One evening toward the end of May,
1944, a column of Army trucks roared into our school grounds. Within hours a
whole infantry regiment, its cheerful, foul-mouthed soldiery and their
vehicles, weapons and supplies had taken over the grassy spaces around the
school’s ancient stone residences, classrooms, library and gymnasium. For
several days, while the school tried to conduct its business as usual, the
troops were hidden under trees and out in the open under camouflage netting.
More soldiers
poured into the county on their way south to the coastal towns in Kent and
Sussex, bordering on the English Channel. There was no doubt about it -- the
invasion of Europe was coming! For us,
in our early teens, it was all a schoolboy dream. Friendly fighter planes
swooped and dived over our heads, while tanks, armored cars, anti-aircraft guns
and field artillery rolled through the village streets. The summer term at
school had begun, but it was too hard to concentrate on dreary Latin and
chemistry and algebra when there were such distractions on our very doorstep.
Then, in the
first few days of June we woke to find the troops gone and shortly afterward,
on June 6, BBC radio news announced the invasion of Normandy. Suddenly the war
seemed far away, though we were well within range of German fighters and
dive-bombers. But the Luftwaffe stayed away from us for the rest of that month,
otherwise engaged by the D-Day beachheads. Instead, a few weeks later, we
encountered the first of Hitler’s most terrifying secret weapons, 8,500 of
which rained down on London and its surrounding counties, killing about 9,000
civilians.
It was late at
night when they came for the first time. They flew out of the southeast, low
over the school buildings, with rowdy, rattling jet engines like huge, poorly
silenced motorbikes, and tongues of flame belching from their tails. In our dormitories we hung out the windows,
craning to see them as they careered overhead. No grown-ups came to reassure
us, and we had no idea what these noisy, mysterious craft were. Of one thing we
were sure, they were hostile.
On the radio
next day we learned what they were. These were flying bombs, V1’s (“Vee Ones”), crudely built, pilotless,
rocket-propelled aircraft launched from railroad lines in Nazi-occupied France.
Each contained a ton of explosive, and when the fuel ran out, after fifteen
seconds of unnerving silence, they crashed and exploded. In daylight, RAF
fighter pilots quickly learned to deal with what were soon nicknamed buzz bombs,
or doodle-bugs. Some pilots intercepted them by flipping them over with their
Spitfires’ wing-tips, causing them to crash, but the most effective way to stop
their passage on their fixed courses was for fighters to shoot them down with
cannon shells. Whatever the method, the result was the same – a massive
explosion in a ball of fire in the fields and woods around our school.
Soon after the
first buzz-bombs plunged into London, more than 2,500 anti-aircraft guns were
moved into the counties to the southeast of the capital, mainly to Kent, Surrey
and Sussex. A battery of these guns
-- 40 mm Bofors guns that had already
more than earned their keep during the Battle of Britain -- quickly dug-in on the edge of our school
cricket field, a grassy plateau that looked down on the school in the river
valley below. In their sandbagged emplacements the guns were right on the
course the buzz bombs followed from their launch pads in the extreme north of
France to London, their ultimate target.
Sixty-nine
years on, it seems incredible that on one hot summer afternoon in 1944,
following a shrill warning whistle signal from the umpire, we schoolboys lay
flat on our faces under the wooden benches around that cricket pitch, while the
guns blazed away at a passing flying bomb.
Hot, jagged pieces of silver shrapnel pattered down on the
well-manicured grass around us.
Oddly, none of
us sensed real terror at that strange time in our early lives. Even in the
darkest days of the early 1940’s, though we sometimes stumbled on the grisly
wreckage of German and friendly aircraft in the dense woods around the school,
and looked up to see the sky black with high-flying formations of enemy bombers
heading for London, we somehow felt detached from the reality of it all. It was
a dreamscape, some over-long Saturday morning movie show.
Unlike the
Jews, The Poles, the Russians and millions of children in many occupied
countries, we had enough to eat, and we stayed warm in the winter. No one took
our parents or friends away, and we never actually met the enemy face-to-face.
We were the
lucky ones. For us it wasn’t an ordeal; it was sheer adventure.
ooo0ooo
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