They’re overused phrases in football, we’re going into battle, it’s going to be a war out there, he’s someone you’d want alongside you in the trenches, but what of some of the players who, 70 years ago now, did find themselves in the trenches, in a battle, in an actual war. Where better to start you would think than with a former Carlisle manager, in Tim Ward, who as a pre-war wing-half for Derby County and after making guest appearances for Notts County, Hamilton and Leeds during his time in the Army, found himself serving as a nursing orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps in June 1944.
Ward involved in both the battle to take the Odon river then Caen as he was kept very busy dealing with badly wounded and dying men, the winger himself suffering a shrapnel wound to the scalp on the front line at Estry when a Bren-carrier exploded. Ward’s only weapon he had himself though was the football he carried in his ambulance, the beautiful game however being the last thing he would have on his mind as in May 1945 he witnessed the horrors of the Belsen concentration camp. The ending of hostilities seeing Tim resume his career with Derby, win two England caps and then go on to manage Carlisle for 13 months during the years of 1967 and 1968.
Things were no easier for Johnny Sherwood either, although he did at least manage to win the 1941 War Cup Final with Reading before he left England. It didn’t take him long to be captured in Singapore in February 1942 though where he would spend three years imprisoned in the infamous Changi prisoner of war camp. Sherwood leading a somewhat charmed life before at the end of the war returning to Elm Park via Australia as he survived working on the notorious ‘death railway’ in Burma, his prison ship being torpedoed, and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, where he was last imprisoned.
Others were just as lucky meanwhile, Arthur Turner, who was an amateur at the time and would later sign professional forms with Charlton and play against Derby in the first post-war FA Cup final in April 1946 in a match watched by an estimated 98,000 fans inside the old Wembley, being one of them. Turner, an air gunner, the only survivor when the Coastal Command aircraft he was in crashed in the Bay of Biscay. The centre-forward floating in the sea for several hours before eventually being picked up by the Allies.
Another fortunate Coastal Command server being Eddie Kilshaw who made his Football League debut for Bury before the war ended normal football. Kilshaw the pilot when his flying boat crashed into a hillside on a Scottish island in conditions of poor visibility, some of the crew dying but Kilshaw and the other survivors eventually being rescued by the Royal Navy. The famous name of Stan Mortensen being another plane crash escapee, the future England international and wireless operator crash landing in a fir plantation on a training flight, Mortensen very lucky to receive just a cut to the head that required stitches considering his pilot and bomb-aimer were killed and their navigator lost a leg.
Fortune wasn’t there for well over 50million people however who did perish in the war, one of those being Jackie Pritchard. The Cardiff City goalkeeper, a slave labour prisoner of the Japanese, one of 640 men aboard the prison ship Suez Maru when it was torpedoed by the American submarine USS Bonefish in November 1943. Those that survived drowning in the holds swimming away from the sinking ship only to be gunned to death in cold blood in the Java Sea by the crew of a Japanese minesweeper that was in the area, the vessel also ramming rafts and lifeboats before speeding off in the direction of Jakarta.
Bolton outside-left Wally Sidebottom was another to die at sea, the Rochdale war-time guest involved in the biggest British naval disaster in the English Channel during the war. Sidebottom, alongside 461 seamen, aboard HMS Charybdis when she was sunk by two German torpedo boats during the failed attempt to intercept the German blockade runner Münsterland off the coast of Brittany in October 1943. So, for some footballers they ended up involved in what was definitely a matter of life or death, Bill Shankly himself playing for various teams on a part-time basis during his travels around Britain at R.A.F. stations during the war.