´óÏó´«Ã½

This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Harry Smith and has been added to the site with his permission…

I was 26 when the war started and working in Gateshead near Newcastle at an Auto Body Repair Works, so I was in a reserved occupation. We worked amongst other things repairing American Army Vehicles, as there was an army depot outside Newcastle. People round Gateshead didn’t take to the Americans at first, they always seemed to have money and other items we couldn’t get hold of. But after a while we got used to them, they were OK.

We had to try and black the place where I worked out at night, but it was almost impossible, so we didn’t work at night and I had to take my turn at fire watching from 7pm until 6.30 in the morning.

I was married and my wife worked in munitions at Armstrong Whitworth. My first daughter was born in 1940 followed by another daughter 1n 1944.

We had raids most night in and around Newcastle, they were aiming for the bridges and Armstrong’s, an enormous factory covering around seven miles and employing about 100.000 people at the time.

The German fighter planes would come first and try and shoot down the barrage balloons, when they were successful the people manning the balloons couldn’t always wind in the steel cables they were attached too fast enough and sometimes they would drag across the roofs of nearby houses, pulling off the slates as they went. Once the balloons were out of the way the bombers would follow, they could fly down much lower, which enabled them to drop their bombs more accurately.

I remember one night; a bomb dropping at the bottom of our street and diving under the table with the baby in my arms. Luckily it didn’t explode, had it done so I wouldn’t be here to tell this tale. When I went to have a look at it the following day it was the size of a dustbin, stuck nose down in the ground, of course it had to be diffused.

Some of the houses in Gateshead are built one on top of another and one this particular day a raid had just started. I was on West St. Gateshead where my apprentice lived in one of the top houses. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and shouted up to him, ‘Geordie let’s go to the works.’ As I said this, a bomb dropped 20 or 30 yards away; the blast hit me in the back and blew me up 14 steps, bursting my nose. The bomb hit an air raid shelter the 47 people inside it were killed outright.

All around Newcastle, about 6 miles inland there were ten or twelve 16inch guns; they had to be so far inland for the range. They would fire simultaneously as the bombers came over. The noise was deafening, the houses shook and shrapnel came down like rain. One night during such a raid the roof of our house fell in.

Manor Station a mile away from Newcastle had thousands of tons of sugar stored in a cellar underneath it. One night the station got a direct hit, this ignited the sugar, which was still smouldering when I left the Newcastle area in 1945.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.