The Wartime Memories Project - The Second War

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221989 Pte. George Atkinson British Army Royal Army Medical Corps from:Marton, Lancs In the months before the war, my father, George Atkinson was employed at Millom Iron works in Westmoreland, as a labourer, casting gun barrels for RN ships. Ironically, he was laid off because of a lack of orders. On the dole, he volunteered for the Army. This was on family advice; as relatives who had left it too late in WW1 had been conscripted into the infantry and ended up on the front line. As he had been educated at grammar school for one year after the age of 13, he had the extra literacy and numeracy skills, when he took his recruiting tests, to become a Nursing Orderly in the RAMC. This, he thought, would get him a cushy number. Unfortunately, he was posted to a Field Ambulance Unit serving on the front line throughout the war. He served in the Middle-East, Far-East and Italy; seeing active service at El-Alamein, in Burma and Monte Casino. As a regular he was not de-mobbed in 1945,but went on to work in a British military hospital in Belgium until 1947. When he left the Army he worked for Glaxo making antibiotics until his retirement in 1980- a medical advance he witnessed first hand in the middle-east in 1941-42. My father died in 1985 aged 66. I know a great deal about his service - even though he hardly ever spoke of it to the rest of the family - because I was determined to join the Army myself as a boy soldier. He made it his business to tell me about his experiences and leave me without any doubt about life in the Army. I know he was trying, in his way, to put me off. Nevertheless I joined the Royal Artillery. George Atkinson Add to this record.  Related Content: Royal Army Medical Corps Italian Campaign Burma & India Campaign Can you help us to add to our records? Add a record to our website. The names and stories on this website have been submitted by their relatives and friends. If your relations are not listed please add their names so that others can read about them Did you or your relatives live through the Second World War? Do you have any photos, newspaper clippings, postcards or letters from that period? Have you researched the names on your local or war memorial? Were you or your relative evacuated? Did an air raid affect your area? If so please let us know. Help us to build a database of information on those who served both at home and abroad so that future generations may learn of their sacrifice. Contact us. Celebrate your own Family History Celebrate by honouring members of your family who served in the Secomd World War both in the forces and at home. We love to hear about the soldiers, but also remember the many who served in support roles, nurses, doctors, land army, muntions workers etc. Please use our Family History resources to find out more about your relatives. Then please send in a short article, with a photo if possible, so that they can be remembered on these pages.

The free section of the Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers. We have been helping people find out more about their relatives wartime experiences since 1999 by recording and preserving recollections, documents, photographs and small items. The website is paid for out of our own pockets, library subscriptions and from donations made by visitors. The popularity of the site means that it is far exceeding available resources and we currently have a huge backlog of submissions. If you are enjoying the site, please consider making a donation, however small to help with the costs of keeping the site running. Hosted by: The Wartime Memories Project Website is archived for preservation by the British Library Copyright MCMXCIX - MMXXIV - All Rights Reserved We do not permit the use of any content from this website for the training of LLMs or for use in Generative AI, it also may not be scraped for the purpose of creating other websites.