Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Locals watched in awe as the bombers went lumbering off with a thunderous roar in the morning, and awaited their return in the evening with as much anxiety as the American ground crews:

  Suddenly a shout goes up from an officer with binoculars on the control-tower roof. Following his outstretched arm, straining eyes locate the first tiny specks on the horizon. A fuselage glints in the sunlight. The counting begins … The specks get nearer and the familiar outline of a Flying Fortress takes shape. The lead plane is clearly damaged. Its landing gear is still not down. The one behind fires a double red flare – casualties on board. The ambulances rev up. In the Forts come, just clearing the church and the big trees by the farm. Along the village street, women stop chatting and gaze upwards. Kids point at the smoke pouring from one of the planes.

  Losses were appalling but there were also many lucky escapes. One day a B-17 put down in a barley field on Gypsy Farm, near Langley, Hertfordshire. The aircraft was not badly damaged, and was soon repaired. But how to get it airborne? Engineers solved the problem by laying down 450 feet of steel matting and attaching six rockets to either wing: with that terrific thrust, the bomber took off after a run of 370 feet, in only eight seconds.

  Downed aircraft of any nationality were an irresistible attraction to boys. When a Flying Fortress pilot misjudged his approach to Woodbridge air base, beside the River Deben in Suffolk, the bomber came down in fields and skidded to a halt. The crew climbed out unhurt and asked a gang of boys where the nearest pub was. Off they went, telling the youngsters to keep away from the plane – but of course their orders were disobeyed. Ignoring the potential danger from live bombs or leaking fuel, the boys swarmed aboard, discovered the emergency rubber dinghy, made away with it and hid it in a wood. Once the aircraft had been recovered, they dragged it out, and for the rest of the war sailed it up and down the river.

  The Americans, for their part, were fascinated by the rusticity of their olde worlde surroundings: decrepit farmhouses with outdoor privies, broken-down farmyard walls, thatched cottages leaning all ways, horses working in the fields, hardly a tractor in sight. Later in the war all this began to change as the agricultural revolution took hold; but in the early days the countryside was much as John Constable had known and painted it. One evening Roy Jonasson, an airman serving with the USAF 389th Bombardment Group at Hethel Airfield in Norfolk, cycled out six miles to the village of Hethersett, and afterwards wrote home:

  Coming round the bend in the road I could see the little English church sitting on the side of the hill. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen – the church on the hill and the sheep grazing in the green meadow.

  In these Arcadian surroundings the Americans made their own entertainment, setting up ‘hostesses’ clubs’, whose members were automatically invited to every party at every base, with free transport laid on. Land Girls were always welcome, provided they came nicely dressed (‘Don’t wear those goddam breeches, honey’), and they never forgot dancing on the concrete floors of hangars to the music of Glenn Miller. Visits by film stars always generated huge excitement.

  ‘As an area of interest for any enthusiast, East Anglia was unbeatable,’ wrote one historian. ‘Operational aircraft passed that way in thousands, so that one acquired the feeling, “Oh no, not another 300 B-17,” or “It’s only a Lancaster.”’ Security was tight, but aficionados were constantly trying to spot rare visitors and identify the occupants of any new airfield.

  By the summer of 1944 the inhabitants of East Anglia were well used to having their sleep broken by the sound of aircraft engines. As one enthusiast put it, ‘the early-morning chorus of Cyclones and Twin-Wasps had grown in volume over past months until few places were free from the reverberating throb when ten million horsepower sought the thinner air’. If a thousand aircraft assembled in the sky over East Anglia, the bombers swarmed so thickly that on some days they seemed to be affecting the weather. Contrails of white vapour, created when hot exhaust loaded with particles blasted into the cold air of the troposphere, formed into clouds that blocked some of the sun’s rays.

  This happened on 11 May 1944 (three weeks before D-Day), a warm and cloudless morning, when 363 B-24 Flying Fortresses and 536 fighter escorts took off from airfields in the South East on a mission to attack marshalling yards in France where the Germans had concentrated troops. For hours the aircraft climbed, circled and eased into one vast formation, producing contrails when they reached 12,000–15,000 feet. Their exhausts, being white, reflected sunlight back into space, so that from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. the area over which they flew remained distinctly cooler than the land outside their shadow.

  Cooperation between the air forces, American and British, was excellent, as depicted in the film The Way to the Stars, released in 1945, based on a play by Terence Rattigan and starring John Mills and Michael Redgrave. In the United States the movie was renamed Johnny in the Clouds, a title taken from the moving poem which John Pudney wrote for the film, commemorating the death of a leading character, the American bomber pilot Captain Johnny Hollis.

  Do not despair for Johnny head-in-air,

  He sleeps as sound as Johnny underground.

  Fetch out no shroud for Johnny-in-the-cloud,

  And keep your tears for him in after years.

  Better by far for Johnny-the-bright-star

  To keep your head and see his children fed.

  So East Anglia became the USAF’s stronghold; but in June 1943 the Americans had also taken over Burtonwood Airfield, north of Warrington in Lancashire, which until then had been an RAF servicing and storage centre for the modification of British aircraft. In American hands it grew into the largest airfield in Europe, with huge statistics: twenty-eight miles of road, four miles of railway track, thirteen hangars, 1800 buildings, four million square feet of aircraft parking space, and sixteen miles of fence enclosing an area of nearly 1500 acres. Among the buildings demolished was the Limerick Pub on Cow Lane.

  Burtonwood was used principally for building, servicing and repair rather than for the launch of operations: hundreds of aircraft were built, refurbished or scrapped there. Fighters like the P-47 Thunderbolts and P-38 Lightnings came to Liverpool by sea and were driven through the streets of the city on trailers for assembly on the base. More than 4000 B-17 bombers went through Burtonwood’s hangars, 71,000 parachutes were repaired and packed and 38,000 machine guns were overhauled or modified. The roar of aero engines running on test beds continued day and night, audible for miles around. The Germans seem never to have realized the importance of the site: Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes made several flights over the airfield, but it was bombed only twice and little damage was inflicted.

  At the end of the war there were 18,500 servicemen on the base: celebrated entertainers flew in to give concerts, among them Glenn Miller and his band, and the singer Bing Crosby. Relations with the town were excellent and many of the men sent their laundry out to local housewives. One woman pushed her old pram out to the nearest camp, to make collections and deliveries, earning enough money for her husband to keep his little Austin Seven going through the rest of the war. Children who ran errands could charge outrageous prices.

  The dances Americans organized (often in the lunch hour) became highly popular, especially when they introduced the latest craze, the jitterbug. In three years 6500 marriages with British women took place, but many of the children sired by GIs never saw their fathers – either because they had been killed in action, or because they had been sent home before the child was born. In 1945 illegitimate births in England reached a peak of 65,000 – although how many of these involved American fathers it is impossible to say. In 1948 Life magazine estimated that in Britain 22,000 war babies were born out of wedlock to white US soldiers; but many children were also got by black GIs – and some liaisons left tragic consequences.

  One day in 1943 or 1944, in a typical English village, a local girl gave birth to a child sired by a black American serviceman from one of the nearby
bases. Let us call the baby Jessie. Such was the sense of shame among the family that the young mother was vilified – and her coffee-coloured daughter the same. Indoctrinated from her earliest years to believe that she was a disgrace to the community, unworthy of human attention, she grew up a recluse. For this, her father cannot be blamed, since he may not even have known of her existence; what condemned the girl to a life of misery was the rigid attitude of her mother.

  Most of the houses in the village were owned by the lord of the manor; many still are, and in one of them Jessie has spent her entire life. Now in her seventies, she lives alone in a small, damp cottage and rarely ventures forth, except on twice weekly visits to the village store. Dressed in shabby but clean clothes, she walks a few hundred yards to the shop and hands the proprietor a short list; he makes out her order, for which she hands over money, and back she goes, carrying her purchases. She seems to exist mainly on tinned food. But her list is always the same – the same piece of paper – and local people believe she cannot read, having been hidden away at home as a girl and never gone to school. So repressed is she that she will hardly speak: if somebody meets her and tries to make conversation, she merely nods.

  What does she do all the time? Nobody knows, because nobody can penetrate her reserve or her front door. She remains totally withdrawn. She never goes for a walk, never communicates with neighbours, never smiles. She has a radio, but no television. At one stage there was a move in the community to buy her a TV; but when a man who had made efforts to befriend her suggested that the church should give her a set, he was seen off by a male cousin, who growled in a menacing voice: ‘Don’t you interfere!’

  Successive parish priests have tried to make contact, only to be repulsed. The one occasion on which she opened up fractionally was at Christmas some years ago, when a church warden asked if she would like to see the tree and other decorations which he had just put up. To his surprise, she agreed, and walked with him to the church.

  At the door he stood and watched her go up the aisle ahead of him, towards the altar. Then she turned left and disappeared into the vicar’s vestry, without pausing to look at the splendid tree or anything else. After a while, when she did not reappear, he went up and found her gazing at a stained-glass window, the bottom panes of which showed a scene from the nativity.

  Fascinated, he asked, ‘Have you seen this before?’ She replied, ‘Yes’ – and that was that. Next year he tried again, but she did not want to go.

  Did her father ever know that Jessie existed? Seventy years on, the villagers remain distressed that she should live among them in such isolation, a pathetic victim of the war.

  Sixteen

  On the Wing

  ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers

  That perches in the soul,

  And sings the tune without the words,

  And never stops at all.

  And sweetest in the Gale is heard;

  And sore must be the storm

  That could abash the little bird

  That kept so many warm.

  I’ve heard it in the chillest land

  And on the strangest sea.

  Yet never in Extremity

  It asked a crumb of me.

  Emily Dickinson, ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers

  In war, even more than in peace, birds kept human spirits up. The sight of them flying free gave people hope that life would return to normal – and in the autumn of 1939, whenever country folk, hearing a far-flung clamour in the sky, looked up to see skeins of geese heading south on their annual migration, they trusted that the V-shaped formations were a sign of victory.

  Nevertheless, the war was harsh on many species. Garden birds must have perished by the thousand in air raids on cities and towns. House sparrows were particularly vulnerable: before the war they had been in decline, and now they were being annihilated by the blast and fire of air raids – but they were still being persecuted by householders everywhere on Government orders.

  The stresses of war put other birds in peril. A War Ag pamphlet declared that in Derbyshire the abolition of grassland had caused a decline in numbers of insects, and this in turn appeared to have led to ‘a serious deterioration in the feeding habits of rooks’. It seemed that rooks had run short of wireworms and leatherjackets, which they normally ate in huge numbers, to the farmers’ benefit. ‘Large areas of winter wheat have been destroyed, and reluctantly we have to recognise the need for a reduction in the number of rooks in the province.’

  Not mincing its words, the pamphlet recommended that ‘the attack’ be launched during the nesting period, in early summer, and followed up by the shooting of young rooks as they left the nest. Hollow-nosed bullets were the preferred ammunition, and it was suggested that the .22 rifles used for Home Guard practice ‘could serve a good double purpose in this work’.

  Most other birds in the country presumably carried on as usual; but rationing, and the shortage of food for humans, left some at greater risk than in peacetime. From a report in the British Birds magazine of 1942 it is clear that countless poachers, professional and amateur, were after them.

  In Volume 36 the magazine departed from its usual observations – ‘Aerial Evolutions and Soaring of Cormorants in the Lake District’, ‘Remarkable Behaviour of Green Sandpipers’ – to report on the prices being charged by poulterers for birds on sale. The list would give latter-day conservationists cardiac arrest, but no hint of criticism or disapproval coloured the wartime report: it was merely a statement of what was available.

  At ‘one of the great London stores’ the shelves ‘were lined with coots and moorhens. Curlews were on sale at 3s 6d, lapwings at 2s 9d.’ There were also rows of starlings at 9d each – though these were mendaciously described as ‘Grey Log – not starlings, but very like them’. Cock capercaillie were available at 12s apiece, blackcock at 7s 6d, grouse at 6s and ptarmigan at 3s 6d, besides common or garden pheasants at 9s and partridges at 5s. At various times of the year one of the magazine’s correspondents had seen two dozen land rails (or corncrakes) on offer. There were also many types of wild duck ‘which are not normally welcome as table birds’, including goosanders and red-breasted mergansers.

  It is hard to imagine anyone who ate a coot or a merganser deriving much nourishment or pleasure from the experience. Nor can starlings have been very appetizing – for when they go to roost, doing their synchronized diving in huge, swirling swarms, they give off a nauseating smell; but the only species listed as ‘unmarketable’ was the heron.Two parrots stolen from Bristol Zoo by boys in 1944 were probably taken for pets rather than for consumption; but the variety of birds on offer seems less surprising in view of the fact that many species were then regarded as inimical: one old river-keeper was offering a bounty of £1 for every heron killed on his beat, and 2s 6d for a kingfisher.

  In spring boys living in hill country could make extra pocket money by climbing down cliffs or wading out to the nests of black-backed gulls in marshes or lakes and collecting the mottled eggs, which were (and are) highly prized by connoisseurs. Fishmongers would pay 2s 6d a dozen. That was legal. Not so the robbing of plovers (lapwings or peewits), which lay their eggs on bare fields, but betray the position of their nest by agitated aerial manoeuvring and screaming designed to decoy marauders away from the vulnerable area. Although protected by the Lapwings Act of 1928, which forbade the sale of birds or eggs between 1 March and 31 August, their eggs, also, sometimes appeared in butchers’ shops.

  Country dwellers found that birds became accustomed to the noise of war with remarkable speed. When bombs landed in fields or woods, the craters would soon be visited by robins and finches in search of insects or seeds. Watchers noticed that at the beginning of the conflict duck took off from rivers or reservoirs if a single aircraft passed over, but later they became so inured to noise that they stayed put even if several planes roared low across the sky. Owls, which hunt by sound as much as by sight, pinpointing the tiniest squeak of a mouse, must have be
en seriously inconvenienced by night flying, especially in areas like East Anglia and Lincolnshire, where bombers were taking off and landing in such numbers at all hours of the day and night that the sky shook with thunder.

  Luckily for owls, ideas about them were gradually changing. Gamekeepers had always regarded them as a menace because they killed young pheasants and partridges. Now people started to point out that they were splendid catchers of vermin, and therefore allies in the campaign against rats. In 1942 one observer watched a pair of nesting barn owls bring in twenty-seven mice, four rats and an assortment of voles during a single night, and the Ministry of Agriculture spoke up for the birds in a press release:

  Every farmer should make it his business to encourage a bird that is working so diligently on his behalf … There is no bird that is more worthy of protection, and none that will more quickly pay for its keep.

  On land used for military training, birds fared badly. Caerlaverock – a huge expanse of mudflats and salt marsh on the Solway Firth, where at low tide channels of water wind through banks of glistening brown and grey mud – was already a gathering point for Barnacle geese, which collected there in vast numbers for the winter. But when riflemen from military camps began to use the roosting birds for target practice, many were killed and the rest driven away.

  Seabirds also suffered. In 1943 the American Air Command applied to use Grassholm Island, off the west coast of Pembrokeshire, as a bombing target; but since the island was inhabited by thousands of gannets – the only gannetry in Britain – the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds objected strongly, and the Air Ministry refused the Americans’ request. Two years later, when a party of distinguished ornithologists, including Dr Julian Huxley and Ronald Lockley, visited the island, they were dismayed to find much of it pitted by craters, with bomb cases scattered everywhere, and some of the nests occupied by dead birds. Yet, to their surprise, the number of live gannets, far from diminishing, seemed to have increased from the pre-war figure of 6000 pairs; even so, the RSPB remonstrated with the Air Ministry in the strongest possible terms.