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This story was submitted to the people war Website by a volunteer from Tiverton Museum of Mid Devon Life on behalf of Dennis Holwill.

Dennis Holwill

I was asked recently to give a talk to the local school here in Silverton on WW2 and they鈥檇 prepared two sheets of questions which was rather daunting. But anyway, the sort of questions they asked was: How old were you when the war started? Well, I was 14, 14 years getting on for 15. By the time I was 16 I was offered an apprenticeship as a ship鈥檚 draughtsman at Dartmouth, my home town, Dartmouth, Devon. Well that was a 5 year apprenticeship through the war from 1939 to 1945. Now other questions that were asked by the local school was sort of: What fears did you have, or other traumas of WW鈥�? Well there was major shock for instance when France fell. France fell in a matter of a week or two. It was absolutely devastating for everybody and of course the British Expeditionary Force which was in Belgium was over 330,000 men were in peril of being slaughtered on the beaches of Dunkirk. I remember the small craft that left Dartmouth to go up the Channel to rescue those men at Dunkirk. Everyone of them were brought back home which was very important at that time because the amazing defeat, if you like, was turned into a sort of victory. And would you believe it, the King asked for prayers on 27th march, 1940, the King called for the National Day of prayer at the blackest time in Britain鈥檚 history. All those men got back. Anyway the next thing that I remember very much was the Belgian fishing fleet came into Dartmouth, escaped with their families from Belgium and my father was the special constable and he was only a short man but he was armed with a truncheon and there was a lot of trouble at the Town Hall because the Belgian fishing fleet refused to go to Dunkirk to bring those men back. Anyway that was settled up but the next thing was the Channel Islands rescue. Now in Dartmouth the navy commissioned every ship available, every boat in fact, fitted them with water, fuel and food and they traveled over to the Channel Islands to rescue as many people as they could get back to the British Isles.

Now I remember the rationing of course. At the school I tool along a match box and that gave them some idea of the sort of weight of butter, tea, meat. Two ounces of sweets, for instance, and sugar and so on. Four ounces of meat and jam and one egg, that was for a week鈥檚 ration. Tinned dried eggs and dried milk was plentiful, thank goodness. Tinned Spam and corned beef was about the only meat that sometimes we obtained. Rations did vary through the war depending on how many ships were sunk by the U boats at sea and magnetic mines, of course, which was a deadly weapon. We now come to the blitz on Plymouth. You see the German airforce couldn鈥檛 defeat the RAF and so they started a blitzgrieg attack on all the major cities and ports of the British Isles. I remember Plymouth because it was only 34 miles from Dartmouth and at night you could actually read a newspaper with the light of the terrible fires in Plymouth. Now, I had a friend that lived in Plymouth and he told me that there were fire engines from Edinburgh, would you believe, that鈥檚 500 miles away, to help with the blitz in the southern parts of Britain. Now at that time the harbour, Dartmouth harbour, was full of escort ships. MLs and motor torpedo boats and gun boats 鈥� an amazing number of them. All I remember once one torpedo boat was going out at evening just as the sun was going down 鈥� which was what they normally did 鈥� and one of the armed ships accidentally opened fire. The shells went into the hillside behind Dartmouth, but nobody was hurt, not even any sheep were killed or anything, but it just shows you how dangerous it can be with loaded guns and deadly weapons.

The next thing that happened was sneak raiders had attacked the southern coast of England. They were FW190s which was a radio engined fighter and very distinctive sound. And I was in the drawing office and I heard this plane coming and there it was going across the bridge at Kingswear. I darted for my tin hat and ran into the area that we used for storing all the drawings of our ships and the lady tracer came in with me and it was the only accident I had through the war. She dug her nails into my hand to such an extent that it was bleeding. Anyway, there were six of these FW190s. One blew a hole in our roofs and all the glass out, and I helped dig out Mrs Ball from the pub just down the road but she, of course, was killed and as soon as I found her I walked away. But to give you some idea of the trauma here my friend, school friend, also in the Home Guard as I was carried on digging her out and knowing her he couldn鈥檛 sleep for months after. How sad. But U was wise enough to move away and dig somewhere else. That also happened in the main street, in Duke Street. There was a major bomb there and I helped dig Mr Pook out which was a milliner.

Anyway, enough of that sort of thing. Let鈥檚 move on. My mother was very much into the Ladies/Woman鈥檚 Voluntary Service and she used to serve evening meals to the armed forces. Navy, Army, Airforce, anybody who cared to come in. And she also organized entertainment on Saturday, Sunday nights for all the armed forces who were in Dartmouth and there were many thousands. But anyway, my mother, accompanied with one policeman went down to Slapton village and other South Hams villages and gave every person living there, every household, six weeks notice to get out. The reason was secret and nobody said what it was, nobody knew what it was. The US navy arrived in due course, in six weeks, and took over everything in the South Hams area. And the reason for being in Dartmouth was the Royal Naval College, the Royal Navy moved out and the US navy moved in. Even Coronation Park, our public park in Dartmouth, was turned into a ship鈥檚 repair yard. There were many dozens of slipways on each side of the river to enable landing craft to bring in troops and also goods and whatever.

Now there鈥檚 another thing that turned up after the war that nobody know about. We only had an inkling of it. My mother knew something about it because she attended to a lot of the poor sailors and US Navy personnel who came ashore soaking wet and so on, but she never said, never let on, what it was about. But it was 600 US forces were lost in Slapton Sands on the practices for beach landing attacks. And these practices gradually crescendoed into major attaches on the beaches of Slapton Sands and these 600 men lost their lives when E boats sneaked in very quietly behind the escort ships and attacked these landing craft on the beach side. A lot of lives were lost and 2 of the LCTs, that鈥檚 Landing Craft Tanks, those huge landing craft, were towed into Dartmouth, crippled.

Now we come to D-Day. I remember a lovely time of day on the beach at Kingswear, Lighthouse Cove actually, and 390 LFTs and LCIs went for a practice run landing on Slapton Sands. But it didn鈥檛 happen to be Slapton Sands, it was the Normandy beaches. D Day. Of course, then there was the war with Japan. One or two of my colleagues at the drawing office had already joined the RAF and they were moved out to Japan to deal with the Japanese conflict. And of course that all came to an end with the Flying Fortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that鈥檚 about the end of WW2.

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