大象传媒

This letter was submitted to the People's war website by Sarah Cooper at the AGC Museum on behalf of Gill Gutteridge. Gill Gutteridge fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

Martin Gutteridge
BERMUDA
6.6.1994 (D-Day + 50 years)

Dear Martin

A very happy birthday and many happy returns from Gil and me, with much love.

2. Fifty years ago today I was based at Poole and serving as the Naval Bomb and Mine Disposal Officer covering the coastal territory from Southampton to Portland. Apart from a few low level hit-and-run bombing attacks by the Luftwaffe (six unexploded incendiary bombs at the RN Cordite factory at Halton Heath) trade was slack. During this time in Poole I was always called "Bombs"; Leslie before that and Gordon after it, none of them chosen by me.

3. So, as a "professional" sailor, i.e. pre-war merchant navy, I learned to be a Poole Harbour Pilot. This was no easy task; uniquely Poole has 95 miles of coastline within the harbour entrance, countless islands and never deeper than 15ft at low water. There were five of us, two merchant navy, three RN and we had to prepare to move, locate, berth, anchor and moor several hundred landing craft. We were bossed by Lt Cdr Vandy RNR the quintessesntial taciturn sea-dog. I don't think he had a chrisitan name, it was "Vandy" in the pub and "sir" everywhere else. Since most of the landing craft were designed to run up on a beach, going aground in Poole usually did little damage but Vandy regarded this as a personal slur so we'd get put on night piloting, which meant more groundings! We had two pilot boats and three harbour launches manned by WRENS, in bell-bottoms of course!

4. Poole harbour was the UK "landing strip" for the Allies flying boat service; Sunderlands to and from Gibraltar and North Africa, the Azores and Bermuda; Consolidated Corronados and Mars boats for the Azores and Norfolk Va. We got to ferry all the Allied top leaders, civil and military, to and from these aircraft, usually at 5.30 am and 11.00 pm.

5. The 45 square miles behind Studland Bay, to the west of Poole Harbour, was the primary assualt work-up battle range for co-ordinating bombing, rocket firing, beach landing, tanks, troops and naval fire-support so I spent the working week being a pilot and on Saturdays and Sundays I turned in to Range Safety Officer, finding and disposing of each weeks output of unexpolded Allied Ordnance.

6. Since there was no time to deal separately with each missile my team and I drove around in three tanks operated by Fearsome (not fearless) French Canadian army drivers, each tank with half a dozen wire slings toward astern. In this way we could lasso the UXBs, or whatever, and haul them all into a central heap. This way we had one monumental bang at the end of each day instead of lots of dangerous little ones, if a 500lb bomb can be called a little one. Occasionally one would go off whilst being towed but apart from throbbibng eardrums (a tank IS like a biscuit tin) no harm would be done.

7. For several weeks prior to D-Day (a date of which we were unaware) we shuffled hundreds of landing craft around, led them out to sea, nursed them back in and watched them practice loading and unloading at the miles of concrete loading "hards".

8. We watched the Pioneer Corp (mostly European, often Jewish, refugees from Hitler) erect dozens of 200ft canvas and oildrum tank-landing-craft overnight and we'd get them moored up or anchored by daybreak only to see them vanish, packed into a few three ton trucks a few nights later, after German recce planes had had a chance to photograph them.

9. D - 4, 3, 2, and 1. All leave was stopped; we were not allowed to go home to "civy" digs; I slept on a requisitioned fish-shop- floor or in a piolt-boat deck house, sans Wrens crew. We were bringing craft in for loading, parking them in ordered bunches to the "bar" buoy, a dozen at a time, endlessly; "follow me closely; no overtaking!"

10. On the face of things, D-Day should have been quiet; early summer and everyone gone off to France! But D-Day was only the first wave, you can only put so many men ashore on a given beach, and the build-up never slowed. Every loading was a seemingly chaotic mass of tanks, trucks, guns and troops endlessly going aboard and endlessly being replaced from every village and country lane in Dorset and Hampshire. It got worse from D+2 onwards when retuning landing craft started coming in, some severely damaged, most usually instantly repairable, as many as possible to be loaded and turned around again. And quite a few who hadn't left from Poole in the first place and either got lost or needed first available shelter.

11. Hence the, possibly apocryphal, story of the American Cost Guard Cutter seen halfway between Arromanche and Plymouth flying the "Church" flag (flown on Sundays in HM Ships) and the "Interrogative" or "Questionmark" flag which was translated as "Jesus Christ - where am I?"

12. But back to D-Day. I had the day off; at 10.30, with nothing to do, I was having morning coffee in the Bon Marche Cafe, served by the faithful Gladys, a lady with enourmous influence in the kitchen and a foundness for young N.O.'s. The bomb and Mine Disposal wagon turned up with red mudguards, bell ringing, and blue lights flashing. My driver, Wren Lochivar, a bouncing Czech, yells that a bomber had crashed by the landing-craft loading "hards" at HMS Turtle and the N.O.-in-charge would quite like to see me. He told me that, as far as was known, it was a US Army AF Liberator, it would have a crew of eleven, it was probably carrying ten 500lb high explosive bombs and was on fire; none of the bombs had gone off as yet. The area had been cleared for 300 yeards, work had stopped at the loading hard and would I please deal with it smartly? Yessir, right away sir!

13. It took half an hour to muster my trained team of UXB whiz-kids. Chief Petty Officer Parfitt, a Dorset farmer, imperturbable and invaluable, our grandfather; he recokoned to drink 13 pints of beer a night and, as he put it "after that, I pours it over me; I likes the smell". My "stripey" an Able-Seaman with three "good conduct" stripes, who'd managed to serve for 16 years without promotion, Stoker Coombs, of Poole, my techncian, whose work-a-day experiences had been shovelling coal at the local power station, and finally two bright, educated "hostilities only" sailors one of who had previously been an art dealer and the other a repertory actor.

14. Some 400 yards from the "incident" we were overwhelmed by a mouth-watering smell of roast beef. My, I thought, these American troops do very well for grub. Minutes later the dreadful, nauseating reason for this became all too plain. It was a Liberator; it had nosedived in at several hundred miles an hour; it was almost burnt out; it had created a hole some 12 ft deep and three times as wide; it was close to the harbour and the crater was full of wreckage, water, mud, wholly dismembered, burned bodies and, somewhere, ten bombs.

15. The smell was so much worse than the most offensive smell that can be imagined; roast people; all of us were sick over and over again and were almost up to our waists in this indescribable mess.

16. Feeling, digging, moving what we could, bits of aeroplane, arms, legs, we found five bombs. They couldn't be "rendered safe" where they were; far too much mess; muck pumps had not yet arrived, therewas endless urgency and pressure to solve the problem.

17. I borrowed a tank from the Americans, I think it was a General Grant, and we hauled these bombs clear with wire slings. We made an appalling discovery. Each bomb fuse had a safety pin in it attached to the metal "tally" which read, more or less, "After loading fused bomb remove this wire and insert safety arming wire". This aircraft was on a bombing mission to make the Normandy beach-head safer for our troops; it was carrying bombs which would not have gone off had they been delivered and eleven men lost their lives on a wholly fruitless mission.

18. Finding the other bombs in this awful mess would have taken a lot of time and time was in short supply.

19. Americans, understandably, like their casualties returned to them for burial; there were no bodies to be buried. I asked that if I could locate the other bombs, could I detonate then in-situ. It took the Admiralty and the American Authorities to give the OK but it was quick.

20. At about 15.30 I put a demolition charge between what I thought were two bombs and, when it was detonated, 2,500lbs of high-explosive went off creating a vast crater, BUT no aircraft, no bodies, and the loading hard back in business.

21. That was my day-off on 6th June 1944. The immediacy and urgency of war made it bearable and there was still France, Belgium, Holland and Germany lying ahead. Whether the bombs were properly armed to explode or not could have had nothing to do with the crash. But I remain appalled at the incompetence, the dreadfulness, and the futility.

21. Forty years ago today you made your debut, at Lashly Cottage, Funtington, West Sussex. There now!

Love, Father

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