1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment

1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment
Suez November 1956

Although 3 Paras drop at El Gamil airfield gained much publicity, 1 Para also fought at Suez. The picture on the right is of me rigged to jump, which was taken during the summer of 1957 at RAF Boscome Downs when 'D' Coy was testing the Blackburn Beverly for both the Army & Airforce, but that's a long story.

We sailed into Port Said harbour on 5th November 1956 and there was a large plume of smoke on one side and the crackle of gunfire from the town. When we were put ashore the first thing we were told was to brew up as no one seemed to know what we should be doing and we stayed in this general location for the rest of the day or pretty close to it. After a little while, small patrols were sent out to police the neighbourhood. These became very popular when the lads started to come back laden down with AK 47s, and it became a must to get hold of one as they were so far advanced over our trusty old 303.

We were impressed by the variety of ammunition that came with these guns,as the tips of the bullets were coloured coded. If I remember rightly a red tip was for tracer, blue was armour-piercing, green was explosive, and then there was a rainbow tip bullet with several different coloured rings on it. How did we find out what was what? By the normal way of firing off hundreds of rounds just to see what damage they did.

During the day we slept rough except at night most of the lads slept undercover. The following day we were withdrawn by sea on an aircraft carrier, and before we left we had acquired some of the latest Soviet track mounted ack-ack vehicles along with a large Mercedes Salon car in which some enterprising men of the Battalion were doing their patrol work.

Our CO thought the ack-ack vehicles would look nice in the airborne museum so we loaded them onto an LST along with the Merc. When we got back to Famagusta after a very stormy night we found a number of MOD officials there to greet us, where they confiscated our ack-ack vehicles and all our AK 47s but did leave us the Merc, which the CO had sold and the money placed in the Battalion's funds.

Bryan Hunter
On parade with the
PRA branch at Hastings

As we had been withdrawn to cover the withdrawal of the British Army from Suez, we started training straight away for an airborne assault on the Egyptian barracks at Isamalia. My job, if this attack went in, was to move forward with the Engineers and when they blew the barbed wire with banglore torpedoes, then I had to charge through the gap with two haversacks of handgrenades and start to throw them in all directions to keep the Egyptians' heads down while the rest of the Battalion charged the gaps in the wire from about 200 yds back. There were about six of us that had been given the unenviable job of the first charge, and when we had asked how it was we had been selected we were told that we some of the fastest and most nimble in the battalion. The officer would not comment on the fact that all those chosen were national servicemen, therefore, they would not be missed so much as we were all due for demob in under a year. It was a time I was glad not to be called on to go into battle as I did not fancy my chances of reaching the ripe old age of twenty.

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