大象传媒

This contribution was submitted by Mike Urry to the People's war team in Wales. It is added to the site with his permission

What I remember most of all was the noise. I鈥檝e taken my grandchildren to a theme park since then and I was asked how it compared with the real thing. I said: 鈥淚t鈥檚 too quiet鈥� and the manager of this park said 鈥渨e had to tone it down because it was frightening the children鈥� and I said: 鈥淚t did鈥�. And the other thing that was missing was the smell, the smell of cordite, dust, gas escaping from the mains鈥ell it lived with you and he couldn鈥檛 reproduce the smell of the Blitz. But more frightening than the blitz was the doodle bugs. Whether I was older and therefore realised the danger鈥�.or whether it was because everyone thought the war was virtually over and then鈥ust at about the same time as D-Day the first Doodle bugs came over. And that was nasty. That 15 seconds between the engines cutting out and it crashing, was just long enough to pray it would hit someone else. Fifteen seconds may not seem a long time, but it felt like half a lifetime鈥t was scary. But I was 13, 14 at that time and you realised the danger. It wasn鈥檛 just exciting ..it was dangerous. And we got doodlebugged like most people sooner or later, because the blast from the doodlebug 鈥hat鈥檚 what we called the V1 鈥as spread out because they exploded on contact with anything 鈥� a tree, a telegraph pole. So the blast spread out. When we had the rockets鈥hat we called flying gas mains. They were going three, four thousand miles an hour say鈥�.they made such big craters that the blast was contained within the thirty foot crater so it didn鈥檛 damage so many buildings. And you couldn鈥檛 hear them coming so if you heard the blast you knew you were safe. It was psychological I think.

The end of the war was a fiasco quite frankly. Everyone knew that the war had ended. Hitler had committed suicide鈥hat was known. And every day 鈥淚s it ended鈥as it finished?鈥� It went on and on. It was a damp squib quite honestly when Churchill announced that from midnight the war would be at an end. It was a damp squib. Mind you a lot of people didn鈥檛 have cause to celebrate because their families, their fathers etc. were away fighting the Japanese. That reminds me鈥ne of the hardest things I had to do鈥as two friends of mine had their fathers killed during the war. As a 14 year old boy, what do you say to your friend whose father鈥檚 just been killed?. You think about it. What do you do. A girl you can have a kiss and a cuddle, but 14 year old boys, you can鈥檛 do that. And it was tough.

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