"The next day John arrived and gave me a good telling off. I told him that I had missed the train. He than told me that my mates had told him everything...!He was responsible for me and said put it all down to experience. The same evening we were back in the fold with the others after a hectic trip across Normandy and arrived at "Le Petite Swiss Normande. The Tod organization was present with architects and supervisors, also with a few ramrods assisting. It was a quasi militarised organization of drop-outs, army rejects and a few old ones. They were dressed in light khaki uniforms.
In the morning, after John had introduced us, we were briefed and John departed to go back somewhere, Belgium? We were taken to an open clearing at the summit of a hill. From what I could make out it was a pyramid built tower structure with a central control and a huge screen similar to that found in a drive-in cinema but grilled and facing the seaside. It appeared to be Radar but not quite as sophisticated as the British Radar. Their specialists resembled air force personnel.
The work we had to do was jolly hard work. The rock face was hard and difficult. The slower we worked the less the Germans would be able to use the Radar but the ramrods and supervisors saw to it that we kept hard at work. Moving the tiploaders tracks I found back breaking. I seemed to get all the load to myself.
When we had finished the building and screen on the hill they took us further afield to Beaumont on the left side of the Cherbourg Peninsular, then to St. Pierre LÉglise which was in front of a large convent. I believe, that later, Pierre-Eglise was used by the Americans during the invasion as a landing sight, near to Utah Beach. Beaumont had another Radar that was very vulnerable to straffing and attack.
One of the Tod men in charge was a typical bully ordering everybody around in the worst possible manner and we thought he was in need of a hard lesson. One day we decided to teach the bully a lesson. While he was picking up dirty cement bags he called us "Dirty French", he then made a huge pile of the cement bags and set light to it. The flames went up very high and burnt the camouflage nets... His smile quickly froze when he saw the chain reaction.
Most of us acted as though we hadn't seen anything till he started screaming fire and then he started to panic, running frantically with buckets of water until it was under control. He then suddenly disappeared from the scene and we were never bothered again.
We also had a fearless strong man in our group called Jan. One day, it didn't take too long for a fight to start after the German soldier's started singing, "We are sailing against England" and referred to the bombing of Coventry. Jan was involved in the fight and got stabbed in the back by a short dagger like bayonet as he was tackling two of them at the same time. The rest of us got rounded up by Tod's military police and transferred to "Tod's" security jail. Jan was taken to hospital and lost a lot of blood but survived he was given sick leave and never came back. The rest of us had a day in the cooler and afterwards we had to run behind their bicycles towards the convent a couple of miles away before we were dismissed.
On our last day, we had a shopping spree in Cherbourg. As there was no suitable transport we took our chances and travelled partly in a french dustcart standing upright, holding our noses and then later in a picturesque little train rolling along the coast. We finally reached Cherbourg in safety to find that a raid had been made on the beach incurring a number of casualities. Some of the casualties were from our group who had been mistaken for Germans. This was our lot to be caught between the various fighting factions. An unpleasant situation inflicted on us because the German's presence was everywhere".
To be continued ...
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