大象传媒

Chapter 4 鈥� 鈥楾he London Blitz鈥�

At Biggin Hill we were equipped with three inch guns which had been taken off decommissioned naval vessels and modified for land use. They were remarkable for having the most ear-splitting crack when fired which was much more hurtful to the ear than the somewhat duller boom of the 3.7inch guns that we had just become accustomed to and we were not issued with ear mufflers in those days, not even earplugs. Their other characteristic was that they had a maximum ceiling of twenty thousand feet unlike the 3.7s which had a ceiling of a bit over thirty thousand feet. This was to present us with a sense of enormous frustration a few days later when Herman Goering launched the first massive daylight raid on London. There we sat, watching wave after wave of five hundred bombers passing directly over our heads at a height of thirty thousand feet and we were unable to fire a single shot.
The major target for the raid was Surrey Docks, at that time a major port and stacked with masses of imported timber. Biggin Hill is just fifteen miles due south of the docks and it is true to say that it was very nearly possible that night to read a newspaper in the light of the fires left in the wake of the bombing.

I went on a seven day leave from Biggin Hill and whilst at home in Bedford got a telegram telling me that the Battery had moved and that I must report at the end of my leave to Headquarters at Mitcham. I got there in the late afternoon only to find that my Troop were occupying a gunsite, equipped again with 3.7s, in Southwark Park, Bermondsey in the east end of London. The Battery Captain was going over there in the evening and said he would take me in his car. By this time the night raids on London had started in earnest and as it was after dark when we set off we soon became embroiled in the air raid and as we got deeper into the metropolis it became necessary to make several diversions caused by blocked streets from falling buildings. This was my first experience of really being, as it were, 鈥榰nder fire鈥� and the first time I felt really frightened.

Every night the four guns fired something like forty to fifty rounds each at planes illuminated by searchlights and although I don鈥檛 recall seeing a single one falling out of the sky as a result of our efforts there can be no doubt that the good effect on the civilian population was very high indeed. The morning after every raid the cockneys surfaced from their air-raid shelters, or from the depths of the London Underground, where they had sheltered from the blitz and spent the next half hour or so sweeping the shrapnel that had fallen from our bursting shells away from their doorsteps. They must have been weary and frightened but were always cheerful and called down all sorts of curses on the Jerries in their own inimitable variety of cockney rhyming slang. So grateful were they to us 鈥榯he gunners in the Park鈥�, that we received an almost embarrassing supply of gifts, cigarettes, sweets and the odd football, and these were from people who were anything but well-off. It鈥檚 somewhat ironic to record that the other Troop of our Battery was in Hyde Park, just across from Park Lane and they bitterly reported that they never got even a packet of fags between them. Moreover, if any one of our gunners went into a pub in Bermondsey he would be asked if he was out of the Park and when he said he was he just could not buy a beer. I learned quickly to have a high regard for the London east ender.

Whilst the civilians were sweeping up the shrapnel it was our job to replenish the guns with ammunition every morning and this was a task in which everybody on the gunsite took part. Fifty rounds a gun meant two-hundred rounds in all from the four guns and each round weighed half a hundredweight which comes to five tons of ammunition to be manhandled to the gunpits. The shells came two to a steel box and were delivered and stacked on the edge of the Park about a hundred yards from the guns, so as not to be too close a hazard, and each morning there was to be seen rows of men, in echelon, marching across the grass with the handle of a shell case in each hand; backwards and forwards until the job was done.

We weren鈥檛 on duty every night and as I remember did two nights on and a night off. On our night off we were so tired that all we wanted was sleep and as it was more comfortable in the beds in our huts we preferred to sleep there rather than a night in an air-raid shelter; in fact I don鈥檛 think there were any shelters for us. We slept alright despite the noise of the guns and I only recall one near miss from a bomb.

Once a week we were given a twenty-four hour off pass, which meant we could be away from camp for the whole period. At first I elected to go home to Bedford, but a couple of times experiencing the boredom of spending much of the time on a train soon put me off that. Then a friend of mine from Beds Yeomanry days, bought a motorbike for a fiver and offered me a lift home on his pillion. The bike was really old with narrow tyres and we had got no further than Maida Vale when the front wheel got stuck in a tram-line, the back wheel slid to one side and rider and passenger were deposited gently onto the tarmac. Undeterred we remounted and set off again but hadn鈥檛 gone far before off we came again. Fortunately there was little traffic in war-time London but nevertheless we decided not to play our luck any more and deposited the bike in a side street yard, and made our way back to camp by tube.

My friend had been saddled with the full name of Lucas Guthery Atterbury; we knew him as Gus, but he had an unfortunate accident which brought his army career to an abrupt end. One night we were both on guard duty together and were sitting in the guard room when a sentry came in having been relieved and proceeded to unload his rifle. This was done by working the bolt of the rifle and when he thought that he had emptied the magazine he closed the bolt and was just about to pull the trigger when Gus noticed that a round had gone 鈥榰p the spout鈥� He put his hand out and shouted 鈥淣o!鈥� but too late the rifle fired and Gus took the bullet right across his wrist severing most of the tendons. He was rushed to hospital but lost his hand and was invalided out of the army. I heard that he went to work in the London office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (more recently to merge with Midland Bank to become HSBC). I wonder how many people know that that stands for 鈥楬ong Kong, Shanghai Banking Corporation鈥�? I lost touch with him after that.

After our motorcycle mishap I gave up trying to get home to Bedford on my days off and spent much of the time wandering around London on foot; I didn鈥檛 have the money to do much else and it is surprising how much I learned in this way about our capital city. On these days we did, of course, experience the Blitz as did the civilians and my very nearest 鈥榥ear miss鈥� happened on one such an occasion when I was in a pub just off Jermyn Street and a bomb took out the garage next door. A plate glass window under which I and others were sitting blew in on top of us. We ended up on the floor amongst lots of shattered glass but not a scratch on any of us.

As far as I can remember we were in London for about ten weeks or so and were then told that we were going back to Yorkshire for a rest. This meant another interminable rail journey and this time our progress was halted in Nottinghamshire and we detrained to spend the night in a disused mill in Long Buckby. Hard lying again and we found out in the morning that the reason for the delay was that during the night Sheffield was suffering what turned out to be it鈥檚 severest blitz of the War. When we did get to Sheffield it was not for a rest but to take possession of a gunsite in the grounds of a large school. It was a new site and we were to occupy a cluster of newly built wooden huts. This would have been fine were it not for the fact that they were constructed of new timber and as they were unlined it was possible to see daylight through the cracks in the walls. Add to that the fact that there were no beds, the floors were made of corporation paving flags upon which we slept with the customary three blankets and a groundsheet; and it really was very cold. To cap it all the powers that be decided it was time for us to have smallpox vaccination and inoculation against tetanus and typhoid. We were given it all in one arm and I shall never forget the following night lying on the cold, hard floor and feeling so ill.

The Sheffield blitz, whilst not being as severe as that of Coventry a few weeks earlier, nevertheless took out the whole of the central shopping district, the Moor, and when I used to go to Sheffield for meetings in the sixties, some twenty years later, there was still a row of temporary single storied shops. There was a follow up raid a couple of nights after we got settled in but not nearly as bad as the first one.

We went to two Heavy Anti Aircraft practice camps whilst I was in Britain. These were understandably sited on a remote part of the coast so that we fired out to sea and the of the two I visited, the first was on the Isle of Whithorn, almost on the outer extremity of the northern shore of the Solway Firth, and a more desolate spot it is hard to imagine. At least it was then! The other was at Weybourne, near Sheringham on the north coast of East Anglia and I remember this better for two reasons. Firstly it was my first experience of seeing military rockets fired. They were mounted on rails and were at the very experimental stage so that many of them proceeded to turn head over heels almost as soon as they became airborne. They became much more sophisticated but I never saw them fired in anger. The other reason that I remember Weybourne is that it was from there that I went to O.C.T.U. There were two O.C.T.U.s for aspiring anti-aircraft gunners; one at Shrivenham in Wiltshire and the other at Llandrindod Wells in what was then Radnorshire (now Powys), and I was posted to the latter. I won鈥檛 dwell on how long it took me to get from the east coast to mid-Wales!

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