Songs and Music
The 2/5th Sherwood Foresters was a very musical battalion! From the very outset, when the original 5th Battalion band played an important part in recruitment, to final days in Austria when the battalion danced band performed many concerts for both military and civilian audiences, songs formed an essential part of army life.
Sherwood Boys
This song appeared in a collection of photographs of battalion members compiled by Wally Binch, with the comment 'Whenever, or wherever, Sherwood Foresters are assembled...sooner or later, someone starts off, and is soon joined by one and all singing the song that was handed down to us, and is known by everyone from the Commanding Officer to the Privates on "jankers" (punishment duty).'
We are the Sherwood Boys
We are the Sherwood Boys
We all know our manners
We all spend our tanners
We are respected wherever we go
When we're marching down the old highway
Doors and windows open wide they say
You can hear the Colonel shout
Put those ******* Woodbines out
We are the Sherwood Boys​
D-Day Dodgers
There are many versions of this famous song, but this is the one taught me by my father when I was young and which we sang incessantly on holiday in Scotland, much to the annoyance of my mother and sister. It scans much better than some variants on the internet. The last verse never fails to bring a lump to my throat. Sung to the tune of 'Lili Marlene'
We're the D-Day Dodgers out in Italy
Always on the vino, always on the spree.
Eighth Army scroungers and their tanks
We live in Rome – among the Yanks.
We’re the D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy.
We landed at Salerno, holidays with pay,
The Germans brought the bands out to guide us on our way.
Showed us the sights and gave us tea,
We all sang songs, the beer was free.
We’re the D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy.
Once we heard a rumour we were going home
Back to dear old Blighty, never more to roam.
Then somebody said in France you'll fight,
We said no fear, we'll just sit tight.
We’re the D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy.
Up among the mountains, in the mud and rain
Stand the scattered crosses, some which bear no name.
Heartbreak, and toil and suffering gone
The boys beneath them slumber on
They’re the D-Day Dodgers, who'll stay in Italy.
PG 66, Capua
Around forty of the Sherwood Foresters captured at Sedjenane in March 1943 ended up in the Italian POW camp P.G. 66 near Capua. To keep up morale an entertainments officer was appointed, and this rather bizarre 'camp song' was written and attested to by several of the prisoners. Quite what tune would have fitted these lyrics I don't know.
There's a place In Italy, and it’s called Capua,
Where on a dark and stormy night, the boys went down the sewer,*
At Campo Concentramento P.G. 66, seldom you ever see a frown,
There are English and Irish, and good old Welshmen too,
And the Scotsmen who never let you down,
At Campo Concentramento P.G.66, there’s blacks and whites
But never blue,
And soon will come a day when we can sail away,
From Campo Concentamento P.G.66.
* The sewer reference is to an attempted mass escape in January 1943. The reprisals were the subject of war crime investigations post-war, documented in WO 311/1221 ‘Unlawful Wounding of Escaping PoW at P.G.66 Capua’ (1945-46) and WO311/1203 ‘General Charge: Ill treatment of PoW at P.G.66 (Capus) (1945-46)
My Melancholy Rifle
Privates Wally Binch and Eddie Hallett were both in the 70th Young Soldiers Battalion and then transferred into the Anti-tank Platoon of the 2/5th. They fancied themselves a comedy song and dance double act, and this is just one of the comic songs they created while on service in North Africa. It commemorated Wally 'christening' his Lee-Enfield rifle by shooting at a Messerschmitt fighter. Sung to the tune of 'My Melancholy Baby'
Go to sleep my melancholy rifle,
You know I will pull you through ,
Your sights are set at Five Hundred, Baby,
To shoot the Messerschmitts out of the blue,
Every rifle's got a different number,
I know yours is 'Two, Five, Two'*,
Your sights are bent a bit,
And your barrel 's full of grit,
That's why I'm feeling melancholy too ...
* A reference to the army Charge Sheet, numbered 252.
Sedjenane
Not a song, but this poem featured in the first collection of battalion members experiences, Memories of Sedjenane. The earliest version of it that I have been able to find appeared in Recce News, a typed newsheet produced by the 46th Recce Battalion in Tunisia, on 15 March 1943, submitted and presumably written by Lt D. V. Weeks
Night — and over the darkened plain,
The guns roll back from Sedjenane.
Not in defeat, or dark despair,
For their throats have chorused a battle air
All day to the skies o'er Sedjenane.
Back in the red Tunisian mud,
Red with the flow of our English blood.
Men are lying, some dead, some dying,
They fell in the fight for Sedjenane.
We were there too in that mouth of hell.
'Neath the whispering rush of the German shell
Or the rending crash where the mortars fell,
Fell on the road from Sedjenane.
We saw men come in twos and threes
With bleeding hands and bloody knees,
We saw men come from that place of death,
With the Reaper's song in their laboured breath.
They had fought so well for Sedjenane,
So we left that town with its silent dead,
Came back with our guns from that place of dread,
The world was told and ' twas truly said
It was bitter fighting at Sedjenane.
