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This contribution was submitted by Mike Urry to the People's war team in Wales. It is added to the site with his permission

What I remember most of all was the noise. I’ve taken my grandchildren to a theme park since then and I was asked how it compared with the real thing. I said: “It’s too quiet” and the manager of this park said “we had to tone it down because it was frightening the children” and I said: “It did”. And the other thing that was missing was the smell, the smell of cordite, dust, gas escaping from the mains…well it lived with you and he couldn’t reproduce the smell of the Blitz. But more frightening than the blitz was the doodle bugs. Whether I was older and therefore realised the danger….or whether it was because everyone thought the war was virtually over and then…just at about the same time as D-Day the first Doodle bugs came over. And that was nasty. That 15 seconds between the engines cutting out and it crashing, was just long enough to pray it would hit someone else. Fifteen seconds may not seem a long time, but it felt like half a lifetime…it was scary. But I was 13, 14 at that time and you realised the danger. It wasn’t just exciting ..it was dangerous. And we got doodlebugged like most people sooner or later, because the blast from the doodlebug …that’s what we called the V1 …was spread out because they exploded on contact with anything — a tree, a telegraph pole. So the blast spread out. When we had the rockets…that we called flying gas mains. They were going three, four thousand miles an hour say….they made such big craters that the blast was contained within the thirty foot crater so it didn’t damage so many buildings. And you couldn’t hear them coming so if you heard the blast you knew you were safe. It was psychological I think.

The end of the war was a fiasco quite frankly. Everyone knew that the war had ended. Hitler had committed suicide…that was known. And every day “Is it ended…has it finished?” It went on and on. It was a damp squib quite honestly when Churchill announced that from midnight the war would be at an end. It was a damp squib. Mind you a lot of people didn’t have cause to celebrate because their families, their fathers etc. were away fighting the Japanese. That reminds me…one of the hardest things I had to do…was two friends of mine had their fathers killed during the war. As a 14 year old boy, what do you say to your friend whose father’s just been killed?. You think about it. What do you do. A girl you can have a kiss and a cuddle, but 14 year old boys, you can’t do that. And it was tough.

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