well-known liners and there were many small Royal Navy ships patrolling on the outer perimetre of the convoy. I was lucky in not suffering from claustrophobia and even more, in being an officer, which latter meant that I was able to move out and sleep on deck as soon as the weather became warm enough. This, the unfortunate troops could not do, owing to their huge numbers. It must have been hell for them, though we all tried to get them all up on deck at some time during the day, and Robin Reade as Sports Officer organised as much exercise and sport as was possible. He had started out in another bridge-playing group, but against his will and when they started having post-mortems, he threw his cards down and took up gin-slings and exercise instead. My job as adjutant was shared with the four or five other adjutants on board and consisted of being Duty Officer and doing the rounds and listening to complaints and arranging fire drills, etc.

     The convoy put in once at the port of Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa, or Freetown as it used to be known. It was frightfully hot and had been known as 'The White Man's Grave' down the years because of the terrific humidity and disease. Someone suggested because we were not allowed ashore that, to amused the troops, there should be an officers' race between various ships with the officers (Army, not Navy) rowing the great big life boats. About 20 men to a boat and the race was to the river mouth and back again. What we did not know was that these boats' oars were about twenty feet long, extremely heavy and hard to handle, and that the river flowed extremely fast when the tide was going out. The thought of getting away from the ship for even a short time was so attractive that Robin Reade and I both volunteered and got places in one of the boats. Far from being the cool and refreshing change from routine that we had envisaged, it was pretty dreadful. The convoy was moored upstream in the very wide river and we managed to pull our way to the starting line, suggested by the sailors, where we were immediately caught in the tide-rip and swept rapidly out to sea, quite unable to row back to our ships, let alone the mouth of the river. This, of course, had been anticipated by the sailors and just as we were getting into a bit of a panic we were thrown a line by a Naval Launch and towed back to our ship. The troops hanging over the sides were thrilled at the discomfiture of their officers and, no doubt with the connivance of the sailors, pulled all the lavatory chains so that all the effluent of the ship's bilges cascaded over us as we tried to come alongside. Great joy everywhere except amongst the sunburnt, blistered officers in the boats.

     Deolali got rather a surprise when the Canteen contractors there, as was their custom, wanted to interest our Major, Jimmy, in gifts such as a large car and trips to other smarter stations and other delights at their expense, so as to gain further business and found themselves sharply discouraged. We played a good deal of tennis in the early morning when it was comparatively cool, and even took a few more rides across the Maidan. Another night Robin Reade and I borrowed an Army car and drove up to Poona where we had a marvellous dinner and saw how much more acceptable life could be in a really puckha hill station with a good Club.

     On again by train to Calcutta, a pleasant enough experience for the officers. Our train stopped for meals at stations forewarned, where tables were set out on the platform in the shade and we had about an hour and a half to eat a good meal and walk about before re-boarding the train. The troops got their meals in packs and were also able to get out and walk about, and, being charitable Belfast boys, dispersed backsheesh to the swarms of beggars, mostly children who followed them everywhere. Despite their very crowded conditions, the troops appeared very happy and interested in all the strange new ways and life they were seeing.

     When we first arrived in India we were warned that we might have to take part in quelling civil disorder, and had been given instructions, strikingly similar to those of today. When we met a revolutionary mob we had to shout 'Halt! Disperse or we open fire!' or rather, as we could not speak any Indian, we were told to hold up notices saying this, but not unless we had a magistrate with us, who would first read the 'Riot Act'. Our troops were thrilled at the thought of quelling a riot, being Irish, but thank God, we were never called upon to do this. I personally remember cases where officers had been court-marshalled for ordering troops to fire, and almost always blamed for doing so. Our H.Q. in Calcutta was in a large house at the top of Chowringhee, which was really the main boulevard of the city. A huge park surrounded by very wide streets of smart shops, offices, hotels and clubs".

     It has always been a source of utter fascination to me, meeting this regiment down the years since our marriage, how such incredibly different, and all equally determined to go on being different, characters ever managed to merge into an effective fighting unit, and 1 have tried to work out what the common denominator was. The answer, I concluded, was an utter determination not to be pushed around by anyone but 'their own'. No-one, from the English to the Japanese, was going to move them in any direction they did not want to go, and this fused them into a pretty invincible little regiment. I watched them 40 years later arriving for the annual V.J. Day march past in Belfast, forgotten still, as they were in 'the Forgotten Army' by the rest of the citizens of Belfast, never even a General or colonel of any other regiment stationed in Ulster turning up to salute them, but the regiment turning up to parade. All sizes and shapes and degrees of successes in life, every man as good as the next, and they form up into fours and march, everyone leaning or hobbling at a different angle, and yet all that identical look of determination to 'get there' and, once again, despite age and decrepitude, they make a very formidable looking little group, and there is not one of them who will fail to help another.

     With my C.O., I was called to a meeting in the Town Hall where Slim was to address the local citizens and some of us soldiers. The future of that part of India looked pretty bleak; the British Army had been driven out of Burmah. The few battalions who had been at the Front line were retreating into India and the Japanese had even bombed Ceylon and were soon seen over Calcutta and West Bengal. Slim was quite marvellous. The Indians obviously believed Britain would be defeated, but he stood in front of us all and exuded the leadership and confidence which was to turn the tide. I was thrilled, and the Indians realised Britain was not done for after all.

     At about this stage I was approached to try and get a Corporal in the Royal Irish Fusiliers transferred to our unit. He was a friend of many of our York Street men and his regiment had had a very bad time in the Arakan and been cut to pieces, but when I rang their Adjutant and asked whether this could be arranged, he replied 'The fellow has obviously lost his nerve, he has got no guts ... You are welcome to him'. It would be nice to record that he did join our regiment and do better, but I cannot remember anything except the sad fact that this was the state the retreating Army was in."

     Here I would like to put in a Memoir from a member of this retreating army which I found recently in the Burmah Star magazine 'Dekho', which gives very substantial and impressive reasons why the retreating army was in a sad state, and how marvellous General Slim was to rally these heroic men again.

     "As we moved down the coast we came to a little town called Feni where there was the most wonderful beach absolutely covered with scurrying crabs. If one could avoid them one could have a glorious time on beautiful sand and in warm sea, but as was always the way, rich American officers would land on the beach in their tiny planes with gorgeous girls, nurses from some hospital near them, which made us very jealous, later these planes became very useful as they were assigned to us as spotter planes.

     Despite my efforts. Col. Dearden was inclined to get short of sherry, and on one or two occasions I was sent back to Calcutta by plane to stock up for him, using my undoubtedly useful connections with the wine trade. He was a very able Commanding Officer, but in the afternoons when the sherry was beginning to take effect, he used to write the most appalling tough letters to our Generals and H. Q. in Delhi; probably right in what he said, and in the most beautiful English, but I realised that if these letters were received at G. H. Q., he would be sacked immediately, so any letters written late on I used to hold until the next day for his signature, and then he usually accepted that the letter would not be sent. We understood each other perfectly.

     The British Army which had received a pretty bloody nose in the Arakan and had made one effort to attack the Japanese just before we arrived in Bengal, had advanced but been surrounded from behind and then had to retreat and their morale was very low indeed as I have told, but now we had two new divisions with us, experienced British and Indian troops and we began to believe that we could move forward after the monsoon.

     While the monsoon was on we were taken out of the Arakan (after about four months of fairly desultory Ac-Ac warfare, there not being very many Japanese planes to shoot at) plus our vehicles and back across the Delta to near Calcutta, where we left the vehicles and entrained on to Ranchi, a peace-time base far to the west of Calcutta for another month of re-training and polishing our guns preparatory to going back into the Arakan for the expected New Offensive when the monsoon ended".

     Despite this confusion, the New Offensive did go much better and the 8th Belfast Heavy Ac-Ac advanced down the Arakan and got as far as a nice little place called Maungdaw, where we set up our H.Q. and the battle through tunnels which had been dug years before the war by Indian engineers, and which made movement easier, but in which one was inclined to find Japanese already installed which was very hair-raising and unpleasant, fortunately by the time we got there with the Heavy Guns, most of the Japanese were dead and just unpleasantly smelly.

     My Adjutant's job was an interesting one. We were Corps Troops, that is 15 Corps was our H.Q. but they allocated our guns to the Divisions under their command, and I therefore dealt with the Commanding Royal Artillery man at Corps H.Q. and the Brigadiers in the Indian Divisions, and our Batteries were spread widely amongst them all, which made keeping contact much more of a test. Our guns not having many Japanese planes as targets at the stage, we became involved in ground targets and because our guns were good over long ranges, the Japanese defences, which were bunkers at the top of the surrounding mountains, could be hurt by our shells if suitable primed and fired from long distance.

     We had one serious Battle in H.Q. with the Japanese, when one of their patrols came through the jungle and crept into our encampment without our sentries seeing them, and put firebombs into our lorry park and blew up quite a lot of our lorries before our men realised what was happening. It was about 3am and most of us were asleep so it was not an occasion to be proud of, but fortunately we suffered no casualties, and replacement lorries came though pretty smartly. We learnt to be more careful about going round the sentries to see that they were awake at night. The sentries, of course, became a good deal more jumpy and started throwing hand-grenades at any movement they heard, which very sadly frequently turned out to be tame Indian logging elephants which had been turned loose from their work pulling timber down the mountains when the War broke out, and now wandered about looking for the food and human companionship they had come to depend on.

     I had two alarming experiences exclusive to me at this time, we were dug in on the top of a little hill on the steep banks of a tidal Chaung (small river) the whole area surrounded by three heights of rolled Dannert wire and we all enjoyed being able to bathe in this Chaung when the tide was right. One morning I called to the Assistant Adjutant to know if the tide was in as he lay sun-bathing after his swim, and he nodded, so I dived in ... and nearly broke my neck. When I stood up the water only just covered my ankles. He had either bathed much longer ago than he realised (and the tide did go out very fast) or else he was looking for promotion!

     The second occasion which caused me considerable alarm was when I was standing after another swim, drying myself in the sun, and I suddenly saw an enormous water buffalo gallop straight at the Dannert wire and leap it with the greatest ease, followed by another even larger animal and they both came charging straight at me! I decided the wisest thing to do was to take to the water and dived into the Chaung accompanied by the cheers of the spectating men, to be followed immediately by the buffalo. This was really worrying, and I swam furiously some way upstream before I dared pause to look round and realise that the buffalo were swimming in the opposite direction and quite definitely only interested in each other fore reasons of nature. This has been one of the most popular stories at Mess reunions ever since!

     One of the heroes of this siege was my friend Robin Reade who seized one of the guns and engaged the Japanese on 'open sites'. Which means they were so close he used his eyes rather than instruments to assess his target; for which action he subsequently received the Military Cross, and I had the pleasure in assisting Col. Cunningham in writing out the citation of his bravery and that of another Officer called Bing. Also for Billy Adrain, who had been one of the motor-mechanics in Lyle and Kinahan before the war, and who most bravely tore round putting out fires caused by Japanese shell-fire in the ammunition lorries. Billy, who like all of us was extremely thin now, looked so like Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame, that he had been mobbed in an Indian Cinema showing one of their Films when the audience thought one of the Stars was actually visiting the Cinema! Now he also received a Military Medal for his courage. All three men survived "The Box" as this action became known.

     We had no communication with the Box except through one of their tanks which was 'linked' to a tank on our side of the mountain. The troops in the Box as I have said received food dropped from the air (as did the Japanese, who were very quick to pick up parachute loads which drifted their way) and the food included drink and cigarettes. Some months later I was pretty surprised to receive a bill from the NAAFI for these supplies, and 'discussed' the matter with Jimmy, who told me to 'tear the damn thing up' which I did. We never got a reminder, but if we had we would have pointed out that they should also really be billing the Japanese too.

     When the monsoon came again, as it did reasonably soon after the Nyakyedauk incident, the roads became quite impassable for our heavy guns and vehicles, so we were once again pulled out for a period in India, and once again Ranchi was our location. One incident which occurred here was a night when we were asleep in our tents and were suddenly awoken by tremendous sounds of shooting, and found a number of jeeps driving through the camp with Bren guns mounted on their bonnets, firing away at Pie dogs and any other animals they thought was fun to hunt. As a number of their bullets had gone through our tents we put an end to this 'entertainment' and discovered they were all Chinese, who we arrested and discovered they were being trained by the Americans so that they could be flown back 'over the hump' (the mountains through which they had come to offer their services to the Americans) and dropped back into the jungle to fight the Japanese from the Chinese border. We had some special dealings with the American 'dug-out' officers who were here so when we handed the Chinese back to them. Jimmy Cunningham said, "Well! What's going to happen to them now?" and was horrified when the American Colonel shrugged his shoulders and said, "I guess we'll probably shoot them." Jimmy said, "Please don't. We don't do that sort of thing in our Army." We never heard what did happen.

     Among these dead whom we remembered was a man called Bert Kinnon who had been a lift-man in Gallahers cigarette factory in Belfast and also my batman for a long time. This included our journey out to India, when he embarrassed me by 'knocking off' (army slang for stealing) a camp bed, so that I could be more comfortable when sleeping out on deck. I made him take it back to its rightful owner and he thought I was daft. He also drank half a bottle of Jamesons whiskey, which I had stupidly forgotten to lock up ...After some time in Burmah with me we fell out and he demanded to go back to the Guns, which he did, and was immediately killed. I used to send his widow a Christmas present every year when I was running the Regimental Fund after the war was over.

     Information was coming through to us now that the war was going very much better; that the Army had broken through into Northern Burmah and were advancing on Rangoon. We, meanwhile, advanced a little further down coast. The Japanese in our sector were still 'holing up' in fox-holes and firing hard as they were flushed out. This we did with our long range guns, helped by the aforementioned spotter planes which used to bring the pretty nurses down to the beach at Chittagong! There was an incident when Robin Reade decided to experiment whether he could not do it better himself and climbed up a mountain to our forward Observation Post, where he heard on the radio link, a visiting gunnery Instructor further down the line giving some other guns instructions to fire on a certain area. Robin joined in on the radio link, much to their surprise and told them in no uncertain terms not to fire on that area because that was us. They were extremely annoyed at his interference and even more annoyed when they discovered he was right. We were extremely grateful. The spotter planes had the effect of stopping the Japanese firing as they did not want to give away their positions, so we inclined to keep the pilots up fairly often to get a respite, which annoyed them a bit too.

     We had just been supplied with 7.2 inch guns, and installed them on the island of Ramrek, but before we got a chance to use these fine big guns the Japanese retreated again, and we realised that our war in Akyab was over, and we were put on stand-by for another sphere of war. We were told to go to Madras in Southern India to await instructions.

The Kinahans were one of the very few families in Northern Ireland who had both sons returned to them after the War...