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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by David Baker at Dorking Library and has been added to the website on behalf of Gerald R Sims with his permission and he fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Background to story: Frightening experience of a diving doodlebug

This is an account of a young boy’s experience of a diving doodlebug, including the events leading up to the explosion and the hours that followed.

My name is Gerald Sims and my most terrifying memory of the war is of a doodlebug that fell in June 1944. Not that I was a stranger to bombs and explosions.

I was seven years old when the war began, living in the outskirts of Bromley in Kent. On 7 September 1940, the first of the daylight raids on London took place. This was the start of what became known as the blitz and it lasted for many months. It was shortly after a land mine landed near our house later in September that we left Bromley for Horley and, in May 1942, we moved again to 45 Marler Road, Forest Hill. For the next three years, there were daylight hit-and-run raids, but no concerted bombing.

Then, in January 1944, a small number of German planes began a three-month mini-blitz; these were really nuisance raids with sirens going all night and it was pretty wearing. Two houses next to us were hit or burned out after receiving strikes from Molotov breadbaskets (a package of incendiary bombs).

However, by June we were just getting over this, my mother’s birthday was imminent, we had enjoyed the good news of D-Day and thought it signified the end of raids at last.

I was now twelve and living with my mother, my step-sister Mary and my two sisters Margaret and Anne. My brother had left for a holiday in the country. We had a double deck Morrison shelter where we spent much of our time. Then, on 13 June, we heard the first flying bomb which landed in Bethnal Green. Our local ARP Warden thought it must be a plane on fire. Two days later, the doodlebug flying bomb campaign began for real. As a young boy, I was fascinated by the technology of the doodlebugs, but frightened to be at the ‘wrong end of it’.

At first there were air raid warnings, but they couldn’t keep up with dozens flying over every twenty four hours, so they were discontinued. After that, we could never remember whether there was a raid on or not. After a couple of weeks of this, I was getting rebellious, fed up with spending so much time cooped up in the Morrison Shelter. In the end, Mum relented and told me to go for a walk round the garden and then make everyone a cup of tea. But we never had that cup of tea.

It was seven o’clock on a beautiful sunny morning, so I put the kettle on and stepped outside. I felt tired and jaded, but was glad to be up and moving about, and while waiting for the kettle to boil, I enjoyed looking at the flowers, fruit trees and tomatoes. Suddenly, I became aware of a noise in the sky; I knew what it was, but I never saw it. I think I would have died if I had. As it came closer, the noise grew louder and I turned and ran indoors to the shelter. There was no time to fit the mesh guard in place, so I held it in position while we all prayed.

Suddenly, the noise changed to a diving crescendo and the doodlebug flew rapidly down at an angle, passing immediately over us and crashing into the ground in Fermor Road about a hundred yards to the north. I later learned that it had killed about fifty or sixty people, including a young man who had been seeing my step-sister.

The noise was deafening and we thought we were going to die. Then for a moment, when the noise receded, we thought that we had. The explosion was followed by the noise of collapsing buildings, falling debris, breaking glass and people shouting and, as we continued to huddle in our shelter, a cloud of white dust filled the room.

Luckily, when we crawled out a minute or two later, the worst injury was to my sister who had some grit in her eye. We found that the front door had been blown in and part of the wall of the hall had collapsed. The windows were all gone and the roof was badly damaged. Just the main walls of the house were left.

By this time, there were signs of rescue activity outside and, very shaken, we assembled on the pavement where officials took our personal details. We were still suffering from shock, but couldn’t believe our luck at being alive.

After that, we went to the ARP Centre in the church hall round the corner where we were given food and drink; then we spent a few hours in a neighbour’s Anderson shelter before returning to the ARP Centre and then moving to what remained of our house. From there we were taken by lorry to a rest centre in a girls’ school in Kirkdale Road, Sydenham where we stayed for about a week. In the months that followed, we stayed with aunts in Kettering, Swindon and the Isle of Sheppey until after the war had ended, returning at last to a newly repaired Marler Road on 1 July 1945.

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