Many of us read the saga of our armed forces MP Ivor Caplin's trip to Iraq.

This included eight hours in a plane of the Queen's Flight plus all the attendance required and, as later described, a punishing schedule of visits fully protected as befits a Minister of the Crown.

This is in stark contrast to the experience of servicemen sent there in 1942 when the travel arrangements were somewhat different.

We embarked on a troopship at Liverpool on a cold, dark December afternoon in 1941.

It was a modern passenger liner but our bunks were rows of hammocks and we were packed in like sardines.

If a film had been made of us trying to climb into those hammocks as the ship dipped in the waves (there were no stabilisers in those days), it would have won an Oscar for the best comedy.

After a rocky night at sea, we awoke to find ourselves in convoy battling through mountainous waves in the North Atlantic and, as if this were not enough, informed that the Japanese had wrecked Pearl Harbour.

So there we were, dreading an attack by submarines with a war in the Middle East and another in the Far East - can you imagine the thoughts of our families back home?

To complete the picture, I would guess that 80 per cent were seasick as there were stricken bodies everywhere.

As we headed through the South Atlantic, the weather improved and so did our spirits. After brief stops at Freetown and Cape Town, where we were not allowed ashore, we dropped anchor in Durban on January 8, 1942. This meant we had been at sea for a whole month.

We enjoyed a memorable five days ashore then it was another ship, another continent and so we reached Bombay in India. But this was not our final destination for, after three days, were put aboard a well-equipped Dutch ship.

By this time we were really cheesed off with liners, battleships and anything else connected with the high seas. At last we were told our final port of call would be Basra in Iraq.

Our last night aboard was spent sailing up the Euphrates and, as a welcoming gesture, the Iraqis were taking shots at us.

We heard bullets striking the ship's funnel and were ordered below decks but we all arrived safe and sound on February 3. This made the journey time to our war station eight weeks and one day precisely and some of my pals acquired bow legs in the process. A modern airliner from Gatwick can do it in four hours.

We were then taken to a desert in the middle of nowhere where we were ordered to unpack large canvas bundles strewn here and there.

These turned out to be tents, Indian variety, with a double skin to ward off the heat, but nobody knew how to erect them and no instructions were enclosed.

By then we were exhausted and lay down to sleep amid a mayhem of tent poles and canvas, only to be awoken at the crack of dawn by a bugle call to remind us we were now on active service.

-S. Lipman, Hove