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15 October 2014
WW2 - People's War

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Just a Boy in the War: Blitz on Sheffield

by Alan Cox

Contributed by听
Alan Cox
People in story:听
Alan Cox
Location of story:听
Sheffield in Yorkshire
Article ID:听
A2053513
Contributed on:听
17 November 2003

I have always been rather childishly resentful that Sheffield is rarely mentioned in accounts of English cities and towns blitzed in the war. I was 10 when there were at least two prolonged night time attacks on Sheffield.

My parents, my brother and I lived in a turn of the century house in the Broomhill area - a western suburb of Sheffield. We had a rather dark, dingy and damp cellar with a large stone table. I remember sheltering there and being terrified by the piercing shriek of the falling bombs and by the thud of the explosions for hours on end. I didn鈥檛 take much comfort from the conventional wisdom that you wouldn鈥檛 be hurt if you heard the bomb - they said "it was the ones you didn't hear that did for you".

The morning after one of these raids, I went with a chum to see the damage. It was mainly in the shopping area just off the city centre affecting particularly a long road called The Moor. The devastation was substantial and I have to confess I was more fascinated than horrified. My other reaction was that the Germans must have been pretty rotten at aiming their bombs because they had completely missed the industrial area which was so important for steel making.

The reality of war was brought home to me when I heard of a tragedy just down the road. The father of a school friend had been standing at the top of their stairs when a landmine dropped in the next road and blew him down the stairs and killed him. The family鈥檚 name was Macbeth and I felt, very vaguely, that there was some sort of poetic irony there.

My mother was Norwegian so there was naturally great distress when the Germans invaded Norway and severed all contacts with her many relatives. There was one exception in the shape of one of her nephews called Bj酶rn-Ole Dehli. He was on a whaling ship at the time of the invasion and came to England to join the Norwegian merchant shipping fleet. He was able to visit us occasionally when he was on leave and brought us all sorts of foods unobtainable in England. I seem to recall a huge ham joint. What luxury!

Soon after the war, my parents invited a German POW in a camp just outside Sheffield to our house. His name was Otto and he was a cook - a really nice fellow but I cannot remember if he cooked for us. He was allowed to work in a local bakery. I was frankly surprised how nice he was and I suppose that taught me that Germans are human too.

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This story has been placed in the following categories.

The Blitz Category
Childhood and Evacuation Category
Sheffield and South Yorkshire Category
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