We landed over in Bombay after 6 weeks. In these days there were no aircrafts to ferry you. We went over on a rotten old Dutch ship. About 2 thousand of us crammed into holds .The weather was terrible, especially in the Bay of Biscay. Everybody was sick, by the time we got to Bombay we felt a bit better in the nice warm weather. We landed in Bombay itself. The 34th Amphibial Assault Regiment which I was in. We had no tanks, we were waiting for tanks from America, not actually tanks, but amphibious vehicles. They travel on land and sea but they hadn’t arrived in India by the time we got there.So we spent a bit of time on training and they sent us to Phuna, where we did our jungle fighting course.

You can imagine most of the areas that we were going to tackle or take over were covered with jungle. So we had to know how to defend ourselves and how to fight in the jungle. Eventually our vehicles arrived and we moved to a place just outside Bombay. We carried on with more training in landing amphibious landing craft. They were quite modern craft in as much that they carried rockets which was a new thing at that time of the war. They came directly from America so were all brand new. The tanks would have maybe 50 rockets mounted on top, quite a crude make-up, not particularly accurate. You couldn’t be very sure where your rocket was going.

One platoon had 4 point 7 guns, another platoon had rockets, and the platoon I was in had flame throwers. Which was another more or less a new thing in those days. You had a big tank of liquid rubber which was discharged from this gun, sometimes when it worked. The effect was terrible- it burnt everything it touched. You shot your machine pointing it at the wood and the wood just disappeared. Same with any individuals. We used it against the Japanese quite a lot, especially the hand carried one. We didn’t have any hand carried ones. We had ones carried by machines. The European war was by this time coming to a close, and there’s a little bit of a story that’s personal, and probably you could hardly believe it but it did happen.

We were landed in drips and drabs on the Burmese coast, not to go inland but just to hold the areas. We were scattered about on the coast to wage whatever warfare we could sabotage and what not, and found out the war in Europe finished.