Sadly Sid I cannot find out what units were on the Common at that time, but it was the gathering place for a lot of US units prior to D-Day and was one huge camp. This little piece is from a BBC People at War page "Our next move which came sometime in April 1944, was to Camp 21 on Southampton Common which had been transformed, like much of southern England, into a vast military camp holding thousands of troops and vehicles. It was surrounded by high coils of barbed wire and patrolled by police, both civil and military. Even before it was sealed in late May, access to and from the common was severely restricted with passes required to leave and enter -1 still have one permitting me to leave on signals duty, actually to operate a military switchboard located in a house adjacent to the common. As a highly trained wireless operator, my skills were put to good use riding about the common on a bicycle delivering weighty missives, marked "Overlord, Top Secret", to various unit commanders against signature. A military postman! In May, we took part in the last pre-invasion exercise codenamed "Fabius" providing line and radio communications for a monitoring team based on Hayling Island - a task not entirely dissimilar to that we later performed in the Normandy beachhead, albeit without the noise and fireworks! Here, for the first time we sampled 24 Hour Assault Ration Packs - small brown boxes containing 4,000 calories of concentrated food. We also had cans of self-heating soup, water sterilising tablets and a small "Tommy" cooker for brewing up in our mess-tins. A letter home , enclosing a press cutting about these packs, stating that I had sampled these rations was cut out - literally - by a base censor - by this time all our mail was censored, some by our unit officers, some by a base censor for greater privacy. During exercise "Fabius" we heard a rumour that a number of bodies of GIs had been washed up along the south coast - the story was that some GIs had disemberked from landing-craft in deep water and had drowned. Probably a deliberately leaked rumour for it was not until long after the war that the full truth emerged. A convoy of landing-craft containing thousands of GIs, sailing from Plymouth, had been attacked by German E-boats; two large LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks) had been sunk with the loss of some 700 lives and many more injured. Soon after "Fabius" all the embarkation camps were sealed with no one allowed in or out. Our advance party remained in Southampton, the rest of us were moved, in convoy under guard, to Camp R7 near Felixstowe" http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/69/a2001169.shtml Chris SOUTHERN LIFE(UK) http://Southernlife.org.uk History of the Hampshire, Dorset and IOW Villages,Towns and Churches ----- Original Message ----- From: "SydHockey" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2007 9:22 AM Subject: [ENG-HANTS] ARMY Hello Everybody, I wonder if any one would know the name of the Regiment that was stationed on the SOUTHAMPTON COMMON 1944-45. Thank you, syd ............................................. Want to contact the local community? Please visit Hampshire Parish Jottings http://hants.parishjottings.org.uk ............................................. ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message