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WORLD WAR II MEMORIES
By Geoffrey Martin

During the War, I was living at Cliffe, a village in North Kent. There was a large area of marshland bordering on the River Thames. On the opposite side of the river in South Essex was Thames Haven, a large Oil Refinery. One night during an air raid in 1940, a German Bomber dropped land mines, which came down on parachutes. One exploded on the marshes, shattering windows in the village. The next day I was on the marshes when I heard a loud rumble, like thunder. Across the river there was a huge explosion on a tanker moored at the Refinery, dense black smoke and flames shot hundreds of feet into the air. What must have happened is that one of the mines had landed in the river and drifted into the tanker. It burned for almost a week and at night the village was illuminated and it was a beacon for the night bombers going to bomb Jordan. Later, an unexploded mine was found on the marshes. A Bomb Disposal Squad detonated it, causing more broken windows, including our own. I did manage to get pieces of parachute, which was made from green silk.

Before war had been declared, we had started digging an air raid shelter out of solid chalk, about thirty yards from our house. We had nearly finished when the War started. The roof was made of planks of wood and sheets of corrugated iron and these were held up by a railway sleeper and part of a telegraph pole. It was covered with two-three feet of chalk. The sides had panelling and were boarded and my mother covered these with wallpaper. There were steps down and a passage leading into the main part where we had plenty of room to sleep. My mother said that as we were sleeping underground like rabbits, the shelter should be called ‘The Warren’ and we had the name over the entrance. My mother and sisters slept in the shelter every night. I slept down there the nights when I wasn’t on duty at the Fire Station. I was a messenger boy. My father was a Special Constable, he hardly every slept in the shelter as he seemed to be on duty almost every night. The shelter was cosy and we felt very safe, even in the heaviest of air raids.

During the ‘Blitz’ in 1940, the German Bombers came over for fifty-six consecutive nights. The warning siren went at dusk, the all clear never went until dawn and the bombers were flying around all night. Cliffe and the next village, Cooling, had their fair share of bombing and although there was considerable damage to houses, thankfully there were no fatal casualties. For older people like my mother who remembered the air raids in the First World War, it was a terrifying time. For us young lads, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz were an exciting time, a great adventure. We were all in either the Fire Service, Home Guard or Air Training Corps. In 1943 I left the Fire Service and joined the Air Training Corps. as I wanted to get into the R.A.F. In November 1943, I went with dozens of others to Euston House in London for a test as Air Crew. I failed on the written exam, only nine got through. On 6 April 1944 I was called up into the Army. Almost all the young lads went into one of the Services. There was twenty-seven young Cliffe men killed in the War including by best friend, Fred Stirling. He was killed when his Lancaster Bomber was brought down in an air raid, over Germany, he was only nineteen. My sister’s brother-in-law was also killed in a raid over Germany. With forty-eight men losing their lives in the First World War, including my uncle George who was only eighteen, it made a total of seventy-five in the two Wars, a great loss for a village the size of Cliffe.

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