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Description: | British NCO served with 252 and 184 Coys Royal Engineers on Western Front, 1915-1917
REEL 1: Recollections of operations as NCO with Royal Engineers on Western Front, 1915-1917: joined up aged 27; description of digging saps; casualties in company; day and night shifts; passwords; preparations for Somme offensive, 6/1916; role in supervising construction of chamber to house boxes of ammunition and fuses at Mailly Redoubt; 1/Jul/1916; construction of trench mortar position; story of young soldier writing address and subsequent death; description of explosion of mine at Mailly Redoubt, 1/Jul/1916; memory of seeing infantry leave trenches and men falling; memory of German troops advancing with stretchers under white flag; story of helping wounded soldier; problem of bodies blocking sap; role in clearing of bodies and helping wounded; memories of winter 1915/1916; description of terrain in Auchonvillers sector, Somme; accommodation in cellars; problem of lice and rats; living conditions in trenches; issued with Wellington boots; problem of losing boots in mud; use of sandbags as puttees; problem of mud and water in trenches and collapsing duckboards; story of using well containing dismembered corpse; wounded and returned to GB for treatment; transferred to 184 Coy Royal Engineers at Passchendaele, Belgium; story of being gassed and losing sight and speech, 9/1917; method of communication by tapping out Morse code on hands; description of German booby traps and methods of defusing; taken by Germans to dressing station; memory of walking in line of blinded men with hands on shoulders | Publisher: | http://www.iwm.org.uk | Source: | Imperial War Museum | Creator: | BBC Radio Leeds | Identifier: | http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/o... | Go to resource |
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