The World at War (21 page)

SERGEANT PILOT HOLMES

I don't think anyone ever considered that he would be killed, that was something which was just put at the back of your mind. If it was not, then you'd have got the jitters and have been very worried. If a fellow did go missing it was just, 'poor old so-and-so's had it' and that was that. Inwardly of course you'd feel it tremendously if you lost a pal but you didn't dwell on the subject at all. It couldn't happen to you.

WING COMMANDER AITKEN

LMF [Lack of Moral Fibre] was a very unfortunate situation, a horrible thing which was that a pilot really packed it in and said I can't go on. They all said may I go to training. Well, no – if a fellow said I don't want to do any more fighting there was only one thing to do and it was done with absolutely no thought at all. He was taken away from his squadron that day, he was taken away from the Air Force that day, if he was an officer he was stripped of his rank and he was put into another service or into the Home Guard or something. We could never keep on anybody who faltered for one moment, because you know faltering is a very catching business and if that had happened in any way it would have been quite wrong. Therefore there was this horrible thing LMF – it became a bit of a joke, you know people saying I think I'm suffering from it, but the fact of the matter was that it could have become a disease unless it was stopped. Sometimes you could tell a fellow was going to get killed. Yes, you could – he sort of lost it. When you're tremendously keen on something you're much better than when you're rather holding back, and the fellows who were tremendously keen generally came through.

COLONEL GALLAND

We didn't know at the time why he changed to London: we had only to obey orders. I believe today that Hitler and Goring wanted to make use of their advantage of having the capital of the enemy in the range of their fighters, which could therefore escort the bombers. On the other side Berlin was far out of the effective range of the RAF at this time and in addition the effect of an air raid against a big town has been overestimated. Nobody knew at the time how much was needed to destroy a great part of the town. Perhaps Hitler and Goring hoped that they would force England to negotiate after these attacks. It is difficult to decide which motive really had priority, but it is a matter of fact that this switch to London from military targets changed the situation of Great Britain and Fighter Command considerably.

SERGEANT PILOT HOLMES

After your first attack if you're lucky enough to see one or two that you can go for, and if you've broken them up then that's what happened, you chase them and if they turn for home you let them go because our strict instruction was that we mustn't chase anybody over the Channel because if we came down in the Channel there's a pilot and an aircraft gone. The main thing was to break up the raids and save our own aircraft. And so thirty-six Dorniers very quickly became two or three on which you're focusing your attention. I followed two or three and made attacks on each one of them and ultimately used up all my ammunition. Then I hit the tail of the last one and he came down on Victoria Station and I came down on a rooftop in Chelsea.
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COLONEL GALLAND

The Battle of Britain during daytime became more disorganised and finally it was stopped. After a short time the Luftwaffe Command changed over to night attacks by the bombers only and the fighters were ordered to carry a bomb, and about a third of our fighters had to drop bombs in daylight, while the other two-thirds were escorting the bombers. Both fighter bombing and night bombing had never been practised, and therefore the effects were very low.

ANONYMOUS MALE EAST ENDER

Pub interview in Canning Town, east London

My flat overlooked all this area, looked down the river and across the river to the City, 'cos there's the Surrey Dock there, and I'm going to say this much – in my opinion he should have continued that type of bombing in daylight 'cos he was hitting everything of consequence, shipyards, gasworks, oil farms, everything of consequence, you know, all the bombs were dropping in the proper target area. So he only wasted his time when he came of a night-time, when he couldn't see what he was throwing them at.

ANONYMOUS MALE EAST ENDER

Pub interview in Canning Town

Just over the road from here was an oil bomb that set the house on fire and more or less blew it to pieces – the house is now rebuilt, as you can see for yourself over the road. From there we had other duties and went to the pub, the Liverpool Arms in the Barking Road, where we found that the proprietor had had his head chopped off with the glass and was laying in the forecourt, and big hole in the road where an ambulance had gone down and killed the ambulance driver and attendant. And I would like to say this – bombs were streaming about this particular area and the old women and people went out to put those bombs out, even in the road which was a silly thing to do, they could have let them burn themselves out. But they just had the spirit in them that they had to do something about it, and the old women – some of them are in this pub tonight – went out and they did a magnificent job of work.

MR OVERLANDER

Pub interview in Canning Town

They expected a tremendous number of civilian casualties, dead, and all the schools and playgrounds were turned into emergency mortuaries with stretchers and things of that sort to put the bodies on. But the thing that surprised the authorities, owing to the policy of Anderson shelters and things of that sort, was that very few of the people themselves were injured but there was a tremendous damage to property, all these little houses at the least blast fell down, and it was a question of putting people in schools and things of that sort, of turning out the auxiliary fire brigades and people of that type to give the people, where they could, at least sleep.

ANONYMOUS MALE EAST ENDER

Pub interview in Canning Town

Many of the casualties that happened in the early part of the Blitz need not have happened if they had accepted the help and advice of the authorities. There must have been thousands and thousands of Anderson shelters stacked up in depots up and down the country where people said they weren't going to have their gardens destroyed, they weren't going to have them in the house at all.

ANONYMOUS MALE EAST ENDER

Pub interview in Canning Town

The day I was hit was October 13th, 1940. About ten to eight I said to my wife and my in-laws, 'Well, I'll be off now,' and I just walked out the door. Lovely, big three-floor houses they were and I just walked up the approach road about twenty yards from the church which was our air-raid post and suddenly there was – shh – nothing, I heard nothing and I fell flat on my face. I picked myself up, I turned around and all I could see was just a grey curtain hanging down the middle of the road, about twice as wide as this pub. It was just a brownish-grey curtain hanging there and I thought, My God, something's happened. So I staggered down to the post and I said to the post warden, 'Jim, I think something's happened up at the Prince of Wales.' When we went up there and when we saw it I said, 'Christ almighty, the family's down there!' And there it was – we were there, about fourteen of us all on this big row of houses, and it was just one bloody great hole.

ANONYMOUS MALE EAST ENDER

Pub interview in Canning Town

The whole of Holborn was ablaze; the buildings were falling down. Cheapside was not so bad but all around St Paul's there were buildings ablaze. One thing that struck me as absolutely typical, the Lord Mayor of London was walking along, quite unconcerned with his umbrella and bowler hat, along Cheapside.

ANONYMOUS FEMALE EAST ENDER

Pub interview in Canning Town

The shelter where we used to go used to be what we call 'under the arches' and at the end of under the arches was a bigger archway and there'd be a canteen in there and this was run by Father John Groser of Stepney He used to run this canteen and run dances so we all used to have half an hour, an hour up there and all. He used to come through selling coffee or cocoa or tea and what have you and keep us all happy in the shelters, it was one big, happy family.

ANONYMOUS MALE EAST ENDER

Pub interview in Canning Town

It was a very light attack on the first day and in this small and very narrow street the bomb sort of slid down the front of the houses and we went down there all in our newness ready to serve and we got some of them out, and then we saw this dear old lady sort of staggering around and all she had on was just half of what should have been a nightdress. It was the top half and she was completely in a daze and we said, 'Go and get something on, Ma,' and we didn't want to go and help her, obviously So she said, 'Oh, I'll go in and get something,' and when she came out she'd got her hat on.

ANONYMOUS MALE EAST ENDER

Pub interview in Canning Town

One of the biggest morale builders in the East End of London was
Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw. He used to come on the radio every night about eight o'clock and predict where the bombs were going to be dropped. He'd say, 'Well, tonight we're not going to Stepney, we may drop a few on somewhere else,' or something of that sort, and it so infuriated the people, the people were so angry about him, I mean, he actually done more good than he did harm.
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ANONYMOUS MALE EAST ENDER

Pub interview in Canning Town

A big morale booster was the Women's Voluntary Service – the
WVS. These ladies came down to the town hall in 1939 and the town clerks and people of that sort were very perplexed what to do with them and they found them an office, but when the Blitz started they certainly proved their worth. They went out with mobile canteens right in the middle of the Blitz; the following day they had their clothing centres open. People who had lost everything were fitted up with clothes and then taken along by the WVS and be given a cup of tea and a bun, then taken along to the assistance people who doled them out £10 or £20, whatever the size of the family was. Really, from the start these ladies done an excellent job. For example one lady from Poplar was a Miss Gretton, she was one of the brewery family and she'd led a very, very sheltered life – but she had guts, that woman.

J B PRIESTLEY

English author and broadcaster

One interesting thing, you know, is that on the whole women took it better than men. I think because men hated their helplessness – they couldn't do anything back – whereas women are more used to this extra suffering without any aggression following it, so the thing didn't get on their nerves as it did on men's nerves.

MR BUTLER

London air-raid warden

Some of the worst things I think was when there'd been a direct hit and someone had blown into little pieces and you had to pick that up, put it in sandbags, label it where it came from, where we found it, and by that they used to more or less identify all these people, who they were and where they came from. Sometimes we'd get two hands, two left hands, or two right feet. Well, you'd know full well that if you got two on the same side there were two people that had been killed there. I think that's about one of the worst things that you had to do and it took a man with a very strong stomach to do it, I can assure you on that.

GEORGE HODGKINSON

Coventry town councillor

People seemed to choose the kind of shelter that suited their disposition. Some favoured going under the stairs or the domestic surface shelters which were made available to them and of course there were the street shelters made for the purpose of affording protection for people on the move, in the street, they could dive into these shelters. One old lady when her priest went round to comfort her said, 'Well, I just read my Bible a bit and I says bugger them and I goes off to bed.'

FLIGHT LIEUTENANT WRIGHT

We had no defence against the night bombing. The night-fighters, although they had a wonderful promise and this AI – Aircraft Interception, which was an airborne form of radar – fitted into night-fighters, we hadn't had it for a long time and at the time of the Blitz it was not working. We had it first in Blenheims, a comparatively sedate aircraft, the magic box, the black box, all sorts of mysterious names we had for it, because it was a great secret. But during the Blitz itself we had no defence. Heavy demands were made on the single-engine fighters trying to see in the dark, they couldn't see anything at all, it was very much a hit-or-miss proposition.

COLONEL GALLAND

The night raids of our bombers were sometimes very successful, as in Coventry; on other occasions they had a minimum of navigation equipment, they didn't have radar and they were forced to navigate in daylight, and weather conditions always changed. It depended mainly on the first attack by the leading unit: when this unit hit the target, the following bombers could easily hit the target also. It was almost by accident whether night-fighters would be effective or not.

GEORGE HODGKINSON

As chairman of my own street fire-guard organisation I had to go on the street to be ready with buckets and stirrup-pump and so on, ready to snuff out any incendiaries that were round about. We lost one neighbour and her mother and we were under the bombs all night, our family, eleven solid hours. We got a landmine exploded within a few yards of the house: it ripped through the house hooking the curtains to the window frames, took the roof off, the tiles falling on to the pavement and you could see the stars through the building. We were in a rather desperate state at the end of the night.

MR BUTLER

There was an Anderson shelter and apparently there was a little girl inside. Her parents had gone round the corner to visit their friends or relations or something and the shelter was more or less caved in and covered with soil. I got down into the shelter and there was this little girl about fifteen or sixteen and her mouth was full of soil. Naturally I got hold of her hand, which is our job to console these people and try to quieten them down. She was in a pretty bad state and I cleaned her mouth out; she laid back and as she was catching her breath, sort of breathing heavily, some stupid devil walked over the top of the shelter, soil came down and went back in this girl's throat and as she squeezed my hand like that she just faded out. Now I had the feel of that girl clenching my hand for weeks and weeks and weeks. I could never forget it and I don't forget it now.