大象传媒

I was a school boy of 6 years old on 3rd September 1939 the day that we went to war.

I can remember when the first air raid warning sounded on a Sunday morning and my father made my mother and my older brother and myself put on our Gas Masks and walk around the house.

Then a few months later when the air raids started i used to watch the RAF fighters and German aircraft having their dogfights with all the vapour trails in the sky.

My brother and i went to school in Chertsey, come six miles from where we lived in Walton on Thames. On one occasion the siren went as we were waiting for the bus in Walton to take us to school and by the time we arrived in Chertsey a full scale dogfight was happening. Our school was beside a railway line and on one day a red cross train which was some twelve/sixteen coaches long was offloading wounded troops returning from Dunkirk and France to take them to the military hospital of St Peters in Chertsey. Chertsey station was only long enough to take four carriages at a time. They had to be shunted along four coaches at a time to offload the rest. As this was happening a German pilot spotted the train and began to shoot, whilst also being engaged by an RAF fighter. Bullets were flying all over the place and empty shells were falling all around us. We ran across our school playground in order to get down into the shelter. The train was badly damaged but fortunatly those coaches had already been unloaded.

I used to love watching the german bombers being held in the search lights and the tracer bullets flying into them. There would often be a bright flash and the plane would catch on fire and the air crew would bail out and would often be held in the search lights.

On another morning we would have to dodge the butterfly bombs which were hanging in the hedgerows and from the overhead telephone wires. These bombs were anti personel.

We would sometimes find unexploded bombs lting on the pavements.

Walton on Thames was only three miles from Brookland in Weybridge which was the first car racing crcuit in England before WW2 and was converted to aircraft production when war broke out and became Vicker Armstrongs where Wellington bomber fighters were built.

As a lot of the German pilots had been racer drivers before the war, they knew the area fairly well and often tried to bomb it. So a lot of immotation buildings were built about the water reseviour between walton on molesley and an AA battery and search lights. There were also Barroque Bloons in the area to fool the Germans into thinking that they were over Brooklands. Also at the right time the moon would reflect off the water in the reseviour and with the grass banks of the reseviour it could easily be mistaken for Vickers factory so the Germans would bomb Wolton.

Later in the war we also had the Pumping station for the Pluto Fuel Pike Line which supplied the British Forces D Day in France. And for years often there were unemploded bombs foound all around our area.

On one occasion we were sitting down to our evening meal at about 6.30pm when we heard a loud thud, which turned out to be a 500lb bomb which fell 11 gardens away from us. As it fell

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