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World War 2.

My recollections

I was 10 years and 8 months old when the war started; old enough to know what it was about and young enough not to be terrified! On 3 September 1939, my parents and I sat around the wireless (radio) in the sitting room listening to Neville Chamberlain telling us that the country was at war with Germany. (Today’s young would not believe the radio set! A horn loudspeaker sat on an oak box containing the valves, powered by a 90-volt high tension battery and a 2 volt lead acid accumulator, taken for charging weekly). As soon as the Prime Minister’s announcement was finished, the first air raid siren of the war sounded, apparently all over the country, because a reconnaissance plane was spotted some where off northern Scotland! The dear old lady living next door was seen and heard running up and down their back garden path exclaiming, ‘They’ve come, they’ve come!’.

Maidstone, in the middle of Kent where I lived throughout the war, had the doubtful distinction of having at least one of every kind of missile thrown at the country. From the autumn of 1939 until the summer of 1940, nothing happened which affected us directly, but after the evacuation at Dunkirk, when the Battle of Britain began, we had a grandstand view. We lived on the top of a hill overlooking the Medway valley; from my bedroom I could see about seven miles to the east and three or four to the west, as well as across the valley to the south. Dog fights between the RAF and the Luftwaffe became an almost daily event. The sound of machine guns, the sight of massed vapour trails in the sky of bombers en route for London, aircraft on fire and of parachutes of airmen who had baled out in the distance, became familiar sights. The fighters screaming around, and dogfights really quite close were very exciting. The fact that people were being killed didn’t register with me until later. If a German plane was shot down, that was a source of pride. Parachutes coming down were not infrequent over the area which could be seen from my bedroom window or from the back garden. My friends and I collected bits and pieces from planes, shrapnel from shells, bullets from planes, etc. We held an exhibition in our shed, charging admission, the proceeds of which went to a war charity. There was no shortage of items for the exhibition!

In addition to volunteer Air Raid Wardens (‘put that light out!’) there was the formation after Dunkirk of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) which became the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard. Many of the volunteers for that were First World War veterans, the youngest of whom were about 40 and the oldest about 60 or more. At first they had only armbands, and drilled with sticks, because there were neither enough uniforms nor rifles to go round. They became a very effective backup to the army in home defence, and they would have given a good account of themselves, not withstanding the much later humorous TV account ‘Dads Army’ of their activities!

The Battle of Britain was over in September, and I started at the local grammar school. For the first month or two we went to school on alternate Saturday afternoons, to the air raid shelter, to collect homework to be handed in the next time! There was a regulation that there could be not more than 150 in the school at any one time, and there were four London schools evacuated to us. (I am uncertain which they were but Alleyns, Dulwich were among them I think. (Of course we never met any of the boys because of the numbers restriction!) Towards the end of the year, the other schools were sent off to the West Country and we had the place to ourselves, and the 150 rule was abolished. There was a deep ditch forming a tank trap dug around two sides of the school fields, plus barbed wire a plenty and the south east corner of the school building was turned into a block house with gun slits, and blast walls broke up the corridors. Fortunately the effectiveness of these defences were never tested in anger, but they sure made a mess of the playing field! The ditches and barbed were continued beyond the boundaries of the school, of course, across the county. The other innovation at that time was the inclusion of ladies on the staff to replace those men who decided that it was more suitable for them to be fighting the Germans than teaching us. (I didn’t know most of them until some started to return after the war.) The first two ladies were, I’m sure, delightful people; the first problem were their names- Miss de Glanville (Latin) and Miss Archibald (Mathematics)- names which were uproariously funny to 11-12 year old boys. They seemed very ancient, and I think both had retired, putting them into the 60+ category; they both had taught in girls’ schools and neither of them could cope with classes of boys at all.

As the daylight Battle of Britain ended, just over 12 months after the war started, the night-time air raids on London started. We could hear the drone of squadrons of enemy aircraft in the distance and as often as not see the sky lit up by distant fires. (The fire at the margarine factory on the north bank of the Thames, at least 15 miles away to the north, was particularly memorable) We had incendiary bombs in the road outside the house; a parachute carrying a land mine left a very large hole in the corner of an orchard 300 yards down Tonbridge Road, Barming. Despite a wide selection of missiles, we fortunately did not have anything like as many as there were in areas of London. A German aircraft, a Heinkel 111 if I remember correctly, was shot down one night- probably in 1941, and the front half crashed onto a house about 200 yards away from ours, setting fire to the house and killing the crew and the lady living there. The rest of the fuselage and tail plane crashed a hundred yards further along Tonbridge Road, in the front garden of a friend’s house. (Geoff Leeves)

One day, I think in Autumn 1941, I was on my way to school at 8.15, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a Dornier 115 in the low cloud. (It was important living where I did, to be able to identify aircraft quickly, and like my friends, I was something of an expert on the subject!) Just before I got onto the trolley bus I saw the plane through a gap in the clouds and confirmed its identity. There was no air raid warning in operation at the time. (They had become localised early on in the war, but did not signal every intruder!) The bus arrived in High Street at about 8.30 and was, mercifully stationary at a bus stop, when chunks of brick started to break the windows of the bus. We didn’t hear the bombs falling nor the explosion, but all ducked under the seats until that barrage of bricks and rubble stopped. At this point I decided that home was better place to be than at school that day, so I ran the three or so miles home, during which journey, the air raid siren sounded! The Dornier 115 had dropped a ‘stick’ of seven bombs, which landed on Mill Street, which joined the High Street some hundred or so yards beyond the bus stop; thus we were protected from the direct action of the blast. Sadly, a girl, with whom I had been at primary school (one of identical twins), was on foot in High Street in the direct line of the blast and was killed. While I recall she was one of twins, I do not remember her name.

In June 1944, shortly after D-Day, as the family expert on aircraft recognition, my mother woke me at about 2 a.m. to ask my opinion of a strange aircraft noise. (We had given up sleeping down stairs years before because it was so inconvenient, and anyway there was less to fall on top of you if only the roof collapsed on you and not the roof plus the first floor!) ‘It sounds very rough’, I said, ‘but like an FW 190’ (a single radial-engined fighter). Looking out of the window under the blackout curtain, there were flames coming from it. ‘Good oh’ I said, ‘it’s on fire. Let’s go back to sleep!’ But it wasn’t an FW 190, it was the first sight for us, of a ‘Buzz bomb’, ‘Doodlebug’ or V1. The first of hundreds. From my bedroom, I had sight of four or more V1 routes. They had no ability to steer, so followed the track on which they were launched, although presumably affected by the wind. One of the routes was directly over our house, which was why I had seen the first one to fly over. They signalled their arrival because the characteristic noise started quietly and became louder and then reduced as they went on their way to London. Sometimes near to us the noise suddenly stopped as the engine cut out- a frequent experience, sadly, in London. The bomb then crashed to the ground, quite unpredictably, because it was by then un-powered. I watched one such from my bedroom window as the engine stopped a few hundred yards away, and shortly after, instead of continuing on a north-westerly route, it veered off to the west. It exploded when it crashed about a mile away, into the house of the headmistress of the local (Barming) primary school (where my mother taught), killing her father. The picture of this event is fixed in my mind. More frightening than the sound of the V1’s, for us, however, was the noise of the rocket flares used to guide fighter aircraft to the route being used by a V1. The rocket flare was launched from a field about 300 yards away and went up with a sudden unannounced loud ‘whoosh’! The parachute flare came down swinging as it came, but the case came down independently, and how no one was killed by one of these cases, I do not know! After early disastrous attempts, which resulted in the explosion of the bomb and the death of the fighter pilot, our fighters did not shoot the V1’s down. Instead, they manoeuvred themselves to get one wing under the short wings of the V1 and then tipped it over, resulting in the bomb losing its gyroscopic control and crashing. Very skilful flying. Typhoons, the only planes which could catch the V1’s had to be cruising at high level and dive at the target, marked for them by the line of flares across the county showing which route was being taken. Imagine our surprise when a friend and I saw an unidentified plane flying straight and level catching up with a V1 almost over our heads: it tipped it over and roared off. It was some years before the Gloucester Meteor was off the secret list, and able to be identified! I have never seen a reference to its ever having been in action, but we certainly saw it!

Although we were unaware of it at the time, seven shells landed on Maidstone the same night as the V1’s started. It is probably not widely known that these seven shells travelled so far to land in the middle of Kent. Twenty miles across France from a rail mounted gun, twenty miles across the Channel and forty miles across Kent. Eighty miles in all. I believe these were the only shells this gun fired in anger. (Why were such weapons known as ‘Big Bertha’ I wonder?). These shells meant that although we fortunately didn’t have many of them, Maidstone had at least one of every kind of missile the Germans hurled at the UK.

Maidstone also had a mercifully small number of V2 rockets (aimed at London no doubt). Had the Germans started that campaign before 1944, the outcome could not have been predicted. They certainly had a very serious effect on London’s morale. The first one knew of their arrival was the sound of the explosion, followed by the shrieking sound of the rocket falling to earth. There was a permanent air raid warning in force because their arrival could not be detected at that time. Many people were evacuated from London because of them.

I sat my School Certificate exam in 1945, after the end of the war in Europe, but those taking the exam in 1944, had to scatter to sit on the floor next to the walls of the hall every time there was an alert for V1’s. I am sure they were much too well behaved to discuss the exam in progress when the exam was being interrupted! (I have no evidence for or against for or against this cynical suggestion!)

Rationing was pretty severe and a major trial to a growing lad! Fortunately, during the war neither bread nor, for some reason, peanut butter was rationed which was a life saver for me. I would come home from school, hungry and with a headache having had a miserably small school dinner, slice up a loaf into ten or so slices, spread it with peanut butter, devour it and then ask what was for tea! (Bread was rationed after the end of the war; we were never told why at the time, no doubt for fear of a violent backlash. The rationing was imposed on us because the Germans were starving for lack of food and wheat was diverted from the UK to Germany.) Why was peanut butter not rationed, when it had to be imported across the Atlantic, and shipping was in such short supply? Perhaps it wasn’t very popular, but it kept me going. I didn’t eat of lot of it subsequently!

On VJ day, my friend Colin Smith and I cycled up to London on his tandem (about 70 miles round trip); me on the back, Colin on the front. We reached Parliament Square, and pushed the tandem through the crowds, but didn’t get much further, because the number of people made it impossible. It was very evocative to see the TV pictures from London on 10 July 2005, the veterans marching proudly with their standards high, the Queen reviewing the parade and the history delivered by various actors. Then the fly past! I recognised all the aircraft taking part having seen all of them for real, as well as many, many more types flying over Kent among them the Beaufighter and the Mosquito (both of which were stationed at some time at RAF West Malling, about three miles from home).

Brian Whitehouse
Completed 10 July 2005

Post Script 31 August 2005

The recent 60-year commemoration of the end of the war prompts me to add a thought or two about the dropping of the Atomic Bombs on Japan. A friend of mine was the son of an eminent scientist, a botanist not a physicist, and I remember being very impressed by his lack of surprise that such a bomb could exist! To me like to almost the entire population of the country the concept of such a thing was amazing. I believed then and still to this day, that it saved many more lives than it took. The fanatical Japanese would have fought for every inch of their homeland, at an enormous cost of lives of Allied Service men to say nothing of Japanese troops and civilians. It took two such bombs to convince the Japanese hierarchy and even then a day or two elapsed before the surrender. Of course the deaths of so many civilians was dreadful; so was the bombing of Dresden. But I do not know how the war could have been ended so fast without the bombs, and when one knows of the appalling behaviour of the Japanese to prisoners of war, service and civilian alike, it is hard to feel much sympathy.

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