LITMIR.BIZ

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about marching proud, swinging your arms high with your back straight and your head up, knowing that, as a unit, you look terrific. We were getting to be soldiers now!

      Blackdown held no terrors like Corporal Coleman. I reached the required standard without interruption and, in October 1943, it was goodbye to 512 Troop at Pre-OCTU and hello to 115 Troop RAC OCTU at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the most famous and historic in the world. Sandhurst, as it is known, has been the elite training centre for regular officers of the British Army since the early 1800s and, compared to Bovington and Blackdown, was relatively luxurious. When World War Two broke out it became the Officer Cadet Training Unit for Royal Armoured Corps (RAC) personnel only. We were quartered in the historic buildings and followed the long-established Sandhurst traditions and practices that had made the British Army so dominant and powerful over the centuries. I was immensely proud to be associated with and shaped by them and to be trained in such impressive surroundings.

      Some 23 of us started in 115 Troop and six months later 18 of us reached the giddy heights of Second Lieutenant. Sandhurst was enormously enjoyable but it was also tough, because of the ever-present fear of failing what was a pretty demanding mental and physical regime. The whole thing was even more intense than Blackdown with major emphasis on determination, initiative and leadership. The Sandhurst assault courses had some fiendish elements. One of them required you to climb up a 40ft hill in full kit, run off the top of it on to a single narrow plank, clear a gap on to another plank, run across that, jump on to a third plank and then rush down the hill. I’ve seen strong men stuck with one foot on each plank and a 40ft drop beneath them, transfixed with fear and panic and unable to move. Being put into a room into which CS gas was pumped, but not being allowed to put on your gas mask until you had inevitably inhaled some of the filthy stuff was not a lot of fun either. Nor was having to negotiate pitch-dark shoulder-width underground tunnels while some joker dropped thunderflashes around you. However I made it, only to experience the supreme test of physical horror – a Welsh battle course.

      It started at a Youth Hostel at Capel Curig, in Caernarvonshire, from which we set off to do infantry manoeuvres, sleeping rough and living off the country until we reached Britain’s highest mountain, 3500 ft Mount Snowdon. I was the one carrying the 2in mortar and my abiding memory of the whole week was the Troop Sergeant’s non-stop screaming to ‘double up, the man with the mortar!’ But after days and nights of marching, digging slit trenches, attacking seemingly invulnerable positions, sleeping in pig sties and other fun things, we finally got to the lower slopes of Snowdon.

      ‘I want 10 volunteers to climb to the top with me,’ said Captain Marsh, our course commander. And, of course, dead keen, I volunteered. It was hard, but we went up a comparatively easy route and had a double bonus at the end. Apparently, it is very unusual to get an uninterrupted view from the top of Snowdon but ours was as clear as a bell and you could see for miles in every direction – magnificent. As soon as we were done we were bussed back to the hostel we had started from – those who hadn’t volunteered, in the belief that they would get to the hot baths and beds before us, were made to march there on a compass bearing that got them back, by way of rivers and very rough country, at four in the morning. My respect and admiration for what was known in World War One as the ‘PBI’ (Poor Bloody Infantry) had increased tenfold and I knew now why it was that I had wanted to serve in tanks – you didn’t have to walk and had a roof over your head.

      The camaraderie at Sandhurst was wonderful; the tank driving and commanding and the gunnery fabulous; and the occasional evenings in the pub were great. Even the Church parades were very special because they were held in the RMA Chapel: an immensely dignified and very moving scene of military tradition and magnificence. But of course all good things come to an end. For me that was on 8 April 1944, my passing out day, with all the moving pomp and circumstance at which the Army is so accomplished. My parents and friends were there and the salute was to be taken by that great American General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander in Chief of the Combined Allied Forces which, in just two months’ time, would be landing on the coast of Europe to commence its bloody liberation.

      On to that magnificent parade ground in front of the Old College, then, marched the entire Sandhurst contingent in proud formation, with heads held high, arms swinging and boots resounding to the drum beat and stirring military marches of the band that preceded them. I certainly felt emotional – even 57 years on I can still feel the excitement and pride. I was now Second Lieutenant Walker, Royal Armoured Corps, wearing the coveted black beret and ready to go to war from a sealed camp at Manningtree, near Harwich, the gateway to the Continent.

      My recollections of Manningtree are dim and my recall of the ship I boarded dimmer, but the trip itself was smooth and straightforward. It took quite a long time: we turned right after Harwich and headed south through the Straits of Dover for the Mulberry Port at Arromanches, a wonderful example of British initiative and enterprise. To bypass the heavily defended French ports of Le Havre and Cherbourg, enormous concrete caissons were prefabricated in Britain and towed out to France on D+1, 7 June, to create a brand new port almost the size of Dover. When we were put ashore the whole area was a hive of khaki-clad activity with tanks, trucks, guns and all the other bric-a-brac of warfare flowing out of ships and on to the shore along the floating roadways. I wasn’t there long because I was rapidly assigned to a tank transporter column that was to make its way to Brussels. And what a journey that was. As the lengthy convoy of enormous American White tractor units with their massive trailers, each carrying a Sherman tank, slowly churned its way through the recently liberated French countryside into Belgium we got an enthusiastic reception from the population, still euphoric after their liberation from ‘les salles Boches’.

      I was very lucky to join the Royal Scots Greys, even if I was rather a round peg in a square hole. First raised in 1678, the regiment was one of the foremost in the British Army and had fought with great distinction in Palestine and in General Montgomery’s magnificent Eighth Army from the Western Desert to Tripoli. It had taken part in the invasion of Italy, landed in Normandy, fought its way through France into and out of Belgium and was now at Nederweert in Holland where I joined it.

      So, as a young, untried and totally inexperienced new boy I was becoming part of one of the toughest, most case-hardened fighting units of all. When I reported to the tent of the charming Major Sir Anthony Bonham he said to me, ‘Welcome to the Regiment, George, we are glad to have you with us.’

      Somewhat embarrassed, I said, ‘The G is for Graeme, actually, Sir, but my friends call me by my second name, which is Murray.’

      ‘Oh,’ he replied. ‘I thought Murray Walker was a hyphenated, double-barrelled name.’

      I had the feeling that he was rather disappointed that it wasn’t, because that’s the sort of regiment it was: very Cavalry, very regular, officered by moneyed County gentry, many with Scottish connections, who had been educated at the very best and most expensive schools and who had known each other and fought together for a long time. I was and still am immensely proud to have been a Greys Officer and to have fought with them but I certainly felt as though I was in a club of which I was not a natural member.

      Major Bonham told me, ‘You will be responsible to Sergeant McPherson, Murray.’

       Sergeant? What the hell does he think this Second Lieutenant’s pip on my shoulder is – confetti?

      ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘Fresh out of Sandhurst I expect you think you’re God’s gift to the British Army, but you should know that McPherson has been with us since Palestine. He has forgotten more about fighting and the way the Regiment does it than you’ll ever know and when he says you are capable of commanding a troop you will have one.’

      He was, of course, absolutely right. So I watched and listened and before long I got my own troop. A few days later we moved to the island between the Waal and Neder Rijn rivers north of Nijmegen where I had my first experience of sentry-go, Greys style. Up all night standing in the Sherman’s turret, with the Germans on the other side of the river, thinking that every sound you heard was one of them creeping up to blast you to perdition with a Panzerfaust. This was shortly after the airborne forces’ foiled attempt to capture the bridge over the River Maas at Arnhem and to launch the 21st Army Group

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