Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Still more intrepid were the women who flew new aircraft from factories to RAF airfields all over the country. At first there was much disapproval, especially during the Phoney War, when regular RAF pilots were sitting around with nothing to do. The editor of Aeroplane magazine declared that women, many of whom were too stupid even to scrub a hospital floor properly, were a menace at the controls of a fighter or a bomber; and readers agreed that it was disgraceful to employ them in such a dangerous role. The pilots thought otherwise. They were exhilarated by flying, and by the knowledge that they were doing an essential job. They started on little Tiger Moths, dozens of which had to be flown to Scotland for storage – and every journey was a marathon, as Lettice Curtis remembered:

  It was a ghastly journey in winter in those little, light planes. It was about four hops up there. When you arrived, you got straight on a night train, and sometimes when you got back there was another one waiting for you, and off you’d go again for a whole night and a day.

  Lettice remained undaunted when the engine of her Typhoon cut out and she came down in a field at 100mph. ‘The aircraft turned over and the tail broke off. I was lucky, but I was knocked about a bit on my face and leg.’

  Later, when the factories were churning out huge numbers of new planes, and the RAF was desperately short of pilots, nobody minded who moved new aircraft, whether ‘you were a man, woman or monkey’, and the girls delivered Spitfires, Hurricanes and Oxfords – but navigation was by no means easy:

  The main problems were weather and balloons. You could never fly straight from one place to another, because all the big towns had their balloon barrage. You had to find out where the balloons were in advance, but you weren’t allowed to mark them on your map, so you had to remember. You studied the master map before you took off, and you did your best to memorize any special features such as roads or railways … You had to keep below cloud, looking at the ground, and you jolly well had to know where you were … [But] you did have some fabulous flights, taking a Spit up to Prestwick.

  After the war Lettice realized, like the Land Girls, how much the experience had changed the flying women’s existence and broadened their outlook. ‘Girls where I came from, who would have just lived in one small village all their lives, were called up and went into the world to join the forces.’

  Notwithstanding the Land Girls’ contempt, the number of prisoners working on the land increased rapidly in 1943. At first most of the foreign labourers were Italians, captured in North Africa, but later, as the Allies drove deep into Europe, there came an ever-increasing flood of Germans, who were graded into four categories. Grade A were deemed anti-Nazi and graded White; Grade B (Grey) were thought tolerable, but less reliable; Grade C (Black) probably embraced Nazi ideals, and Grade C+ definitely did. The blacker they seemed, the further north they were sent. The last two categories were housed in secure camps in remote areas, but the others lived in camps insecurely surrounded by barbed wire, and quite a few escaped, only to be caught within a few days.

  The biggest breakout, made through a tunnel, came early in the morning of 11 March 1945, when fifty-six officers got out of the Island Farm camp at Bridgend, in South Wales. All were recaptured: some had gone only a few miles, but others had managed to reach Southampton, having made their way through 150 miles of enemy territory. To frustrate rescue attempts, possibly by paratroopers, prisoners were not told where they were, and the names of camps were frequently changed.

  Many of the young Grade A Germans came from farming families and were content to work on the land, greatly preferring a tough but safe life in the English countryside to one of constant danger on the continental battlefields. They went out into the country wearing brown uniforms, each with a big purple triangle dyed on the back of his tunic, allegedly to make a good aiming mark for the armed soldier in charge, should anyone try to run away; but country people often befriended them, if only through occasional meetings along the way.

  Work on the land was relatively safe in the middle or west of the country; but in the south-east and east the hazards were greater. One day during the harvest of 1943 young Malcolm Rees was perched on the mudguard of a Fordson tractor, on the lookout for rabbits as it towed the binder round and round a field of corn. Suddenly he heard an earth-shaking thud, and smashing through the tops of a line of trees came a stricken four-engined American Liberator:

  The bomber flew right over us, casting us in its dark shadow as it soared only a few feet above our heads. Then it hit the ground and slid on the harvest field, its propellers bent back by the force of the crash landing. Suddenly it spun round, and this huge monster of aluminium and steel stood still. From its belly appeared men in khaki over-suits and fur-lined caps, and they raced off towards the ditch on the edge of a wood. Staying close to the wheel of the tractor, we prayed that the plane would not explode.

  Running for home to spread the news, Malcolm met a huge American recovery truck whose black driver scooped him up into the cab as a guide, and they sped back to the wreck across country. It turned out that the mighty thump had been caused by the plane’s undercarriage hitting a road: the impact had bounced it back into the air and sent it through the tree tops. The crew were unhurt – and the boy and his friends were rewarded by being allowed to play in the cockpit and the gun turrets.

  Just as the Women’s Land Army sprang from the initiative of Lady Denman, so another invaluable wartime body, the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, was the creation of another energetic woman, Stella, Marchioness of Reading, widow of the former Viceroy of India. Set up in 1938, the WVS was at first intended to be no more than a back-up to local authorities in time of war, but, thanks to the persuasive advocacy of its founder, by August 1939 more than 300,000 women had joined the new organization and a thousand WVS centres had been set up. Their original role – of helping other civilian services during air raids – quickly expanded in many directions: they set up canteens for firefighters and others, cooked in mobile wagons, provided hot baths for soldiers in camps, made camouflage nets, refashioned old clothes, brewed tea for grave-diggers, staffed makeshift hostels and sometimes even acted as marriage brokers – all without pay. Their relationship with the WI was uneasy, and there were frequent disagreements about what responsibilities each organization should take on. Yet the volunteers, in their bottle-green uniforms, lived up to their motto, ‘The WVS never says no’, and accomplished an amazing amount. Looking back after the war, Lady Reading reflected: ‘We have done work we never thought to approach and have carried burdens heavier than we knew existed.’

  Eleven

  Laying Up Treasure

  Bury them in the bowels of the earth,

  but not one picture shall leave this island.

  Winston Churchill, 1940

  The threat and outbreak of war led to a prodigious amount of secret excavation, some small-scale, some immense. Government agencies, military units, individuals – all began digging frantically in attempts to commit their most valuable assets to the safety of the ground before they were destroyed by bombs or fell into the hands of an invading enemy. The burrows made in 1939 and 1940 by, or for, the men of Auxiliary Units, who would go to ground if the Germans came, were so well concealed that even people living close to them never knew of their existence. But those excavations were like mouse holes compared with the huge subterranean projects in train elsewhere.

  In 1934 teams of Royal Engineer officers had been sent out to survey possible sites for the underground storage of ammunition, inspecting and assessing obsolete railway tunnels, limestone quarries, slate quarries, gypsum quarries and worked-out salt mines which seemed capable of adaptation. The most promising was the huge network of abandoned workings south-west of Corsham, in Wiltshire, which for seventy-five years had been yielding high-quality oolite limestone. There in the mid-1930s the War Office bought four quarries – Ridge, Tunnel, Eastlays and Monkton Farleigh, covering 150 acres in all – which over the next few years were reconstituted as the Central A
mmunition Depot.

  The task of converting the old diggings was immense. Because the galleries were so cramped, it took 12,000 men working mostly by hand four years to clear two million tons of rubble out of the Tunnel Quarry alone – and the workings had to be strengthened with new support pillars and steel roof girders, before lifts, conveyor belts, narrow-gauge railways and ventilation systems could be introduced. From 1940 until the end of the war and beyond, vast quantities of munitions were stored beneath Wiltshire. Contemporary photographs show staff handling bombs, shells, mines and cases of ammunition without any protective clothing – not even gloves or overalls. In 1940 yet another use was found for part of the Corsham complex, when an underground operations centre was built for No. 10 Group of RAF Fighter Command in Brown’s Quarry, north of the Tunnel and connected to it.

  Elsewhere, new facilities were created by burying them, rather than by hollowing out existing cavities. In 1938, for instance, the Air Ministry bought a disused limestone quarry near the village of Harpur Hill, on the outskirts of Buxton in Derbyshire, and filled in the 100-foot-deep excavation with a single-storey structure of parallel arched tunnels cast from reinforced concrete, topped by a forty-foot layer of loose rock to protect it from bombs. Standard-gauge trains carrying ammunition could roll right into the depot and unload in safety.

  At much the same time the Admiralty commissioned a new mine-storage depot at Trecwn, in a secluded valley three miles south of Fishguard, where two groups of tunnels were bored into the rock on opposing hillsides and lined with concrete. Fifty-eight cavernous chambers, each about 200 feet long, led off them, and to minimize manual handling (and so reduce the risk of accidents) munitions were distributed around the site on a specially designed narrow-gauge railway, with rails made of copper to reduce the risk of sparks; as a further safety precaution two reservoirs were built, one on either side of the valley, with the water supply connected to high-pressure hydrants in the storage chambers (all reservoirs were placed off limits for the duration of the war, to reduce the risk of sabotage). The construction of the site was such a huge undertaking, in a remote location, that the Ministry of Defence built three new housing estates for its workforce; but one of its advantages was that it lay only a short distance from the ports on the Welsh coast.

  Any place in which large quantities of mines, bombs, explosives and small-arms ammunition were stored was obviously at risk, and although elaborate precautions were taken to forestall accidents, disasters did occur. At Llanberis, in Snowdonia, an RAF bomb depot was built in the bottom of an old slate quarry on the same principle as at Harpur Hill, except that it had two layers of arched concrete tunnels, one above the other, instead of one, with a forty-foot covering of loose slate rubble on top, for protection from air attack. A standard-gauge railway line ran into the depot, so that ammunition trains could pull in and be unloaded inside, and electric lifts raised bombs from the platform to the upper storey. Unfortunately, the structure proved disastrously weak. The depot was completed in January 1941, but on 25 January 1942 the ceiling of the lower tier collapsed, burying an entire train and trapping 14,000 tons of high-explosive bombs. There was no detonation, but it took more than a year to recover the ordnance.

  At least that accident did not rearrange the local landscape – which is more than can be said of the disaster which overtook the Fauld gypsum mine at Tutbury, near Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire. There the RAF had established its main storage depot in two areas of disused subterranean workings, either side of a central pillar of dark-red gypsum – a core of undisturbed rock, which had been left in place to support Castle Hayes farmhouse and buildings, on the surface ninety feet above. The depot contained thousands of tons of bombs, shells, cordite and dynamite, and 500 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, stored in bays and bunker passages twelve feet high and twenty feet wide – broad enough for trucks to drive along beside the piled stocks of ordnance.

  At 11.11 on the morning of 27 November 1944 one mistake underground precipitated the largest non-nuclear detonation the world had ever known. Black smoke and flames shot thousands of feet into the air. Two million tons of rock, earth and exploding bombs were hurled skywards. Upper Castle Hayes Farm, directly above the seat of the blast, evaporated, along with its six human inhabitants, its animals and its wagons. At Hanbury Fields Farm, a short distance to the west, the house and buildings were shattered by falling debris, which included lumps of earth weighing a ton or more. There was widespread damage in surrounding villages. The Cock Inn in Hanbury, half a mile from the blast, had one wall blown out and was left a tottering wreck. The dam of a reservoir was obliterated, releasing six million gallons of water and a torrent of mud which swamped the local plaster factory, killing several of its workmen. Two church steeples were cracked, and one had to be dismantled. As the debris settled, it left a carpet of dust up to four inches thick, so that people walked in a deathly hush.

  The explosion left a twelve-acre crater 300 yards long, 230 wide and 380 feet deep. Seventy people were killed, including civilians and Italian prisoners of war who had been working on the site, but eighteen of the dead were never recovered. The whole area was littered with the corpses of cattle and horses: some 200 cows were killed and many injured. One was found dead on its feet: air pressure had inflated it to dreadful dimensions, and when rescuers discovered it looking grotesquely swollen, they immediately shot it, only to find that it had already expired, and that all that had kept it standing were its rigid, pumped-up legs.

  The cause of the blast was never precisely established, but it was thought that, in trying to remove a detonator from a 4000-lb bomb, an inexperienced airman had used a brass hammer instead of a wooden one, and that the impact on his chisel had caused a fatal spark. The only positive circumstance was that natural barriers of rock, still intact underground, had saved two-thirds of the munitions from exploding, and only one third of the stocks had gone up.

  Plans to save the nation’s art treasures had been laid well before the outbreak of war. In 1935 the Museums and Galleries Air Raids Precautions Committee had drawn up a list of large country houses, in areas thought to be beyond the range of German bombers, whose owners were willing to accommodate pictures and other artefacts if they had to be evacuated from the capital. Then, in 1938, Martin Davies, Assistant Keeper at the National Gallery, made a reconnaissance of possible repositories, keeping acerbic notes about the properties he visited. ‘The owner is nice, ruled by his wife, a tartar, anxious to have N[ational] G[allery] pictures instead of refugees or worse … Owner seems obliging but in a haughty way.’

  Some contents of the British Museum, it was decided, would go to the Duke of Buccleuch’s palatial Boughton in Northamptonshire, some to Drayton House, the crenellated home of the Stopford-Sackville family in Northamptonshire, and some to the Clifford family’s medieval Skipton Castle in Yorkshire. Pictures from the National Gallery would be sent to Penrhyn Castle, to Caernarvon Castle, and also to the Pritchard-Jones Hall in the University College of North Wales at Bangor; smaller pictures were destined for a tunnel repository near the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, which also accommodated some of the most valuable books from the Royal Horticultural Society’s library at Wisley. Artefacts from the Victoria and Albert Museum were allocated to Montacute House, the Elizabethan mansion in south Somerset, one of the first properties acquired by the National Trust, which had plenty of space, as it was scarcely furnished. Pictures from the Tate Gallery were assigned to various destinations in Cumberland, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The artworks would travel most of the way by train, and at night, before being transferred to container or flat-bed lorries for the last stages of their journeys.

  In the evening of 29 September 1938, at the height of the Munich crisis, the first consignment – two containers of paintings – was taken from the National Gallery to Camden goods station and loaded onto a train equipped with a special coded array of lights on the front of the engine that would identify it to officials down the
line. The train reached Bangor at nine o’clock next morning, but during the night Chamberlain had signed the Munich agreement with Hitler, and the danger of war seemed to have been averted – so back to London the pictures came, without ever being unloaded.

  The major dispersal of treasures took place just before the human evacuation of cities, starting in the last week of August 1939 and ending on the day before war was declared. Some 6000 pictures were taken out of London, minus their frames, and for the time being pictures and artefacts were safely stored in new homes. When the immediate threat of bombing receded, many were returned to London. Those that remained in the country, however, began to cause problems, as stately home owners resented the expense incurred by acting as the nation’s guardians: they found themselves having to provide extra heating to keep paintings at the right temperature, and – worse – to entertain, at their own expense, experts who came down from London to carry on their normal work of cataloguing and maintenance. In the words of the subterranean expert Neil McCamley,

  To their horror, the property owners found that the museum and gallery trustees expected these staff members to be treated as country house guests – as if on a weekend retreat – that free accommodation should be provided for them and that the family servants should wait upon them.