大象传媒

A CHILD鈥橲 WAR MEMOIRS
By John Austin

I was 5 years old at the outbreak of war and had not long started infants鈥� school. As I could not read or write I did not keep a diary, hence some of my memories are not necessarily in correct sequential order.

I remember my mother and father being very serious and obviously worried as they listened to the declaration of war on an old fashioned wireless. Next I remember great sadness as all the schools in Clacton-on-Sea were closed and all children were evacuated to the Midlands in school groups. My brother was in the air force and my two sisters were at high school and were evacuated. As I was the baby of the four children my mother took me from school and said she would keep one child at home. I watched with great sadness as my two sisters were marched in school crocodile to the railway station and we waved them goodbye. We would have been even more sad if we had known they would have left school while evacuated as they reached leaving age and got local jobs and never returned to live long term at home as a family again.

Soon after the schools left Clacton, all civilians were evacuated as it was thought the area was a German invasion target. Only essential workers were allowed to stay of which my father was one. I and a few other children of essential workers were left in the town with no schools to go to. The streets were eerie as 90% of houses were empty and all streets seemed deserted. Sand bag check points were put up in key streets and manned by armed soldiers who stopped everyone to see their I.D. cards. Such a post was near our house and I had an old bread knife tied as a bayonet to a replica gun and held it to the tyres of cyclists who were stopped by the soldiers (a right little horror).

My father and other local workers were in the Home Guard and my father was Platoon Sergeant. Unlike some inland Home Guards armed with broomsticks, the Clacton contingent had rifles and machine guns with ammunitions from the very beginning because of the high risk of invasion in the area. My father鈥檚 first gun was an American model automatic Browning Rifle which had a very severe recoil. I used to 鈥渉elp鈥� my father strip and clean the gun on the kitchen table. He was authorised to open fire independently without further authorization at low flying German planes that could be clearly identified. I have memories of my father rushing into the house to bring out this heavy gun whenever a low flying German came over, often machine gunning the town on the way, but he never did get a shot at them as they were gone by the time he was ready. He spent hours digging for victory in the garden with the gun at the ready but then the planes never seemed to come. Later my Father, as Platoon Sergeant was issued with a Tommy Gun and later still with Sten Gun, all of which I helped strip and clean.

Soldiers were returning to Clacton from Dunkirk and some were in a bad way and of a very nervous nature, others were very much up for the challenge ahead.

I was spending a lot of time with the soldiers at the checkpoint, partly because my mother used to bake cakes for them, which I used to take to them. One batch of soldiers showed me how to strip a Bren Gun and I could do it quicker than most soldiers. The sergeant in charge used to use me to shame new recruits who were slow.

Major memories were watching Dog Fights as our Spitfires and Hurricanes intercepted formations of German planes and they would make condensation trails that filled the sky with what looked like muddled up knitting. Some planes would be shot down but more would be damaged and leave the scene trailing smoke. One night time a German bomber crashed not far from our house after being hit by ack-ack (local term for anti-aircraft fire) and my father and two other men rushed off with their guns across the fields and captured one of the German pilots who bailed out. He was later handed over to the Battery that shot him down. For many years my father had the pilot鈥檚 revolver at home and it was only recent legislation that caused its disposal.

Anti-aircraft guns were all along the seafront and often a lone plane towing a big red target would fly just off to sea for the guns to practice on. After practice the target was dropped on the playing fields of a school taken over by the army. Because of wind, etc. the target often drifted and my friends and I would race the soldiers and claim the material target from which my mother made various items of clothing and other useful objects.

About this time, the empty streets began to fill up with unusual traffic, massive guns, tanks and lorries and the houses were now full with their new owners, the American Army. They just invaded the town and the schools were now used as their dining rooms and we would see the yanks marching in their own casual way in the casual fatigues they wore. We trailed them begging for gums which they often gave us. One day they just vanished and we heard later on the wireless of the landings in France. We also saw masses of planes flying over in formation. Later in the day we saw some limping back, often with an engine stopped and trailing smoke.

Sometime after the Americans left, some of the schools started to move back and my freedom was curtailed as I then had to start school again, only three half days a week to start with. Then I remember a new distinctive sound in the sky, the V2 doodle bug. These robot planes crossed the coast near Clacton on the way to London from their launch pads in Belgium. As schoolchildren we now had a different life. When warning was given of a V2, we all had to go to shelters and it was quite scary just
listening to these planes which were accompanied by a vast barrage of anti-air craft fire from the naval ships at Harwich and then all the coastal batteries as they progressed on the way to London. Sometimes they were hit and the engines stopped and it was an eerie wait in the shelters waiting for the explosion, which may or may not come as the V2 came down. This was in big contrast for the few pupils like me who
had been in Clacton all the time. We never went to the shelters but watched the display which was not so nerve racking as being shut in shelters. When out of school however we still stayed outside and watched the display.

One Saturday morning I was at the station yard where my father worked when six 3.7 inch anti aircraft guns were being off loaded from a train together with what looked like camouflaged caravans with no windows. The next time I saw the guns and caravans, the caravans had funny aerials on top and they and the guns were in position along the seafront. When the next V2 came over none of the coastal batteries fired but when it reached the new guns they fired just a few rounds and brought the V2 down. From that day on no V2 passed these guns, the caravans were radar detectors and fire control predictors. As the V2 flew straight, at the same speed and height they were perfect game for this new style anti aircraft guns. We always felt the numbers of V2 reported as hitting London included the ones shot down off Clacton, so that the Germans did not know they were being shot down before reaching London and change the routes.

The army did not clear all their munitions dumps when they left for the invasion. A couple of us who had been in Clacton all the time acquired a number of mortar bombs from a dump we knew of and for a few days each carried a bomb home hidden in our trouser leg. These bombs obviously had a main charge, which blew when the bomb landed and would do a lot of damage. In the fins they also had some granular cordite in cartridges, which was the propellant to send the bomb to the target. We took these granules out and sold them to school colleagues as watercress seeds!. My partner in crime was up before me one Saturday morning and was dismantling one of these cartridges when it exploded injuring his legs where he had been holding the bomb while he worked at it with his hands, and these were also injured. The first I knew of this was when he knocked on our door in an awful state, displaying quite a lot of blood on legs and hands. The ambulance and police were called (a Sergeant on a bike). The police sergeant then questioned me while my friend went off in the ambulance, and was amazed when he saw our den. The bomb disposal people were next in, and frightened everyone by saying how lucky we were that the main bomb had not gone off which would have set the other bombs off and done considerable damage. I was told off by the sergeant and the bomb disposal people and told not to do it again. I think they were relieved that more damage was not done and that they had learned about the existence of this bomb dump which they were unaware of before this incident. They later cleared the dump, which did some good, and stopped a bigger accident from possibly happening. My friend spent a couple of days in hospital and fortunately was not badly hurt.

I thought that was the end of the story but Mr. Learoydd, our headmaster who had a glass eye called me into his study on the Monday morning for a full explanation, after which he gave me three strokes of the cane.

End of War Story

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