"I’d like to give you my opinion of some of our equipment that we had during the war such as the uniform. I wasn’t very keen on that battledress that we had.. I don’t think that it was a very serviceable outfit. I think the old trousers and tunic that the Germans had was better than ours. You got bloody wet in that battledress and it took a heck of a time to get dry. We never had a decent waterproof cape. We had a cape as such but it’s an ungainly thing, not very serviceable, but I noticed that the Germans had a nice one - especially their paratrooper’s cape. It came down to your knees and had plenty of pockets in it and was waterproof. It was similar to our paratroopers rigout, I invariably wore that up in Holland when the weather was very bad and most of my mates managed to scrounge one and was wearing ‘em. And there were the rifles. We didn’t have rifles but the poor old infantry had rifles, the old Lee Enfield bolt action, the Yanks had their Garand rifles, automatic rifles and you could get a lot more rounds off in a short time with those and I was surprised that we never managed to get an automatic rifle out for the infantry and there was our Sten gun, and I didn’t think much of that, it was like bloody Woolworths made it."

"So when we managed to pick up a German 42 Schmeizer, which was a similar sort of weapon, 9 mm, that was a beautiful weapon that was, we just slung the bleeding Sten gun away. I remember a staff officer who caught me one day - he came over to me as I was sitting on the pavement of a little village - and I jumped up when I saw a jeep pull up, and this staff officer approached me and he said, ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’. I told him who I was and he said to me, ‘You don’t look it. Look at the way you are dressed.’ He was shocked by the German paratrooper’s smock, German jackboots, carrying a German sub-machine gun and he wasn’t too pleased about it, so I said ‘Well, I’m more bloody efficient wearing what I’ve got on that with our own gear.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ll have to look into this. I’ll see your bloody colonel about this.’ So he buggered off and luckily I didn’t hear any more about it"