Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45. Duff Hart-Davis

Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45 - Duff  Hart-Davis


Скачать книгу
call a siren a ‘cyrene’, or just to refer to it as ‘that thing’. ‘There goes that thing again’, they would say, before getting on with the job in hand; and distant dogfights were regarded as a form of free entertainment. ‘They were just like butterflies flying round each other,’ said a woman of two tussling aircraft. ‘Lovely to watch.’ Children felt the same. Twelve-year-old Eileen Ryan, who had been evacuated from London to Weymouth, was walking with friends on the promenade one day and stopped to enjoy the spectacle of Spitfires wheeling in pursuit of ME 109s – until a warden roared at them, ‘You bloody kids – GET IN THE SHELTER!’

      There was huge excitement one day in Essex when a lone parachutist was seen swinging down out of the sky over Dagenham. Nine-year-old Richard Hunt was messing about with a gang of friends when somebody shouted that the invasion had begun, and a great crowd of people poured into the boys’ lane, armed with every kind of makeshift weapon, from garden forks to butchers’ knives, making for the fields. Richard had his airgun, and his friend Reggie some other weapon. Joining the rush, they ran through allotments, scattering the crops and breaking down fences in their way. At one stage they heard shots, and later learned that some member of the Home Guard, ignoring all the rules, had opened up on the parachutist and wounded him. The boys reached the scene in time to see an army van drive off with the man inside, and found out that, far from being German, he was one of the Polish or Czech pilots flying Spitfires with the RAF.

      Between 19 and 24 August bad weather enforced a lull and gave the RAF fighter squadrons some respite, but then Goering decided to concentrate attacks on 11 Group, which was defending London and the South East, and by the end of August Fighter Command had been drastically weakened: in the last week of August and the first of September 112 pilots and 256 aircraft were lost. Damage to ground stations was so severe that the fighters had to use small civilian airfields.

      Fortunately Goering never realized how close the RAF was to collapse. Instead of keeping up the pressure on fighter stations, he switched to the bombing of London – and so the Blitz proper began late in the afternoon of Saturday, 7 September 1940.

      Just after eight o’clock that evening the Chiefs of Staff issued the code word CROMWELL to military units, signifying that invasion was imminent. The warning put the whole country on alert: church bells rang out, the Home Guard stood to, and remained on post all night. Many people believed that German troops had already landed. What Hitler had launched, in fact, was Operation Loge, a mass attack on London, in which more than 1000 aircraft took part. Between then and the end of May 1941 the capital was attacked seventy-one times; a million houses were destroyed, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed.

      H. E. Bates was fishing on a lake in Kent when he witnessed one of the big raids coming in:

      Up to that day we had seen as many as eighty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty planes flying over at one time. Now we saw a phenomenon. It was like the inland migration of hundreds of black and silver geese. They came in steadily and unceasingly, not very high, the black geese the bombers, the silver the fighters. The fighters made pretty circling movements of protection above the bombers. They went forward relentlessly. The air was heavy with moving thunder and the culminating earthquakes of bombs dropped at a great distance. All that had happened before that day now seemed by comparison very playful.

      On 15 September – which became known as Battle of Britain Day – Fighter Command achieved its most spectacular success, breaking up raid after raid over London and the south coast. Such was Hitler’s frustration that two days later he shelved Operation Sealion indefinitely and turned his attention eastwards to Russia. It is estimated that during the Battle of Britain the RAF had lost just over 1000 aircraft, and the Luftwaffe nearly twice as many.

      When Hitler realized that his attempt to demoralize England had failed, attacks on London dwindled. But all Britain had been battered by bombs. After the capital, the city most heavily raided was Liverpool, where nearly 4000 people were killed. Bristol also came under persistent attack: on the night of 3–4 January 1941 a single raid lasted for twelve hours. Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Plymouth, Swansea and Southampton were also prime targets.

      Of all the outrages perpetrated by Hitler, none caused greater anger and grief than the attack on Coventry, on the night of 14 September 1940. The city was, in a sense, a legitimate target, for its factories were making cars, aircraft engines and munitions; but nothing could have prepared it for the devastating raid, which began at 8 p.m. and lasted until midnight, killing 560 people, destroying most of the city centre and leaving the fourteenth-century cathedral a ruined shell.

      Almost as emotive was the series of attacks that became known as the Baedeker raids. In April and May 1942, in revenge for Bomber Command’s laying waste the Baltic port of Lübeck, Hitler ordered reprisals against Exeter, Bath, York and Norwich – historic towns of no strategic importance. The raids killed 1600 civilians and wrecked many notable buildings, including the Assembly Rooms in Bath and the Guildhall in York. Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, a Nazi propagandist, announced that the Luftwaffe would hit every town in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker tourist guide. His threat was never carried out; but in another burst of retaliation Hitler responded to Bomber Command’s mass attack on Cologne (in May 1942) with three raids on Canterbury.

      In all the air raids throughout the war, human casualties were inevitably by far the most numerous in cities and towns, but the countryside suffered as well, mainly from bombs jettisoned by crews who had accomplished their principal mission and were on the way home, or were being hard pressed by fighters and sought extra speed to escape.

      In the early days of the battle a rumour went round that the Germans were dropping magnetic mines, and people wearing steel helmets were warned not to approach them in case they set off an explosion. But in fact almost everyone did wear steel helmets when out of doors, including ladies playing tennis, because during dogfights shrapnel and spent bullet cases were constantly raining down out of the sky. Vera Lynn wore a helmet in the car while driving to her shows.

      There were some astonishing survivals, such as that of Mr Withers and his neighbours in their Essex village, described by Margery Allingham:

      Their stick of bombs fell neatly between their bungalows, one bungalow, one crater, and so on … In the actual spot where Mr Withers’s own bomb fell he had a shed containing a pony and trap, a cat, some budgerigars, a jackdaw and a ton of coal. They got the pony out from under the trap in the crater and held it up for a minute or two until, to everyone’s amazement, it wandered off and began to eat. The cat ran away for nearly a fortnight. The budgerigars were none the worse. Most of the coal was retrieved, and the jackdaw died three days later, more from rage than anything else, Mr Withers said. No one in the houses was hurt.

      Between raids, life carried on. At Cranbrook School anti-aircraft guns were installed on the cricket field, and, whenever they opened up during a game, the boys had to sprint for cover. For minor crimes committed, an alternative to detention was a spell hoeing the sugar beet planted on one of the rugger pitches.

      Later in the war the Kent Messenger published a map showing where high-explosive bombs of 50kg or more had fallen on Sevenoaks Rural District between the end of July 1940 and the end of February 1944. Even though some 50,000 incendiary bombs were not included, the chart looked as though it had been blasted with a charge of No. 5 pellets from a shotgun, so thickly was it spattered with dots. One particularly dense cluster, running north-west to south-east, lay close below Chartwell, as if the Luftwaffe had been aiming for the Prime Minister’s country home.

      Efforts were made to lure German pilots to false targets. One decoy town was laid out by Shepperton Studios on Black Down, north of Bristol. Bales of straw soaked in creosote were set alight to simulate the effects of the incendiary bombs dropped at the start of a raid, and drums of oil were ignited to represent buildings on fire. Dim red lights, powered by petrol generators, were switched on in a pattern based on the streets and railways of the city. But these initiatives seem to have been fruitless, for no bombs landed on or around the site.

      The Germans went so far as to attack the Republic of Ireland – even though the country was officially neutral, and the Government had embellished the south coast with signs made from white-painted concrete


Скачать книгу