大象传媒

The War started tragically for our family, as after only two months my brother was killed when the Wellington Bomber he was in, crashed and caught fire. It was his nineteenth birthday and also my mothers birthday: Nov.5th, 1939. The Aircraft had taken off from Marham airfield and crashed nearby at Boughton near Stoke Ferry, Norfolk. He was the first service man from Lowestoft to have been killed on active service, I believe. There was also an airman from Beccles killed on the same plane. I was about thirteen and a half years old at the time. A few months later most of the school children were evacuated from Lowestoft to the Midlands (excepting myself) my parents did not wish me to go having lost my brother a few months before. My wife(to be after the war.)Gwendolen Francis was billeted with The Rev. and Mrs Hurt at Shirebrook Vicarage, near Mansfield, Nots. The home of the now famous John Hurt,a very small boy at the time of course.

A time later I joined the 469 Squadron Lowestoft Air training Corps as I was hoping to join the RAF (much to the sadness of my parents). In the end I was not called up because I was in a reserved occupation having joined Mann Egerton electrical contractors as an apprentice electrician. We worked at Richards Shipbuilders who were building mine sweepers etc. We also worked on motor torpedo boats and motor gunboats that were based in Lowestoft and being maintained and repaired and varios boatyards in the area: sometimes they would come back from operations overnight having been shot up by the faster german E Boats.

In the day time whilst at work we used to see hundreds of American flying fortresses and Liberator aircraft circling overhead to gain height and formation to proceed to bomb targets in Germany. They would return many hours later at low level, sometimes in the dark. On one such occasion they were followed in by German fighter planes and there were about eighteen shot down around Lowestoft. I also remember on one occasion sitting on my bike at the harbour bridge which was open to shipping at the time, the cloud was very low and without warning a twin engined aircraft came low over the bridge, it was fired on by a Bofors anti aircraft gun at point blank range, subsequently it crashed in a field near Oulton Village just outside Lowestoft. It had been one of our own aircraft returning from a mission over Germany a case of friendly fire as it is known nowadays.

Much later in the war I was sent with several other employees to Pembroke Dock in South Wales where two mine sweepers were being built,we had to trvel by train via London, it had many carries and was packed with people fleeing from the blitz bombing on London at that time. Having to stand in the corridor nearly all the way, we felt very self concious wondering what the other passengers thought: what are these young men doing, bomb dodging?

In the latter part of the war and back in Lowestoft working at the local shipyards,we had the flying bombs called doodlebugs coming over and several V2 rockets. The last raid on Lowestoft, as far as I can remember, and the most frightening for me was when about eighteen German Fock Woolfe fighter bombers came over dropping bombs on the town and then striking the ground whilst flying at roof top height using canon and machine guns. I happened to have been sitting on my bike outside my fathers shop in Durban Road near the CoOp canning factory. I dived in to the side porch and crouched down untill it was all over. When I picked my bike up the two tyres were flat, there was a hole in the seat and several in the frame, a small canon shell had hit the ground along side it, several also hit the house. The planes were fired on by machine guns located on the canning factory roof and also from the boats in the harbour. The planes were too low to be fired on by the heavy anti aircraft guns stationed arround Lowestoft.

In one raid on Lowestoft main street when Wallers Restaurant, Boots and several other shops were flattened many people were killed, my girlfriend (later my wife)who was back in Lowestoft from being evacuated was working in Boots library at the time was pulled from the rubble, her poor parents fearing that she had been killed having had to wait for several hours before finding she was OK.

Arnold Dye

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