Reminiscences Of Stanley H. Kryszek

We left Gibraltar, I believe on July 1, and started on the long, slow sail from Gibraltar to England. We were shot at a few times by aircraft, and the one destroyer that was escorting our little convoy had its hands full with submarines, but we reached Liverpool somehow, and all in one piece. Life on that French ship wasn't bad. The cooks were fair, Czech cooks, and there was always some company, and not too much shooting. We arrived in Liverpool, and everything was very well organized. We got into the railway station, and there were long trays of bread and margarine and tea, everything neat and clean, and I just thought that I was in Paradise.

After we had enjoyed our little lunch, we got back on the train, but we didn't know where we were going, because everything was pretty much secret, and nobody was telling anybody anything. The location signs on all the stations were covered, so no one knew where they were going. We traveled fairly slowly overnight, with the good ladies of the W.B.S. distributing more bread and margarine and tea, until we arrived in Scotland. There, we were put on a truck, and driven a place called Douglas, a very pretty place in the Highlands, and we had nice, clean tents, where we could wash, bathe, and we were even given our first four shillings' pay, for a day, which was absolutely fabulous, because after the French pay of 50 centimeshalf a pennya day, four shillings was like a fortune.

I remember going to the Church of Scotland canteen in the camp, and eating several shillings' worth of canned pineapple and candy and milk. That was before the very strict rationing. You couldn't get those things over the next few days or months. It was almost like Paradise. And then we started training in Scotland.

For a while we didn't have any equipment, because everything was lost in Dunkirk; in fact, all the British equipment was gone. We trained the best we could. There were no more horses: everything was motorized, and our equipment, we had eleven rifles. That was supposed to be an artillery unit! We patrolled some dumps and power stations, and every night wed change, with a different eleven guys going out on patrol. Eventually, we got a little more equipment but, unfortunately, we were transferred several kilometers away to a place was called Crawford, still in the Highlands.

Crawford was a very stupid camp. The camp was builta tented campin a bowl, so whenever it rained, all the water came into the tents. After some time, we made some nice friends, and then we were moved to Dundee, and billeted in a school, in black, miserable Dundee. I spent some little time there, being again an acting medical officer; otherwise, I was running around with guns. Eventually, while in Dundee, we received our first for-real artillery weapons, four small howitzers. It was a great time.

There was one advantage to being under British command, and that was cleanliness. Everywhere we went, it was clean. This was much different from France, whereif you pardon the expressionwe had lice. Lice are little animals that bite, particularly when it gets warm, and are rather unpleasant. We had been deloused a few times. Delousing meant having your uniform and clothes put into a steam laundry, and at the same time showering and washing to kill all the little animals. This was rather difficult in the winter, because the clothes were wet from steam, and the showers were cold.

We had very interesting exercises. Among other things, we had one civil defense exercise on being attacked by German aircraft in Dundee. It was a mock exercise, and we demonstrated all the wares we had in our sanitary units. Time went on, and there was more and more training. One sad event happened. A truck in our group turned over, and four of our cadets died within a couple of days.

Social life was very pleasant, if you could call it that. We had a few dances in our battery,