J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c7

Chapter 7 - AFTERMATH.
And then, quite suddenly it seemed, the war was finished. Even after V.E. day in 1945, we were still talking about transferring every available man to the Far East for 'as many flaming years’ as it took to finish off the Japanese. Then the atom bomb reduced those years to days and it was all over.
It is interesting to note that all the heart-searching about this is a post-war peace-time product. At the time nobody questioned the use of the bomb any more than they would have queried the use of a bigger and better gun or a heavier tank. The fact that most of its victims were civilians made no particular impact either. We were hardened to civilian casualties of aerial bombing on both sides, even where this included unfortunates in occupied territories, 1e% alone the hated Japanese. This was a far-cry from risking valuable aircraft to drop leaflets over Germany in the early days of the war, or bringing home bombs because targets could not be clearly identified in the childish belief that, if you could see a military target, you could hit it without causing civilian deaths.
Nor were the other Services any more squeamish than the Air Forces. I realised that the 'phony war' was well and truly over in 1941 when a radio commentator with the Mediterranean Fleet, describing the bombardment of Tripoli, casually remarked’ The first couple of salvoes were well over and fell in the town'. Probably in some packed native area where the inhabitants had never heard of Hitler even if they had been conquered by Mussolini.
With hindsight and fuller information it seems likely that the Japanese would have collapsed fairly quickly anyway, but their reputation at the time did not encourage any such hopes. The Americans had suffered enormous casualties in taking comparatively small islands and the cost of invading Japan was certain to be far more. Moreover, thousands of Allied prisoners-of-war were dying by inches all the time the war continued.
Even today, it seems likely that Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more Japanese lives than they destroyed and undoubtedly saved many thousands of our own. At the time the question was never asked, because these were acts of war against the enemy and war makes nations callous, none more so than the British. Some modern terrorists claim to be treated as enemy forces in a state of war and not as peacetime criminals. If they were given their wish in the fullest sense they might live to regret it, but not for long.
But these matters are really too high for me, so back to my own experience.
The scheme of demobilisation was broadly based on first in –first out but there was plenty of scope for exceptions and the Navy in particular was quick to get rid of classes rendered immediately redundant, such as Convoy Signalmen. Convoys were abolished over night and I still wonder if all the U.S. ships caught far from home ever re-discovered America. We at Southend were mostly de-mobbed through a base in London and I was out by the end of 1945. Thank God nobody thought of Chatham Barracks or I might still be there. I believe the barracks has now been closed, but I wouldn't mind betting that a few of the ghosts still haunting the Drill Shed are actually still alive.
People who have now seen the furore about the returning Falklands’ veterans', who were professionals who had been away a few months, probably imagine that there was a much bigger reaction to the return of the vast army of men and women who had served for years all over the world. Not a bit of it. The newly elected Labour Government was more interested in peacetime reforms than in wartime heroes and could claim precious little credit for the fact that we had finished on the winning side anyway. But the main reason for the low-key reaction was that there were just too many people involved.
I myself had done nothing of any significance but there must have been many survivors who smiled wryly at the contrast between 1945 and 1982. A few hundred men, doing the job they had volunteered and been trained and paid for in the years of peace, had fought a very short minor war and were greeted as though they had won a modern Waterloo. Hundreds of thousands of conscripted civilians had fought in the greatest war in history spread over six years and then been largely ignored.
In the Civil Service all wartime promotions were technically on a temporary basis, so as not to disadvantage those who were absent in the Forces. In practice it was all a little different. Many fortunate officials with flat feet or whatever had had three of these wartime promotions, where in peacetime they would have been lucky to get one, and I never heard of one who ultimately dropped back more than one of the three. I came back to an Air Ministry short of Clerical Officers but over-burdened with Junior Executive Officers, so my chances of promotion from C.O. to J.E.O. were minimal.
Officially we were specially considered for promotion six months after our return. In my case, I was on a traveling job around R.A.F. Depots and not really known to my boss at all. When he was asked for his report on me he consulted his minions, not one of whom even knew me by sight, and after an awkward pause one said 'Oh, I don't think he's particularly bright'. He may have been right, of course, but hearing this later from a fellow C.O. who was present, did nothing to increase my faith in the selective system of promotion. In the event, I got my first promotion by selection in 1970, 32 years after joining the service, so it is no wonder I prefer exams.
The war had disrupted normal Civil Service entrance exams, and
a special series of Reconstruction Exams, were held to fill
the gaps, being open to both new entrants and existing officials
seeking promotion. These were much less 'academic' than normal
and there were no educational pre-requisites. There were four
papers in each exam.. Arithmetic, English, General Knowledge
and General Intelligence followed by an interview which also
carried marks. One series was for entry into the Junior Executive
Grade of the Civil Service generally and there was a separate,
but virtually identical, series for the Customs and Excise
Department, which had a grading structure of its own at the
time .
I sat one exam from each series, resolved to opt for the Customs and Excise if I had the choice. Their basic grade of Officer of Customs and Excise covered the two grades of J.E.O. and E.O. and moreover promotion to the next grade was by selection in the Civil Service at large but by written professional examination in the C. and E. I am not concerned to argue the rival merits of the two systems but written exams have always been better for me. There is an element of chance in both and my luck has always been better on the written side.
While awaiting the outcome of these exams, I remained in the Air Ministry in an Accounts branch called "Travelling Audit’. This involved visiting R.A.F. Maintenance Units (Stores Depots) and imposing certain checks on Stores Accounts, vehicle running records and the like. We were not much concerned with cash. It was not a very interesting job in itself, it meant a good deal of rail travel when the railways were at their post-war worst and the winter of 1946/47 was one of the most severe on record. On the other hand, it was interesting to see a bit of the R.A.F. and compare it with the Navy. They had a great deal in common.
The auditors were classed as 'Civilians of Officer Status’, usually lunched in the mess and sometimes lived in on remote stations. This was not always popular with the officers but, as in the Navy, senior regular officers were invariably courteous and any audible asides about 'civilians in the mess ‘usually came from junior officers in the non-flying branches. As a recently de-mobbed ranker, I didn't take much notice of such things, but on one audit we had a trainee who had been a Flight;-Lt. navigator and held the D.F.C. and Bar and the French Croix de Guerre.
In theory rank was everything, of course, but in practice age and seniority were given their due. I remember seeing a C.O.'s order on a notice board which limited officers' wine bills. It applied to all officers below the rank of Sqn.Ldr. 'unless over 40 years of age'. It was nicely judged to prevent excessive drinking by well-heeled young men without biting on ex-rankers who could probably drink as much as they could afford anyway.
I also noted another point with echoes, in the Navy. Commanding
Officers, whatever their own rank, tended to be much shorter with their immediate juniors than they were with people much lower down the pecking order. At a small depot near Cambridge the C.O. was an ex-ranker Squadron Leader. Apparently when he took command there was a weekly airman's dance to which local girls were bussed in to sit round the walls while the airmen propped up the bar until they were ready to come looking for female company. Even then dancing was not what they had in mind and the C.O. thought this did little for the good name of the service.
He promptly reduced the frequency of the function to once a month and expected the officers to attend and raise the tone of the whole affair. We were living in the mess and at breakfast on the morning of the dance he invited all the officers and the auditors to attend. His second-in-command was a Scottish Flt. Lt., very much the officer, who had a mistress in Cambridge, and he said, 'Sorry, Sir. I have a prior engagement’. The C.O. said, 'Yes, Jock, I thought you would have. That's why I mentioned the matter in good time for you to cancel it'. I had been in the forces long enough to recognise an order when I heard one and so had Jock.
An unusual station which we audited was a bomb storage unit near Derby, the scene of a dreadful wartime accident which was hushed up at the time and not much publicised since. Vast numbers of bombs were stored underground in a disused gypsum mine and about 1943 there was an explosion which must have been one of the biggest things of its kind pre-Atom bomb. It was said that the ground heaved as in an earthquake, opened and then closed swallowing a farm. It was believed that a fused bomb had been sent down in error and someone had attempted to defuse it underground, contrary to standing orders.
I noticed that they had a Mines Rescue Vehicle and remarked to a civilian official there 'I bet that was useful at the time of the explosion'. He said 'Oh, no. We only got it afterwards’, a thing I might have guessed. I said I supposed all underground were wiped out anyway, but this was not the case. Apparently not all the bombs stored exploded. There were about 250 men-down there at the time, of which 60-odd were killed outright and many more injured. I said 'How on earth did the survivors get out', and he replied 'The police called in the pit rescue teams from all over the Derbyshire coalfield and they went down and brought them out'.
The sheer cold-blooded courage which those last words imply is staggering and the most tremendous feats of arms performed in the heat of action pale into insignificance. It takes a braver man than me just to work in a coalmine. To volunteer for a rescue team and thus agree to share everybody else's disaster as well as your own is on a much higher level. But to walk into a totally unfamiliar type of mine containing thousands of tons of high explosives in search of total strangers who might well all be dead is really something else.
I hope these men were properly recognised and rewarded but in the fog of war and with the need to avoid highlighting a disaster which would have 'comforted the enemy', I doubt it. There should
be monument somewhere with the inscription; 'They went down and brought them out’. I wonder whether there is.
To leave the Air Ministry on a lighter note, I recall the saga of the accumulators. These were not, as you might imagine, long-odds bets. What they were requires some explanation. Forty years ago very few radio receivers worked off the mains. Most of them had a high-tension battery which was a rectangular affair about twice the size and weight of a house brick, and an accumulator which was a square glass wet cell rather like a car battery but smaller. The accumulator had to be charged about once a week and everybody had two per radio, one in use and the other round the corner at a little shop being charged.
During the war , some detective had discovered that a number of airmen on remote stations possessed private radio sets and, the little shop being miles away, had the accumulators charged in the station Electrical Section along with all the various wet batteries belonging to the Crown. Their Airships in Kingsway were profoundly disturbed. They could not allow such use of Government resources for private purposes, but to ban it altogether would have silenced all these privately owned sets and been a hardship to the owners. Moreover, it would not have looked good in the 'Daily Mirror'.
So it was decreed that each station should set up a record and raise a charge for charging which made it rather dearer than the little shop. Auditors were required to examine this record and record the result in their report, unless they were satisfied that no such charging was going on. If carried out thoroughly the whole business would have cost far more than the radios were worth, let alone the accumulators, but in practice the item was cleared up in haste on the last day of the audit and was usually a 'Nil' return.
On one such occasion an auditor put his head round the door of the Section and said, 'Do you charge any private accumulators?' The corporal in charge said, 'Sorry, Mate, not this week. The bloody auditors are here'. Luckily the auditor was not nearly as silly as Their Airships and noted that as a 'Nil'.
During the period of waiting for the results of the post war Reconstruction Exams I became engaged to be married. The affair had started during the war and had something in common with my father's case.
For a nation which professes great interest in the Navy, the British have always had a very misleading picture of the men who serve in it. Up to Nelson's time our gallant lads really were the sweepings of the gaols and the gutters, very largely recruited by the Press Gang. Unlike general conscription, this did not produce a cross-section of the nation as the gangs operated only in the seaports. Most of their victims were down-and-outs with sea-faring backgrounds and where they got hold of landsmen with any sort of status or influence, they usually had to let them go. Pepys mentions a case where a member of one of the London Trade Guilds had been pressed 'and we (the Navy Board) did order his immediate release'.
During and after the First World War the picture was of Jolly Jack riding the bounding main, making short work of the King’s enemies when at sea, and hunting nymphomaniacs who were willing to pay for the beer when ashore. I certainly never approximated to this image and I never met many who did. We seldom did anything jolly, let alone gay, on coasters and I can only remember hearing of one prank. A signalman calling his relief at 3.45 a.m. first put on his oilskins etc. and stood under the shower. Dripping all over the bunk he warned his drowsy colleague to wrap up well as it was a foul night. The latter thus made an ass of himself by staggering up weighed down with protective clothing on a balmy night when everybody was in shirtsleeves.
Ashore, matelots were usually far less interested in getting their leg over than in getting their feet under the table. Girls who could provide appetising meals, even in wartime, or who lived with mothers who could, were far more in demand than actual prostitutes or enthusiastic amateurs. A few hours round the fire in a normal comfortable house were prized as much as the meal, particularly in Newcastle where the alternative was the cheerless Y.M.C.A.
One redeeming feature of this establishment was that local girls acted as voluntary unpaid waitresses there and my wife was one of them. We met one Saturday night when I was with two members of another crew and she was working with another girl. We arranged to see them to their separate homes and I plumped for the other one, because I had been up most of Friday night at sea and she lived closer to the YM. Thus I was back there and in bed by about 10pm. The other two went with Margaret and informed me in the morning that we were all invited to her house for Sunday lunch. Conscious of food rationing and general shortage of everything we resolved to leave as soon as we politely could so as not to stick them for tea as well, but when we got there Margaret and her elder sister Betty were baking cakes and pies and we finally left about 1 am and got a lift into the town centre on a milk lorry.
After that we normally visited there when in the Tyne and a number of others joined in from time to time. We did our best to repay this hospitality by taking them anything we could scrounge on the ships and taking the girls to the pictures or the theatre. In my case, the relationship survived the war and I became engaged to Margaret in February, 1947 and we were married in July, 1948. We still are. Thus my experience of women has been very limited, with only a few casual dates between Joan in 1940/44 and Margaret from then on to the present day.
I suppose in more general terms sex went on pretty much as it does today, but in my youth it was not so fashionable to discuss it publicly. I was certainly aware of some kind of activity between boys and girls by the time I was about 6 but for a number of years I didn't think it had anything to do with babies. I thought it was just a dirty habit that some people had, like spitting. Even when I knew better than that it never really occurred to me that girls might enjoy such things as boys did. I knew that some girls 'did it' - by hearsay I am afraid – but I just thought that they were more obliging than the others.
Doubtless my celibate upbringing was to blame for these gaps in my education but, like so many other things, it’s too late to think about that now.
I am not sure how far my salary had advanced by the time of my engagement, but I recall that the ring cost about £35 and that this was more than a month's pay. Luckily the exam results came along about May 1947 and produced a sizeable rise.
I had sat the J.E.O. one a month or so before the Customs and I failed the former and passed the latter well up the list. The fact that the two exams were virtually identical may make this surprising at first glance, but it was actually quite logical. Not having done anything like it for about ten years I went into the first one cold, but it served as an excellent rehearsal for the second. The biggest improvements were in my marks for the General Intelligence paper and the interview, which was strange as I wouldn't have thought that my general intelligence and personality would have changed much in a month.
I don't see how any test can accurately assess one's IQ as a little practice in taking the test, whatever its nature, would produce a marked improvement. As for the interview, I suppose they may have been looking for a totally different type for the Customs, but I doubt it. It is more likely that the panel knew how I stood on the written papers in each case and this coloured their attitude. The J.E.O. interview took place at about 4 pm on a wet, cold, miserable day and the Customs at 10.30 am on a lovely spring morning. I think I was just lucky, as I often am, and got the breaks in the one I really wanted.