HERBERT Tatem was only 16 when, in July 1939, he completed his first 'boot camp' with the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps. Within weeks Europe was plunged into war and the boy soldier found himself manning a machine gun outpost at St. David's, guarding the East End against enemy vessels.

Signing on as a professional soldier the day war was declared, Pte. Tatem spent the next six years in khaki, carrying out a number of key duties to ensure the island remained out of Nazi control.

And now the 83 year old has written a book about his military service during those days of uncertainty. is the result of two years of research and personal recollection by a man who, more that 65 years ago, found himself in the first line of defence against a possible German invasion.

Despite the hardships of those years, Mr. Tatem has provided readers with a light-hearted yet colourful account of life in Bermuda throughout the 1930s and early 1940s from the perspective of a young man still coming to grips with adulthood yet eager to do his duty for Queen and country.

"I've tried to leave out as many of the tiresome guards, patrols, trench digging, navy watch keeping and dozens of other duties, unless they were interesting, and tried to recall most of the funny things that happened to me and the other troops," Mr. Tatem said.

It is perhaps not surprising that the young Tatem would become a professional soldier. Growing up in Spanish Point, the military, and in particular its marching bands, imposed its presence on the impressionable youth.

"Back then Prospect was a military barracks and I used to go up there with my four sisters," he told the .

"We'd go to church and after church service the band went down in the park and played military music and popular songs of the time.

"We also lived about 400 yards from Admiralty House and they held parties every summer and would invite all the neighbours. I also remember my sisters would get invited by all the sailors to go up to dances at Dockyard so we got very closely knit with the services."

There was another reason why Mr. Tatem would eventually find himself in the army.

"I joined the Cadet Corps when I was at Saltus at the age of about ten or 11 and then later on that year I joined St. Andrews Sea Scouts," he said.

"That's where I learnt arms drill and marching ? it was a fun thing for young people to get involved in.

After leaving school at 15, Mr. Tatem entered the retail trade, working in Smith's department store. And it was through his job that he wound up in the army.

"Several of the boys were a year or two older than me and they had joined the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps," he said.

"They basically talked me in to joining the BVRC. I said, 'Look, I'm still only 16' but they said I might as well join as I was tall enough and I was going to be 17 in July ? this was in April of 1939

"So I got talked in to joining up when I was still only 16 and I became a weekend soldier. Back then we had our camp then in the first two weeks of July. It was all under canvass then ? no buildings at all, or very few. I was in the machine gun company and had to do 20 drills before I was allowed to go out. The sergeant instructor said he'd give me two lessons a night so that I could get my 20 drills before I went to camp.

"On the Vickers machine gun I have been told I put in the highest score that was ever made on a tapping exercise. I went along the target and kept firing in short bursts. I fired off my 70 rounds and got 64 hits out of 70. No one else had made a score like that before or since.

"This caused quite a bit of conversation in the Officers' Mess apparently. I went to get my pay at the end of camp, smartly saluted and held out my hand for my money and Captain Astwood who paid the troops asked me how old I was. When I told him I was 17 he replied, ' will you be 17?' Very meekly I had to admit that I wouldn't be 17 for another week."

He said that I should have been in boy service but after that show that I put on with the machine gun I deserved a man's pay.

"That wasn't too long before war broke out in September and I was posted to St. David's. I remember hearing that war had been declared that Sunday morning. I was on my way to St. John's church and I met two of the fellows from Smith's. They asked me where I was going and when I said church they said 'not today you're not ? don't you realise the war's just started in Europe?'

"I dashed home on my bike, undoing my necktie and shirt as I went along. Luckily, I had polished my equipment a few days before and so I got it all together and headed off to the armoury.

"All this stuff was coming in in trucks and we had to sort it out ? guns packed in grease and a ton of other equipment.

"Were we war ready? Well, about as well as we could be for the first day of the war. Obviously somebody knew what was going on but the information really wasn't spread around that war was going to happen. It just seemed more like a last-minute 'bang' with something going wrong over in Europe.

"The next morning we hopped on a train and headed out to St. George's. My platoon then got on a ferry boat and went to St. David's. We were based near where the Black Horse is now but what used to be the St. David's cricket field.

"We had an interesting time up there. We had outposts and two machine guns that were mounted to lay an arc of fire across St. George's harbour and two more at Ruth's Bay near Clearwater Beach. That area was all open with a couple hundred yards between Ruth's Point and Cooper's Island. There was quite a stretch of water with small beaches in there."

Although a German invasion never materialised, the threat of a Nazi strike was a very real one throughout the six years of conflict, and while Mr. Tatem ? like the rest of Bermuda ? had a quiet war, fear and tension were part of daily life.

"You never knew what was coming," Mr. Tatem recalled.

"We had to sleep with our equipment. There were quite a few submarines around Bermuda and a couple of German warships were out this way also. There was definitely a possibility that Germany would invade. Why would they want to? Because of our closeness to America. Although the US wasn't in the war at the time, the Germans probably had a feeling that they would enter the war on the side of the Britain and Canada eventually.

"In fact, I don't know why they didn't try and invade. We had a German plane come in, a flying boat, just before the war and of course the crew was made to feel at home ? I guess they took a lot of pictures. There was also the German warship , a heavy cruiser, which was out in the harbour for a while.

"They had plenty of pictures and information about the island and they could have easily taken over. They could have just sent over one ship with 11-inch guns, put it off the South Shore outside of the range of our six inch guns, and obliterated Bermuda really.

"We never even had six-inch cannon on South Shore until the middle or end of 1940, and although Dockyard was meant to be fortified, it really wasn't. We just had the two guns at the east end covering the harbour.

"We did have Royal Navy warships here as backup ? heavy cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, we probably had up to 17 ships at any one time at this station. But they usually went on cruises ? up north to Boston when it was hot here and south to the islands in the winter time. They'd be gone for two months at a time."

So was serving in Bermuda a soft option?

"It was a difficult set-up," Mr. Tatem said.

"Food got very scarce and life for everybody was very poor. There were no tourists coming in and we had to depend on ships for our food supplies. I can remember one ship coming here with supplies was sunk just off Bermuda. We had to start killing off horses because there wasn't any feed for them. We didn't actually go hungry but a lot of things that we used to have on the table disappeared."

There were other hardships that many suffered. Although he never fired a shot in anger, Mr.Tatem had several friends who fought in foreign theatres of war ? some never to return home.

Mr. Tatem finished his military career working in the Cipher Office at Admiralty House before returning to Smith's in 1946. So what made him decide now to write about his experiences as a young man?

"In recent years I have had friends ask me what Bermuda was like when I was a youngster and, from fairly newcomers to Bermuda, what it was like during the war years," Mr. Tatem explained in the introduction to his publication.

"After answering many questions I have been told, 'You should write a book with all of your memories and all of the things that happened here, for at least your children to know about it'."