Cahill

Bernard 'Barney' Cahill was born in 1911 in Liverpool. He joined the regiment at Renshaw Hall in Liverpool and, when a service no ending in '13' came up, there was a bit of a scuffle as nobody wanted it. Bernard wasn't superstitious and stepped up to take it.

Before Normandy he spent a lot of time in Caithness and he and his comrades were drafted in to help search for Rudolf Hess. *The Hess thing was they were turned out to search the moorlands for him as the report was he bailed out over Scotland. As it turned out, Hess was miles away from them.

He remembers two men - Billy Upton and Billy Eastham - one was from Glasgow. One of them was invalided out of the army with stomach ulcers prior to going overseas. When he joined KOSB he did the trade courses and was found to be quite good at Signals, morse code etc. He told me he was sent on a Signals course in the battalion. There was him and another bloke who kept getting the high scores. It came to a head when my dad was supposed to decipher a morse code message that ended in the word CAMPAIGN but my dad wrote CHAMPAGNE and so did the other fella sitting next to him. They split them up and found the other bloke had been copying my dad. I often wondered why they sent him on so many courses, even sending him back home to do them and then rejoin the regiment later on.