The Militia Boy

This is the autobiography, memories and impressions of a boy born in 1918 in the poorer district of a large Lancashire city. His childhood and early youth were spent unaware of the awful poverty and deprivation of the hungry thirties, which were coloured by the spectre of mass unemployment, social degradation and abject misery. The clouds of war had been building up from 1935 and the Spanish Civil War was a prelude to the final holocaust of 1939.

On his twenty-first birthday, in July 1939, his passport into manhood was getting conscripted into the armed forces among the newly recruited militia and he became a militia boy. For over six years, these militia boys served in every theatre of war from Narvik to Dunkirk, the deserts of North Africa, Sicily, Burma, Singapore and Malaysia, India, Iraq and Syria, Crete, Italy and Germany. They even witnessed the final disregard of human life in the charnel houses of the concentration camps of Europe. This story is dedicated to all those militia boys who were unfortunate to be born at the wrong time and who gave over six years of their manhood in the hope that the world would become a better place to live in. James Palmer, June 1980