Jim Moon's war recollections

In common with many of his generation, my grandfather Jim Moon rarely - virtually never - spoke about the war. His speech at his 90th birthday celebration in 2007 went into great detail about his early life, the places he had lived - as he had moved around a lot - and so on. It was quite a long speech. But when he reached the start of the war he pretty much skipped over to the present day, and quickly wound the speech up.

On a visit to my hometown I decided to ask which regiment he was with, so as to be able to trace his route for myself. When I visited him I set my mobile phone just to the side, set to record this valuable piece of information. I was surprised to find he wanted to say more, and did my best to keep him talking, but it wasn't too difficult.

I went back to Bristol, and after so many scares and hospital stays in previous years, fully expected to see him again to follow up on some of the war memories, and talk about other things. But I didn't get the chance. He passed away peacefully on the 12th November, aged 97.

This is an edited transcript of this recording, made on 7th October 2014 in Ormskirk, Lancashire. The recording itself is available to listen to below the text.

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Q: Which regiment were you in?

A: The Royal Regiment of Artillery – the Royal Artillery. 

Q: And what section -  more specifically?

A: It was all to do with gunnery – big guns, small guns, defending the coastline, you know, all of that. And then when the invasion from Germany was not going to happen, they took us away from coast defence and formed us into a field regiment. And six weeks before D-Day, I was taken away from the regiment, and seconded to – six of us was taken away and were allocated to three naval gunboats. And I and another mate of mine, we were on one gunboat and we had a wireless – we had a radio. We had to look after it, which we were used to – listening to it. But we couldn’t do much with that because there was what they call ‘wireless silence’, before D-Day. Everything was shut off. And we were training for that, and saw King George VI who came to inspect us just outside Southampton. 

Jim's boat, as drawn by a friend

Then the day came for D-Day, and it was supposed to be June 4th. We set out but it was too rough. Eisenhower decided to wait. Well I don’t think it got much better. Anyway on June 6th we went, and I was sick all the way over. Seasick.

And of course when hostilities started I was off the Normandy shore at 5 o’clock in the morning. And I don’t know when they were going to start, but they did start up, and we went near the shore, close in shore, firing at whatever we could see. And I had my helmet on and was there with my radio, had it on. And I don’t know what my other mate was doing. I think he – actually he more or less took charge of the cooking. 

And, anyhow, these marines kept firing this gun. And I don’t know who was directing them, but eventually I got a message from the shore saying to “Stop Firing”. The bloke who gave me the message seemed very agitated, and I think we were firing on him. You know, on their – wherever they were. So I wrote the message out and took it up to the bridge, gave it to the – of course we had a gunnery officer on board – gave it to him, and we stopped firing.

And we didn’t do anything much after that, but stay in the harbour. At night we used to form a semi-circle round the harbour to stop the German one-man submarines. And we captured a bloke off one of them. And we had him for a day or two. And then he was taken and put on a larger ship along with other prisoners.

Then they used us as a decoy, because there was a big gun in the coast of Le Havre, set in a tunnel. And they’d bring this big gun out and fire off a few rounds. The Naval authorities at Normandy decided to try and get rid of it, so they sent us out to be a decoy, so as they could get at him when he came out. 

Well for three days nothing happened, and we got a bit lax. We were sunbathing. And I was on what they call the fo'c'sle, sunbathing, and all at once there was a loud explosion. But the captain on our ship, he wasn’t sunbathing, he was alert, and he called for engines on. Because he knew they’d straddled him, you know. If he’d’ve received another two blows, we’d have been under. But he went further in so they couldn’t get their gun down low enough. 

But that first one, it must have been pretty accurate, because they damaged our steering gear. And so they hemmed and ha’ed what to do. At first they were going to mend it on the beach. I don’t know how they were going to do that. And then they decided to go back to Southampton. So we went back there and stayed there until they mended it. And then we went out again. And it was more or less guarding the harbour again from mini subs. But the danger was gradually receding, because our troops were going inward, were well established then. Although they had a difficult job in Caen - that was the French town: they literally had to demolish it, to get at the Germans.

Eventually the harbour was safe, and they sent us back to England again, to form up with my own regiment. And that took some time. I was shunted about from this unit to that unit, until I got to what they call a regimental re-holding unit. And it contained all blokes like me from different regiments, that they were sending out again to pick them up.

Eventually we got back to France, and there were no proper railways. There was a steam engine, who had been shot up. They used that with open trailers and all that, so what we did we used to get on these open trailers, and it went that slow you could get off and run alongside it, and get on again. Oh, it was fun really. If we came across a French orchard we used to get off, and have some fruit, and get back on again. Eventually he puffed his way to the outskirts of Brussels, and said he wasn’t going any further, so we got off and we stayed in the Brussels area for about three or four days. I know we walked into Brussels from there one day, and looked around, came back out again. We lived in small tents then.

Eventually, the lorry came from our own regiment – not from my own battery – my own regiment. And they picked us up and distributed us – picked all the gunners up and dropped us off at the various batteries we belonged to. I belonged to 418 Battery, which contained four 155mm guns. [Given this detail, this may actually have been 419 or 420 Battery, both also part of 52nd (Bedfordshire Yeomanry) Heavy Regiment, RA.] And there used to be four batteries to make up a regiment. I met my old friends and acquaintances again. I met up with them just outside Nijmegen. And we stayed there until they built up enough power to start the battle of the Reichswald forest, going towards the Rhine. Because eventually that was what the object was, to get over the Rhine. And we got through the Reichswald forest, and the battle started, and it was on for a week, over a week. 

And eventually we broke through, and got to the banks of the Rhine. And then we stayed there and all the different batteries did gun spotting. The guns would be fixed to a certain point and they would take readings: if it was just one gun, from the way one gun fired. So all the others gunners, and the other three guns, recorded it on their ac, ax – something. Used to record it on their maps, so that whatever target was called for they could get on it. But the one gun couldn’t stop in one place too long, or else the Germans would be onto him. 

But eventually they finished gun spotting, came back, and we waited for the off. We got about five regiments of artillery there, and when everything let off it was a lot of noise I’ll tell you, as there was at D-Day. It was all noise. 

Q: So this was to get over the Rhine...?

A: First of all the engineers had to form a bridge: a ‘Bailey bridge’. We had to wait for them to build the bridge. The infantry troops had already got across, in boats and one thing and the other, and once the Bailey bridge was built we could go over. But they stopped us going over because we’d been firing so much, the artillery had been firing so much, that there was no targets for them to go for. So they took the guns off us. Mind you one of our guns...we’d been firing so rapid, one of our guns blew up. 

Anyway, they took the guns off us. Gave us a small, what they call a 15-hundredweight truck, loaded with rations, and told us to go up behind the Guard’s Armoured, and take the grub up to ’em. So we went right up to the tip of Holland. It’s called Enschede. [Den Helder might be meant.] And, unfortunately, really, I would have loved to have gone further, but I was withdrawn because I was on leave. When I got back to England my leave started. I was due to get married. 

Q: Was that the end of it for you, then?

A: For me, yeah, because by the time I had my leave, got married – it was only ten days – when I was due to go back, the Germans had caved in. But we had to go back and help protect certain things in Germany, because there was nobody to – there was no police to guard anybody, and nobody to run anything. So we used to run the telephone exchanges. 

 

First of all we went to Brunswick – a nice little town that, though I didn’t see much of it. Then we went shunted off to another place, and we were there for a while. Then we got shunted up to Nuremberg, where they were holding trials. You know with the military criminals. So we were there for a while, manning our exchange, which was the only one that was supplying –  that could get used to get through to England, or any other unit, in Germany. Then we stayed in Nuremberg for quite a while, until eventually they moved us to a small village, called Henschede, and we had to make a small unit of gunners to form a small exchange there. Though there wasn’t one in the first place we had to form one, and it wasn’t very big but it was busy. 

And we stayed in this village for quite a while, and it’d been attacked by the Russians, and the local people had been treated pretty badly, especially on a housing estate above us. But between you and the signalling, and that we did, we were all right. Made friends with the locals. And there’d been a club formed near us. The regiment formed a club, so that we could socialize with a group of people. They were people from all over the world, all over Germany, that had been captured to work in Germany. And so these girls formed the socializing part of the club. We used to go up there for dinner, and then a dance. Not all the time because we had to have a ticket to get in. Somebody’d ring me and say: “Tomorrow you’re going to so-and-so”; to the club, “for two days”. And that was that.

Q: It was going on all the time?

A: Yes, different parts of our regiment, they used to ring them up and say: “Right, you’re going to the club.”

Q: Just rotate it? Sounds amazing. You must have met some interesting people. 

A: I got to know them too well. It was boring really, at the end. 

Q: Were you still connected with your battery then, or separate?

A: I was with my battery right from Nijmegen. As I said we went through the Reichswald forest, and down through some farmland to the banks of the Rhine. But we made such a quick breakthrough that we were given a 15-hundredweight truck with rations to take up to the Guards Armoured. (The Guards Armoured were the tanks.) They were going right up through Holland. We got to Enschede...got rid of our rations, stayed there one night, and were ordered back. So the actual war for me was over. 

Because by the time I got back, peace had been signed by the Germans. The Russians were in Berlin. We went up on the Elbe. We were sent up on the Elbe once, and go to what was a big town in Germany called – I forget the name of it now. But it was shot to pieces. Nobody could live in it. I forget the name of it. [Possibly Dresden.]

Q: I suppose you had to work with the Russians after the end of the war?

A: No, they stopped at the Elbe, and so did we. Eventually they sorted out that Berlin was to be shared by the four nations involved: the Americans, the British, the French, and the Russians.

There was only one way you could get in Berlin, a certain way – a certain road that you could travel on, and that’s the only way you could get into Russian territory, and you had to have a pass. Then the Cold War started. They closed everything, the Russians, and the only ways we could get supplies to our people "in Russia", in Berlin, was to fly them over. And that lasted quite a while.

Q: So the Cold War started pretty quickly.

A: But we on our side started getting the German country going by forming West Germany. We gradually got everything going. There was shopping, socializing: especially in Hanover, the main town in western Germany.

 

...we were pledged to see that all of the cities would be rebuilt. We had to get the builders going in Germany, and get it back to something like normal.