大象传媒

This story was submitted to the 大象传媒 WW2 People鈥檚 War site by Mrs M A Nallen of St Benedict鈥檚 Catholic High School on behalf of Stephen Corsi and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.
SECOND WORLD WAR MEMORIES OF STEPHEN CORSI

1939-1945
Aged 10 years 8 months at outbreak of war; 16 years 4 months in May
1945.
THE PERSONAL WAR
On 29 August 1939, I was sent back from Italy by train in care of sleeping car conductor to Paris, where I was met by my father and flown to Croydon, stayed one night in London then on to the country by train. This was the first time I had ever travelled entirely on my own on a main line railway with having to change of trains. However, I had been using the London Underground system regularly for 3 years by then.
Then on Sunday 3 September at 11:00 everyone listened to the radio to hear the Prime Minister say that the country was at war. Actually, it would have been a greater surprise if he had not said it, because it had seemed inevitable, since Poland had been invaded 3 days before.
Life seemed to be normal all through the war as everything developed slowly. By 1941 it felt as if we had had identity cards and ration cards all our lives. This was particularly true in the country where rationing was very well supplemented by local produce.
In the cities, you could eat in restaurants without ration cards up to a value of 5 shillings per meal. Expensive restaurants overcame this with a 鈥渃over charge鈥�. People who were very hungry sometimes had 2 lunches in different restaurants to fill up.
Ration cards were issued for food, clothing and petrol. Food and clothing was adequate but not generous. With the help of unrationed food you could get by quite comfortably and the gardens of houses were turned into vegetable plots, tennis courts were dug up and many open spaces ere rented out as allotments to people who had no gardens.
Many houses kept pigs, chickens, goats and other livestock which were fed on leftovers from cooking or from growing vegetables.
Everyone was issued with gas masks but after a few months hardly anyone carried them.
At first, cars received petrol rations but later only essential vehicles were allowed to have petrol. Paraffin for farm tractors was coloured red to stop people using it in their cars. You could fill the carburettor with a few drops of petrol to start it and then a car would run on paraffin. Some cars were adapted to use town gas and had large silvery balloons fitted on their roofs to carry it.
At night all the curtains had to be shut tight to prevent even a chink of light getting out. Cars had special covers over their headlights so that they only shone downwards.
I rarely went near any major cities for next five years, merely passing through when necessary.
I watched the red sky above Coventry when it was being bombed but was too far away to hear the explosions. By contrast to the devastation of Coventry and Birmingham, it is said that only 1 bomb fell on Leamington throughout the war on open space between 3 possible targets.
For the first year of the war, some of my London School were transferred as a group to Arnold Lodge, Leamington, sleeping in the family home of our former headmaster, in Jury Street, Warwick.
As a boarder at school in Dunchurch (1940-1942) we went down to the cellars whenever the sirens sounded. One night a land-mine (large bomb on a parachute) landed near the middle of the village and when I came back upstairs after the all-clear my bed had moved a foot away from the wall.
Our home, in London, was a six-storey town-house and one night a bomb landed precisely on top of the wall dividing it from next door, knocking down some 5 metres of wall. The top two floors were later found to have moved about 3 centimetres sideways. The building was shored up and my father continued to live there except for the top floor and I would sometimes spend the occasional night there.
The house had been built just after the 1914-1918 war and the first owner had thought that there might be another war and had built it with a cellar which was designed to be used as an air-raid shelter.
One night, when in London for a couple of days I went across the river by underground to visit friends but when returning was caught on the wrong side of the river during an air raid and had to spend the most of the night in the tube train.
One day when he1 on a farm, the farmer and I heard a German aeroplane approaching and we hid behind a haystack but we must have been seen because the tail gunner fired off his machine guns at us but without effect.
Towards the end of the war the Germans started to use flying bombs (Vi), which people affectionately called 鈥渄oodlebugs鈥�. These were planes with ram-jet engines and no pilots and no remote control. They were started up pointing towards southern England and when they ran out of fuel they came down. There was a very eerie period of about 10 seconds between when the engine stopped and when the explosion came. Those ten seconds could seem like hours. Fighter planes used to be sent up to shoot them down over open ground and sometimes, if they were found near the coast, the fighters would get under a wing tip and ease them round so that they would fly back to France.
After these came the rockets (V2) . In some ways these were an improvement because the first thing you heard was the explosion, which meant that you had escaped as it must have fallen some distance from you.

I had two paternal uncles both of whom had been born in London and had British passports. One uncle (Edward) was a doctor but had been practising in Italy at the start of the war (15 June 1940 for Italy). He was interned with his brother (Tino) but being a non combatant was exchanged and came back to England. After which he joined the army medical corps (RANC) and worked in field hospitals in France. My father (Henry) was too old to be called up in 1939 but he had worked in field hospitals in 1914-1918.
The other uncle (Tino) was released in July 1943, when the Italian government stopped fighting, but the Germans more or less took over Italy for the rest of the war and he became a partisan for some time before escaping to Switzerland where he was interned for the rest of the war. This was in a hotel in Lugano, which happened to be owned by friends who had been allowed to stay in the top floor flat. His wife (Bice) and son (Carlo) had escaped to Switzerland earlier and were living as refugees with other friends in Lugano.
The end of the war came twice, once on 8 May 1945 and then on 15 August 1945. Most people remember the first date more than the second and certainly bonfires were lit on 8 May and everybody celebrated but there was probably as much joy in August when it really was all over. However, life went on afterwards much as before, rationing continued and later on bread was rationed for the first time. In some ways it did not feel as if the war had really ended until ration cards were abolished in 1951.
In 1946 I visited Guernsey, which had been occupied by the Germans. However, the Senior Officers in the Channel Islands, being mostly professional soldiers past retiring age, had always seen that their troops behaved correctly. The one thing that I remember is that all the schools were full of furniture. The soldiers had moved the furniture around between the houses that they had commandeered and returning householders had found these pieces in their homes and were displaying them for the real owners to find and collect.

THE REAL WAR
The 鈥渞eal war鈥� hardly seemed to affect daily life in England. There was no television so news came by radio or in the newspapers. Everyone followed the progress of the fighting but at no time did the population believe that the Allies could lose in the end. When Hitler invaded Russia, repeating Napoleon鈥檚 mistake of 130 years earlier, everyone in Britain heaved a sigh of relief as the end then seemed to be inevitable.
The war in North Africa was seen as a purely professional operation in which the tanks merely replaced the medieval knights in armour. It was followed with interest but with a certain amount of detachment as if it did not really affect us.
People became rather depressed when Singapore fell in 1941 and also on the occasions when we lost major ships like the 鈥淗ood鈥� and the 鈥淧rince of Wales鈥� but otherwise the reverses were taken in one鈥檚 stride and the victories were considered to be our due.
After the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, interest became more intense but by then, with both the Americans and the Russians fighting on oour side, the only question was 鈥淗ow long will it take to get to Berlin?鈥�

THE DOWNSIDE AEROPLANE CRASH
The following is based on a letter to an old school friend dated 11 May 1994 about a crash by a fighter aeroplane on a bank where most of Downside School was gathered to watch a cricket match on Saturday 15 May 1943. The pilot and 9 boys were killed and 14 boys were injured.
鈥淚 read your account of the crash in the Raven with interest and until then I had no idea that the full picture of what happened that afternoon was unclear. It is now a very long time after the event but I think that it is still not too late to record what I remember seeing.
I was playing cricket on the upper field and at the time was fielding in a position facing the pavilion. My concentration was not entirely on the game and I was watching the antics of these two aeroplanes with some interest and even trepidation as they were flying lower than any I had seen before.
As was always the case, the instructor was in front and the pupil was flying behind and some ten to twenty feet below his leader. The final pass was very low and over some very tall fir trees at the edge of the field. The first plane cleared these but the second one just touched the tallest tree, probably with its tail, so that its nose tipped downwards. At that height there was no chance for Sub-Lt McCracken, the pilot, to do anything and he ploughed straight into the crowd on the bank.
There is a tree with a dead section at the top at approximately the point where the aircraft touched and it would not surprise me if this was the actual tree that was struck and that the dead section had resulted from a partial fracture of the trunk.
Everything that happened after that moment is a blur and the only things that I can remember were that we were all given sandwiches the next morning and told to go out and not come back before teatime. I also remember seeing the shrouds laid out in the squash court and only half-believing that underneath these were the bodies of my friends, particularly David Lowndes whom I had already known for seven or eight years. My most vivid memory is of his brother Michael coming back from hospital with his terribly scarred face. On the Monday everything returned to normal and life continued exactly as before being only interrupted for the joint funeral of the dead pilot and boys.
I ought to have been in one of the Junior House dormitories with all the other first year boys but had been moved up into the Smythe dormitory at the beginning of that term so I have no recollection of the empty beds on the Saturday night. This might also explain why I was playing cricket when most of my friends were sitting in the crash area.
I hope that this helps to clarify the actual sequence of events and I would be very pleased to know whether there is any evidence to support (or disprove) my memory of that terrible event.鈥�

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