大象传媒

This story was contributed by David Durow to the People's War team in Wales and is added to the site with his permission.

My father worked in the dockyard and he worked all hours there repairing ships. And when the blitz got bad, the defences in Portsmouth, they tried to improve them and they formed a Home Guard unit firing rockets. They weren鈥檛 much good they were a blind barrage which they鈥檇 put up and which they hoped would deter them. He did three nights on the guns there. And he鈥檇 come home from work, change out of his working clothes into his Home Guard uniform, see us into the shelter, then he would go off to the rocket site鈥�.come back the next morning鈥ee us out of the shelter, change into his working clothes and go back to work for another full day鈥檚 work. And at the height of the blitz when all the bombing was going on he was doing that.

Portsmouth wasn鈥檛 a good place to be 鈥�.the Germans either came over in large formations because they were after the dockyard and we only lived ten minutes walk from the dockyard. You can imagine the size of the dockyard鈥�.and there were rows and rows of very tightly packed Victorian terraced houses which is where we lived, and I mean bombs were so inaccurate they may have tried to hit the dockyard but they came our way. Then you鈥檇 get the sneak bombers coming in very low on their own, trying to sneak in and they鈥檇 just drop one without warning. 鈥nd you didn鈥檛 know until you heard the bang go off, you know, and it was going on all the time. The situation got so bad with the mains that they put huge great big 12 inch pipes down the main road for water mains and they had mobile smoke makers 鈥 can only describe them鈥�.like the old-fashioned rocket that Stevenson made and it was filled up with filthy diesel oil and they used to set fire to it and billows of smoke would come up in the hope that it would mask the fires. And next door to Portsmouth was Hayling Island, almost the same shape and it was very sparsely populated so what they used to do was light fires on that in the hope that it would decoy the Germans over. Then we also used to get the doodle-bugs, the flying bombs coming over. We used to watch those come over and they were worse because a bomb might knock down two or three houses, but one of these would knock down a whole terrace, and destroy it completely. And I think at one stage there was about a quarter of a square mile in the centre of Portsmouth completely flattened. It was all gone. It was dreadful. The accommodation was awful because you also had lots of people working in the dockyard and all the troops were out there, there were lots of troops and naval personnel there from other nations and it was really really crowded.
And it was also a very exciting place to live, because just over the hill鈥t was very, very rural in those days with little tiny villages. And on the build up to D-Day there were masses and masses of troops and tanks and guns and artillery and everything in these lanes, you could see it. You could walk across the front, because there was a main road right across the front and they cordoned it off and wouldn鈥檛 let you on it. But you could see from the side roads and there were hundreds of workmen building gigantic concrete blocks 鈥� about twice the size of a huge bus they were 鈥� and we just could not understand what these concrete blocks were. We knew D-Day was coming because of all the troops started moving in, all the ships were moving about, you couldn鈥檛 disguise it from us because we could see it all 鈥� and these concrete blocks all disappeared and we discovered they were part of the mulberry harbour. They鈥檇 built part of the mulberry harbour there and as a boy I just could not understand how concrete floated!

The entrance to Portsmouth harbour it鈥檚 not very wide鈥�.so you could see everything going from there, quite incredible. Then waves and waves of aircraft going over so you knew something was happening before the official announcement that D-Day had started. So we were well aware of what was going on鈥�.and we thought 鈥淎t last we were giving them something back!鈥� Which was what my Dad was so angry about sitting in the shelter with all the bombs coming down鈥nd as soon as he got on the rocket site he thought he was doing something. At the beginning of this blitz the anti-aircraft guns hardly fired at all, because they were so short of ammunition that they were told only to fire when they thought they could definitely hit something. And I think Churchill said it was getting people down so they said 鈥渇ire - whatever you鈥檝e got, just fire!鈥� And I remember my dad and I going out in the streets with this barrage going up cheering 鈥� even though the shrapnel racketing down was liable to kill us, you know. And we actually had mobile guns which toured around the streets and we had one firing away in our street just outside our house I remember, my mum was making the soldiers cups of tea 鈥�.

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