大象传媒

This story was submitted to the people war Website by a volunteer from Tiverton Museum of Mid Devon Life on behalf of A.W Beech.

BOUNCING BOMBS:
I left school in 1941, Rockbeare School. You had to do work of national importance so I went to the local nursery. In 1942 I was late for work, went out to get on my bicycle to go to work and I saw this German plane. It was shooting at a train, one of these early morning raids. It lined itself up with Rockbeare straight, on the A30, too low for bombing really. It let these bombs go and one exploded right outside the nursery. It was dead on 8 o鈥檆lock. One exploded opposite the nursery, in a tree. The bombs just bounced along until they hit something. When I eventually got to the nursery there was a girl badly injured, she later died and there was one chap clocking in, hit with a cannon shell, and he died instantly.

We were sent home that day and didn鈥檛 go back to work for a fortnight. The aircraft carried on down the straight, shooting at anything that was moving. I was waiting to go to work as the plane came over shooting and my mate was coming the opposite way on this bicycle and we had to shoot across the road into the ditch. You could hear the cannon shells bursting in the road. The aircraft turned towards the airport, which wasn鈥檛 far away. It was gradually losing height and it crashed killing all the crew near the Polish billets, where the new A30 goes up now. It was a camp with both Poles and Czechs. Exeter Airport had Spitfires, Hurricanes and Bullfighters.

FORCED LANDING ON A FOOTBALL PITCH:
I changed my job and worked for an agricultural engineer in Broadclyst. We went down to Starcross to service a tractor and a B17 Flying Fortress made a forced landing on the football pitch at Langdon Farm. The Americans towed it back as far as they could, built a runway, stripped all that they could off the Flying Fortress to make it as light as possible, put 4 fresh engines in. They were there for weeks. When we went down to do some more work on the tractor we just missed the take off which was successful. They put the football pitch back as it was. You wouldn鈥檛 have known anything had happened there.

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