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From Brian James,( now 74)
To My Grandson, Adam

Your Daddy tells me you often ask him questions about the Second World War. So I thought you might like to know what it was like being a boy during that war. I was Nine when the war began and fourteen when it ended.

The first thing I remember is the day that war broke out. Germany had invaded Poland and because Britain was a friend of Poland we told Germany to leave Poland at once or we would fight them. At 11 oclock one day we all sat around the wireless and heard Mr Chamberlain, who was then the Prime Minister say that Germany had refused to leave Poland — “therefore we are at war with Germany.” Everybody was very nervous, especially when a few minutes later the sirens sounded — they were big noisy machines on the roof of police and fire stations, and the “wow…..wow….wow” sound they made could be heard for miles. Everybody thought that the German planes had arrived to bomb us… so we all ran like mad for the air-raid shelters which people had dug in their own back gardens. We carried our new gas-masks, and some people even put them on. But it was a false alarm.

Things went very quiet for months after that….. it was not until the next May, nearly eights months later, that the Germans launched a very fierce attack on the French and Belgium armies, and the British troops who were in France to help them. The Belgians soon gave up… the French were pushed miles back.. and the British were forced back to the coast near Dunkirk. We used to cut out maps from the newspapers, showing how far the Germans had reached… and we could tell from the voices on the ��ѿ��ý that things were very bad. Then we heard that the British soldiers had been taken off the beaches in France and brought home by hundreds and hundreds of little boats sent across the seas to rescue them. This was Dunkirk.

But we knew that things would now become very tough — for the fear was that Germany would now invade Britain. We had heard how cruel the German soldiers were…. stories that they killed women and children for no reason had been told and believed, though we know now that not much of this was really true.

None the less many people were very scared.

What I remember about this was listening outside the door of the house where I was then staying - and hearing my Aunt Babs asking her husband the best way to shoot herself, her daughter Wendy and ME. She had the .45 Webley revolver her husband Stan had brought back from World War One, when he had been in the Royal Flying Corps, and she wanted to know how to use it to kill us all before the Germans captured us, but in a way that we would feel no pain. You can imagine how scared I was at that…. But it shows how terrified some people were of the German paratroops we expected.

But first the Germans had to beat the RAF before they could invade… so that led to the start of the Battle of Britain.

It was a glorious summer… so we kid used to stand out on the fields of Epsom Common where I was staying at the time… and watch the white contrails of the planes fighting miles up in the sky. You could hear the roar of the plane engines and faint “chat..chat..chat” sound of their machine guns.

But sometimes it got much closer. Once, we heard this roar, and a Messerschmidt 109 came whizzing towards us… down to about 100 feet off the ground. Just behind and above him was a Spitfire chasing him down…. he was firing bursts at the German, and Wendy and I saw the bullets which missed the German pinging into the ground a little way away (we tried to find them and dig them out later… but they were too far in). Any way soon after we heard a great bang… saw a cloud of smoke go up near Chessington…and soon after that the Spitfire came back, flying low, and doing a Victory Roll while we all leapt about and cheered.

The Battle of Britain lasted weeks. There were many exciting days — and some scary one too.

But the worst times after that when the German decided they would come at night and simply bomb the cities. Especially London. I had gone back to live with other relatives in Barking by then. And I remember my mother coming to collect me, after all the windows had been smashed out by a bomb blast, to take me back to Epsom — it was supposed to be safer, ha! — and we had to cross London by Tube. Except that the Tube was all messed up by the bombing, we had to get out (somewhere near Old Street I think) and walk through the streets to another station. Everything around had been bombed. You could smell the burning wood and broken buildings. Down one street there were dark bundles on the ground. Dead people who had just been carried from the buildings and were to be taken away. My Mummy was crying…. I was just scared.

Some time later we were at Epsom when that too was raided. Not surprising, because all around the Common the British had placed a ring of anti-aircraft guns to attack the German bombers…. So the more nervous German pilots got scared at the amount of guns firing up at them, jettisoned their bomb load and whizzed off home. Some of those bombs crashed into the street outside our house…. Bringing half the roof off, and the ceiling down in the bedroom where I was just getting up to run to the shelter. All I remember is a terrible whack on the head… being knocked down…. covered in dust, and great lumps of plaster. The First Aid men ran in from the Depot up the road, bandaged the great cut on my head, and made me drink a cup of very hot, very strong, and very, very SWEET tea. For the shock, they said. I have never liked sweet tea since!
But my “war wound”, got me off school for several days.

So back again to London (Babs thought that the Germans were chasing her deliberately!!) where for months we spent every single night in the air-raid shelter on the Common. Dark, smelly, and full of people playing daft “I spy” sort of games to pass the time. Not much to cheer us boys up those days — not with no sugar for the cocoa, and one small bar of chocolate and half a jar of jam to last a whole month.

But we had a bit of fun collecting scrapnel — that’s bits of the shells they had fired up at the Germans — and looking out of the tail fins of German incendiary bombs. I went once with Uncle Stan to look for these on Epsom Common after there had been a fire-storm raid the night before. You looked for a new six-inch hole in the ground, and looked in to see if you could spot a tail-fin. Well I did… reached in… go the fin…. Pulled… up it came….and everybody around went very, very quite.

What I had found was an unexploded incendiary bomb… what’s worse it was one of the German “terror” devices armed with a small bomb to kill any fireman or rescue worker who touched it. “I wont try to take it from you in case we drop it, or jar it “said Stan. “I want you to hold it very, very tight… walk very, very slowly to the Air Raid Depot (about 200 yards away)… don’t try to talk… don’t be scared… just concentrate… on walking slowly… and calmly…..” We got to the Air Raid Depot.. a warden took the bomb from me, very, very gently,,, placed it in a great bin of sand…. Then we all ran away. Some time later some soldiers came and blew it up in a ditch.

The next great excitement was V1 and V2 terror weapons the German used when they saw they were losing the war. I was in bed in another house in Epsom, when the sirens sounded but we did not bother to go the shelters, or even get up… there had been no air raids for a long time in 1944. Then I shouted to my Mum, “ look we have hit one… it’s on fire.” I could see a long strip of flame coming out of the back of this dark ‘aeroplane’. Then I shouted “Look there’s another…. And then another…. They’re All on fire.” Nobody could understand what was going on. Until we heard next day that these were unmanned rocket bombs that flew until their fuel was all gone, then they dived to earth to cause terrible explosions. A week or two of these and we knew that while the engine was roaring away they were passing overhead and so harmless to us…. But when the noise stopped, you dived for cover — quickly. One day we heard these Doodlebugs, as they were called going over… I went downstairs, hearing nothing, looked up and few hundred yards away a doodle bug was diving straight for us….. I yelled to everyone upstairs in the flat to “get down….get down”, grabbed my small nephew Michael (he was a baby) and dived with him under my arm into our Anderson shelter outside the front door. Most terrible bang…. Half the roof had gone away… all the windows and doors smashed by the blast.. but no one hurt. Not even in the Canadian Army camp in the next field where the V1 had landed… just a few bruises as all the wooden huts had collapsed around the soldiers’ heads. They were NOT happy.

Not much fun being a boy in wartime. Yes it was exciting to see the planes roaring overhead — at least when they were OUR planes — and it was thrilling watching the tanks and guns and millions of soldiers assembling in southern England before D-Day. And yes it was interesting collecting the cap badges of all the regiments, and souvenirs like used bullets, bits of bombs, scraps of fabric from German planes…. But too many people you knew had relatives killed or missing… so you always knew that this was a sad, bad time to be growing up.
I hope you never know anything like it.

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