Battle to save regiment

MEN of Lancashire have fought, and died, all over the world for hundreds of years.

And always there have been Lancashire Regiments for them to belong to.

Now former soldiers are leading the campaign to halt the merger of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment into a faceless, numbered "regional" regiment.

Geoffrey Lowe is the Bolton branch secretary of the regimental association.

Mr Lowe, one of six members of his family to have been in the regiment, served between 1962 and 1977.

With several tours of Northern Ireland and a tour of Aden, Mr Lowe saw plenty of action.

"The British infantry regiment system has been developed and refined over 300 years," he said.

"It relies on fierce local loyalties and inherited traditions to produce close-knit fighting teams of battle-proven effectiveness. The Ministry of Defence is messing with that system at its peril.

"Your regiment is like your family and you develop a pride in it and in your local town or area.

"What use is a faceless regional regiment going to be? What is there in that to feel proud of?

"Combining regiments from Cheshire, Lancashire and Cumbria is not going to increase efficiency, or bring in any pride in the regiment.

"At the present time, the Queen's Lancashire's is one of the few regiments that has more volunteers than it needs.

"Yet look at the regional regiments that have been set up down south and they all need more men. The problem is that young men have nothing specific, a name to be proud of, to join up to."

The "Save the QLR" campaign is now well under way, with members of the regimental association appearing at selected venues around the county until the end of October.

Anyone who wants to sign a petition -- or write a letter of support -- can contact Mr Lowe on 01204 667219.

Burmese days of

"WE, well I, wasn't brave at all. I just got through it, day by day."

When "it" consisted of living in the jungle of Burma, fighting the Japanese almost the full length of the country and living with the flies, leeches, mud and ever present danger of a bullet from an unseen enemy, we can decide for ourselves what constitutes bravery.

The speaker, Jimmy Pendlebury -- who doesn't think he was brave -- is chairman of the Bolton and District Combined Ex-Servicemen and Women's Association.

Sitting in his Astley Bridge home, the 83-year-old said: "We made the most of it really. I've always looked for the funny side of things anyway, and that's what I tried to do out there."

Jimmy joined the Territorials as a bandboy at Fletcher Street, Bolton in 1937.

"I wasn't old enough, at 17, to join the Army proper, but in 1939 I became a real soldier," he said. "Prior to that I'd worked in the mill."

Jimmy joined the Loyal Lancashire Regiment, one of the regiments that eventually became the Queen's Lancashire's.

"That's what you did, d' y' see? You joined your local regiment and so did your mates. You all belonged."

Jimmy remembers the outbreak of the Second World War because it happened while he was on exercise.

"We were held up at York while they decided whether we could go home on leave or were to be shipped straight out to France.

"We were a mechanised regiment, had all our gear with us and could have gone at a moment's notice."

After that close call it was another three years, 1942, before Jimmy left the country.

"We were guarding airports and strategic buildings and the like because we were mechanised, you see.

"And we were training, always training. I joined the Reconnaissance Corps -- the blokes that go out in front of the main battle group."

After linking up with the largest convoy to leave England in 1942, there was a short period of acclimatisation in India before heading for Burma.

"We were part of the Combined Services Battalion by this time. Our job was to probe, as much as 30 miles in front of the main brigade, find and make contact with the enemy and hold until the main group arrived.

"As I said before, we had trained and trained, we were mechanised with motorbikes and sidecars and scout cars and we were highly trained in their use.

"So -- just like the Army -- we went to Burma and they took all our vehicles off us so we went in as infantry!

"We were still doing the same job, still reconnaissance, but it was a lot slower and conditions in the jungle were very different to anything we had experienced."

In fact, before Jimmy and his comrades went into Burma they had some fighting to do in India as the Japanese had penetrated up to 40 miles from the border.

The Battle of Kohima was a bloody, messy battle which marked the furthest point of Japanese penetration.

From that point onwards, Jimmy and his comrades pushed the Japanese back through Burma.

But it was a fighting retreat by the Japanese and one fraught with danger for the British troops.

"The heat, the rain and the mud were just indescribable. We were still on reconnaissance, we'd go out on patrol and might go for two days without seeing anyone.

"Then we might be in a firefight within minutes. You couldn't see very far and you didn't know what was happening much. One day we would ambush some of their lot, and the next day they would ambush us.

"We even swapped our tin hats for bush hats very early on. You try wearing a hot tin hat in that heat.

"You got so you were just bearing it, just getting through it day by day.

"We'd come off patrol and so-and-so had 'copped it', then we'd start joking 'it'll be me next time'-- you just had to joke and put up with it."

Jimmy and his mates walked for hundreds of miles in inhospitable jungle as they fought their way down through Burma.

"Of course I killed the Japanese, they were the enemy. I shot at enough, so I must have killed them. I wasn't keeping count though, it wasn't like that, half of the time you couldn't see them properly."

Jimmy was wounded, but even that did not make a great deal of difference to daily life.

"We had just gone into this copse and were getting settled when some of them came at us with grenades.

"A corporal was badly injured and two of my mates were knocked off their feet by concussion, but I didn't realise anything had happened to me until someone pointed out that my leg was bleeding.

"I got it bandaged up by the first aid lad and carried on. There were bullets flying all over the place, so I wasn't going to get very worried about a cut on my leg.

"It wasn't bravery, conditions were horrible and we were fighting more or less every day. It was just surviving. Mind you, as reconnaissance we got paid extra, 15 shillings (75p) a day while we were abroad."

Jimmy and his comrades, many of them from Bolton, fought in this way down through Burma heading for Rangoon, where the biggest battle was expected.

"We were only about 12 miles from Rangoon when the Allied invasion of Burma took place further south. It was all over then really.

"We went back to India and were being re-equipped to invade Singapore when the Atom bombs were dropped. So that was called off."

Jimmy spent another year or so helping "clear up" the jungle where some Japanese had not given up: "They simply couldn't accept that the Emperor had given up, they didn't believe us, so we had to kill or capture them."

He returned home in 1947, still not accepting that he had done anything brave.

"It was a job, it was unpleasant but we had to do it. Some of the lads did go a bit nuts in the conditions and were taken back to hospital in India, but in the main we just got on with it."

Jimmy looks upon the plans to reorganise the Army with scorn: "What are they 'Americanising' our army for when the Americans admire our system so much?

"You need something to identify with. The Loyals and the Queen's were our regiments, they belonged to the people of Bolton and Lancashire, and no-one is going to be proud to be a member of a number.

"We fought for our mates and for our regiment. What is there to fight for if you are a number?"

Battle honours since 1695

THE Queen's Lancashire Regiment has more battle honours than any other infantry regiment in the Army.

Itself the result of numerous mergers over the years, the regiment can trace its lineage back to The 30th Foot, which was first raised on March 8, 1689, as Castleton's Regiment to fight for William of Orange against the French.

The 30th won early distinction at the capture of the fortress city of Namur in 1695 and remained in some type of action almost continuously.

During the First World War, the Queen's Lancashire's predecessors raised 58 battalions, of which 38 saw active service overseas, earning 112 battle honours.

In the Second World War, service was seen at Dunkirk, Singapore, Italy, Normandy and Burma. In the course of the war, a 52 further battle honours were won.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, regular Lancashire battalions served in India, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Eritrea, Malta, Italy, Trieste, Austria and Germany, and the 40th and 47th saw active service in Palestine.

But peace brought reductions and, by 1949, the three county regiments had been reduced to one regular battalion each.

The present day The Queen's Lancashire Regiment was inaugurated at Connaught Barracks, Dover on March 25, 1970, and only six weeks later the 1st Battalion was on active service in Northern Ireland.

Out of area operations took the 1st Battalion to Cyprus from 1978 to 1980 and in 1983, where they saw service with the United Nations.

A company was sent to the Falklands in the aftermath of the 1982 war, and the battalion went to Bosnia in 1996 for the Nato operation.