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Able Sea. William Thomas Redhead
Royal Navy HMS Copra
from:Peterborough
My father Bill Redhead enlisted on 31st of August 1942 for the duration of WW2 and was discharged from duties on 3rd of June 1946. His Certificate of Service lists his Port Division as Chatham and he revisited Chatham on several occasions until his death in 2004.
He started out on the HMS Ganges as an Ordinary Seaman on 31st of Aug 1942, then to HMS Pembroke on 12th of Nov 1942 presumably when his initial training was complete. On 5th Dec 1942 he moved to HMS Quebec & remained with that ship until 31st Aug 1943 when he became an Able Seaman & moved to Copra where he was stationed until 28th Feb 1946. The remaining time until his Discharge on 3rd June 1946 was spent with HMS Pembroke.
He rarely spoke about the War as he found memories of friends lost too distressing but when he did he talked mainly of his time on Landing Crafts during the time of the Battle of Anzio. One story in particular sticks in my mind - a close friend asked my father to switch Watch with him one night as the friend wanted to go ashore to see a girl. My father did & had an uneventful Watch. The following night when the friend was on my father's Watch they received a direct hit and the friend was killed. My father used to say that had his friend not asked him to do him a favour, he would not have survived the War and neither me nor my 2 brothers would have been born.
According to my older cousin & an uncle my father was trained as a Royal Commando during the war but I can find no official record of this, although it does tie up with the time he spent at Anzio, Salerno and in Sicily. In 1984 by father returned to Anzio & the surrounding region for the first time since the war. He enjoyed the trip, taken with my mother, but said it held so many sad & moving memories. Sadly talk of his training as a Royal Commando only came out when I was preparing his eulogy after he died in 2004 and so I was never able to ask him to verify this.
