The Wartime Memories Project - The Second War

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263333 A/L.Bdr. Douglas Oliver Elphee British Army 97th Field Regiment Royal Artillery from:Maidstone Doug Elphee Douglas Elphee was my father. He said very little about his war service except that he was evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, then billeted in South Wales. He then was shipped to the Middle East by way of South Africa and crossed from Iraq to North Africa by way of Palestine, Egypt, and Libya, where he was captured by Rommel’s forces and handed over to the Italians. When Italy capitulated, he lived in the hills picking olives until he was re-captured by the Germans. He was then taken by train to Magdeburg and put to work in the salt mines until being liberated by the Americans. The only time I heard my father swear was one Sunday lunchtime back in the eighties he was re-united with his sergeant. They were going over their experiences in South Wales and were relating to the time when the invasion codeword "Cromwell" was inadvertently passed in the Southwest by mistake. The sergeant received a phone call from the officer relaying the codeword, whereupon the sergeant replied: "Who the f*** is Cromwell?" The reply was "Invasion". "Oh, that Cromwell, right sir". Then he said "Put the kettle on lads”. Toward the end of his life, I took him to Dover Castle where our local Radio Kent was trying to piece together people’s experiences of the war. So I suggested he go tell them about his evacuation from Dunkirk. Over he went and came back in 5 minutes. “How come you were so quick?” I asked. He replied “I told them it was just like a day at the beach, I walked down to the sea and got on a boat”. I am not sure I could be so laid back as that, but there were so many like that who saw such awful things during the war, and that was their way of coming to terms with it. David Elphee Add to this record.  Related Content: Royal Artillery 97th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery Battle of France and The Low Countries 1940 Operation Dynamo - The Evacuation from Dunkirk and nearby Beaches Western Desert Campaign in North Africa Stalag 11A (341) Prisoner of War Camp 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.