Instead, the action was in the air. Breathtaking aerial battles occurred largely in southern England: over Kent, Hampshire, Sussex and Surrey. Residents of the south cheered and gasped as they watched Spitfires thrusting and parrying with Messerschmitts high across the summer sky like modern-day knights, while journalists and radio announcers on the ground commentated on the whole thing for the rest of the country and the world, as if it were a cricket match.
The British people were more than spectators watching or listening to the action as ‘The Few’ defended Britain’s shores against the invader. Instead, the Battle of Britain provided opportunities for ordinary people to fight the enemy and support the war effort. On 10 July, the WVS beseeched the nation’s housewives to deliver a blow to the Germans with their saucepans; any item made of aluminium, they were told, could be recycled into Spitfires, Hurricanes and other aircraft. Soon, droves of women, men and children began scouring homes and garages for the ‘Saucepans for Spitfires’ campaign. Kettles, saucepans, metal dishes and other kitchen implements poured in – anything thought useful, even shells of old cars, were donated. When homes were emptied, those with money to spare raided local shops for new aluminium goods that they could offer in patriotic gesture. When the drive ended after two months, the appeal had raised an estimated 1,000 tons of aluminium.
In addition to sacrificing new and used kitchen stock, one could simply invest in a new Spitfire. Recycling metal for planes could be a bit intangible, but with the ‘Spitfire Fund’, the Minister of Aircraft Production Lord Max Beaverbrook, itemized the cost of every Spitfire part. Five pounds bought a compass, while a few pennies bought a rivet; set down 15 shillings, and a machine-gun blast tube was yours. Cities, neighbourhoods, factories, newspapers and other groups organized collections for a grander contribution: £2,000 put a pair of wings on a fighter plane, while £5,000 bought the entire plane. (This was not, however, the true cost of building the plane: £12,000 was nearer the mark.) Those who bought a plane had the honour of naming it; some names were mundane, some patriotic, others advertising opportunities, and still others were simply unfortunate. Alice’s ‘City of Birmingham’ graced four Spitfires, LNER sent up a ‘Flying Scotsman’, Marks and Spencer was proud of its ‘Marksman’, while any pilot must have been a bit wary of flying Portland Cement’s ‘Concrete’. Listening to an air battle ‘called’ over the air, or turning one’s eyes to the skies to watch the glint and flash above, one might, as Lady Reading of the WVS put it, ‘feel a tiny thrill’ at the thought that perhaps one’s saucepan or shilling was part of the fray.5
* * *
While aerial battles pitting fighter against fighter raged in the south, civilians across Britain began to feel the heat of the Blitz. Before 24 August, nighttime raids consisted of a few aircraft roaming across wide swathes of the country, dropping bombs here and there. After the 24th, however, night bombing campaigns began to concentrate on industrial and urban areas. Industrial works, such as the 345-acre Nuffield factory (producing Spitfires) and Fort Dunlop (tyres), situated in the Castle Bromwich area close to the city centre made Birmingham an ideal mark. South of the city, Austin’s plant at Longbridge, which had converted operations to manufacture both military vehicles and aircraft, added to the importance of Birmingham. Nearer Alice, in Acock’s Green, Rover made engine parts, and just down the road was Serck Radiators, which manufactured all of the radiators and air coolers in the Hurricanes and Spitfires used in the Battle of Britain. British Small Arms (BSA), producing nearly half of the precision weaponry in Britain, was also very near Alice in Small Heath. Besides these major works, Birmingham produced everything from tanks to stirrup pumps (used by firewatchers to douse fires started by incendiaries) and grenades to minesweepers. Although Cadbury continued to supply the nation with chocolate and cocoa, the company also opened up Bourneville Utilities, making plane parts, rockets, respirators and munitions.
On the first night of intensified bombing for the area, 24/25 August, German bombers embarked from the Brittany coast in France and flew over Dorset, dropping bombs on Bristol and South Wales before heading into the Midlands, where bombs fell on factories in Castle Bromwich, less than five miles from Alice’s home.
On 25/26 August, Birmingham experienced its worst raid to date. Woolworths and other shops in the Bull Ring were damaged, the Market Hall was destroyed and, closer to home, just five minutes’ walk away, a bomb dropped in the garden of one of Jacq’s schoolmates, while another lifted a house and dropped it whole in the crater left by the bomb. Overall, twenty-five people were killed or seriously injured in the raid. When the Bridges looked out of their shelter door that night, they could see the glow of fires that erupted across the city, which the German planes flocked to like ‘flys [sic] to the honeypot’.
The period of ‘nuisance raids’ was over. After three nights of raids on Birmingham and Coventry, the Luftwaffe shifted its attention to Merseyside, which received heavy attacks on the last four nights of August. Over 1,000 people lost their lives in the raids across Britain in August alone. By the end of the month, the effects of regular air raids were noticeable, not only in the damaged landscape of Alice’s Birmingham, but also in the people around her. Stomachs flipped and churned, some bought phospherine tonic to calm their nerves, and everywhere emotions were raw. Bridges’ husband sulked and complained that in all the commotion, Alice had forgotten to pay attention to him. When he came down to the shelter during a raid on 30 August, he was in a huff that he couldn’t find his keys. ‘He was none too sweet … blamed me, how like a man,’ she told M-O. But she kept her calm and helped him search the house, until finally she asked him to try his pockets. ‘I was right, as usual. What a man.’
With nerves snapping and confidence slipping all around her, Bridges attempted to shore up morale. She taped a large sign to her window for all to see; it was similar to one her husband, Les, had noticed on the way to work. It read: ‘THERE IS NO DEPRESSION IN THIS HOUSE AND WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN THE POSSIBILITIES OF DEFEAT. THEY DO NOT EXIST.’ The same day she made out her will. In admiration for her neighbours or as a mantra to bolster her own spirits, she told M-O that she was impressed with how others around her endured the Blitz: ‘INDOMITABLE SPIRIT DOMINATES. THEIR CHEERFULNESS IS WONDERFUL.’
The focus of the German bombers shifted to London soon afterwards. After a RAF raid on 26 August killed civilians in Berlin, Hitler promised to raze British cities to the ground in revenge. ‘When the British Air Force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then’, he swore as a crowd of Germans erupted in frenzied applause, ‘we will in one night drop 150-, 230-, 300-or 400,000 kilograms’.6 To those in England who wondered when the invasion would begin, Hitler assured them, ‘Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!’7
The London Blitz began on 7 September, just three days after Hitler promised to destroy British cities, and would continue uninterrupted for fifty-seven nights. Helen Mitchell endured the first night of the London Blitz playing cards ‘in a state of fright’ with her husband, son and friend in an underground coal cellar in Beckenham among other residents (whom Helen called ‘bodies’) of the flats where the Mitchells were living at the time. The next day, Helen’s husband left for Canada, and her son went off to the army four days later, abandoning her to face the Blitz alone. Unable to carry on she left the city a week later to stay with a friend in Epsom. A landmine later obliterated the flats.
From the end of August, German ships streamed towards the Dutch coast from ports in Lubeck, Stettin and Kiel. Soon, British reconnaissance reported a build-up of ships in the invasion ports of Holland, Belgium and France. By 8 September, most of the barges, tugs and trawlers slated for Operation Sea Lion were in place. More ominously, British intelligence believed that specially trained Gestapo troops had arrived at embarkation points on the 11 August. Intelligence reports announced that, ‘An expedition may be launched at any time now.’ 8
The Battle of Britain lasted until 15 September, when the RAF
chased German fighters and bombers to the coast during a daylight raid on London, forcing the Germans to rely on night raids from then on. On the 17th, the RAF bombed Dunkirk and scattered the invasion fleet. Hitler now had little option but to postpone the invasion of Britain until the spring. Nonetheless, across the Channel, preparations for invasion continued to be reported by Allied intelligence well into October.
Bridges didn’t write for the entire month of September, but by October, when she resumed her diary, Birmingham was once again a target despite the heavy raids on London. Sleep was becoming a treasured commodity with each passing day and, although Alice had complained in August that her sleep was cut to a mere seven hours, it got considerably worse.
On the night of 4 October, it wasn’t the German bombers that deprived her of sleep, but her husband. He stumbled into the shelter late that night, drunk from a night out with his mates. She sent him back to the house for his dinner, but when she went in to check on him, Alice found he’d burned his meal and in a fit of anger had thrown the plate across the kitchen against the wall she’d recently painted.
I blazed … I told him exactly where he got off and that I was wasting my time running a home for a man who could go out drinking, come home and make himself a damn nuisance, when at that moment there were our lads giving their lives for such as he.
Defiantly, she said that she would evacuate Jacq to safety in the countryside and find a job instead of keeping house for him. He threatened to lock her inside the house so she couldn’t. She went to bed shaken, ‘I cannot afford rows … I can face bombing better.’
In the morning, she told him he could keep some of the housekeeping money and eat his dinners out, for she wouldn’t waste her time cooking for him. He balked, but then they patched things up. He admitted that he’d got drunk because he felt guilty that he was doing nothing for the war effort. She softened and defended him to M-O:
The last war he was seventeen or sixteen when he joined up, he was in it, you see, and doing something. This war he has responsibilities, a home to pay for and upkeep, a wife and child, his job to keep or another to get, to help the war effort and yet he’s in a reserved occupation.
For most of October, Alice and her family rushed down to the shelter at around 8 p.m., the time when the sirens seemed to wail as if on schedule. Some nights were relatively ‘quiet’, but the roar of German planes could nonetheless be heard overhead as they bypassed Birmingham and turned their wrath on another district. Bridges and her friends held their breath and hoped that Lord Haw-Haw, the British turncoat who broadcast on German radio with seemingly uncanny accuracy (though often this was little more than rumour spread after the fact), was right. Maybe Hitler really would spare Birmingham for his capital since he was determined to raze London to the ground, as Haw-Haw had asserted. But the hope was fleeting. In mid-October, the Germans returned to Birmingham for several nights.
At the start of these raids, on 15 October, Bridges had a difficult time convincing her husband to take cover. He was slightly deaf and swore she was too cautious: her ‘2 miles away is about 10 miles’, he mocked. Stubbornly, Les vowed not to move until he heard the bombs himself. Between the raids, she ran from the shelter through the garden, with ack-ack fire blazing nearby, to the house to beg him to come down, but it was no use. Finally, she absolved herself of all responsibility for him and ran back to the shelter. ‘He got terribly peevish, he’s a man that likes everything cut and dried and he thinks jerry shouldn’t come until he’s ready for him,’ she huffed to M-O from the safety of her Anderson shelter.
In his own good time, Les eventually came down to the shelter with a peace offering of coffee, but not without delivering a backhanded comment that he was right. The next morning, he learned that the bombs fell only a quarter of a mile away. Alice couldn’t help jesting: ‘I like your 10 miles.’ When the sirens went the next time, Les was in the shelter, wearing his tin hat.
On 24 October, Birmingham city centre endured a large raid that obliterated Marshall and Snellgrove’s department store. Bridges listened for bombs, ready with cotton for her ears and a piece of rubber to pop in her mouth (to protect from the impact of nearby explosions) and hovered over her daughter, prepared to protect her if need be. When the bombs whizzed nearby, Alice flopped over Jacq, who was duly annoyed to be awakened. When they looked out of the shelter, the sky over town was fully alight and fires glinted across the horizon. The next night, the Carlton Cinema where she’d taken her daughter to see a George Formby movie only five days earlier was hit in a raid. That night 170 people perished throughout the city. Alice would later learn that some friends were among the nineteen casualties in the theatre. ‘My interest in pictures has evaporated,’ she wrote in her diary.
In November came the rain. To Bridges, the back garden and the Anderson shelter resembled the trenches of the Great War. Water poured relentlessly into the shelter from all sides. Alice and Les took turns baling out the shelter, but it was a losing battle. It wasn’t long before all of the families along Bridges’ street gave up and decided to brave raids in their houses, taking cover in their shelters only when absolutely necessary. At such times, they sat ankle-deep in water, watched the rain run down the walls of the shelter and waited anxiously for the All Clear, when they could dash up to their homes and escape both the bombs and the wet. In the damp, with fear and frustration mounting, Alice learned that not only ankles, but also nerves became raw. ‘My young man went out this morning peevish,’ she wrote, ‘blaming me for the wet in the shelter, the cough on his chest, the fact that he has to wash and shave in the morning, the fact that there is a war on.’ Two days of constant rain, baling, ducking for cover and foul moods finally led to a truce. They both decided they must adapt to the situation and be civil to each other, ‘but if you could have conceived for one moment the hopelessness of our task’, Bridges sighed after she and Les endeavoured unsuccessfully to keep their shelter dry during the raid on 5 November.
The worst still lurked in the future. On 19 November, Bridges noted the fearful devastation that Coventry had suffered on 14/15 November. The shelter was still flooded, so she and her family were forced to endure the raid in their home.
Planes flew over in droves, right over our roof tops, hour on hour on hour … I sat on the bed on the floor in the corner of the big room, ready to fall on top of Jacqueline the minute I heard a bomb whizzing, wishing I had moved our heavy gramophone from overhead wondering how big a dent it would make in me.
But the night was Coventry’s, not Birmingham’s.
With the devastation wrought on Coventry that night, a new word was created: ‘Coventration’, or ‘to lay waste by aerial bombardment’.9 Around 500 tons of high-explosive bombs – five times the amount considered a ‘major raid’ – and 30,000 incendiary bombs obliterated the city centre. It took one woman a year to find where the Boots she had patronized for years used to stand. ‘It stood in the centre of the city on a corner, and the complete street … is gone,’ she told M-O. To her and others, though, after a year to heal, the destruction wasn’t entirely bad. On the anniversary of the bombing in 1941, the same woman wrote:
One continually gets new views through the ruins … One of the miners in this village said, ‘Apart from the loss of life, these Blitzes aren’t too bad. They have cleared away lots of stuff which the Corporation would never have been able to afford.’ I can endorse that. Apart from about four really interesting buildings, there is nothing at all to regret about the destruction of Coventry, as far as the actual bricks and mortar is concerned.10
One might find a silver lining in the destruction of uninspiring ‘bricks and mortar’, but there was nothing more tragic than the 568 dead that night, many of whom were rendered unidentifiable after an explosion took the roof off the mortuary and two days of rain soaked the remains. The raids injured a further 1,200 people. Nearly everyone in Coventry, which was a relatively small industrial town, knew someone who died, had gone missing or had lost their home in the ra
id. Soon after, a team from M-O went there to report on the ruin wrought on the city. They found ‘more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis, than during the whole of the previous two months together in all areas’. Some were left dazed and speechless, others cried or trembled uncontrollably, and still others lashed out at rescue and support personnel. Over and over, the team of observers heard residents echo a feeling of hopelessness – ‘Coventry is finished,’ ‘Coventry is dead.’11
A few days later, on the night of 19 November, it was Birmingham’s turn. Sirens went at 6.50 in the evening, just as Alice was ready to serve dinner. Initially, the family took cover inside, but the bombardment became so hot and shook the house so violently that they ran down to the shelter, the gunfire shredding the air and the sky lit up as if it were day. As they settled into their Anderson shelter, the next-door neighbours, the Brownings, came down looking for shelter. Seven of them huddled together under the corrugated steel and earth listening for hours on end to the ‘clack-clack of incendiaries falling’ and the shrapnel that ‘fell like hail round us’.
The electric fire that Les had fitted in the shelter warmed them and soothed their nerves somewhat, but when she heard a bomb falling – and much to her annoyance, her neighbours were quick to point out and comment on each one – Alice’s ‘tummy turned right over’. The noise was terrifying: according to one Londoner, bombs came down ‘with a tearing sound as well as a whistle; they did not fall, they rushed at enormous velocity’.12
Not until 2.30 in the morning did there seem to be a lull in the action, but when the Brownings decided to go back to the house, they were greeted by a massive blast. Two ‘landmines’ – parachute mines 8 feet long and 2 feet in diameter, which floated to the ground and caused extensive damage – landed in the street parallel to them. At the same time, a ‘breadbasket’ of incendiaries had fallen nearby, starting numerous fires.
Domestic Soldiers Page 6
