大象传媒

In the ten years before the 2nd World War my parents were tenant farmers running a small farm in Lancashire. I was born in 1929 and my childhood coincided with a period of depression in the farming industry. In 1937, after a number of years of very hard work for little reward, my parents decided to move to Sidcup in Kent to run a milk-retailing business.

The second world war began in September 1939. Sidcup was on the south-eastern outskirts of London and, after France had been overrun by the Germans, the direct route to London from the airfields near the French coast passed over our town. Consequently, in July 1940 when the "Battle of Britain" began, we soon became used to seeing flights of bombers and fighters overhead and we were able to watch the dogfights between our Spitfires and Hurricanes and German warplanes as the Germans attempted to get planes through to bomb London. The air battles were played out in glorious sunshine in the autumn of 1940, the sky becoming full of vapour-trails left by the manoeuvring planes above. To an eleven-year-old schoolboy it was all very exciting.

Hitler's attempt to destroy Britain's fighter squadrons didn't succeed (although it very nearly did) and he abandoned it in September 1940. His lack of success was due to our chain of radar stations which gave the fighter command chiefs early warning of the direction, height and number of oncoming enemy aircraft. This early warning enabled our fighter squadrons to get airborne well before the enemy arrived. Fighters on the ground are a sitting target and can be destroyed easily. Bombing of London and the south east continued, but mainly at night after the Battle of Britain was over. The extreme value of the success of our young fighter pilots was that, because Hitler couldn't destroy the fighter squadrons, he had to abandon his plan to invade England. At the time we would have been very hard put to to prevent his armies from overrunning this country if he could have safely ferried them over the English Channel.

As a schoolboy I became used to things like food and clothing rationing and cycling to school despite the risk of air raids. At school we often had to go into the air raid shelters during air raid warnings. We didn't mind this because no work got done in the shelters! As a boy scout I remember spending a lot of time collecting waste paper because of the shortage of paper. We also went camping despite the risk of air raids. In my summer holidays I used to spend several weeks each year helping on a farm in Herefordshire, and I have a photograph of me working with the farmer to harvest potatoes, which was backbreaking work. Even farms which didn't normally grow potatoes were forced by the government to grow some to help with the food shortages due to the war.

Towards the end of the war Hitler began deploying his "secret weapons" the V1 and, later, V2 pilotless aircraft. The V1 was propelled by a pulse-jet engine and it was quite a slow aircraft, the engine of which made a great deal of noise as it flew overhead towards London. As long as its engine kept running one knew that it wasn't going to land. However, if the engine cut out, it soon fell to earth and exploded on impact. So, there was time to take cover before the explosion occurred. These aircraft were of limited success, partly because they needed long, permanent launching ramps. These ramps could not be disguised and could easily be destroyed by bombing.

The V2 weapons were rockets of the type now used to take men and payloads into space. They carried 5 tons of explosive and travelled extremely fast. They were launched from mobile sites which could be disguised and moved easily. Within a minute of launching they were already travelling at three times the speed of sound. They rose to a height of 50 to 60 miles as they sped towards England and, as they descended on our side of the English Channel, they were travelling at four times the speed of sound and so one did not hear them coming because the sonic bang occurred after they had exploded.

Altogether just over 1,110 V2 rockets fell on the south east of England. The advance of the allied armies eventually pushed the German army back and, by the end of March 1945, the rocket launching sites were too far away for the weapons to reach this country. In February 1945, 232 rockets landed in the south east. According to one account only two fell in the following month and none thereafter. One of those landing in March landed close to our house when we were having breakfast on March 20th. We didn't hear it coming of course. The house was partly demolished and I escaped with a number of cuts from flying glass (from the windows which were shattered by the blast from the explosion). The two other people in the room with me, my mother and my aunt, were killed.

The V2 rockets were very complex and expensive to produce, involving very skilled construction techniques. It has been calculated that, if Hitler had not pursued his plan to produce this weapon, he could have produced 20,000 conventional bombers with the same manpower and capital investment. These could have done infinitely more damage to our country.

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