They came
in the dark, 73 years ago, when I was 13. One evening, towards the end of May,
1944, a column of British Army trucks roared into the grounds of our boarding
school in South East England.
Within
hours a whole infantry battalion, its cheerful, foul-mouthed soldiery and their
vehicles, weapons and supplies had taken over the grassy spaces around our
school’s ancient stone buildings, classrooms, library and gymnasium. For
several days, while the school tried hard to carry on as usual, the troops were
hidden under trees and out in the open under camouflage netting.
More
soldiers poured into the area on their way south to the coast in the rural
counties of Kent and Sussex, bordering on the English Channel. There was no
doubt about it -- the invasion of Europe was coming. We knew it, and the Germans knew it. But for
us, in our early teens, it was all a schoolboy dream. Friendly fighter planes
swooped and dove over our heads, while tanks, armored cars, anti-aircraft guns
and heavy 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, based only 21 miles across the English Channel. But
the Luftwaffe stayed away from us for the rest of that month, otherwise engaged
by the D-Day beachheads. Instead, shortly afterwards, 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 pouring from their tails. We hung out of our dormitory widows, craning
to see them as they careered overhead. No grown-ups came up to reassure us, and
we had no idea what these noisy, mysterious aircraft were. But of one thing we
were sure, they were hostile.
On
BBC radio next day we learned what they were. They were flying bombs, V1’s (“Vee
Ones”), crudely built, pilotless, rocket-propelled aircraft launched from
railroad lines only 21 miles across the English Channel in Nazi-occupied
France. Each contained a ton of explosive, and when the fuel ran out, after
fifteen or twenty 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 fighters’ wing-tips, causing them to veer
off-course and 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 southeast of the capital, mainly to Kent, our
county, and 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 a 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 in the fields and
farmland 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, like an 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, oddly, it wasn’t an ordeal, butt sheer adventure.
ooo0ooo
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