Bill Valentine

When Bill Valentine from Motherwell was a young teenager he couldn't wait to join the Navy.

"My two older brothers had already gone off to fight," he explains. "I used to kid them on to keep it going so I could get into it!"

Originally from Blantyre, Bill was 14 when war was declared. His first job after leaving school was delivering milk, bread and cakes for the Co-operative but, like most people, he wanted to do something to help the war effort.

"I became a runner for the ARP wardens," he says. "Because there were no telephones they designated posts at certain points in every town and used runners to deliver messages between the warden posts. When I left the Co-operative to work at the Hallside steel works I joined the St Andrews Ambulance Service, as well as still being a runner for the ARP.

"I tried to volunteer for the Navy but steel work was a reserved occupation and they wouldn't take me. The second time I tried to volunteer they told me to go home and wait for my birthday and just before my 18th birthday my papers came through - three weeks later I was in to the Royal Marines."

Bill spent the first six weeks of his training learning how to obey orders before learning how to fire a gun, read maps and do route marches. At that stage of the war it was thought that the Germans might invade the south of England so Bill was issued with a gun and 50 rounds of live ammunition.

Bill's next posting was in north Wales before going down to Dartmouth to learn how to land a craft on a beach.

"There's a sandy beach on one side of the River Dart and on the other is a short beach with a cliff so we had to teach the troops as well as ourselves how to land on both," Bill explains. "We were designated onto certain craft and then taught how to fire missiles to blow up the mines on the beach to allow the troops to come in and that's when we realised we were going to be first in. We were also taught how to lay smoke screens and in all it took me about nine months to train as the coxswain of a landing craft."

After his training Bill was allocated to a flotilla of landing craft and at the end of 1943 was given embarkation leave before a posting to North Africa.

"We landed in Algiers, Oran and the borders of Tunisia and we were based throughout the Mediterranean for the rest of the war," Bill says.

"They were always planning another invasion and because we were landing craft we were almost always on the move. Normandy is known as the big landing but it was almost the only landing in that area. In Italy there were landings going on all the time – Sicily, Solerno, Anzio, Taranto, Brindisi, Bari, Molfetta, Termoli, Pesaro, Rovenna, the River Po, Lake Comacio and finally Venice."

Bill was wounded during his first landing, when he was hit by a piece of shrapnel in the back. His boat was sunk and he was rescued from the water but the stoker was trapped and drowned.

But even after such a close escape, Bill says that, like most of his comrades he just got on with the job in hand and didn't think too much about the what ifs.

"I don't remember fear ever striking me," he says. "In fact when I look back on it, it was all great fun. My craft carried 36 commandoes and we ran back and forth from the main ship to the beach until they were all deployed. We were bombed a lot because the Germans reckoned if they sank our boats we couldn't invade.

"The only time I remember being frightened was when we were in Venice disarming mines after the war because to me it would have been a disaster if I'd been blown up by one of them after the war had finished."

Bill was in Rovenna waiting to sail to Venice when the war in Europe ended. "Everyone, army, navy and marines took their blanco, which we used to whiten our gaiters and belts, and threw it overboard. It turned the sea all around us green and we got drunk on the local vino!" laughs Bill

"The next day we sailed up to Venice. The New Zealanders had beaten us there and had made sure the breweries were all in safe hands so we could celebrate."

The German Navy had a big base in Venice and used midget submarines that a man could sit astride but when it became clear that the city was about captured they sank them in the lagoon so that the allies wouldn't be able to use them. Bill spent the next two months with Italian divers locating them, and any stray torpedoes, so that they could be raised and made safe.

"After Venice we headed back to the Clyde via Gibraltar," says Bill. "We were sent for more training and then handed out tropical kit for the Far East. I was on embarkation leave when the Americans dropped the atom bombs and the war with Japan ended. There was a decree issued that those servicemen who had left the UK for the Far East should carry on but those who hadn't should stay in the UK so that was the end of my war.

"It was very strange to walk up Stonefield Road in Blantyre after everything and I must have been a strange sight," Bill continues. "You never saw bananas during the war but when we were in Gibraltar we were each given a huge hand of them so you can imagine the sight of me walking along with them slung over my shoulder."

So how does Bill think the war affected his life?
"It mad e a man of me," he says. "It taught me how to look after myself and how to eat, drink and act in a responsible manner. It taught me how to take orders and obey them and to do the best I could because it was ingrained into me in the training.

"I have grandchildren the same age as I was when I went off to war and when I look at them I wonder what they'd do if it all happened again.

"I'm a great optimist and I'm sure today's young folk would rally to the cause."