Читать книгу Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45 - Duff Hart-Davis - Страница 19

Through many a day of darkness,

Through many a scene of strife,

The faithful few fought bravely

To guard the nation’s life.

Hymns Ancient & Modern, No. 256

Forecasts of German airpower made in the early 1930s soon proved to have been wildly inaccurate. The Government had assumed that even if war opened with a blitz on London, the limited range of Luftwaffe aircraft would mean that destruction would be confined to the south and east of the country. The rest of England, north of a notional line from the Wash north of East Anglia to the Solent on the south coast, was reckoned to be relatively safe from bombardment.

Perhaps that was true in 1939; but with the fall of France in the summer of 1940, the picture suddenly changed. Taking off from captured airfields closer to England, German bombers could reach targets much farther inland, and to the north and west. One of the first daytime raids on the United Kingdom was an attack on Wick, at the extremity of Caithness – about as far from the Channel coast as any point in Britain. The object of the attack may have been to disable the RAF fighter squadron based on the airfield just north of the town, which was there to defend ships in the anchorage in Scapa Flow. The Luftwaffe raiders came in at teatime on 1 July, a fine summer’s day, and whether they meant to hit the airfield or the harbour, a stick of bombs fell in the middle of Bank Row, a narrow road alongside the port, killing fifteen people, including eight children (the youngest not quite five) who were playing on the bank. After its first run one aircraft turned and came back, machine-gunning along the river. In all Wick was raided six times, the last on 26 October, when three Heinkels dropped twenty high-explosive bombs on and around the airfield.

All summer the Luftwaffe carried out sporadic raids on convoys in the Channel and on south coast ports, from Dover in the east to Swansea in the west in what Hitler called the Kanalkampf – the Battle of the Channel. Key targets were Weymouth (which suffered forty-eight raids in all during the war) and Portland, home of the Whiteways Royal Naval torpedo works. On 9 July twenty-seven people were killed in Norwich. Southampton and Coventry were also heavily bombed.

People soon learned to identify the marauders, especially when they attacked at low level. The Heinkel 111 – a twin-engined medium bomber – was easily recognized by its bulbous cockpit with curved, clear panels through which the crew were visible. Also all too familiar was the Junkers JU 88, a fast and versatile twin-engined fighter-bomber with low-mounted wings, and the JU 87, also called a Stuka, or dive-bomber, distinguished by its upwardly bent wings and fixed undercarriage (with wheels permanently down). The Dornier D-17, known to the Germans as der fliegende Bleistift (the Flying Pencil), was recognizable by its slim body and twin tail, especially in its low-level role. Even schoolboys could soon identify fighters like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the twin-tailed Bf 110 by the noise of their engines alone.

On 16 July Hitler issued Directive No. 16, which authorized detailed preparations for Operation Sealion, the invasion of England. Three days later he proclaimed his ‘Last Appeal to Reason’, still pretending that he did not want war with Britain, and demanding that the nation surrender. When this rant failed to produce the required result – even after leaflets of the text had been dropped over England – he changed tactics and in Directive No. 17 ordered the destruction of the entire RAF – aircraft, airfields, supply organizations, factories – a task which the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, the sybaritic, elephantine Hermann Goering, assured him could be accomplished in four days.

On 24 August bombs fell on central London for the first time, killing nine people. In fact the docks had been the target, and the German navigators had lost their bearings. But Churchill was so outraged by the strike on the heart of the capital that the War Cabinet countermanded Bomber Command’s plan to hit Leipzig in retaliation, and on the night of 25 August a force of seventy aircraft went out to bomb Berlin.

Hitler, infuriated in turn, set in motion Adlerangriff (Eagle Attack), his attempt to destroy the RAF and its bases. Preliminary raids were launched on 12 August, and heavier ones on the 13th (Adlertag – Eagle Day); but all else paled before the mass assault on 15 August, when 2000 aircraft attacked. Seventy-six of them were shot down, but the raids continued and many key fighter airfields – Biggin Hill, West Malling, Croydon, Kenley – were badly damaged.

As battle raged in the sky, of all the counties Kent was at the greatest risk. Any Luftwaffe raid made life in the countryside hazardous, for the danger area extended far beyond the perimeter of whatever airfield the Germans were attacking, with stray bombs falling, aircraft crashing and shrapnel cascading down. One farm lost forty sheep to bombs and bullets, and its pastures were pitted with ninety-three craters, the biggest forty feet across and more than twenty deep. With such dangers prevailing, it was hardly surprising that many Londoners decided not to take their annual holiday hop-picking. To fill their places 2000 soldiers were drafted in, and local schools waived normal rules so that children could help with the harvest. Elaborate precautions had been made to protect those taking part: shelter trenches had been dug, casualty stations built and camouflaged. One of the most evocative images of the whole war is a photograph of a dozen small children crouching in the bottom of a freshly dug slit trench, gazing upwards at a dogfight in progress high overhead.

Farmers naturally wanted compensation for damage to their crops, and to their land. If the army could provide labour to carry out repairs, there was no problem; but if no military help was available, farmers often called on rural solicitors to make their case to the War Department. A 250kg bomb created a sizeable crater and scattered earth for hundreds of yards, which made filling in the hole a laborious and expensive business. Damaged trees also gave rise to disputes. Branches blown off of an oak (for instance) could be burnt in situ, but if bomb splinters were embedded in the trunk, no timber merchant would look at it, for fear of wrecking his saws. Market gardeners – especially those with big greenhouses – were particularly vulnerable, and often had an entire crop destroyed by a single explosion.

Northern farmers were hit as well. ‘Eh! Just fancy! Bang in the middle of Ford’s clover root,’ wrote the Mancunian diarist Arnold Boyd. ‘These Jerries will stick at nothing.’ Another diarist, identified only by the initials M.A., reported the effect of a bomb which fell in a woodland copse in the winter of 1940:

The small symmetrical crater was ringed round by the now-familiar mound of earth, and the surrounding bracken and grass was mown close to the soil. About thirty yards away from the crater a large number of beech saplings had had their heads cut cleanly off with a cut that ran parallel to the earth and not, as one would have supposed, at an angle to it. The larger trees that had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of the shell splinters received deep, clean cuts often six inches deep and the width of the bole.

In spite of the obvious danger, country people going about their work soon became phlegmatic, tending to call a siren a ‘cyrene’, or just to refer to it as ‘that thing’. ‘There goes that thing again’, they would say, before getting on with the job in hand; and distant dogfights were regarded as a form of free entertainment. ‘They were just like butterflies flying round each other,’ said a woman of two tussling aircraft. ‘Lovely to watch.’ Children felt the same. Twelve-year-old Eileen Ryan, who had been evacuated from London to Weymouth, was walking with friends on the promenade one day and stopped to enjoy the spectacle of Spitfires wheeling in pursuit of ME 109s – until a warden roared at them, ‘You bloody kids – GET IN THE SHELTER!’

There was huge excitement one day in Essex when a lone parachutist was seen swinging down out of the sky over Dagenham. Nine-year-old Richard Hunt was messing about with a gang of friends when somebody shouted that the invasion had begun, and a great crowd of people poured into the boys’ lane, armed with every kind of makeshift weapon, from garden forks to butchers’ knives, making for the fields. Richard had his airgun, and his friend Reggie some other weapon. Joining the rush, they ran through allotments, scattering the crops and breaking down fences in their way. At one stage they heard shots, and later learned that some member of the Home Guard, ignoring all the rules, had opened up on the parachutist and wounded him. The boys reached the scene in time to see an army van drive off with the man inside, and found out that, far from being German, he was one of the Polish or Czech pilots flying Spitfires with the RAF.

Between 19 and 24 August bad weather enforced a lull and gave the RAF fighter squadrons some respite, but then Goering decided to concentrate attacks on 11 Group, which was defending London and the South East, and by the end of August Fighter Command had been drastically weakened: in the last week of August and the first of September 112 pilots and 256 aircraft were lost. Damage to ground stations was so severe that the fighters had to use small civilian airfields.

Fortunately Goering never realized how close the RAF was to collapse. Instead of keeping up the pressure on fighter stations, he switched to the bombing of London – and so the Blitz proper began late in the afternoon of Saturday, 7 September 1940.

Just after eight o’clock that evening the Chiefs of Staff issued the code word CROMWELL to military units, signifying that invasion was imminent. The warning put the whole country on alert: church bells rang out, the Home Guard stood to, and remained on post all night. Many people believed that German troops had already landed. What Hitler had launched, in fact, was Operation Loge, a mass attack on London, in which more than 1000 aircraft took part. Between then and the end of May 1941 the capital was attacked seventy-one times; a million houses were destroyed, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed.

H. E. Bates was fishing on a lake in Kent when he witnessed one of the big raids coming in:

Up to that day we had seen as many as eighty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty planes flying over at one time. Now we saw a phenomenon. It was like the inland migration of hundreds of black and silver geese. They came in steadily and unceasingly, not very high, the black geese the bombers, the silver the fighters. The fighters made pretty circling movements of protection above the bombers. They went forward relentlessly. The air was heavy with moving thunder and the culminating earthquakes of bombs dropped at a great distance. All that had happened before that day now seemed by comparison very playful.

On 15 September – which became known as Battle of Britain Day – Fighter Command achieved its most spectacular success, breaking up raid after raid over London and the south coast. Such was Hitler’s frustration that two days later he shelved Operation Sealion indefinitely and turned his attention eastwards to Russia. It is estimated that during the Battle of Britain the RAF had lost just over 1000 aircraft, and the Luftwaffe nearly twice as many.

When Hitler realized that his attempt to demoralize England had failed, attacks on London dwindled. But all Britain had been battered by bombs. After the capital, the city most heavily raided was Liverpool, where nearly 4000 people were killed. Bristol also came under persistent attack: on the night of 3–4 January 1941 a single raid lasted for twelve hours. Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Plymouth, Swansea and Southampton were also prime targets.

Of all the outrages perpetrated by Hitler, none caused greater anger and grief than the attack on Coventry, on the night of 14 September 1940. The city was, in a sense, a legitimate target, for its factories were making cars, aircraft engines and munitions; but nothing could have prepared it for the devastating raid, which began at 8 p.m. and lasted until midnight, killing 560 people, destroying most of the city centre and leaving the fourteenth-century cathedral a ruined shell.

Almost as emotive was the series of attacks that became known as the Baedeker raids. In April and May 1942, in revenge for Bomber Command’s laying waste the Baltic port of Lübeck, Hitler ordered reprisals against Exeter, Bath, York and Norwich – historic towns of no strategic importance. The raids killed 1600 civilians and wrecked many notable buildings, including the Assembly Rooms in Bath and the Guildhall in York. Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, a Nazi propagandist, announced that the Luftwaffe would hit every town in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker tourist guide. His threat was never carried out; but in another burst of retaliation Hitler responded to Bomber Command’s mass attack on Cologne (in May 1942) with three raids on Canterbury.

In all the air raids throughout the war, human casualties were inevitably by far the most numerous in cities and towns, but the countryside suffered as well, mainly from bombs jettisoned by crews who had accomplished their principal mission and were on the way home, or were being hard pressed by fighters and sought extra speed to escape.

In the early days of the battle a rumour went round that the Germans were dropping magnetic mines, and people wearing steel helmets were warned not to approach them in case they set off an explosion. But in fact almost everyone did wear steel helmets when out of doors, including ladies playing tennis, because during dogfights shrapnel and spent bullet cases were constantly raining down out of the sky. Vera Lynn wore a helmet in the car while driving to her shows.

There were some astonishing survivals, such as that of Mr Withers and his neighbours in their Essex village, described by Margery Allingham:

Their stick of bombs fell neatly between their bungalows, one bungalow, one crater, and so on … In the actual spot where Mr Withers’s own bomb fell he had a shed containing a pony and trap, a cat, some budgerigars, a jackdaw and a ton of coal. They got the pony out from under the trap in the crater and held it up for a minute or two until, to everyone’s amazement, it wandered off and began to eat. The cat ran away for nearly a fortnight. The budgerigars were none the worse. Most of the coal was retrieved, and the jackdaw died three days later, more from rage than anything else, Mr Withers said. No one in the houses was hurt.

Between raids, life carried on. At Cranbrook School anti-aircraft guns were installed on the cricket field, and, whenever they opened up during a game, the boys had to sprint for cover. For minor crimes committed, an alternative to detention was a spell hoeing the sugar beet planted on one of the rugger pitches.

Later in the war the Kent Messenger published a map showing where high-explosive bombs of 50kg or more had fallen on Sevenoaks Rural District between the end of July 1940 and the end of February 1944. Even though some 50,000 incendiary bombs were not included, the chart looked as though it had been blasted with a charge of No. 5 pellets from a shotgun, so thickly was it spattered with dots. One particularly dense cluster, running north-west to south-east, lay close below Chartwell, as if the Luftwaffe had been aiming for the Prime Minister’s country home.

Efforts were made to lure German pilots to false targets. One decoy town was laid out by Shepperton Studios on Black Down, north of Bristol. Bales of straw soaked in creosote were set alight to simulate the effects of the incendiary bombs dropped at the start of a raid, and drums of oil were ignited to represent buildings on fire. Dim red lights, powered by petrol generators, were switched on in a pattern based on the streets and railways of the city. But these initiatives seem to have been fruitless, for no bombs landed on or around the site.

The Germans went so far as to attack the Republic of Ireland – even though the country was officially neutral, and the Government had embellished the south coast with signs made from white-painted concrete blocks proclaiming EIRE in huge letters. People were nervous of German intentions, fearing that Hitler might use the Republic as a springboard for invading England from the west – and the saying went that if the Führer wanted to take Ireland at 13.00 hours, it would be his by 16.00.

Even so, nobody was prepared for the attack at lunchtime on 26 August 1940, when four bombs fell on the Shelburne Cooperative Dairy factory at Campile, in Wexford. The first landed in the canteen, killing three young women; the second came through the roof and started a fire; the third hit the railway line and the fourth landed in a field. The Germans claimed that the pilots had become separated from the rest of their formation, and had jettisoned their bombs over open country. To the people on the ground it seemed that they had made a precision raid. No convincing reason for the attack was ever established, but great was the fury of witnesses who saw the German Ambassador come from Dublin to the women’s funeral sporting a top hat and a scarlet sash emblazoned with a swastika.

In England animal losses on farms mounted rapidly: in the nine months to December 1940 the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee – a voluntary body – reported 3000 air-raid casualties, mostly cattle and sheep. Of these, 843 were killed outright, 706 had to be put down and 440 were given first aid treatment. Many of the deaths and injuries resulted from the Nazi fighter pilots’ deplorable habit of machine-gunning herds in low-level attacks – more for target practice and their own amusement than from any hope of reducing English food supplies. From the dead stock, 30 per cent of the meat was bought by the Ministry of Food and sent for human consumption – but the salvage of a carcass depended on prompt action immediately after the animal had been killed. Unless some competent person – farmer, butcher or vet – tackled the victim within a few minutes, it would be useless; and the easiest method of disposal would be to bury it at the bottom of a bomb crater. The Ministry had its own arrangements for salvaging useable livestock, but told farmers that they themselves should be prepared ‘to slaughter, bleed and disembowel any animal injured beyond hope of recovery’.