I joined the army at Ipswich recruiting centre in 1949 and after six weeks was told to report to Butler Barracks at Aldershot, where I was kitted out and posted to Farnborough for basic training.  From there I was posted back to Aldershot onto a horse transport course.  Halfway through the course I

realised it wasn’t for me, so I opted out and was posted to Yeovil to train as a driver with the R.A.S.C.  After that I was posted to Taunton, Somerset where we transported munitions and other supplies to various regiments.

 Some months later I was drafted to the FAR E.LF. and posted to Cherry Tree Camp at Colchester for jungle training with was carried out in a wood near Fingeringhoe.  As it happened, it wasn’t much help when faced with the real thing in Malaya.  The camp has long since disappeared but the appropriately named Cherry Tree Pub is still there.  After a few days it was off to Goodge Street Station, which was an underground barracks, hospital and dinning facility. 

The next day it was to Liverpool Docks where we embarked on a troop ship called Empire Holadale.  It was quite an experience for a country boy of 19, who had never travelled further than London before joining the Army, to travel through the Med with it’s deep blue water, flying fish landing on deck and porpoises jumping in and out of the waves. 

Our first port of call was Port Said, where we hit a sunken wreck while coming into dock.  This meant that I was stuck in Egypt for three months before we could get back on board ship.  We then sailed down the Suez Canal with stops at Aden and Colombo before we eventually arrived in Singapore and were paraded on the jetty.

 I was the VOLUNTEERED to join 799 Air Dispatch Company RASC, stationed at Neesoon, Singapore.  (799 later changed it’s name to 55 Air Despatch Company).  It was 799 Company who went to the assistance of HMS Amethyst, which was blockaded by the Chinese in the Yangtze River.  We took supplies in two Sunderland flying boats and the following day she broke out under heavy fire.  This later became the subject of a film called the Yangtze incident.

  On one supply drop over DZ Able, “Butterfly” Williams, one of the dispatchers, tripped in the aeroplane and fell out of the door.  Luckily for him he was wearing a safety harness, something that we rarely did as it restricted your movement about the plane.  The pilot banked to port and feathered the port engine while we tried to pull him in.  He was quite a big bloke and we could not manage it on our own.  The pilot said we could have one more try and the navigator gave us a hand because otherwise we would have had to cut him loose.  We did manage it and although he was knocked cold and badly bruised, he was none the worse for his little trip. 

On another occasion we were not so lucky and I lost two of my best mates, Drivers Taylor and Goldsmith, when their Dakota crashed in virgin jungle and everyone on board lost their lives.  By the time the search party reached the crash site the bodies were so decomposed that they were buried where they lay.  The day after the burials we flew over the site with two Dakotas and dropped two wreaths from all the lads of 55AD Company.

 I had been with the Air Despatch Company for over a year when it appeared on Company Orders that volunteers with experience of handling horses were required.  I put my name down and was accepted.

 Instead of getting a nice cushy posting, I was sent to Hong Kong, then up to the New Territories on the Chinese border to collect a string of mules.  We travelled up to the border on a really antiquated train with pigs, goats and people cooking food etc.  The journey was an experience to say the least and the smell was revolting!  We shipped the mules back to Johor Baharu in Malaya, where we kitted them out and put them through their paces.

 I was now a member of the Malayan Scouts, a regiment formed by Mad Mike Calvert, a man famous for his exploits with the Chindits during WW2.

By this time the conflict was hotting up, Chin-Peng had taken over command of the Communist Party in Malaya and had control over most of  Penang and Johor Baharu.  Part of his terror campaign was to raid a village, take a child and kill it in front of the villagers.

 The idea was to terrorise villagers into supplying them with food and make them too frightened to inform on their whereabouts.  They also terrorised the rubber planters.  For instance, Susan Thompson, a planter’s daughter, was ambushed and shot through the head.  In another incident George Burre and his wife were ambushed.  Mr Burre was ordered out of his car, he was not harmed but Mary, his wife, was shot dead.  This sort of thing was happening every day.

 While at Johor Baharu we did four weeks intensive jungle training.  We were taught how to use plastic explosives, lay booby traps and more importantly the use of different weapons such as the carbine, Owen gun and Browning automatic pistol.  We also used to put on fencing masks and fire darts at on another using air rifles.

 After training at Johor Baharu we took the mules up country to Dusm Tua camp just outside Kuala Lumpur.  We arrived at the camp it was still under construction.  The huts were made from wooden poles, mostly bamboo and atap, very flimsy but quite weatherproof.  It was quite funny to lay under your mosquito net and watch the “click-clicks” run up the wall and across the ceiling.  Now and then they would fall to the floor and then shoot up the wall again.   We soon settled down and took full advantage of the hot springs that were there.

While stationed at Dusm Tua there were no parades as such, we all went down to a makeshift range before breakfast and fired five rounds using a different weapon each day.  Twice a week we mustered outside out “bashers” and Mad Mike would walk up and down the ranks, occasionally punching someone in the guts.  If they went down he would have them RTU’d.

  I soon made friends with another lad called Eddie Holt who kept a tame monkey as a pet.  That was until one day it dropped a beer bottle on a Ruperts head.  We held a Court Marshal for the said monkey, which was tied to the centre of the table with Cpl Holt read the charge.  It was duly sentenced to death, whereupon Eddie Holt produced the offending beer bottle and carried out the sentence.  Incidentally Eddie went on to win the MM when his patrol was caught in an ambush.

I was myself mentioned in dispatches for my actions when I took command of the train in which I was travelling when it was ambushed and derailed en-route from Sungi Pattani to Kuala Lumpur in 1952. We came under fire from the jungle, I ran down the train telling the women and children to lie down on the floor and the men to lie beside them.

 I ordered all military personnel to muster at the derailed engine, there were only five Malay other ranks and three Gurkha Riflemen.  I told them to spread out along the track about 10 foot apart but to ignore my next order.  I shouted in Malayan for ten men to go to the jungle to the right of the train and the rest to stay with me on the other side.  I shouted the order very loudly so that the CT’s could hear and would think that I had a lot more chaps than I actually had.  I then ordered them to open fire into the jungle to their front.  After about five rounds I ordered then the cease-fire and hold their positions.

 They all performed extremely well, not one of the lads were hit and all the passengers were unharmed.  An Indian solicitor was so impressed that he wrote to me CO, hence the award.  Incidentally, the troop that came to our aid found three bodies in the jungle. It was a result of this incident that I injured my spine and spent 20 months in hospital.

 While with the 22^nd SAS, I went on many patrols into virgin jungle, which was a far cry from the woods at Fingringhoe.  We used Eban and Dyak head hunters as our trackers and they did an excellent job.  I tried to buy one of the shrunken heads that they used to carry with them, God knows what use it would have been but they just would not part with them.

On patrol through the rubber plantations we would see coolies tapping the rubber trees and collecting the atap, which dropped into half a coconut shell.  It stank to high heaven. Once there was a young Chinese girl, 16 or 17 years old and covered in this stinking goo, before we had gone a 100 yards, half the patrol had sex with her against a tree.  The strange thing was that she didn’t seem to mind, it was just as if it happened all the time.

 About a mile further down the track we came to a C.T camp with food still cooking over an open fire.  L/Cpl Stacey picked up a pot of rice and it blew his hand off. The whole camp had been booby trapped, that taught us to be more careful the next time.

 Two days later we were ambushed by about 20 C.T’s.  That was when Teddy the mule got shot in the backside.  We transported him back to camp at Dusn Tua where we tried to knock him out.  After using enough drugs to flatten two racehorses he was still standing, so we decided to leave the bullet in him.  He came on many patrols after that and it never did seem to bother him.

 The thing I hated most on these patrols, besides being shot at, was the bloody leeches, they would suck your blood and swell up like great slugs.  I had one disappear up my penis, it worried me a bit at the time but it had no lasting effect, thank Christ.

 Another thing that gets you in that stinking jungle is the stinking damp atmosphere, you never seem to be dry.  Your jungle boots only lasted about two or three weeks, they just rotted away on your feet and the mule’s leather strapping disintegrated.  At least we were well supplied by my old mates from 55 Air Despatch Company.

 I ought to mention an incident when my mule, Loppy, killed two C.T.’s.  They had been badly wounded in an ambush that we had laid a few hours previously and we had lashed them to the sides of Loppy on two makeshift stretchers.  For some unknown reason he bolted off through the jungle and tried to go between two trees which were wide enough apart for Loppy but not the stretchers.  Both C.T.’s died instantly, we left them in the jungle and moved on with the job.

On another patrol we had just dropped off three C.T.’s at the Green Howards camp when we received an urgent message to proceed to the Ben-Tong Gap in the Cameron Highlands to assist a convoy of the Seaforth Highlanders that were under attack.  Unfortunately we arrived too late and they were all dead.  All we could do was clear up the mess and load their bodies onto a truck for the burial party.

An odd thing that we used to get up to in this Regiment was tree jumping, in other words, parachuting into the jungle canopy and lowering ourselves to the ground with a length of rope.  On our first jump we had 62% casualties, broken legs, arms, fingers, severe lacerations and one broken back.  We had no helicopters to evacuate the wounded, in those days they had to be carried out.  This didn’t stop the powers that be from making us do it all over again.  After the first couple of jumps it proved to be more successful as we got used to it.  (The jumping, not the injuries).

 I was sent home in 1952 and after 20 months in five different hospitals I was medically discharged in 1954.

 Cpl R W Russell R.A.S.C. Malay Scouts

T/22272819 22^nd S.A.S.