247258 W/Sgt. Frederick Macdonald Burton British Army Royal Army Service Corps from:Hove, Sussex. My Grandfather, Fred Burton, was 38 when he rejoined the army at the outset of hostilities in 1939. June 1940 saw him travelling across Northern France in his truck with other personnel trying to make it back from one of the ports on the west coast of France. During this time he talked of having very little to eat. A solution to this was to purloin a farmyard chicken which they killed for an evening meal.
They tied it to the back of the truck, when they later stopped the chicken was pot ready having been plucked on the intervening journey.
The mountains of equipment that had to be destroyed to prevent it from becoming of use to the enemy was made even more difficult to bear by the sight of the streams of refugees that could have made good use of much of it.
He also talked of Rennes Cathedral, of interest, as he later converted to Catholicism in order to marry my Grandmother Vera, known as Ginny.
At the end of June 1940 he was promoted to W/Sgt. and started training for the North African and Italy campaigns. Returning to the UK not long after the end of the war having acted in the role of RQMS & WOII. He reverted to W/Sgt. on his return to the TA.
|