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Peter Cottingham wanted to share this story to illustrate the sort of things that just became the norm during the war, or the wartime gen, as he put it. He joined the war effort as a torpedo fitter when he was about 17 years old and at 18 he joined the RAF.

Mid-war he re-trained to work with and service guns and bombs - particularly 303 Brownings and 20mm Hispanos canons.

Peter was telling us about some of the “vengeance weapons” used by the Germans.
The V1 or "the flying bomb" had a repeater engine. From the ground, you could hear the reverberation noise from this engine and when the engine cut out the bomb would begin to dive down.

There was also a V2 - a sort of rocket, developed by the Germans. After the war, the Americans used their knowledge of the V2 to power their first space rockets.

Stationed at Dagenham Peter helped repair civilian buildings as part of his duties during V1 raids. On one afternoon, at about 2 o'clock, he was walking along a country road when he heard a V1 coming overhead. He heard the engine cut out, and as he could find no better cover, he dived into the curb edge to protect himself. When he got back to town, he heard that the bomb had landed on a cinema, where quite a few people had been killed.

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