As the title suggests
'Last Stop Karachi 1946-47' is a personal narrative of a young Englishman
enlisted in RAF finally ending up in Karachi. He was an RAF driver,
miles away from his pastoral home who enjoyed the simple pleasures in life in
the British India. Edited by Ali Jan
by John ‘Dusty’ Miller
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| Author: John 'Dusty' Miller. Enjoying a game of tennis in Karachi |
I had enlisted in the RAF – a raw ‘wet behind the ears’ 18
year old recruit, never having been away from home alone previously - born into
a quiet rural way of life and later working on my father’s smallholding in the
country. All the signs were that this
comfortable way of life was about to change ‘PDQ’ and I was now in for a few
shocks. My romantic dream of service
life was not going to be quite as I had first expected when I first so
light-heartedly enlisted.
Over the next seven months, along with all my newfound mates
we undertook the obligatory 6 weeks of training (square bashing) and went on to
complete our training as drivers Motor Transport (MT). At the passing-out parade a particularly
sadistic Flight Sergeant old timer reminded us all that we were about to leave
the feather bed comforts of Britain’s shores and to get a taste of what life
was like in the real world.
So it was that I found myself in Liverpool docks England on
January 2nd 1945 climbing a ship gangplank, kit bag over my shoulder
together with hundreds of other Army and RAF (Royal Air Force) personnel. The ship I was boarding was the peacetime
ocean going liner “Caernarvon Castle” which had recently been converted into a
troop carrier in US.
We were never given any indication as to where our final
destination would be. It was a policy of
the wartime government, for security reasons, not to divulge this information
due to troop convoys leaving Britain being targeted by Hitler’s U-boats in
Atlantic Ocean shipping lanes.
Of course, this secrecy fostered all sorts of speculation
among us lads below deck and various wild forecasts and guesses were made. As one particularly bright member said, “Well
it must be the Orient we’re going to, as otherwise we wouldn’t have been issued
with tropical kit” - i.e. khaki shorts, bush shirts and khaki stockings. But then another ‘bright spark’ announced
that issuing tropical kit to embarking troops was just a ‘blind’ and designed
to confuse the Hitler spy network. An
older cousin of his had previously gone out on a troopship kitted out the same
way and finished up landing in Alaska!
Apocryphal as the story may have been, it was never the less, quite a
‘perishing’ thought - if you really think about it.
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| Picnicking with English and Anglo-Indian native friends at Holiday Hut Manora. (Author, 2nd from left in back row) |
The following day Jan 3rd we set sail as the
winter sun was dropping below the horizon and when we looked out the next
morning we had joined five other troopships, an aircraft carrier and two
corvettes, the corvettes acting as protection escorts on each flank of the
convoy.
Again the speculation among us lads below deck arose as to
our likely destination. Some had tried
to determine compass direction and said that we were definitely going west
towards America and our hopes were raised that it may be Canada where lots of
RAF personnel were serving on aircrew training.
The mystery went on for several days and then it was reported that we
were now going due south and soon after this we changed again to due east. It was only solved when 10 days after leaving
Liverpool we anchored off Gibraltar.
A member of the permanent crew of the ship said that it was
common for troop convoys to use indirect routes to Gibraltar from Britain to
avoid attack from submarines, and convoys often made big box routes west out
into the Atlantic and then east into Gibraltar.
Hence the reason we took 10 days getting there instead of the normal one
or two.
We made our way through the Mediterranean unescorted,
calling at Port Said then down the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, again stopping for
a few hours at Aden before leaving for Bombay, where we berthed on the 27thJan. I spent a few days at the Worli transit camp
there awaiting a posting, which turned out to be Madras. Off I went by train to join a small unit
repairing military vehicles in three civilian garages called Simpson’s. We employed all local labour in the repair
shops and it was my job as a driver to run errands for mail etc.
After three months I was again posted to an RAF station out
in the wilds at Kolar, about 80 kilometers east of Bangalore and after several
months there I again moved on to Vizagapatam, (now known as Vishakapatnam) a
port on the East coast of India where I spent 6 months.
A day after my 21st birthday in late September I
got another posting come through from our Group Headquarters down at
Bangalore. It was to join 57 EU
(Embarkation Unit) Keamari Karachi.
I collected my railway warrant the next day and left Vizag
with some reluctance as despite its uncomfortable sticky climate I had enjoyed
my stay there and had made some very good pals in the MT and around the camp.
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"Farewell Karachi, I'll miss you": Just before take-off
Mauripur Airport 1947
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Logically one would expect the direction of the rail journey
from Delhi and on to Karachi would be to the southwest from Delhi and which
would be about 1100 kilometers as the crow flies, but the story goes, that for
some reason the RAF hierarchy decreed that during the summer months no RAF
personnel would be allowed to travel that route due to the extreme temperatures
across part of the Thar Desert.
Consequently, all personnel had to go north up to Lahore and then down
to Karachi, stretching the journey to a distance of approximately 1650 kilometers.
I arrived on Lahore railway station and had a wait of a few
hours before the train left for Karachi in the middle of the afternoon. One
lasting memory of this journey was the utter desolation and remoteness of this
region with just sand and cacti pushing through the dunes for hours on
end. It was the most uncomfortable
railway journey that I had ever made in India to date. I was in a noisy clattering carriage on my
own, with just wooden slatted benches to sit on. Getting any sleep was almost
impossible with sand blowing through the compartment.
One indelible scar of the journey was that during one of the
many stops along the way I bought a cup of chai in my mug and stood it
on my posh newly purchased green tin trunk.
These metal travelling trunks were an essential part of every service
man’s equipment when moving from one station to another. During the night I must have dozed off
despite the discomforts of the journey and when I awoke the chai had
spilled all over my lovely new trunk and sand had set in it like concrete –
never to be erased again.
I remember pulling into Hyderabad and after a short stop
arrived in Karachi later in the day. An
RAF truck driver picked me up from the railway station and I was pleasantly
surprised not only by the small number of personnel but the situation of the
unit as well. Although my memory of the
road layout after nearly 60 years is a little hazy our Keamari premises were on
the right, and at the end of a tree lined straight road up from the large KPT
building. Across the road from our
quarters we looked out on to a piece of spare ground which was our football
pitch and just to the right a clock tower and small boat basin. I quickly got the feeling that I was going to
enjoy my stay in Keamari, it being a very convenient place to get into town for
shopping and to the picture houses on our day off.
Our living quarters were a nice surprise, modern built, two
level building, with RAF personnel occupying the upper level and Army boys on
the ground floor. I think the army chaps
were engaged on roughly the same duties as we were around the docks with
embarkation, loading and unloading freight etc.
Within the compound and through a gateway behind a high wall there was a
large building, which was occupied by all the clerical staff both Army and RAF.
The clerical staff was not only Army and RAF personnel but
also quite a number of native ladies who were employed and attached to the
Services and wore smart khaki uniforms.
They lived at home within the Karachi city area and it was one of my
jobs several days a week to go out early with my truck and pick them up from
their homes and bring them into work, then later in the afternoon return them.
One of the most striking things I noticed about Karachi soon
after arriving was the climate change from what I had left in the ‘sweatbox’ at
‘Visag. The temperature drop at night came as a relief and also the complete
lack of humidity during the day.
In our MT section we had an assortment of five or six
vehicles ranging from a Ford V8 station wagon, two small 15cwt Ford trucks, a
couple of 3 ton Chevrolet trucks and a mobile crane for use in some of the open
warehouses around the docks.
One memory of those days of 1946-7 was that while working in
some of the warehouses in and around the docks, to see scores of British built
civilian Jowett ‘Bradford’ vans being unloaded from the ships and stored in the
sheds ready for dispatch to various parts of India. These Jowett ‘Bradfords’ were a newly designed
cheap utility van with a small twin cylinder engine and which proved to be very
economical to run. Other warehouses were
full of brand new Royal Enfield motorcycles. To me this was a sure sign that
many of Britain’s factories had already made the switch over from military to
civilian production, post war.
-to be continued
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