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This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Lois Cooper and has been added to the website on behalf of Vera Woodhead with her permission and she fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

Battle of Britain Day 1941 was a day that I will never forget. My friend and I were at Freshwater Bay when we heard a great droning of aircraft engines coming towards the Bay. We looked up at the sky and could see in the distance that the sky was packed with German Bombers. We said, "This is it"! and decided to take shelter, but we needn't have worried too much as in a few minutes we heard the familiar sound of our Spitfires and Hurricanes. They started to surround the German Aircraft, firing continually, and it wasn't long before we saw all the German Aircraft turn tail and race back across the Channel, seen off by our wonderful pilots of the Spitfires and Hurricanes. A really extraordinary and unforgettable sight.

We had quite a few dogfights over our area and many planes crashed, some in fields near Farringford Farm and on Tennyson Down. The soldiers had dug long trenches along the Downs to stop aircraft landing. We saw many pilots come down by parachute. Some were our own airmen who escaped by parachute only to be fired on the Germans as they floated down.

Bombs were often dropped on Cowes and other areas where the Germans thought there were factories. Often the bombers would jettison their load over the Island on the way back from bombing Portsmouth, London, and many more places on the mainland, and they would often strafe the seafronts of Ventnor, Sandown and Shanklin. There were casualties in many areas and quite a few killed.

Later in the War, Doodlebugs also came over the Island and incendiary bombs were often dropped.

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