Terence Terry Downie

I went through five and a half years of war before I went into the [British] Army. And so which is, it wasn’t a very pleasant time. The Blitz [sustained German aerial bombing of Britain] itself was not very nice. We grew accustomed to seeing the big old buildings that were destroyed and the shattered remains of people under, in those houses being brought out: not sights that children should see. We had some fun time as well. There weren’t too many, but we enjoyed ourselves. I mean, we had a sense of humour and we weren’t going to let this war pull us down. In fact, the whole idea of the Luftwaffe [German air force] was to kill Terry Downie as quickly as they could because they were trying to destroy our morale, which was just as important to the Germans as war factories and ships, and so on. So we took the brunt of that. But then in 1944, we had, I was just coming to the end of my training as an army cadet. I was in the 61^st Middlesex Ack-Ack [Anti-Aircraft Cadet] Regiment. I was a battery sergeant at 16. When I was 17 and a half, I was ordered to Glasgow [Scotland] in the training battalion of the Highland Light Infantry for infantry training. Even though I had established myself with a War Certificate "A’" [certificate of service], prior to this, nevertheless, I still had to go through basic training. And so I did in Glasgow. And we’re the first training battalion, the Highland Light Infantry. After spending six weeks in training there, I was moved to the 1^st Battalion of the Royal Engineers in a place called Clitheroe in Lincolnshire, and while I was in training there, I caught scarlet fever, which is not a good thing to catch when you’re 17 years old. And so I was in therapeutic situations until, actually, I was still in, yeah. The war had already ended in 1945 when I was in convalescence in Coventry, and elsewhere. And then I was, having gone through convalescence, I was recalled into the Royal Engineers. It was a training unit, training me to serve in Japan, a combat engineer squadron. And we were taught to lay mines and fight for the home bank and that sort of thing, of a bridge building unit. So that’s what I was in when the war ended. So we didn’t go to it in Japan because the end came with the advent of the nuclear bomb.