[Home] - [Role in WWII] - [Family and Friends] - Diaries - [Preface] : [1940] - [Illustrated article]

Preface to Edward Packe's diary of World War II

Mobilization envelope
Envelope of Mobilization papers, dated 4 Sept 1939. This was the mobilization to his army post. Later he was seconded to the R.A.F.
Edward Packe had retired from the Army in 1930, but was mobilized at the outbreak of World War. At first he trained troops at his Regimental Depot, then by the end of 1939 he was seconded to the R.A.F. as an Air Intelligence Liaison Officer (A.I.L.O) and sent out to join No. 4 Squadron serving with the British Expeditionary Force in 1 January 1940. At first, he trained for his new role as Air Intelligence Liaison Officer (A.I.L.O.), but as he said ""I think the truth of the matter is that nobody knows what we are supposed to learn or how to teach us, so the result is that everybody pushes us off to somebody else as soon as possible. One thing is quite certain and that is that none of us five budding A.I.L.O.s have the least idea what we are supposed to do.
He returned to England in 10 February 1940 for orders, and discovered to his disgust that he was expected to go an A.I.L.O. course in April (he had been told that the course was "out-dated and quite useless"). He returned to France on 10 March 1940 and started his A.I.L.O. work. He returned to England on 6 April 1940 for the despised course (the diary doesn't even bother to cover this time). On 12 May 1940, he was recalled to France, where almost immediately he was involved in the retreat to Dunkirk (which he spells as "Dunkerque"). After a rush to the coast, he managed to return to England a fortnight later.

The diary skips several months, and has a short account at the end of September of wartime Britain, with air-raids and aerial dog-fights visible from the ground. There is no futher entries. As his daughter Celia says "Towards the end of my father's life and probably after he had selected and edited his wartime diaries, he made a huge bonfire in the garden where he burnt a mass of wartime material which had been treasured over the years. He said at the time that he was burning papers of a confidential nature - and that he had breached security by keeping them in the first place. This may account for the fact that he left for posterity most of his Great War diary, with the exception of the final months of 1918. At that time he was working for Intelligence at the Air Ministry in London. And he only saved the first year of his 1939/45 diary for future reading. Perhaps he had got fed up with keeping a diary by then ... or perhaps he had been so strictly trained in the discipline of Intelligence always to observe a rigorous sense of security - he was just tidying things up a bit, before his death."

Interesting events in the diary and letters

The archivist of the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Trust gives one further incident in the war, from the regimetal records of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. "In the War diaries for 1943 someone remembering when Edward Packe and another officer put snuff into the gas masks, so when it came to 'gas hour', when they all had to wear masks as a routine drill, it caused some amusement.....to some!"

[Home] - [Role in WWII] - [Family and Friends] - Diaries - [Preface] : [1940] - [Illustrated article]