Curly And His Tin Hat

We were making some attempt to dig in. We’d got one trench about four feet at one end and eighteen inches at the other and seven or eight of us were standing around when some planes flew over the hill above Salum.

We had decided they were ours returning from a raid when Chica Newman suddenly said, “Something fell out of one of those planes.” They weren’t ours and the something was bombs. The site of the bombing was a safe distance away, but the planes continued their run in our general direction. In a panic we all dived into the trench, such as it was. From the bottom of the pack Curly Quinn complained, “Haven’t got me tin hat”, to which someone in the top layer replied, “Bloody bad luck for us if you need your helmet, Curly.”

Lance Corporal Neville Blundell, MM, 2/3rd Battalion, North Africa, WWII