No cigarettes, no booze... How Yorkshire soldiers greeted the news on VE-Day

It was not the victory celebration they had been expecting 75 years ago, and the collected wartime diaries of soldiers in the East Yorkshire Regiment summed up the prevailing mood in a sentence.

“No cigarettes, no booze, half rations, no amenities whatsoever,” one of them wrote.

On May 8, they were in Burma, in a part of the world still at war. Their comrades in the Second Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment lost 30 men that month alone.

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“The diary tells you what they were still going through,” said Colonel Charles Le Brun, of the Yorkshire Regiment Association.

Cpl Ray Lord. Picture: Yorkshire RegimentCpl Ray Lord. Picture: Yorkshire Regiment
Cpl Ray Lord. Picture: Yorkshire Regiment

“There was no sign of an end to the war in the Far East, and in fact the invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall, was still being planned for later that year.”

The British colony of Burma, which remained the scene of fierce fighting, was where both the overseas West Yorkshire battalions, and the first East Yorkshire, heard of the German surrender. They had arrived there variously by way of Dunkirk, Egypt, Cyprus, India and Normandy.

Corporal Ray Lord, of the second East Yorkshire Battalion, had been in Bremen, Germany, when the news came through. Now 95 and one of the few to remember it, he had landed in Normandy with the first wave on D-Day and almost lost his life in an explosion outside Caen.

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“I was operated on in Portsmouth and then put on a hospital train to Leeds General Infirmary where I spent 10 weeks,” he recalled.

1942:  A NAAFI canteen brings welcome chocolate, tea, cigarettes and newspapers to 'D Company' of the 4th Battalion of the Green Howards (an infantry regiment of the British Army), in the Western Desert south of Tobruk, Libya, World War II. The unit were later captured at the Battle of Gazala on 1 June 1942.  (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)1942:  A NAAFI canteen brings welcome chocolate, tea, cigarettes and newspapers to 'D Company' of the 4th Battalion of the Green Howards (an infantry regiment of the British Army), in the Western Desert south of Tobruk, Libya, World War II. The unit were later captured at the Battle of Gazala on 1 June 1942.  (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)
1942: A NAAFI canteen brings welcome chocolate, tea, cigarettes and newspapers to 'D Company' of the 4th Battalion of the Green Howards (an infantry regiment of the British Army), in the Western Desert south of Tobruk, Libya, World War II. The unit were later captured at the Battle of Gazala on 1 June 1942. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

“I rejoined the unit when they were up in Holland.”

Peace or no peace, his war was far from over, and he now learned that he may have to be part of the Japanese invasion force.

“It’s hard to take in the enormity of that,” said Col Le Brun. “You would have expected some sort of respite. But he still had another two years to serve and he was part of the battalion that was being readied for the next invasion.”

The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the course of the following months, and of history, but Cpl Lord was sent to Palestine and then Egypt before finally being demobbed in 1947. He went on to run a newsagent’s shop in east Hull, and now lives in a care village at Brough.

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“He is disappointed not to be more involved in the anniversary because clearly, he’s locked down like everybody else. He would have had a really good year,” said Col Le Brun, whose own military service with Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire was largely in Northern Ireland.

His unit was the product of the 1958 merger of the East and West Yorkshire Regiments and was itself amalgamated in 2006 with the Green Howards and the Duke of Wellington’s into the Yorkshire Regiment of today – the only one in the modern army to still bear a county title.

“It’s something of a cachet but also a sad reflection on the fact that all the others have gone. But we’re very proud of it nonetheless,” said Col Le Brun. “Yorkshire is the only county big enough to sustain a regiment drawn primarily from its own area.”

It had been very different at the time of the First World War, when battalions of “pals” were formed in every sizeable town and city, with the promise that those who enlisted could serve alongside people they knew.

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That comradeship survives today, at a time when reservists from the regiment have been mobilised to help with the winter flooding clear-up and the response to Covid-19, said Col Le Brun. “There’s a great sense of pride and a sense of identity that comes with the Regiment,” he said. “It always prides itself on being a regimental family. And that county affiliation is still very important.”

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