Training at Isle of Wight

When we arrived in England nobody knew why we came. So at that time the commanding officer of the Canadian troops said well you guys will be my personal signallers. And eleven of us were there. We had a sergeant in charge and I was second in command as a lance corporal and he provided us with five motorcycles and we were able to provide communications for the Canadian troops that were there then. First Div had already been over and my brother Paul who had been in France and come out at the time of Dunkirk, we went to visit him on one of these motorcycles but when my brother Eddie and I were both on the advance party and we went pretty well together until the army decided that they couldn’t keep us promoted together so they promoted me to a sergeant and I went down to 4 Brigade headquarters and they promoted him to a sergeant and he went to Corps Signals to help organize the signal corps there. At 4 Brigade Signals I was in charge as a sergeant and suddenly we were told we were going to go into training. We weren’t told why, we were sent to the Isle of Wight in 1942 and we arrived there early April or late April and we had commando training and really tough training and so on. And we ended up, we were trained on assault landing craft. An assault landing craft holds about thirty five people and that’s enough for a platoon if you’re in the infantry. When you are in signals we were allowed to have our radio set and our operators and the headquarters staff that I was with. I was with the brigade major and we did our training that way towing a nineteen set which was brand new put in a box that we constructed and put on a baby dolly. A baby dolly was what you used to lay lines with but we built a box to put the radio set on top and it lifted up and underneath. You could have a thousand rounds of ammunition plus the batteries so that we could run the radio set.