Copyright (C) 2004 by John Cox. COMING OF AGE 1939-1946 BY JOHN COX (Please see the HTML version of this eBook for 19 photographs) CONTENTS Foreword. Rumours of War. March 1939-1940________________________________1 Plymouth. March 1940-July 1942________________________________10 Bowden Battery. July 1942-August-1942 ________________________14 Oxshott. July 1942-August 1942________________________________34 Aldershot. August 1942-December 1942__________________________37 Going South. January 1943-April 1943__________________________42 India. May 1943-June 1943_____________________________________53 Iraq. June 1943-August 1944 __________________________________57 No. 5 Advanced Base Workshops. June 1943-August 1944__________63 Desert Life. June 1943-August 1944____________________________68 No. 1 Base Workshops. August 1944-August 1945_________________74 Tel-el-Kebir. August 1945-January 1946________________________93 In the End. January 1946_____________________________________105 FOREWORD Now that the Second World War is some 60 years past this would seem to be a good time to collate all the various chapters that I've written over the last few years and present them as an entity. No war can really be described as a "good" war especially by the families of those who didn't return or by those who returned maimed but in the sense that I went through it from the start until the finish and emerged unscratched I suppose that mine could be called a "good" war. Though I spent just under three years in the Middle East in Iraq and Egypt I was never engaged in any action and what follows in these pages describes the more mundane side of military life. I didn't start writing these chapters until about 50 years after the war and have relied heavily on memory, with some photographs but no diaries; the content is substantially accurate. Dates are included in the Contents page; the starting and ending dates are true and the intervening dates are not more than a month out. John Cox Ottawa, Canada March 2004 RUMOURS OF WAR It was 1938 and the Spanish civil war was still in progress; Germany was flexing her muscles having effected an Anschluss with Austria and having out-manoeuvred Britain and France over the matter of Czechoslovakia. It was obvious that a war was coming but Britain had allowed her forces and armaments to run down and was in no position to engage in one. At that time I was 20 years old and was working as a draughtsman in an engineering firm; I believe conscription had started though I'm not certain exactly when and there was always a possibility that my job would be classified as a reserved occupation. To this day I don't know whether or not I would have been called up because together with my school friend I joined the Territorial Army.