The Project Gutenberg eBook, Coming of Age: 1939-1946, by

John Cox

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Title: Coming of Age: 1939-1946
Author: John Cox
Release Date: July 6, 2007 [eBook #21806]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COMING OF AGE: 1939-1946***

COMING OF AGE

1939-1946

CONTENTS

Foreword.

Rumours of War. March 1939-1940________________________________1

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Coming of Age: 1939-1946, by John Cox

Plymouth. March 1940−−−−−−−-July 1942_________________________________10
Bowden Battery. July 1942-August-1942___________________________14
Oxshott. July 1942-August 1942___________________________________34
Aldershot. August 1942-December 1942___________________________37
Going South January 1943-April 1943______________________________42
India. May 1943-June 1943______________________________________53
Iraq. June 1943-August 1944____________________________________57
No. 5 Advanced Base Workshops. June 1943-August 1944____________63
Desert Life. June 1943-August 1944______________________________68
No. 1 Base Workshops. August 1944-August 1945___________________74

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Coming of Age: 1939-1946, by John Cox

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Coming of Age: 1939-1946, by John Cox

Tel-el-Kebir. August 1945-January 1946____________________________93

In the End. January 1946_______________________________________105

FOREWORD

Now that the Second World War is some 60 years past this would seem to be a good time to collate all the various chapters that Ive written over the last few years and present them as an entity. No war can really be described as a goodwar especially by the families of those who didnt return or by those who returned maimed but in the sense that I went through it from the start until the finish and emerged unscratched I suppose that mine could be called a goodwar.

Though I spent just under three years in the Middle East in Iraq and Egypt I was never engaged in any action and what follows in these pages describes the more mundane side of military life. I didnt start writing these chapters until about 50 years after the war and have relied heavily on memory, with some photographs but no diaries; the content is substantially accurate. Dates are included in the Contents page; the starting and ending dates are true and the intervening dates are not more than a month out.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Coming of Age: 1939-1946, by John Cox

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Coming of Age: 1939-1946, by John Cox