Training After “The Raid” and Before D- Day

Well the mixture of the training really, all the way through was being able to climb a rope up a side of a mountain, or hill, or whatever you want, a cliff. It was always something like that, but it wasn’t put together unless you had a big scheme together. And getting towards the D-Day business, we went to Scotland, also Wales and we were doing there in that we were using live ammunition on exercise there. In Wales, in the Black Mountains they call them, Wales is known for coal mines and all the slag that came up, grass they grew, they sewed grass on these. They, they turned out to be bloody mountains and we didn’t know that at first.
The reason I just said the, that we went to Wales and also Inveraray we were firing live ammunition and it was constant and very, very hard training. For instance, up at Inveraray on that estate there was a, this huge mountain and they had a, they had a sort of a look out up on top there, it had nothing to do with the war. But that was there. We had to climb that thing before breakfast in the morning. See, we had Nissen huts in the back and that’s where we were sleeping, staying and our training took part going up and down that bloody hill. And the ranges, firing over in the sea with the machine guns and I, I found it very pleasant except the fact that it was pretty hard to go up and down those mountains, before breakfast. And we knew that we didn’t know for sure, but we knew there was something in the air, once you start doing that kind of training.