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Patricia Bridgen Farley was a Wren (Womens Royal Naval Service) stationed at Portkil, Near Kilcreggan, Scotland during World War II, living in a house affectionately known to the group of Wrens that were based there as 'The Barn'. The Wrens came to be known as the 'Barnites'.
The very first Americans we saw at Portkil were civilians. This was in the summer of '42, not long after I was posted there. The men were engineers who had arrived to supervise the renovation of the base at Rosneath for the U.S. Navy.
Actual construction by Navy Seabees began in the previous summer. According to Navy records, it was completed and commissioned in February '42, and began serving as a turnaround point for convoys on the North Atlantic run. These were the brave sailors and ships that bore the brunt of Nazi U-boat attacks, while trying to deliver much needed military equipment to the Russians.
The British used the base to repair and service destroyers but on October 1st 1942, it became part of the U.S. Naval Forces, Europe. As Rosneath was a great distance from the proposed invasion areas in the south of England, it was destined primarily as a receiving base for personnel and warships from the United States that were scheduled to go to amphibian bases down south.
At the peak of use at Rosneath, there were 136 officers and 5,000 men, with 24 officers and 544 men of the Marine Corps. Personnel were based in 994 Quonset huts as sleeping and eating facilities. The base boasted a 160,000 sq ft. supply depot, a tank farm that stored 200,000 gallons of fuel oil, 30,000 barrels of diesel oil, and 30,000 barrels of aviation gasoline, as well as an ammunition dump, 45 storage buildings and 233 air raid shelters.
We didn't make many friends with the men stationed at Rosneath. We did visit the entertainment area, but only as guests of the hospital corpsmen who lived much closer to us. They took us in their trucks to the movies and the occasional dances. We felt honoured to be part of their group, especially when we saw the ATS (Army) girls and civilians brought in by the Rosneath sailors and marines to the dances. Little snobs we were! The Wrens being the elite corps, of course!
Once in a while, the USO brought over comedians and pretty starlets to entertain the troops. Bob Hope was the star attraction one evening, but I missed the show as I was on leave.
When I was a little girl, my mother had a dressmaker who told fortunes by studying your face and feeling the shape of your ear. She told Mummy that I would marry a foreigner. I imagined a handsome German or suave Frenchman as a husband. It would never have occurred to me at that time to think about Americans. They lived so far away and were really strange creatures. So how was I to know that I would meet many of these strangers and end up marrying one?
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