大象传媒

This is a transcription of Mr. Harrison鈥檚 story from an interview held at Gillingham Library (Kent,) on 7th. July, 2005.

I worked as an aircraft fitter with Short brothers for most of the war until I was called up for the army in 1943.

One incident that I experienced seems to have been completely forgotten - I think because it was censored at the time. It was a major incident though. In October 1941 the Germans sent planes over to mine the river. At that time I had joined the Home Guard and I had a Canadian Ross rifle which I kept near me. It so happened that my father, Robert Harrison, (who was a Chatham dockyard man,) was on fire watch, that night as well - we were at home in Copperfield Road. I heard his voice, 鈥淪on, get your gun, something鈥檚 coming down!鈥� I looked up and to the northwest, at about two hundred feet, there was something coming down on a dark parachute. I鈥檇 got fifteen rounds for my gun so I started firing. The parachute continued to fall and was getting very close. I fired one more round. I couldn鈥檛 fire any more after that because there were houses in the way. The parachute was descending into the valley and almost immediately after it landed there was an explosion. It had hit the wall on the eastern side of Delce Road, near the junction with Onslow Road and the blast had carried into the row of the houses opposite. The backs of the houses in Wickham Street faced the Delce Road. It was one of those nights when the moon was behind the clouds and we saw this explosion clearly. All the windows in Copperfield Road deposited themselves on the grass; some of them came out in one piece and just collapsed. Well, I then put my other hat on, (because I was a First Aider too,) took my First Aid bag and went down the hill to offer my help. By the time I got down there, people were shouting and screaming. There was glass all over the road. Several ambulances turned up, (the ambulance station was just above at the hospital.) I bandaged the leg of one old fellow, but it was too late as he鈥檇 gone already. In the morning I found that Shorts gateway had been demolished, but nobody had been hurt. Some houses along the Esplanade had been hit, like the little cottages tucked away under the castle. However, our foreman Charlie (Pearce) and his wife came out without a scratch, though their house had just collapsed around them.

It turned out that they were parachute mines destined to finish up in the river which must have blown off course. I suppose I either missed with my rifle, or I didn鈥檛 hit the horns. I suppose that, if I had detonated it, I would have saved lives because it was less of a risk in the open air. There were a lot of people killed that night but I don鈥檛 know how many.

Now there鈥檚 a corollary to that. Later, when I was working on the slipway at Shorts Brothers, one of my jobs was to fit a cap which is called a Peto Head on the top of the wireless mast of a flying boat. It picks up the air speed and is almost the last thing to be fitted before completion. You had to stand on the upper wing in order to fit it so consequently nobody else wanted to do this job. As I was working, a tug and two lighters came up the river. Just after they had disappeared from view as they went round the Borstal bend, (a horseshoe bend in the River Medway,) there was an enormous explosion. What had happened was that one of the mines from the same night described earlier had fallen into the mud on the west bank of the river, and some of the parachute cords had come loose and were trailing in the water. The tug had picked up the cords on its propeller and dislodged the mine thus setting it off. Five men were killed as a result.

Nothing was published in the local press. I did find a picture of it in a book called 鈥淗ell Fire Corner.鈥� It just said 鈥淲orkers cottages demolished.鈥� I think the local press was censored, possibly to in order to keep the Germans from knowing that they had succeeded in mining the river. Well, they hadn鈥檛 really; I鈥檇 say they鈥檇 half succeeded. They鈥檇 caused some deaths, but they hadn鈥檛 succeeded in their primary intention to cause some damage along the river. About two years later I looked back at papers from the time that it happened, but the local papers had nothing in them so I think they must have been censored. I never found anything in them during the war.

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