Ernest George Spiller

Ernest George Spiller was born on 21st August 1923 and grew up in Hambledon at Fairfield Cottages, East Street, the son of George and Daisy Spiller. His father worked as a cowman and during the Second World War also served locally with the Royal Observer Corps, part of Britain’s home air-defence network. Ernest’s childhood therefore belonged to a generation that came of age entirely during wartime. By 1939 he was working as a painter, a typical village trade, and still living at home with his parents and younger sister.

As he reached adulthood he entered military service with the Royal Army Service Corps as a driver. The role was far from safe. RASC drivers were responsible for keeping the army supplied with ammunition, food and equipment, and on active fronts they often operated under artillery fire, air attack and the ever-present danger of mines. Ernest was one of several men from Hambledon assigned to ammunition transport duties, carrying shells forward to Royal Artillery gun positions supporting the advance in Italy.

By late 1943 the Allied 8th Army was fighting northwards along the Adriatic coast. The German retreat across the Sangro River line involved extensive demolition, mined roads and ambushes in mountainous terrain. Supply columns had to travel narrow winding roads and river crossings under constant threat while maintaining the artillery barrage essential to the infantry advance. It was during this hazardous phase of the campaign that Ernest lost his life on 9th December 1943 at the age of twenty.

He was buried in Sangro River War Cemetery, where many casualties from the bitter fighting of November and December 1943 were concentrated after the battle. The cemetery contains soldiers from across the Commonwealth who fell during the struggle to break the German Winter Line in central Italy.

Ernest Spiller’s service represents the experience of many young Second World War soldiers from rural communities: not in the front line infantry assaults, but in the equally dangerous work that kept the guns firing and the army moving forward. His death, at only twenty years of age, marked the loss of one of Hambledon’s younger generation whose adult life had barely begun before it was claimed by war.