Len Chester
In May of 1939, fourteen-year-old Len Chester joined the British Royal Marines as a bugle boy. After training, he was assigned to Scapa Flow in Scotland, the Royal Navy’s main base. There, the teenager and other young bugle boys battled boredom while ducking pedophiles, surviving on meager pay, and enduring strict discipline. He would later describe those experiences in his WWII autobiography, Bugle Boy.
Most of his time was not spent ashore at Scapa Flow, however, but aboard battleships. Len’s first ship was the HMS Iron Duke, an obsolescent veteran that had once served as the flagship of the Grand Fleet during WWI, then as the flagship of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet after that conflict’s end. By the time WWII began, the Iron Duke was past its prime, so it was moored in Scapa Flow as a harbor defense ship. There, she was severely damaged by German bombers in October of 1939, and had to run aground to avoid sinking. In that condition, she served as an anti-aircraft platform until the war’s end, when she was refloated, broken up, and sold for scrap.
Len barely survived another bombing raid aboard the Iron Duke in March of 1940. As he described it: “I was very lucky during that raid as I was sent with a message to the bomb area and had to move along the starboard waist when I heard the whine of a plane diving,” he recalled. “I didn’t wait but ran as fast as I could, easily breaking the four-minute mile, undoing eight cleats on an armored door and getting inside to safety. If that German pilot dropped that bomb a fraction of a second earlier on the quarter-deck where I was then I could have been the youngest boy to die in the Second World War“.
After the Iron Duke, Len was reassigned to other warships, where he served on extremely hazardous Arctic convoy duties on the so-called “Murmansk Run“. Those convoys braved German bombers, submarines, and warships, to maintain an Allied supply route to the embattled Soviet Union from Britain and the US via the Russian ports of Archangel and Murmansk.
Upon reaching age 18, Len transferred from the bugle boys and became a full-fledged Royal Marine, with whom served until the war’s end and beyond. He finally took off the uniform and rejoined the civilian world in 1955, after 16 years in the ranks. He went on to raise a family, and pursued a career as an insurance agent and with British Petroleum, before retiring at age 82.