大象传媒

The industrial buildings at the east end of Eastbourne must have looked an inviting target to the pilot of the German hit and run raider attacking the town just before 1 pm on 26th October 1942.

As he descended through the low clouds he would have seen the town destructor works with two tall chimneys, the adjacent electricity generating station with two wooden cooling towers, the gas works with three large gas holders, a lorry-body workshop, and an engineering factory where I worked at the time, all clustered together in a small area.

The wailing sound of the sirens could not be heard above the noise of the machines in the factory, and in any case the factory work was not interrupted for the routine air-raid warnings. Work was only stopped when the local warning was received. Only when this warning was received did a klaxon hooter echo throughout the factory and then it was a case of, 鈥榮witch off your machine and run like hell鈥�!

I was probably thinking that it must be getting close to dinner time when, suddenly, the klaxon gave three rasping blasts which immediately started my heart pounding and my feet running as my hand snatched at the combined clutch/gear lever of the Ward turret lathe I was operating.

As I ran past the 40-horse power electric motor driving the shafting at my end of the workshop, I quickly punched the trip button and swung the 6-inch driving belt from the fixed to the loose pulley.

In seconds I was racing through the back door making for the open ground at the rear of the factory. (You can tell I鈥檓 no hero!) Trying to look up while running, and yet not trip over my own feet, I gazed in wonder at the line of pretty little red lights passing over my head. It was only later that I realised what they were when I saw the row of neat little holes in the factory roof!

As the black, twin-engined Dornier bomber roared over at rooftop height, its cannons and machine guns blazing, the Bren-gunner on the roof of the lorry body workshop must have fired a full magazine at it to no avail. Although on another occasion this gun was successful in shooting down a Focke-Wulf 190 which crashed nearby, clipping the roof of the gas works building as it did so.

By this time we were all flat on our faces, each doing his best to imitate an ostrich with its head in the sand. Then the ground shook as a stick of 250KG bombs exploded with devastating effect.

Whatever the target was for this attack, the bombs all fell in a nearby residential area.

The first bomb fell on a house, causing the three occupants to be gassed by a broken gas main as they were trapped under the stairs. Two others fell on houses in the area, while another struck a public house, passing through several walls; it then skidded across the road and lay in the gutter outside the public house opposite before exploding. A family were all killed outright in an adjoining house and there were many casualties in a bus that was passing at the time.

A seven year old child was located in the rubble of one house crying for his mother; sadly she was one of the dead. A total of 50 houses were reported as being either destroyed or seriously damaged, and the casualties amounted to 22 injured and 15 killed. Eight of the dead, including four children, were known personally to a schoolgirl escaping from a damaged house nearby who in later years was to become my wife.

On a happier note, one 鈥� old boy 鈥� was dug out of the pub after being buried for 16 hours, complaining that he hadn鈥榯 been able to drink the pint of beer that he had paid for!

For us it was a case of going back into the factory and the foreman saying鈥� Don鈥檛 use this as an excuse for coming back late from dinner.鈥�

It is interesting to note that one of the main lines of production at the factory was a part for a bomb dropping mechanism for our own bombers.

This type of hit and run raid was a daily occurrence at Eastbourne at one time of the war, usually with just one or two planes but, on occasion, up to three times in one day, and considerable damage was done to the town.

The public house has since been rebuilt, but not so the adjoining houses destroyed at the time. The empty spaces, now a beer garden, being a permanent reminder of that one day in 鈥淲artime Eastbourne.鈥�

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