TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO Friday May 5, 1995

VE Day anniversary

Courier reporter Jamie McIvor spoke to two of the area’s many war veterans about their memories of the conflict.

Memories from the sharp end

Before he was called up on his 18th birthday in August 1944, Jimmy McGurk had never been any further away from his Whitehouse home than Tarbert. Until then Jimmy’s war had been relatively quiet, apart from the night a lone German bomber reached West Loch Tarbert.

‘It was about midnight when suddenly the house shook,’ he said. ‘In the morning I saw the craters where the bombs fell in the trees, right opposite the pier at Kennacraig. One of them had just missed a farm. That would have been about 1943.’

Jimmy was the only lad called up from Whitehouse. He said: ‘The others all worked in farming which was a reserved occupation. I was in forestry, so I got called up.’

After he received his papers, Jimmy was sent to Fort George for training. It was there, the army discovered their latest recruit had a very unusual problem…

Jimmy was only four feet eleven inches tall and his arms were too short to hold or reload a gun properly. Instead Private McGurk found himself in the Royal Engineers as a convoy driver, travelling near the front line just behind the advancing artillery.

Jimmy was one of the brave drivers who carried essential materials to repair bridges damaged by the Germans to stop the Allies in their tracks.

‘We usually moved at night,’ he remembers, ‘as in daylight the Messerschmitts would come over and machine gun the lorries. We used to have what we called ‘gerry cans’ at the side of the lorry to carry petrol. If one of them got hit the whole lorry would blow up.’ However, Jimmy has no special memories of VE Day itself: ‘We were in Germany at the time and some of the other lads were crying, thinking of their mothers or girlfriends. I grew up with my auntie and didn’t have any brothers and sisters so it was different for me. The other lads couldn’t understand why I seemed so calm and collected.’

After he was de-mobbed, Jimmy had several jobs throughout Scotland with, amongst others, the Forestry Commission and Electricity Board. He’s now retired and widowed but has returned to his native Whitehouse with his daughter Shona.