Memories of Stoke-on-Trent people - Ken
Green
Ken Green
A
Life in the Ceramic Tile Industry
section 5
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Stoke-on-Trent and the Military Collage of Science
next: Richards Tiles in January 1948
The
Military Situation in the Far East
The opinion
of most people was that the Japanese would fight on to the very end.
In reality, the Allies complete command of sea and air had isolated
Japanese occupied territories. The
Japanese were being driven out, but at a tremendous cost.
Operation OLYMPIC was scheduled for 1st November 1945 and
entailed landings in Kyushu (the south
island of the Japanese homeland). A very much larger attack on Honshu (the
largest island of the Japanese homeland), Operation CORONET, was
scheduled for March 1946. These
operations would have entailed five million men, most of them American.
Britain, Australia and Canada would have contributed token forces of one
division each, plus the Royal Navy and some specialist air units.
The logistics of having to service unique foreign equipments was the main
reason for the Commonwealth’s small contribution to Olympic and Coronet.
The use of atom bombs against Japan in August ’45 brought about her
surrender. What would have been the
largest ever assembly of military might was no longer necessary.
The
British situation was different. Operation
Zipper, to be launched from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and various parts of India, was
planned for September 1945. It
was too far advanced to be cancelled and went ahead as an exercise but without
naval or aerial bombardments. It
entailed landings on the West Coast of the Malay Peninsula north of Port
Dickson and south of Port Swettenham (now Kelang).
General Robert’s XXX1V Indian Corps (5th, 23rd,
25th and 26th Indian Divisions, 3rd Commando
Brigade and one Parachute Brigade of the British 6th Airborne
Division, comprised a force of more than 100,000 men.
This force contained many North Staffordshire people
It was met
by local resistance fighters who were members of, or had been trained by, Force
136. Some of these people had been taken by submarine from
Japanese occupied Malaya and parachuted back after training and planning.
Various equipments had also been parachuted to them.
They were to sabotage communications and installations and attack
Japanese positions at the time of our landings.
It is a tribute to Force 136 that no detail of these plans reached the
enemy. Malaya had been considered to be a place where the Japanese
were most likely to resist, despite the surrender.
They did not. Our units were
soon inland to Seremban (to feature in my ceramic tile career 44 years later)
and across the peninsula to the East Coast at Kuantan.
A few days, later Singapore was re-occupied.
There was,
however, a very big problem of reoccupation.
The force, which landed in Malaya, was originally intended to recapture
and reoccupy Malaya and Singapore. It
was now required to also re-occupy vast areas of the Dutch East Indies as well
as Hong Kong and other territories. Our
forces, in what was to become Indonesia, were at first welcomed.
The welcome did not last for long. When
it was realised that we intended to hand the territories back to the Dutch; our
forces, which were mainly Indian, came under heavy attack.
Japanese units were returned to fighting status under British command and
the situation was saved.
However, one
thousand, three hundred and seventy seven casualties, mostly Indian, were
suffered by our troops in Java during the immediate post-war months.
In contrast, those of us who soldiered in Malaya from 1945 to1948 found
ourselves in a very pleasant country amidst friendly people.
We had little factual knowledge, only rumour, of the perils of our
comrades in Java.
Some
of the people with North Staffordshire connections who took part in Operation
Zipper (usually referred to as Operation NBU – nothing buttoned up) were:
Lt.
Colonel Alfred Doulton CBE.
(Obituary in The Times dtd.21st August 1996)
Alfred
Doulton was a member of the Doulton potters family but his career was in
teaching. He wrote “The
Fighting Cocks” in 1951, a history of the 23rd Indian Division
which includes an excellent account of events following Zipper.
Lt.
Colonel Paddy Doyle MC (Obituary
in The Times dtd.13th October 2000).
Paddy
Doyle settled in North Staffordshire after a lifetime with the Indian and
later the British Army. He edited
the Mahrata Light Infantry Newsletter for many years.
I was pleased to be able to pass to him, for publication, photographs
taken by me, in 1991, of Morib beach where the 1945 landings took place and of
memorial stones erected by local people to commemorate the event.
Paddy Doyle had a very full war. He
was awarded his M.C. for conspicuous gallantry in 1940 at the battle of Karen,
Abyssinia against Italian forces where he faced the last recorded horse
mounted cavalry charge. His
brother was killed in that battle. PD
later served throughout the North African campaign and then in Burma.
Contrary to popular perception, he reckoned that his most formidable
opponents were the Italian cavalry and the Javanese irregulars.
Captain
Gerry Jones of the 26th Indian Division.
Gerry
Jones was a member of the family that ran J & G
Meakin, tableware
manufacturers of Bucknall. Gerry
was active in the Territorial Army following the war and, for a time, was a
colleague at Richards Tiles.
Captain
Douglas Schofield.
Douglas
was the son of a Stoke on Trent teacher and was one of the first pupils in
1929 of the newly formed Wolstanton Grammar School.
He became Secretary to W.H.Grindley, tableware manufacturers of
Tunstall and, as such, was my industrial next door neighbour.
Douglas was well known in local cricketing circles and for his work
with the Royal British Legion. He
also served as a governor of Wolstanton Grammar School until his death in
1998.
Hugh
Vavasour.
Hugh
served as the officer interpreter aboard the French battleship, Richelieu,
which “observed” the Zipper landings but had no other role.
(Zipper was an entirely British Commonwealth affair because, so it was
said, it would help avenge the humiliation of the 1942 Japanese victory in
Malaya and Singapore.) Hugh’s
family had resided in Caverswall for many generations and was French speaking.
Hugh became Sales Director of Blythe Colours of Blythe Bridge.
He later married a French lady (nee Beck) and I had dealings with her
brother’s company located near to Dieppe.
There were,
of course, many non-commissioned North Staffordshire men in the British units
that took part in Zipper. Army
records have not yielded their names but I remember two.
One was Driver Posslethwaite REME of Sun Street, Shelton. I had served in the Home Guard with his older brother,
Claude. The other was a member of
the Pepper family of Lord Street, Etruria.
We recognised each other when he was delivering water from his tanker to
our tented camp in Bukit Timah, Singapore.
I
was posted as a “British officer attached” to a mobile workshop company of
the Indian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (I.E.M.E.).
Most Indian units had territorial connections, as had been so in British
units, but the I.E.M.E. units contained Indian craftsmen from all over the
Indian sub-continent. The common
language was Urdu. I was far from
fluent but I could get by. I was
intrigued to discover words that I had thought were Potteries slang were from
Urdu. Char,
dhobi, walla and pani were some of the more obvious but there were others I
had heard before, only inside a pottery factory. Examples are: “head sardar”(chief)
/ “trasha”(a simple footware
operatives used at work / “pipa”(tub)
/ “rassi”(rope) and “chalni”(sieve).
I was much impressed by what I saw of the Indian Army during those two
years before Independence in November 1947.
I found it professional, well disciplined and very hard working. As a
captain, I was much better paid than I would have been back home, and basic pay
was enhanced by eastern wartime allowances, which had not been discontinued.
Furthermore, what I was doing qualified as experience to achieve
Chartered Engineer status.
We lived in
very comfortable wooden-floored-tents more than tall enough to stand in.
We generated our own electricity and equipped ourselves with fans,
refrigerators and other domestic items. We
employed a cook and waiters and each of us had an Indian bearer (batman) and
driver. We were honorary members of
the local clubs, notably The Tanglin and The Cricket Club in Singapore, and of
the other British clubs in the Malay peninsula.
The Raffles Hotel was another popular venue, especially for meeting with
local people. It was all a far cry
from the streets of Etruria but I got used to it very easily. To a large extent this was because it was no more than many
of my peers were used to and expected. In
retrospect I became arrogant and allowed my love of travel to get me into
trouble. I went to places where I
had no right to be and suffered a “Severe Reprimand” for my misdemeanours.
The SR was administered by Major General Cox with caustic and withering
comments including: “ running the detachment as your own private fiefdom”
and “What are your plans for Christmas this year?”
He spoke of the privations back home and probably had in mind the
hardships of our comrades elsewhere. I
was ashamed. I had let down my immediate superior, Major J.Harrison, who
had allowed me the freedom.
Shortly
after arriving in Singapore I met my friend, Denis Tams.
Together with his crew, he was billeted in an annexe to the Raffles
Hotel. They were flying VIPs
between Singapore, Hong Kong and various Chinese cities.
We had several enjoyable months together before he left for England and
Loughborough College. Another
school friend, Fred Coley, arrived in 1946 with an RAF Pathfinder squadron.
He took others and me on our first ever flight and over other I.E.M.E.
units in Malaya. Peacetime restrictions were coming back, but ever so slowly!
Fred became Manager of Goldendale Foundry, Goldendale, Tunstall and so
was another industrial neighbour.
I
spent the last months of 1947 with a British Armoured Brigade workshop.
By this time I had to make up my mind about what I was going to do.
There were three options. One
was to take demobilisation in one of several designated foreign cities and be
given £10.00 in lieu of a demob.suit. Four
of us talked of San Francisco where we would buy an old car and spend a year
working our way across the USA. My
second option was to stay in the Army and apply for a regular commission.
The third option was to return to Stoke-on Trent.
It seems strange to me now that I chose the third option but there were
reasons at the time. One was that
Geoff.Corn, Chairman of Richards Tiles, had kept in regular touch with many of
us in the forces. He was a good
writer and he made the rebuilding and the expansion of the tile industry sound
exciting. My three friends went
to San Francisco and eventually returned to Britain.
I envied them. One is more
likely to regret the things that one does not do than to regret mistakes made!
I returned
to the UK, collected my demob suit and set out on a tour of Scotland and England
with a fellow officer in his new Morris 8 Series E.
He had been evacuated with his school to Pitlochry early in the war and
was looking for ex-girlfriends in Scotland.
He didn’t find any. We
ended up in London where he did. Not
long afterwards I restarted at Richards Tiles.
It was January 1948.
previous:
Stoke-on-Trent and the Military Collage of Science
next: Richards Tiles in January 1948
Ken Green
March 2001
updated: 07 Jan 2003