Friday 17 March 2017

Home Guard


I was just idly trawling through all the photos which had been lost to me for over a year when I came upon these ones. They were found in my father's old wallet by my sister who was clearing up after his death, and are of the wreckage of the Wellington Bomber which he crash landed in somewhere in Kent.

He was in the only recognisable bit of it at the time because he was the tail gunner - life expectancy: 3 missions. He was the only one left in the plane when it came down, because his radio wire had been severed by bullets and he did not hear the pilot's command to bail out. The first thing he knew about the order was when he saw his fellow crew float down on parachutes from his plastic window in the tail.

When he got out of hospital he was put into an office in the Ministry of War in Whitehall where he uncovered a German spy. The spy put poison in his tea before he fled and - miraculously - he survived that too, otherwise I would not be here, writing this under a false name.

I was talking with a friend last night, and she said how she had just visited a fascinating old 19th century sea-fort above Brean Sands on the North Somerset coast. Rather like the Tardigrade, I never knew of its existence until yesterday, even though I know Brean Sands very well as a lovely stretch of sandy coastline near Burnham on Sea.

She showed me photos of the WW2 installations which are still there, and one feature is a wide set of railway tracks which lead right to the edge of a high cliff, as if the train would be sent plummeting down into the sea.

I was astounded to learn that this site was the first testing area for Barnes Wallis's 'Bouncing Bomb', before they settled on Derwent Water up in the North as a better place to drop the things from an aircraft. The length of rail-track was to launch the bombs out to sea as a test. Why  - as with the Tardigrades - had I never known this before?

I suppose that I have always been quietly obsessed about Britain in WW2 because I was born shortly after it had been successfully concluded, and all my uncles (not my father) would recount all sorts of tales about their adventures at Christmas time. I felt as though I had missed out on something - thankfully I had.

My childhood playgrounds were punctuated with brick-built 'pillbox' machine-gun emplacements incongruously set amongst beautiful Surrey meadow land, waiting for an invasion which never happened.

London was pitted with massive bomb-craters filled with buddleia and butterflies, and I was fascinated with the sets of metallic-green gas-masks found in the cupboards of the house we lived in.

The propganda machine and the Spirit of the Blitz was still in good working order when I was young, and I still believe that this was the last - and possibly only - war which truly was a black and white - good versus evil - one, but this is probably because the various shades of grey involving corruption and incompetence had been well whitewashed as everything was then, to stop idle troops from becoming even more bored than they were already.

'If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn't move, paint it white,' summed up the general orders to soldiers in any camp in the British Isles, as told to me by an uncle. They even had to paint the canvas belts of their uniforms white when not in battle, and they became thick and stiff with Blanco.

I was walking on the clifftop near St Ives with my dear German friend, Thomas, when we came upon the concrete ruins of a gun emplacement facing out to sea.

He asked what it was and I said, "Guns."

"Not needed, thank God." His father flew fighter-bombers.


16 comments:

  1. Norfolk has pillboxes all over the place, not just on the coast. When we were kids my father would point them out to us. The ones up on the east Norfolk coast always looked particularly eerie to me as a child because there were few other things around, just windswept beaches and dunes, a few cattle and a pillbox. Our generation is the one to remember the bomb sites and gaps in the houses and the gas masks and the ration books found in the drawer. We cleared them all out a few years ago. My father was in the Home Guard. He saw one series of Dad's Army and declared it to be exactly like it was.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There is a listening station somewhere quite close to you but on the South coast. It is a massive arc of concrete wall which had microphones attached to the middle. I am told that if you stand in the right place, you can hear the traffic in France.

      Delete
  2. I was born in '46, so never had to fight in a war, or do National Service (although I have had military training). I remember our Anderson shelter, plenty of pillboxes, and a strange S shaped underground something-or-other at the bottom of our garden.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My brother and sisters were evacuated to Clevedon, Somerset from East London - not far from here.

      Delete
  3. Going off at a tangent; The fort on Brean Down was depicted as a temple by Dion Fortune in her book The Sea Priestess. Useless information I know but my fingers ran away with me...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That is very good information, Heron, thank you. I am learning more about this place by the day.

      Delete
  4. Your father was very lucky. Amazing story. What a terrible war for England and Europe and all of those brave men and women who fought. I wonder how they ever let Hitler go so far, then think of Trump.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There were many Australians, New Zealanders, West Indians, Indians and -eventuallt - Americans involved in this war as well, of course. As far as Hiter goes, scum always rises to the surface in times of hardship and blame.

      Delete
  5. You all over there had the civilian "involvement" brunt of that war. I remember ration books, and my grandmother turning oleomargarine yellow by creaming in a little packet of orange power. "It's the war, dear," she explained.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, we had food problems, but nothing like the problems of those in the Pacific war.

      Delete
  6. Your father's story, and the photograph, remind me of Joseph Beuys who was a rear gunner in the German Army and survived a similar crash. This framed the story of his life and his art for long after - the lard and fur and the local people who found him who saved him. (Many people did not believe that he could survive such a crash and regarded the whole story as made up. I had always believed it and the lard and fur (being a lard eater and happy to acknowledge its uses other than just eating) I wrote my BA thesis on him so am not making up I know about this from Google.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There is a story about a Beuys exhibition which I love.

      In London, a group of cleaners arrived at the West End gallery where they found a pile of rancid lard stacked up in a corner, so they binned it before the gallery opened at around 10. It was the Beuys installation...

      Delete
    2. And they cleaned the blackboard.

      Delete
  7. My uncle was also a tail gunner, but in the U.S. Airforce. His plane was shot down over the Black Forest in WWII, and he survived as well. Alone, he tried to disguise himself as an old woman to get back to his unit, but was discovered by the Germans. He spent the rest of the war in a Stalag, starved and abused. By the time the war ended and he was released, he was a broken man. He would never talk about his experiences. He died a pauper's death, alone and derelict. What a terrible thing, that war. I always enjoy your posts. I found this one particularly interesting.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We are so lucky to have avoided all of that - I mean us British. We were not conscripted for Vietnam either. We would have been occupied without America and Russia's involvement.

      Delete