大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Ann Wedgwood of 大象传媒 Radio Cornwall Action CSV on behalf of Mr R A Heath the author,and has been added to the site with his permission.The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

In the early days of the war I was at home with my parents.Later I joined the RAF.
On September 7th 1940 ,the Blitz of London began.Every night at dusk the sirens would sound and very soon you would hear the sound of aircraft.
On November 14th the sirens sounded as usual, but we never heard any aircraft.It later transpired that their target was Coventry so things were very quiet.
We had an Anderson shelter in our garden.It proved pretty effective when the bombs were close.We were in the house that night and there were no aircraft about.
About 9pm we heard a plane flying very low.My father went outside and came running in, saying that he had seen a parachute and that someone was landing in our road.As we were putting our coats on there was a tremendous explosion.All the windows and frames were blown out,all the ceilings were down,every door was blown off (inside and out) and the roof disappeared after a while.We were not badly hurt.When the dust had cleared,I managed to get out into the street and found that a large two-story school in our road had been hit.Half of it seemed to be missing.It was used by the A.F.5 and normally they would have been called out but it had been a quiet night.The great tragedy was that 22 firemen died that night.
The parachute mine had a very thin casing about 1/8" and 1 ton explosives.

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