Howard Woodcock - BBC Radio Interview With Jack
Shaw, Part One.
By actiondesksheffield
People in story: Howard Woodcock
Location of story: (Kohima/Imphal) Burma - Mandalay Road.
Unit name: 16th Field Regiment R.A. 2nd Infantry Division - Captain (Retired)
14th Army.
Background to story: Army
This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bill Ross of the ‘Action Desk –
Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Howard Woodcock, and has been added to the site with his
permission. Mr. Woodcock fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This is a transcript made from an audio recording of a BBC radio interview between
Howard Woodcock and Jack Shaw.
===================================================
See also: "Make Me A Soldier, A Burma Soldier:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8766156
Jack Shaw: How many parades have you taken down at Sheffield, can you remember that?
Howard Woodcock: I think I’ve been involved in the last nine or ten. Time just goes by and
I’ve been doing it for several years now. I think they asked me to do it because you don’t
get volunteers to do a job like this. I think that as long as I can put one foot in front of the
other, I shall be asked to do it.
JS: You are leading the Parade Of The Veterans.
HW: I’m leading the Parade Of The Veterans. We form up behind the Territorials, the Sea
Cadets and all the other services. Traditionally, we’re the last on parade and the first off,
and we form up in front of Cole Brothers. There should be about three hundred of us; I’m
just hoping the weather stays fine. Most of us are ex-servicemen, mostly old veterans and
they go on parade because they treat Remembrance Day as something special.
JS: What time will it start?
HW: Well, we form up about twenty five past ten and the parade marches off at twenty
five to eleven. Of course, the dignitaries come out of the City Hall, onto the steps and the
service starts just before the silence at eleven o’clock.
JS: So, we’ll not let the grass grow under our feet because you can’t do that this morning,
you’re a very busy man.
HW: I’ve got to be on parade.
JS: We’ll return to the war years shortly, but let’s find out first of all, something about your
beginnings. You’re a Sheffield lad.
HW: Oh yes, I was born in Pitsmoor.
JS: Right, and brothers and sisters, have you got?
HW: I’ve got a sister.
JS: Younger sister?
HW: Younger sister, yes.
JS: And so, did you go to school up at Pitsmoor?
HW: Yes, I started at Firshill School, and then we moved to Ecclesall, and I went to
Greystones School, and from there, I went to KinG Edward’s.
JS: And during that time, the family business was already up and running.
HW: Oh yes, it was started over a hundred years ago by my grandfather – comparatively
small before the war, and began to grow after the war of course with the advent of the
aeroplane really, particularly in the travel business, it mushroomed tremendously fast
when people could get abroad easily, and that was a rapid advancement in world travel.
JS: Were you shortly after Thomas Cook, because he was a Baptist wasn’t he?
HW: Yes he was.
JS: I think he started the travel business by shipping church people around.
HW: He was a teetotaller as well. But so was my grandfather. I was brought up a
Methodist.
JS: Was it always expected that you would follow into the family business when you left
school?
HW: I think so, yes. I used to plague them as a little boy after school sometimes, interrupt
their work by asking stupid questions about the business. I think they accepted the fact
that I wanted to go into it.
JS: While you were at King Edward’s School, did ideas come into your head then that one
day you might be a soldier?
HW: Not at all, not really until about 1936, being in the business, we went on a small
cruise which included Hamburg, and I remember seeing all the Nazis and the Brown Shirts
and swastikas flying about. That was when I first realised that there was going to be a
problem, and then of course, my father took me to hear the great Winston Churchill at the
City Hall, when he was an Independent. People were calling him a war monger. He was
saying exactly what ought to happen, which was that we ought to be arming ourselves to
the teeth to fight Hitler. Not a lot of people were taking much notice of him in 1936, but of
course, he was right. Then I began to realise that life wasn’t going to be too good.
JS: We’ve had a gentleman on this morning, talking about what it was like in 1938, at
Kristalnacht; a Jew. So the writing was on the wall even in 1936, two years before then.
HW: That’s right.
JS: So you felt that despite old Chamberlain coming back with ‘Peace in our time’ pieces of
paper, that was only a ‘stay of execution’, as it were.
HW: I think so, I think we were putting off the evil day, but who wants a war? People right
at this moment are not keen on sending troops to protect women and kids who are being
killed, which is something I’m a bit moved by. I’m still a soldier at heart, and I think we
ought to go in and stop it happening as a United Nations Force, a big force, or not go in at
all. I think putting off the evil day is cutting lives. It’s costing lives of women and kids and
that’s what’s happening today. Look at Rwanda; thousands, scores of thousands of
innocent people being killed and it worries me that we can’t do anything about it.
JS: How old were you when you first started thinking about joining up?
HW: I was seventeen, and I decided I was going to join up. They brought conscription out
in May of 1939, and conscription meant you had six months, even though we knew there
was a war coming. When you were called up at nineteen, you had six months’ service,
then you had to serve two and a half years I think, in the Territorials. I thought, if I get
into the Territorials first, and learn how to be a soldier as a Territorial soldier, when I’m
called up at nineteen, I shall know what it’s about, and enjoy the experience. Like many
others, I joined the Territorials, I joined the Field Artillery at Edmund Road in May of 39, at
the age of seventeen. I had to have a letter from my father, signing me in, and I had to
queue for an hour, to sign in. There was a queue three or four deep, to join the Territorial
Army. So many were joining that they had to form a second regiment. We had two
regiments of artillery at Edmund Road, and the regiments were about seven hundred men
– because all over the country, young men were volunteering to join before they were
called up.
JS: That’s something that’s not documented very much about the Second War. I know
about the First World War, there was a sort of jingoism around and there were songs like,
‘Oh We Don’t Want To Lose You But We Think You Ought To Go’, and all that sort of thing.
There wasn’t anything like that about the Second World War, but there were still enough
people who wanted to be in there.
HW: I think it would be the same again. You know, sometimes we run down the young
people in this country, but, at the end of the day, if the country was facing a real problem,
the young people of this country would rally to the cause. They would want to serve their
country as they did two generations ago.
JS: And when you signed up, you say your father actually signed for you.
HW: He had to because I was under eighteen.
JS: Does that mean you’d got the backing of the family then?
HW: I had the backing of my father who was an old soldier, and my mother, I can’t
remember my mother being too much against it, although she didn’t like it.
JS: I think we’ll play a piece of music here, because you played this piece of music, or, you
heard it along with your mum. This is the Pathetique, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the
slow movement. You played this together, why, was this an emotional moment?
HW: It was a favourite piece of mine and a favourite symphony of my grandfather’s, who
taught me to appreciate good music. He loved Tchaikovsky and this was his particular
favourite. It was my particular favourite, and my mother and I sat down and played this
on my last day at home in 1942 when I was finishing my embarkation leave before I went
out to the Far East for four years.
JS: It’s very very sad this, this is the slow movement, just before Tchaikovsky died
himself.
HW: Incidentally, I was sitting in the Regent Cinema on the Friday before the war started,
and I was sitting there with my mother, when the notices came up on the screen that the
Territorial Army was mobilised. We had to report to our Barracks that evening. I was with
my mother when that happened. That night, I reported to the Barracks for my seven years
of war.
JS: This was really doom laden music, and as I say, Tchaikovsky wrote it just before his
death, do you think your mother knew something that you didn’t realise?
HW: Maybe she did, but Jack, my mother never allowed anybody to touch those records,
and if I hadn’t have come back, I don’t know what would have happened to them, but
certainly, the first day I was back from the Far East, at the end of 1945, my mother and I
sat down and we played that together. Very emotional it was.
JS: And I can imagine how moving that was. Well, I’ve got a call here from a listener
saying that one of the reasons so many people joined up in 1939 was that there was no
work in Sheffield. Do you think that was a factor?
HW: That could have had some influence on it.
JS: And it would still be the case today presumably wouldn’t it?
HW: It would be, yes. But I was almost too young to understand what was going on, but
I’m sure he’s right.
JS: You were already in the Territorial Army, how did you get a commission?
HW: Well, I was in the Territorial unit of course, and my Battery Commander was Major
Douglas Brown, of H.L. Brown’s, the jewellers.
JS: It’s almost like the 'old lads'of the First War.
HW: It’s a family; the Territorial Army is a family, that’s why it’s so successful. A lot of the
units are comprised of local people – friends. They joined in batches, you know? A great
thing the Territorial Army, I’m a great believer in it. How I’d got my commission, well, I’d
been in a year and I’d learnt a lot about gunnery, thank goodness, which helped me when
I went for my commission. When I was eighteen and three quarters, Major Brown called
me into his office and said, “I’d like to send you out for a commission.” So I’d an interview
and I went to Catterick. I had five of the hardest months of my life, in a squad of forty
prospective officers. Only twenty of us got through, but my biggest advantage was that
most of the others had come from O.T.C.’s and they hadn’t even been in the Territorial
Army.
JS: What’s that, O.T.C.’s?
HW: Officer Training Units at the universities (Officers’ Training Corps) and Public Schools.
They were all great people, but my big advantage was I’d had a year of hard training in
the art of gunnery, which helped me get through. Of course, I was Second Lieutenant
when I was nineteen and a quarter and I got posted to a crack regular regiment and a
crack regular division that had come back from Dunkerque. That was the beginning of five
– I say wonderful years, I mean, some of them were pretty horrible, but wonderful years
really, in a great division and a great regiment, which was my university for life.
JS: When did you get posted to the Far East?
HW: Well, I was posted first to East Yorkshire, where my regiment was, and a year later,
in March of 42, we were posted out to the Far East. We were originally intended to go to
the Middle East and to North Africa to support Montgomery, but Ghandi and all his
supporters were creating problems in India, and there wasn’t a full British division. All the
divisions in India were Indian divisions with British officers and British units, but we were
switched to India because they were anticipating a lot of civil unrest there. Of course, we
remained one of the only all-British divisions out in that ‘theatre’ of war – in Burma we
were.
JS: So when you were actually posted out there then, there was no fear that the Japanese
would actually be knocking on the door of India.
HW: No no, that wasn’t in the frame at all.
JS: So you didn’t feel really miserable about being posted to the Far East.
HW: No no.
JS: But the Japanese Army was eventually, knocking on the door of India and seemingly
invincible then – Singapore had fallen, they marched straight through Burma, and at that
juncture, I suppose the allies had not put up much resistance had they?
HW: Well, we hadn’t anticipated the rapid advance of the Japanese Army.
JS: Do you know, I went to Singapore last year and I was amazed to find that when the
Japanese started landing in Singapore, the Governor of Singapore was actually at a dance
and stayed there all night.
HW: Well, they were operating under fairly peacetime conditions. The Japanese just moved
extremely fast and Singapore was a tragedy. It’s all been well documented and General
Percival was in charge of an army that was just unprepared. And then of course, they
came straight up into Burma and, not that we hadn’t got good troops in Burma, we just
didn’t have enough troops there to stop the tide of advance and we weren’t very well
trained in general warfare. We were very lucky to evacuate so many troops out of Burma
into India to retrain and reform. Of course, the mountains between India and Burma
formed a natural barrier and halted the Japanese because they’d extended the lines of
communication so much, we were able to reform ourselves under General Slim and
organise ourselves into a great fighting army, the Fourteenth Army.
JS: And the climax of the war in the Far East was fought on those high hills between
Assam, India and Burma in the region of Nagaland.
HW: Well, India and Burma, yes. In Nagaland at Kohima, which was the last final bulwark
before getting into India, anyone who held the mountains there could flow down into the
Indian plains and the Japanese of course, were hoping to get a lot of support from the
Indians and were expecting to get into Delhi, but they were stopped on Kohima Ridge.
JS: Did you think they’d be helped by the Indians?
HW: I don’t think they would have been, no; not enough to walk across India. I think that
was ‘pie in the sky’.
JS: So here we are, we’re at Kohima Ridge, you’re a captain by this time.
HW: Well, I was a lieutenant; I became a captain during the battle. One of our officers was
badly wounded.
Continued in Part Two:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A8851773
Pr-BR