大象传媒

Air Raids, Bombs and Shelters

The main change at school was gas mask drill which was carried out every week in the classroom. Everyone had by then been issued with a gas mask which was carried in a small cardboard box suspended by a loop of string from the shoulder or round the neck. Later it became possible to buy rather more
fashionable and stronger containers for the masks. I had a cylindrical metal case with a screw top painted khaki in colour. When drills at school took place, a teacher would enter the classroom and shout, "Gas, Gas!". Whereupon we would all don our gas masks as quickly as possible, the teacher would then check that we had put the masks on properly and that would be that until the next time. There were three things that I remember about gas masks, they smelt of rubber which I didn't like, they were hot and tended to steam up inside, and if you blew as hard as you could you could make a very rude noise as the air passed between the thin rubber side of the mask and your face!

The other change at school caused by the war was the installation of two air
raid shelters, these consisted of curved iron corrugated sections bolted together and placed into a trench so that only the top half of the structure was above ground level. The top was then covered with earth and later the grass grew over it. The shelter had one doorway protected by a brick blast wall, at the other end was a square hatchway rather like a chimney. The intention was that should the main entrance become blocked perhaps by debris, the occupants could escape by climbing a ladder through the hatch.

Whenever the warning siren sounded we were all marched from the classroom to the shelters, the only light came from the doorway and the hatch, thus teachers could never be entirely sure of who was doing what and where!
The teachers tried to occupy us by organising sing-songs and telling stories, children also were allowed to tell a story if they wished. I told one myself which I made up as I went along, a long rambling tale of a dog which didn't really have an ending, it simply stopped!
When the All Clear sounded we all returned to our classrooms and carried on with the lessons. The daytime raids were really non-events, to the best of my memory nothing dramatic ever happened but precautions had to be taken. I can't ever remember being afraid in those days and I don't remember anyone else showing signs of panic, perhaps we were just too young to realise what could happen! The only other thing which sticks in my mind of those shelters is that they had been painted on the inside with a liquid tar solution. During the painting the tar had run and formed small globules which I delighted in picking off with my fingernail, why this gave me pleasure and why I remember it I have absolutely no idea!
When I was at home and a raid took place during the day I would watch the dogfights over Portsmouth while sitting on our air raid shelter. I clearly recall seeing the small white puffs in the clear blue skies caused by the bursting of anti-aircraft fire when enemy aircraft were in the vicinity. By now I had learnt to distinguish Spitfires and Hurricanes from the German aircraft and cheered whenever one of our aircraft was victorious.
By this time we had our own shelter, an Anderson, which consisted of curved corrugated steel sections bolted together with a closed rear end and a front with an entrance.
I have subsequently discovered that the Anderson shelter consisted of fourteen sheets of corrugated iron and formed a shell structure measuring six feet high,
by four and a half feet by six and a half feet, it was supposed to be capable of sleeping six but ours never did, we only went in there as a last resort!
This structure was recessed into the ground by about three feet in a pit dug out by my father, Dad also built a small blast wall of sandbags about three feet high to provide some protection at the entrance. The whole shelter was covered in earth which became covered in grass and weeds. It was situated as far from the bungalow as possible for maximum safety.
The inside of the shelter was somewhat spartan, the floor covered with stones from the garden and a two tiered bunk bed with a wooden frame and wire mesh to lie on. There were always large spiders and the whole place smelt musty, we didn't use it unless we had to! Some people went to a lot of trouble to make these shelters as comfortable as possible, floor boards, part wooden panelled walls, a cupboard containing food and drinks, a torch and candles etc., a portable gas ring, indeed all the comforts of home. Perhaps they spent more nights in their shelters than we did.
Some people had indoor shelters, Morrison shelters, these were in reality steel framed and topped tables with wire mesh sides, if the house should be hit by a bomb and collapse, you could be safe under these tables. They were also found to be excellent for model train layouts on the top and the metal top was also found to be ideal for tap dancing, or so I'm told!

Children learnt very quickly to distinguish between British and German aircraft,
you could hear long before you could see and you knew that if the sound was a steady drone, then the aircraft was British. If, however the sound was a brumm, brumm, brumm, then it was an enemy and if you were out you took cover. I have on several occasions dived into a nearby hedge or under some bushes to avoid being a target. Although as I said previously I wasn't scared, it was just what you did in those days.

Portchester was not a target for enemy bombers although some bombs were dropped on us, I believe these were probably the result of an error by the German bomb aimers or a wish to unload their cargo as quickly as possible and go home! The only possible military targets near us were the line of forts, known as Palmerston's Folly, built in Napoleonic times along the crest of Portsdown Hill to defend the harbour against a land attack from the north. Most of the bombing was on the city, naval dockyard and port of Portsmouth which suffered considerably as did the ports of Southampton and Plymouth.

Most of the bombs which fell on Portchester were incendiaries, I found one which had failed to explode and for a while I played with it, throwing it about just for fun! As far as I can remember it was silver in colour with a dark green tail fin section, it might have been about eighteen inches to two feet long and about two and a half to three inches in diameter.
After playing with it for a while I decided to take it to our local Air Raid Warden. The Warden, a Mr.Robins, was an elderly man with a large white moustache and a red face.
I rang his door bell and when he answered I presented him with my unexploded bomb. His reaction was not quite what I had expected, he indicated in no uncertain terms, his wish that I should remove both myself and my bomb from his front door step with all possible haste and return the bomb to where I had found it. I had rather hoped for some thanks and a commendation for my actions but alas it was not to be, such is life!

In the early part of the war the air raids were a bit of a non-event but things were soon to change, I can't remember exactly when the heavy bombing of Portsmouth began but it was pretty horrific. From the garden of our bungalow on Portsdown Hill we could see Portsmouth burning, we could see land mines, larger than the usual bombs floating down on parachutes. The noise of exploding bombs and the tremendous cracks of anti-aircraft fire was thunderous, the red glow of fires in the city and the beams of searchlights were the only illumination in the night sky. Although we were several miles from the scene of all this action we felt to be in the middle of it, an anti-aircraft gun sited about two hundred yards away deafened us as it fired continually throughout the raid. The entire bungalow shook with all the noise and my mother swiftly came to the conclusion that anything on shelves or on the mantleshelf should be moved in case it was shaken from it's positon and crashed to the floor, so everything was moved each evening before the sirens sounded. The other nightly routine was to put up the blackout curtains in the living room and kitchen before the wardens came round, we didn't bother with the bedrooms and got used to going to bed in the dark.

When the sirens sounded we waited to see what would happen before going to the shelter, if all was quiet we stayed in bed, but when the guns started firing and the sound of aircraft was heard we got up and dressed for the shelter. First my mother would gather up all the family's important documents such as insurance policies and birth certificates etc. These were all contained in a box ready to hand, mother would take these and her prized china elephant, a wedding present, to the shelter. She would then and only then, return for me! Each dash to the shelter was preceded by a wait until things seemed to be a little quieter and then we would run for it and hurl ourselves into it's murky depths. When the All Clear sounded we would return to our beds rather pleased that the bungalow was apparently undamaged, and go back to sleep. The following morning everyone had a tale to tell of near misses and the risks they had run, to be fair the tales probably exceeded the actual dangers but it seemed very real at the time.

In Portsmouth the reality was very grim, the southern part of the city suffered most, the target was obviously the naval dockyard and the raids must have caused great distress to the people living near there. Large areas simply ceased to exist and I remember all too clearly going to Commercial Road, the main shopping street with my mother and seeing the devastation.

My feet scrunched over broken glass and rubble and there was a strong smell of burning, where familiar shops had stood there were heaps of brick, wood and twisted metal. Other parts of the city had also suffered but Commercial Road is the one which sticks in my mind.
Another scene which I can still see in my mind's eye took place in Cosham High Street, the day after the first really big raid, my mother and father had taken me with them to do some shopping. I saw streams of people leaving Portsmouth to avoid the next night's raid, there were people pushing handcarts, prams, a man with a donkey cart, some with cases and bundles on their backs all carrying as much of their possessions as they could. I don't believe many of them knew where they were going and I don't think they cared, they just wanted to be away from the city before the next night's raid began. It reminded me forcibly of newsreel pictures of refugees fleeing in France and Belgium and I have never forgotten it.

Bomb sites were to be a familiar part of Portsmouth's landscape for many years to come and were still there long after the end of the war, one picture that
stays in my mind is that on all the sites there were buddlia bushes growing.
I believe that I must have been concerned when the raids were in progress
at this time but I don't recall great fear as such, perhaps I was too young to
fully appreciate the danger but I'm sure my parents did.

On the mornings after the raids all the young lads went searching for shrapnel on the way to school. Shrapnel was the jagged lumps of metal which fell out of the sky when shells exploded and was highly collectable. If you could find a large piece with numbers marked on it this was great! When I think of the amount of shrapnel collected by us lads plus all that which we probably missed, it seems incredible to me now that I never heard of anyone being hit by all this metal raining down from the sky! My father was however almost hit by a particularly large chunk of it, he was very lucky that night. We didn't have a
garage but we did have a wooden garden shed, on this particular occasion my father was standing in the doorway of the shed when he heard a whistle and a thud about two feet in front of him. Embedded in the earth was a large piece of
shrapnel, certainly the largest I had ever seen, if it had hit him it would have
certainly have killed him, it was almost as big as a cricket ball! Later we would
find strips of silver foil, I believe this was dropped in order to confuse radar.
We collected it at first but it lacked the interest of shrapnel so we stopped
bothering to pick it up!

Eventually the Luftwaffe gave up trying to bomb us into submission and heavy
raids ceased and even lighter raids became the exception rather than the norm.
Portsmouth had of course made preparations to deal with bombing, many
streets had air raid shelters built in them, brick with concrete roofs, I can't
ever remember going into one however. I can also recall that in many streets
there were auxiliary water pipes, black cast iron pipes about nine inches in
diameter laid in the gutters, these were presumably to be used if the water mains were damaged. To assist with the possible loss of water supply, static
water tanks made their appearance, large square concrete structures filled with
water and open to the sky.
We had one near our bungalow and thoroughly enjoyed it! It was great for sailing model boats on, I never remember it being used for any other purpose!
The other anti-aircraft measure was the positioning of barrage balloons, these large grey, elephant like balloons were a common sight round anywhere which was likely to be a target for the bombers. Just how successful they were I don't know, but they must have been a bit of a deterrent!

In the early part of the war before the heavy bombing began, if the sirens
sounded when you were out shopping you took cover wherever you could.
I remember being in the Landport Drapery Bazaar in Commercial Road with my mother on one occasion when the siren sounded and we went down into the basement where the carpet department was and sat on piles of carpets until the raid was over. On another occasion we went into the cellar of a shop in Arundel Street for the same reason.

Of course from time to time other parts of the city were also damaged, the Carlton cinema at the bottom of Cosham High Street received a direct hit one
night, it was right next to the railway line which may have been the target.
The next morning a sign was hung outside saying "Sorry, Full Up Inside."
It was the custom in cinemas when sirens sounded to put a message on the screen informing the patrons that a raid was imminent, it was then up to people
to decide whether to leave or to carry on watching the film, as I remember
most of the audience stayed!
Really that's about all I can remember about air raids, Hitler eventually gave up on the idea of bombing and things returned to normal apart from the very
occasional foray by lone aircraft.

Towards the end of the war raids assumed a new and rather sinister aspect , this was the time of the unmanned V1 and V2 rockets, the Doodlebugs as they were called, Hitler's last major weapon. These were quite frightening, you could sometimes see them, you could always hear them but when their engines stopped and there was silence you knew that they were coming down somewhere. I believe that it was the sheer unpredictability of where they would fall which was unnerving. When at last you heard the bang there was a feeling of acute relief, it wasn't your turn yet!

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