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WARTIME IN WELLESBOURNE MOUNTFORD

I was 13 years old in September 1939, and I lived at Wellesbourne Mountford, near Stratford on Avon in Warwickshire. I went to the local school and one day we saw men starting to work in the field with lorries and bulldozers. They were building what became Wellesbourne Mountford R.A.F airfield which was used to train pilots and crews to fly Wellington Bombers. We used to sit by the airfield and watch the Bombers taking off and landing.

Planes crashed in the area at least two or three times a week, and my friend and I used to go out and look at the wrecks on the crash sites before the R.A.F. men arrived to place a guard around them. We used to collect the Perspex from the windows of the planes and make rings and bracelets from it. We also salvaged the instruments from the cockpits. The local police used to go mad at this, and many times came to school to tell us not to do it, but we carried on, it was exciting!
The planes were carrying ammunition for the guns, which was usually all over the place after the crash, so we used to collect handfuls of live ammunition and take it away with us. At school we used to put a live bullet in between a crack in the wall and then with a nail and another brick hit the firing pin and let them off! It’s a wonder nobody was killed as this was very dangerous. We used to wear the ammunition clips and empty shell cases like bandoliers.

One night two Luftwaffe planes came and bombed the airfield. They were both shot down by the R.A.F. and the anti aircraft guns. One crashed on the airfield and another at nearby Kineton. The crews were all killed, including two brothers who were on each plane.

One of the things we used to do, was collect paper for the ‘war effort’. If you collected a lot you were given a ‘rank badge’. The more you collected, the more badges you got, and you could become a Field Marshal!

Food was not very good most of the time, and I can remember dried egg powder, but the thing I remember was that sometimes we had meat pies, but they tasted so awful it made you wonder what the meat was.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by June Woodhouse (volunteer) of the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Dave Hawtin (author) and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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