大象传媒

Being on the Channel coast, the Isle of Wight was in the frame for what had become known as Tip and Run raids, where adapted Luftwaffe fighter aircraft carried bombs and flew just above sea level to avoid Radar detection. My bedroom window overlooked the town (Newport) and one morning in 1942 I awoke to see two ME109s travelling from right to left across my line of vision, accompanied by a considerable amount of noise. On this occasion the local sugar store was set on fire and burned for the rest of the day.
Just after 7 o'clock on the morning of April 7th 1943 even more noise awoke me and I sat up in bed to be presented with a full frontal view of a Focke Wulf 190 heading apparently straight for me. Behind it mass of red and grey cloud billowed skyward as 19 men died when clocking in at the joinery works down the road, and as the FW lifted over our roof I heard its guns open up- the bullets hit a taller building across the road. My instant reaction had been to turn on my face in the bed - instinctive, even if futile. My parents had dived under the Morrison shelter in the living room only to dive out again and up the stairs to check on my state of health.
The initial noise had been created by the lifeboat maroons installed at the local Observer Corps lookout after the earlier raid when it was realised that the air-raid sirens tended to go off after the event.
From fairly recent inqiries I have discovered that this particular FW outfit was led by a Leutnant Wenger, and oddly enough my wife-to-be also had a narrow escape from the same group during a raid on Exmouth about six weeks earlier.

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