Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  The small symmetrical crater was ringed round by the now-familiar mound of earth, and the surrounding bracken and grass was mown close to the soil. About thirty yards away from the crater a large number of beech saplings had had their heads cut cleanly off with a cut that ran parallel to the earth and not, as one would have supposed, at an angle to it. The larger trees that had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of the shell splinters received deep, clean cuts often six inches deep and the width of the bole.

  In spite of the obvious danger, country people going about their work soon became phlegmatic, tending to call a siren a ‘cyrene’, or just to refer to it as ‘that thing’. ‘There goes that thing again’, they would say, before getting on with the job in hand; and distant dogfights were regarded as a form of free entertainment. ‘They were just like butterflies flying round each other,’ said a woman of two tussling aircraft. ‘Lovely to watch.’ Children felt the same. Twelve-year-old Eileen Ryan, who had been evacuated from London to Weymouth, was walking with friends on the promenade one day and stopped to enjoy the spectacle of Spitfires wheeling in pursuit of ME 109s – until a warden roared at them, ‘You bloody kids – GET IN THE SHELTER!’

  There was huge excitement one day in Essex when a lone parachutist was seen swinging down out of the sky over Dagenham. Nine-year-old Richard Hunt was messing about with a gang of friends when somebody shouted that the invasion had begun, and a great crowd of people poured into the boys’ lane, armed with every kind of makeshift weapon, from garden forks to butchers’ knives, making for the fields. Richard had his airgun, and his friend Reggie some other weapon. Joining the rush, they ran through allotments, scattering the crops and breaking down fences in their way. At one stage they heard shots, and later learned that some member of the Home Guard, ignoring all the rules, had opened up on the parachutist and wounded him. The boys reached the scene in time to see an army van drive off with the man inside, and found out that, far from being German, he was one of the Polish or Czech pilots flying Spitfires with the RAF.

  Between 19 and 24 August bad weather enforced a lull and gave the RAF fighter squadrons some respite, but then Goering decided to concentrate attacks on 11 Group, which was defending London and the South East, and by the end of August Fighter Command had been drastically weakened: in the last week of August and the first of September 112 pilots and 256 aircraft were lost. Damage to ground stations was so severe that the fighters had to use small civilian airfields.

  Fortunately Goering never realized how close the RAF was to collapse. Instead of keeping up the pressure on fighter stations, he switched to the bombing of London – and so the Blitz proper began late in the afternoon of Saturday, 7 September 1940.

  Just after eight o’clock that evening the Chiefs of Staff issued the code word CROMWELL to military units, signifying that invasion was imminent. The warning put the whole country on alert: church bells rang out, the Home Guard stood to, and remained on post all night. Many people believed that German troops had already landed. What Hitler had launched, in fact, was Operation Loge, a mass attack on London, in which more than 1000 aircraft took part. Between then and the end of May 1941 the capital was attacked seventy-one times; a million houses were destroyed, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed.

  H. E. Bates was fishing on a lake in Kent when he witnessed one of the big raids coming in:

  Up to that day we had seen as many as eighty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty planes flying over at one time. Now we saw a phenomenon. It was like the inland migration of hundreds of black and silver geese. They came in steadily and unceasingly, not very high, the black geese the bombers, the silver the fighters. The fighters made pretty circling movements of protection above the bombers. They went forward relentlessly. The air was heavy with moving thunder and the culminating earthquakes of bombs dropped at a great distance. All that had happened before that day now seemed by comparison very playful.

  On 15 September – which became known as Battle of Britain Day – Fighter Command achieved its most spectacular success, breaking up raid after raid over London and the south coast. Such was Hitler’s frustration that two days later he shelved Operation Sealion indefinitely and turned his attention eastwards to Russia. It is estimated that during the Battle of Britain the RAF had lost just over 1000 aircraft, and the Luftwaffe nearly twice as many.

  When Hitler realized that his attempt to demoralize England had failed, attacks on London dwindled. But all Britain had been battered by bombs. After the capital, the city most heavily raided was Liverpool, where nearly 4000 people were killed. Bristol also came under persistent attack: on the night of 3–4 January 1941 a single raid lasted for twelve hours. Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Plymouth, Swansea and Southampton were also prime targets.

  Of all the outrages perpetrated by Hitler, none caused greater anger and grief than the attack on Coventry, on the night of 14 September 1940. The city was, in a sense, a legitimate target, for its factories were making cars, aircraft engines and munitions; but nothing could have prepared it for the devastating raid, which began at 8 p.m. and lasted until midnight, killing 560 people, destroying most of the city centre and leaving the fourteenth-century cathedral a ruined shell.

  Almost as emotive was the series of attacks that became known as the Baedeker raids. In April and May 1942, in revenge for Bomber Command’s laying waste the Baltic port of Lübeck, Hitler ordered reprisals against Exeter, Bath, York and Norwich – historic towns of no strategic importance. The raids killed 1600 civilians and wrecked many notable buildings, including the Assembly Rooms in Bath and the Guildhall in York. Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, a Nazi propagandist, announced that the Luftwaffe would hit every town in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker tourist guide. His threat was never carried out; but in another burst of retaliation Hitler responded to Bomber Command’s mass attack on Cologne (in May 1942) with three raids on Canterbury.

  In all the air raids throughout the war, human casualties were inevitably by far the most numerous in cities and towns, but the countryside suffered as well, mainly from bombs jettisoned by crews who had accomplished their principal mission and were on the way home, or were being hard pressed by fighters and sought extra speed to escape.

  In the early days of the battle a rumour went round that the Germans were dropping magnetic mines, and people wearing steel helmets were warned not to approach them in case they set off an explosion. But in fact almost everyone did wear steel helmets when out of doors, including ladies playing tennis, because during dogfights shrapnel and spent bullet cases were constantly raining down out of the sky. Vera Lynn wore a helmet in the car while driving to her shows.

  There were some astonishing survivals, such as that of Mr Withers and his neighbours in their Essex village, described by Margery Allingham:

  Their stick of bombs fell neatly between their bungalows, one bungalow, one crater, and so on … In the actual spot where Mr Withers’s own bomb fell he had a shed containing a pony and trap, a cat, some budgerigars, a jackdaw and a ton of coal. They got the pony out from under the trap in the crater and held it up for a minute or two until, to everyone’s amazement, it wandered off and began to eat. The cat ran away for nearly a fortnight. The budgerigars were none the worse. Most of the coal was retrieved, and the jackdaw died three days later, more from rage than anything else, Mr Withers said. No one in the houses was hurt.

  Between raids, life carried on. At Cranbrook School anti-aircraft guns were installed on the cricket field, and, whenever they opened up during a game, the boys had to sprint for cover. For minor crimes committed, an alternative to detention was a spell hoeing the sugar beet planted on one of the rugger pitches.

  Later in the war the Kent Messenger published a map showing where high-explosive bombs of 50kg or more had fallen on Sevenoaks Rural District between the end of July 1940 and the end of February 1944. Even though some 50,000 incendiary bombs were not included, the chart looked as though it had been blasted wit
h a charge of No. 5 pellets from a shotgun, so thickly was it spattered with dots. One particularly dense cluster, running north-west to south-east, lay close below Chartwell, as if the Luftwaffe had been aiming for the Prime Minister’s country home.

  Efforts were made to lure German pilots to false targets. One decoy town was laid out by Shepperton Studios on Black Down, north of Bristol. Bales of straw soaked in creosote were set alight to simulate the effects of the incendiary bombs dropped at the start of a raid, and drums of oil were ignited to represent buildings on fire. Dim red lights, powered by petrol generators, were switched on in a pattern based on the streets and railways of the city. But these initiatives seem to have been fruitless, for no bombs landed on or around the site.

  The Germans went so far as to attack the Republic of Ireland – even though the country was officially neutral, and the Government had embellished the south coast with signs made from white-painted concrete blocks proclaiming EIRE in huge letters. People were nervous of German intentions, fearing that Hitler might use the Republic as a springboard for invading England from the west – and the saying went that if the Führer wanted to take Ireland at 13.00 hours, it would be his by 16.00.

  Even so, nobody was prepared for the attack at lunchtime on 26 August 1940, when four bombs fell on the Shelburne Cooperative Dairy factory at Campile, in Wexford. The first landed in the canteen, killing three young women; the second came through the roof and started a fire; the third hit the railway line and the fourth landed in a field. The Germans claimed that the pilots had become separated from the rest of their formation, and had jettisoned their bombs over open country. To the people on the ground it seemed that they had made a precision raid. No convincing reason for the attack was ever established, but great was the fury of witnesses who saw the German Ambassador come from Dublin to the women’s funeral sporting a top hat and a scarlet sash emblazoned with a swastika.

  In England animal losses on farms mounted rapidly: in the nine months to December 1940 the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee – a voluntary body – reported 3000 air-raid casualties, mostly cattle and sheep. Of these, 843 were killed outright, 706 had to be put down and 440 were given first aid treatment. Many of the deaths and injuries resulted from the Nazi fighter pilots’ deplorable habit of machine-gunning herds in low-level attacks – more for target practice and their own amusement than from any hope of reducing English food supplies. From the dead stock, 30 per cent of the meat was bought by the Ministry of Food and sent for human consumption – but the salvage of a carcass depended on prompt action immediately after the animal had been killed. Unless some competent person – farmer, butcher or vet – tackled the victim within a few minutes, it would be useless; and the easiest method of disposal would be to bury it at the bottom of a bomb crater. The Ministry had its own arrangements for salvaging useable livestock, but told farmers that they themselves should be prepared ‘to slaughter, bleed and disembowel any animal injured beyond hope of recovery’.

  By no means all carcasses passed through official channels. One night, when a stick of bombs fell among cattle in a field near Upton House in Gloucestershire, locals sallied forth to assess the damage; but they went armed with knives, hacksaws, sacks and buckets, and by morning there was nothing left of the single casualty – a Friesian cow – except its horns and a few scraps of skin.

  The Luftwaffe had targets all over Britain, and people living under the bombers’ flight path had many alarming nights, wherever they lived. Stray bombs fell in the wilds of Wales and Shropshire, in the Lake District and on the North York moors. Legitimate targets like the Royal Ordnance Factory at Pembrey in Carmarthenshire inevitably attracted the Luftwaffe and endangered communities near them. At Brynamman, at the head of a mining valley, twenty miles north of Swansea, one morning in July 1940 two bombs landed next to the school and blew the roof off the church, but by a miracle none of the children was seriously hurt. During raids on the Liverpool docks shrapnel from the shells of anti-aircraft batteries rained down on the houses of Bromborough, ten miles away across the Mersey. The guns must have scored some hits because, for a fee of 3d, boys in the area could sit in the cockpit of a shot-down German plane.

  For country lads in Devon there was nothing to beat the lure of a downed enemy aircraft. On the morning of 4 May 1942 Dennis Moss and his twin brother Alan were out on their bikes near the village of Northleigh when they came on a place where the hedges on either side of the road had been breached, and the ground was littered with roots and branches.

  We dropped our bicycles on the grass and ran towards what was left of the crashed German plane [a JU 88]. Jagged pieces of the fuselage and wings were strewn over the field where it had come to violent rest … A policeman stood guard over the wreckage. An RAF airman hovered too. They didn’t seem to mind the morbid curiosity of thirteen-year-old boys as we inspected the remains … An arm severed at the shoulder was all that connected this sprawl of metal with the men who the previous night had been aiming to fly back over the Channel.

  The difficulties of rural life stand out in the diary of Doreen Kippen, who was twenty-one in 1941 and living in Cinders Cottage, a rented house with no running water and an earth closet in the garden, three miles out of Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire, some fifty miles west of Birmingham. Lively minded, brave, stoical and slightly irreverent, with a strong sense of humour, she endured the privations of war and winter with indomitable spirit. One main comfort was her boyfriend, Bert; another the wireless, with its news bulletins reporting the progress of the war, and Workers’ Playtime endlessly repeating songs like ‘Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer’ and ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’. A third escape was the cinema in town, where she watched films like Rulers of the Sea, with Margaret Lockwood, Douglas Fairbanks and Will Fyffe, Geronimo (‘the Indian who massacred American settlers. Thrilling!’), and Pride and Prejudice, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.

  January 1, 1941. Wed. Very dark and cold. Last year was dreadful but I met Bert and fell off bike in mud and was kissed in bomb crater, so not as bad as it might have been. Meat ration down to half again and Lord Woolton asks us not to eat cheese but to save for miners.

  2 Thurs. Light fall of snow. First of year and Uncle and I went to evening pictures. Halfway through, whistle and lights up for ‘alert’. Nobody moved and show went on. Terrific noise on way home and barrage over Hereford and Birmingham.

  4 Sat. Saw Bert and found he likes me as much as ever although I had been wondering. Don’t want him to rave over me but do want him to go out with. Bristol raided very badly. Incendiaries and high explosives, casualties fairly heavy.

  8 Wed. Bert proposed. Refused on grounds of non-saving. Enjoyed it immensely and parted on best of terms. Lord Baden-Powell, founder of scout movement, reported dead. King and Queen visited bombed Sheffield and were very upset.

  9 Thurs. Nice frosty day and Grandma’s newly-washed blankets froze stiff, to her fury. Uncle came over and played cards. I never win. Butcher gloomily prophesies no joint this weekend, as his meat so far amounts to 6d per head. No bird seed, onions, lemons, cabbages.

  11 Sat. Eight o’clock news says severe raid on West Country town with heavy casualties. Tobruk is reported to be surrounded. All offal now rationed.

  13 Mon. Very cold, sunny and thick frost.

  14 Tues. Market day. No cheese, fish or anything for dinner.

  16 Thurs. Snow frozen like glass and roads very dangerous. Had quite effective reconciliation with Bert. Wonderful how a week without a kiss sours you … [We] gave Germany a pasting last night.

  18 Sat. Snowing fast this morning but cycled through blizzard to library in Tenbury, just on two hours and had to walk all way back, snow was so deep. This evening it is two foot shallowest and heavy going.

  20 Mon. Absolutely bunged up with snow. No bread, papers or letters. Shovelled path but soon lost it. Definitely a day for miseries. No news on wireless, but heard President Roosevelt sworn in for third term of office, first time i
n history. Duchess of Kent as C-in-C WRNS broadcast an appeal for recruits. They’ll never get many with those hats.

  So Doreen’s life went on. On 1 February she reported ‘Invasion expected any fine day now’, and thought that an attack by ‘gas in waves’ was almost a certainty. Having watched a war film, Convoy, she went home ‘very quietly and felt so small after seeing what the Merchant Navy is doing’.

  As spring came on, she planted vegetables in the garden and tried to find war work, but was frustrated because no buses were running. Shortage of food was a constant preoccupation: ‘Cheese rationed now, 1 oz. per week. Little cocoa, no sweets, razor blades, fish paste, suet, raisins etc., honey, onions, lemons.’

  On 19 April 1941 she was ‘requisitioned for National Service under Conscription for 1920 Class Women’, and passed medical tests. But a devastating raid on London made her feel very low: ‘Please God I will never forget what wars mean to the little people who stay at home and yet are bombed, killed and made homeless refugees.’

  On 4 July she got 7 lb of old potatoes intended for pig food. As the shopkeeper said, ‘They look a bit old-fashioned at you’, but they turned out not too bad. Then came the triumph of digging the first of the new potatoes that she herself had planted. When, in chapel, a ‘revivalist sort of young man, red-haired, freckled and most competent’, kept pointing at her and saying, ‘Will you come to Jesus?’, her reaction was typically direct: ‘I thought of the new potatoes for dinner and hoped I could have them first.’ Next day she went to the cottage hospital and gave a pint of blood, praying that it would save the life of somebody injured in the air raids.

  By the middle of 1941 the whole country was alive with military activity. One night Frances Partridge was woken by ‘crunching sounds on the gravel’ outside her house in Wiltshire. Her husband Ralph looked outside and said, ‘The Army is everywhere, lorry-loads of it.’