The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

such distances, they had given themselves a bit of time; it would take the
Germans a while to gather their strength and move forward. A day, maybe
two. Then the Fusiliers could expect a fight on their hands.
Also now fallen back along the French border was 1st Border Battalion,
part of 42nd Division in I Corps. They too had had a long night march and
by the morning of the 23rd were digging in either side of the village of
Lezennes, just to the east of Lille. Now attached to ‘C’ Company was Sid
Nuttall, a twenty-year-old Yorkshireman from Halifax. Sid had joined the
Supplementary C Reserve before the war, created especially to establish a
reserve of mechanics should it come to war. ‘There were no camp duties, no
training, no uniforms given out,’ says Sid, ‘but we would be the first people
to be called up and put into the trade if and when they required us.’ He had
been duly called up shortly before the declaration of war and was soon after
posted to 14th Army Field Workshops, part of the Royal Army Ordnance
Corps, or RAOC.
Soon after, he found himself in France, but early the following year he
got frostbite in his hands and toes whilst trying to recover a broken-down
truck in freezing winter weather. ‘My fingers had swollen up and were all
touching each other,’ he says. ‘My feet were like balloons.’ Packed off to
hospital in Dieppe, several of his toes were nearly amputated but, by a piece
of serendipity, the doctor was his same doctor from home in Halifax,
evidently now called up too. Sid pleaded with him to save his toes, and Dr
Hendry did just that.
But once passed fit again, Sid was not sent back to the 14th Army Field
Workshop but posted instead to the 1st Border Battalion as a mechanic. As
the battalion moved into Belgium at the start of the offensive, he
accompanied it in that role, following behind the infantry with the B
Echelon, the supply section of the battalion, and moving up by night to take
away and repair trucks and Bren gun carriers. In the subsequent retreat to
the Escaut, however, the battalion managed to lose most of its transport and
so, no longer needed as a mechanic, Sid suddenly found himself being
made into ‘C’ Company runner instead.
The only problem was that he had had absolutely no infantry training
whatsoever. He had never even fired a Lee Enfield rifle. Nor did he have
even a bayonet or an infantryman’s webbing; instead, he had been issued
with small First World War-era five-round pouches. The company was on