Of all wars in human history, the Second World War is unmatched in its horror. It took 27,000 lives on each and every one of its 2,194 days. It shattered families, levelled cities and erased countries. Few people anywhere escaped without loss. Many struggled and failed to keep their humanity and compassion
intact. Perhaps our family was luckier than others, but our parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles and
cousins were changed by the war, with outcomes that
affect us still today.
A heavy sense of doom hung over England in the late 1930s. The Great War had ended only 20 years earlier, leaving millions of young men dead or maimed, crippling the economy and reducing Britain to a second rate power. "Never again" people said, and yet another war edged closer with each new crisis.
No one was panicking, but people were uneasy. Newspapers were full of talk about “the invincible bomber,” the horrors of poison gas, and the destruction awaiting London. My father's dad was deeply
affected by the popular novel What happened to
the Corbetts by Nevil Shute. Published in early 1939, it predicted the devastation that would follow the bombing of England’s major cities.
We were a family of working class Londoners, born and raised and expecting to die in the tiny, shoddy,
mold-infested Victorian homes that lined the narrow streets and lanes
surrounding the docks and warehouses and factories along the Thames river in the East End neighbourhoods of Woolwich, Plumstead and East Ham. Some of our family, a lucky few, had escaped to the newer suburbs of Eltham and Bexleyheath, but they still weren't far from their roots.
By the summer of 1939 Tom and Eva Napier, known to everyone as Uncle Tom and Aunt Eva, knew war was coming. They were fatalistic about their own chances, but were determined their 11-year-old daughter June would escape.
One day that summer, Aunt Eva and June boarded a train
full with other mothers and children, for the 120-mile journey north
to the town of Loughborough. There, in the hoped-for
safety of her sister Millie’s drawing room, Eva said a tearful goodbye to
her daughter. It was the first time they had ever been separated.
Tom
tried to enlist, even though at 38 he was twice the age of the conscripts then
being called up. The recruiting officer rejected him, not because of his age,
but because his job as a blacksmith at the Beckton Gas Works would be important in the coming war effort.
The decisive moment came in August. After swallowing up Austria and much of Czechoslovakia, Hitler was now massing his armies on Germany’s border with Poland. Britain had pledged to come to Poland's aid if Germany were to attack, so on August 25th the Prime Minister issued an ultimatum, declaring to Hitler “Invade Poland and you go to war with us.”
Hitler ignored this warning: on Friday, September 1st he invaded.
June
was sitting in her Aunt Millie’s garden listening to the wireless on the following Sunday, when a voice interrupted the program. She never forgot what happened next:
“Here
is an announcement. At 11:15 - that is, in about two minutes, the prime
minister will broadcast to the nation. Please stand by.”
“This
is London. You will now hear a statement by the prime minister.”
Then
the somber voice of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain:
“I
am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the
British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government the final note
stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were
prepared, at once, to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would
exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been
received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”
June
really didn't know what ‘war’ would mean for others, but she knew what it would
mean for her: separation from her dear mum and dad and an unhappy, uncertain
future with Aunt Millie.
In
the first rush of fear following the declaration of war, my grandmother Elsie
Campbell, Eva Napier’s sister, made the quick decision to evacuate her children
- 12-year-old Elsie (“Babs”), 11-year-old Richard (“Boy”), and my mother, tiny
three-year-old Margaret - from their home in the East London suburb of Eltham.
It turned out to be a gut-wrenching move, and even the safety of Ashford, a
town just 60 miles away, couldn’t outweigh the concern Elsie felt when she
thought of leaving her children in the care of strangers.
The children were split up. Boy stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Strand, who loved him and
treated him as if he were their own son. Margaret and Babs were billeted in a
home completely different. Margaret remembers: “The lady wasn’t nice to us at
all, and I was really scared when my sister was at school, and I was by myself.
We had to eat all our dinner if we wanted desert because she put desert on the
same plate, without it being washed first. I was extremely unhappy . . .”
For
most of our family, the first tangible sign of war was the blackout, when the
streetlights went out, not to come on again for six years. People had to cover
every window with heavy curtain material, so that no light could escape.
Lorries and cars had to drive with their headlights masked so that only a tiny
slit of light would show.
The
blackout heightened the palpable fear people felt, but their initial panic
started to disappear once they realised that nothing else was going to happen.
Over 300,000 soldiers, almost the entire British army, had crossed over to France
and rushed up to Germany’s border, where, with half a million Frenchmen, they
all sat down and did nothing while Germany completed its lightning conquest of
Poland. They carried on doing nothing all through the winter of 1939 and into
the spring of 1940. People started talking about the “Phony War” and gradually
went back to normality.
Elsie
brought her children back home. Margaret was the first to return, after just
two weeks, and the others followed soon after. By Christmas 1939 almost all the
children evacuated from East London had returned, but there were exceptions: Eva
Napier wasn’t going to take any chances – June was doomed to continue her exile
with Aunt Millie.
The
Phony War ended abruptly on April 9th, 1940, when Hitler suddenly struck north
into neutral Denmark and Norway. Denmark fell in a day.
A
month later, on May 10th, Hitler hurled his armies south through neutral
Holland to smash into the Allies in Belgium and France. Within hours, startled
and unprepared British and French troops were in panic-struck retreat. The same
day, Neville Chamberlin resigned as Britain’s Prime Minister and Winston
Churchill was appointed in his place.
The
following six weeks were amongst the most decisive in all of Britain’s long
history.
The
British army in France collapsed. It suffered massive losses as it retreated to
the tiny French seaside town of Dunkirk. There, cut off from supplies and
ammunition, with their backs to the sea and the enemy on three sides, the most
famous regiments of the British army prepared to make their last stand.
Unknown
to most of the world, for five days Churchill and the members of the British
War Cabinet debated negotiation and capitulation to Hitler. For some, it seemed
the only reasonable alternative in the face of Germany’s overwhelming
firepower. In the end Churchill’s arguments and strength of personality won
out. Whatever the consequences for its people, Britain would fight on.
The
English then proved again that they are at their best in adversity when
thousands of weekend sailors, fishermen and ferryboat captains endured
relentless German bombing, strafing and artillery fire as they sailed their
small craft across the channel to Dunkirk to bring the British army back home.
Soon everyone was celebrating the rescue of 200,000 soldiers from the beaches as
the Miracle of Dunkirk, in popular perception turning a massive defeat into a
victory.
But
it was no victory. Most of the British army had been rescued, but it had left
behind all its tanks, guns and vehicles in France and half the Royal Air Force’s
bombers had been shot down.
And
there were no miracles for the French. Demoralized and badly led, they simply
evaporated in the face of the German advance. Paris was abandoned; the Germans
captured the city by simply marching in. The French government sued for peace
on June 16th.
Now
Britain stood alone.
Most
people had no doubt the Germans would turn their half-million-man army on
England, launching an immediate invasion. With the British army bereft of its
weapons, the country seemed to be almost defenseless.
Hitler was confident: “Our enemies are little worms. I
saw them at Munich.” On July 16th he issued “Directive No. 16”, ordering
his war machine to prepare for the invasion of Britain.
Initial plans called for an invasion
force of 500,000 to 800,000 men. The tanks and soldiers that had swept through the
Belgian and French armies and shattered the British Expeditionary Force were already
moving to the Normandy coast, where they began training for the invasion of
London.
German preparations began with the first
bombing attacks on English airfields and aircraft factories.
Churchill’s
commanders gathered the few remaining fully armed and unbloodied soldiers and
cobbled them into a unit they called 7th Corps. This became the army’s only
fully equipped mobile force. It was made up of just 25,000 men.
At
the heart of 7th Corps was the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, which included
two brothers, Jim and Doug Robb, farm hands from the distant frontier of the
Peace River Country of northwestern Alberta. They had volunteered on the
outbreak of war in September 1939 and arrived in England three months later.
Here
was one of the great ironies of the war. When war was declared, Canada’s
full-time army consisted of only 4,261 men, 4 modern anti-aircraft guns, 5
mortars, 92 machine guns and two tanks.
Now, nine months later, the
Canadian members of 7th Corps were the best-equipped, best-trained,
best-prepared troops in England.
Well-trained
as they were, it would still be almost impossible for 7th Corps, outnumbered by
up to 20 to one, to do more than delay the Germans in the fields of Kent and
Hampshire. Churchill’s commanders intended to gather the remainder of Britain’s
army behind the General Headquarters Anti-tank Line. Grand as it sounded, this
was really nothing more than a big ditch stretching from Bristol in the west to
Maidstone in the east.
If
the Germans were to break through the General Headquarters Anti-tank Line, the
way to London would be open. The city’s final defense would then fall upon the
Home Guard. That meant our family.
The
Home Guard was an idea of Churchill’s. It was created in May 1940 so that men
who were prohibited from enlisting in the army because they were in critical
civilian jobs, or were too old or too sick, could still take up arms. The
response to Churchill’s idea was overwhelming. Within 24 hours, 250,000 had
lined up at local police stations to sign up. My grandfather Jack Nice and my
mother’s Uncle tom and cousin Will Hickford were among them.
The
British plan called for a defensive line running right through the centre of
Woolwich, sacrificing all the suburbs to the south and east, including Eltham,
where my mother’s family lived. To stiffen this line the Home Guard dug deep
trenches and put up concrete barriers and pillboxes. To prevent the landing of
German parachutists, they erected tall wooden stakes at regular intervals on
Woolwich Common, Plumstead Common and other areas of open ground. To confuse
the Germans on the ground they removed all road signs and street names
(confusing most Londoners too: according to The Times, “citizens venturing ‘off
the beaten track’ will be able to experience the exhilarating feeling of being
explorers”).
I
wonder if Woolwich Home Guard volunteer Jack Nice would really have obeyed his
orders to fight to the death. He certainly wouldn’t be fighting to defend his
own home, 70 Fox Hill, which was on the wrong side of the line.
So too was the tidy home kept by Will and Elsie
Canning at 17 Preston Drive in Bexleyheath. It was their pride and joy,
purchased new just five years before. Elsie would be safe – she and their two
children had evacuated to Leicester, far from the potential battle for London –
but Will, normally commuting to an office job in central London, would be
fighting a guerilla war. He and his Home Guard unit planned to use their homemade
weapons and naive ingenuity to slow the German assault before it exploded
against the defensive positions dug into the streets of Woolwich.
Across the river in East Ham, Tom Napier and his
friends defended their section of the outermost line. The army had refused
Tom’s attempt to enlist back in 1939, but now he was finally bearing arms for
his country.
Even though defending London would be a big task, the
Home Guard had little with which to do it. They were a bit of a rag-tag army of
pirates, with no uniforms and without even weapons, except what they could
scrounge for themselves.
One Home Guard unit was equipped with 48 pikes
borrowed from the Drury Lane Theatre. Another created a “Cutlass Platoon.” In
another, guardsmen wore roller skates. In the East End one unit created
grenades by inserting razor blades into potatoes. Most just practiced with
wooden guns or simply pretended they were carrying weapons. Eventually most of
the Home Guard received rifles – 63,000 shotguns and sporting rifles donated by
private citizens and by September some 500,000 ex-World War I rifles
contributed by the Canadian government.
Making a commitment to the Home Guard was not easy.
Jack Nice, a father of two, was holding down his regular job as a driver on the
night shift for the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society, and then spending every
third day, more than 80 hours a month without pay, training with his Home Guard
unit, the 34th County of London Battalion. The Battalion trained at a local
school and at the Matchless Motorcycle works at 44 Plumstead Road.
The Germans reacted to the Home Guard with a mixture
of contempt and concern. The Nazi Propaganda Minister referred to them as
“rabble” and a “mob of amateurs armed with broom-sticks and darts,” but later
he accused them of being gangsters. He also announced that any Home Guard
members caught with weapons in their hands by the German invaders would be shot
as terrorists.
Hitler’s generals had good reason to worry. In this
war so far they had achieved enormous success by attacking civilians and by
devastating towns and cities, first destroying each country’s morale and its
people’s will to fight, before then turning on the defending armies themselves.
Now, for the first time, the civilians of a target country were giving notice that
they would fight back. As Winston Churchill said in July 1940, “The vast mass
of London itself could easily devour a hostile army and we would rather see
London laid in ashes and ruins than that it should be tamely and abjectly
enslaved.”
This wasn’t just a politician’s bluster. In the summer
of 1940 most people in Britain expected the Germans to come, but they were
almost unanimous in their will to fight. One newspaper, the Daily Express,
helpfully published an article entitled “How to Receive a German Paratrooper
who lands in your Back Garden.” The story included a German translation of the
phrase ‘Hands up: you are my prisoner.’
The
English didn’t have to wait long before the war came to them. It started in the
skies over Essex, Kent, Surrey and Hampshire with the first Luftwaffe bombing
attacks of the campaign that became known as the Battle of Britain. The Germans
were fighting to establish air supremacy over southern England, so that they
could launch their invasion unopposed. They planned to bomb airfields, destroy
aircraft factories and shoot Spitfires and Hurricanes out of the sky.
Later, Churchill would say, “Never was so much owed by
so many to so few.” The “few” were some 1,100 young fighter pilots, a great
number still in their teens. These young pilots took off day after day,
sometimes three or even four times a day, charging against the never-ending
waves of German fighters and bombers over the skies of England. Within three
months a third of them would be dead, their bodies torn by German cannon
shells, burned alive by fire, or smashed into the ground in the crumbled
wreckage of their damaged aircraft.
The Battle of Britain was also fought by thousands of men
and women on the ground, serving in the air force and working in factories
around the country.
Aircraft technicians laboured around the clock to
patch and re-arm the British fighters and to repair bomb-cratered runways and
hangars, sometimes themselves under direct attack from the air.
All along England’s southern coastline young women tracked
the German aircraft from primitive radar stations, staying at their posts even
while bombs were falling around them. They were feeding vital early warning to
“controllers,” again mostly women, who launched and directed the RAF pilots so
that they could counter-attack the Germans at exactly the right time and place.
And when the Spitfires and Hurricanes were shot down, RAF
aircraft recovery crews rushed to the site of the crash, salvaging all the
equipment they could, and shipping it to aircraft factories and repair depots.
Sometimes crashed aircraft could be patched and repaired, to fly again just
days later.
In factories around the country ordinary men and women
worked beyond exhaustion to produce replacement aircraft faster than the
Germans could shoot them down. German bombers relentlessly targeted these factories,
but no amount of bombing could bring the production of the precious aircraft to
a stop.
Beside the Thames in the centre of Woolwich, the Royal
Arsenal was the biggest munitions factory in England. Here many thousands of
factory hands worked day and night to produce the ammunition the RAF needed in
its battle, and to replace the ammunition the army had lost in France, and
would need in its struggle to repel the coming invasion. In the days after
Dunkirk output at the Arsenal rose by a quarter as production accelerated to 24
hours a day, seven days a week. Workers set a blistering pace, toiling under
the stress of constant threat of attack from the air.
All that summer as Dick Campbell made his way home
after his shift at the Arsenal he could look up into the sky and see the
contrails of the Spitfires and Hurricanes twisting and turning in their
desperate battle with the Luftwaffe, perhaps firing off ammunition that had
been in his own hands just days before.
One day in July, whole families crowded around a
Messerschmitt fighter plane that had crashed on Plumstead Common, just a mile
or so from the Arsenal. Jack Nice and other members of the Woolwich Home Guard
took turns standing sentry around the wreckage, while ignoring their own
families stealing pieces of the aircraft as souvenirs. Jack himself brought his
own three-year-old son, Eddie (my father), to marvel at this example of the RAF’s
superiority in the air.
While
the Royal Air Force fought to hold back the Luftwaffe, Britain’s war leaders
prepared for the inevitable invasion. They displayed a brave face to the
public, but their private correspondence shows just how worried they were. “The
more I see the nakedness of our defences the more appalled I am! Untrained men,
no arms, no transport and no equipment,” wrote the commander of the army in his
secret diary. “The ghastly part of it is that I feel certain that we can have
only a few more weeks left before the Boche attacks!” Alexander Cadogan,
Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office wrote that “. . . everything is
as gloomy as can be . . . Probability is that Hitler will attempt invasion in
next fortnight. As far as I can see, we are, after years of leisurely
preparation, completely unprepared. We have simply got to die at our posts – a
far better fate than capitulating to Hitler as those damned Frogs have done.
But uncomfortable.”
In East Ham and Woolwich and Eltham, our family and
their neighbours were also preparing for war.
Local borough councils were building air raid shelters
in the basements and cellars of most public buildings and in streets and parks.
They erected air raid sirens on almost every street corner.
Families were encouraged to build their own bomb
shelters too. The government produced millions of “Anderson” bomb shelters.
These cost each family £7, but were free to those earning less than £250
a year. At the beginning of the war, few of our family had to pay. Lorries came
round dropping off kits full of corrugated iron and a few printed instructions.
As June Napier recalls, homeowners and tenants had to “get on and build them
themselves,” half burying them in the ground and heaping dirt on top. The
instructions certainly left room for individual creativity.
In some areas, including many parts of Woolwich and
Plumstead, people found it difficult to dig down far enough to install the
shelters. Once they had dug a hole more than a foot or so, water started
seeping in. Many always had water in their shelters, which made them very
uncomfortable to use. Some people refused to use their shelters, choosing to
take a chance inside their homes. For a few, this would turn out to be a fatal
decision.
If people lived in homes with no garden, or a garden
too small for an Anderson shelter, the local council issued them with “Morrison”
shelters. These were big metal cages, with wire mesh on the sides. Many
families, like Will and Elsie Canning in Bexleyheath, set them up in their
parlours or dining rooms, crowding out the furniture. Some stacked the dining
room table and chairs on top of the shelter and began enjoying formal dinners
served with a bird’s eye view.
The government worried that the Germans would use gas,
just as they had in the Great War. Local councils painted the tops of most red
pillar post boxes with a yellow gas detector liquid that would change colour
when poison was in the air. Everyone was issued with a gas mask and told to
carry it at all times.
People struggled with the masks. They were awkward to
put on and uncomfortable to wear. Margaret Campbell was just a toddler, so her
gas mask was fitted with Mickey Mouse ears, which made wearing it a little bit
more of an adventure.
A quarter of a million Londoners signed on as Air Raid
Precautions (ARP) volunteers. They became “wardens” responsible for the
emergency precautions in their neighbourhoods and “auxiliary” firefighters,
nurses and ambulance drivers.
The ARP wardens could be heard patrolling
neighbourhood streets in the evenings on their bicycles, crying “put that light
out!” Everyone had been given instructions for making blackout curtains or blinds.
Tom Napier made his out of thick black-tarred paper nailed to a wooden lathe.
It looked awful until his daughter came up with the bright idea of painting it.
June copied a calendar or birthday card and created a huge colourful picture of
a country market scene, completely covering the blind and brightening up the
whole living room. She remembers that it was her Dad’s “pride and joy.”
Most of the responsibility for the war preparations
fell onto the local borough councils. Although not directly involved in the
military build-up, they had to organize the local ARPs, first aid posts,
stretcher parties, public bomb shelters, clean-up crews, and all the other
activities that fell under the category of “civil defense.”
Some borough councils did a better job than did others.
One of the least prepared was West Ham, an area that included Canning Town and
Silvertown. “Rather Pickwickian” noted one very disappointed government
official when he reviewed the borough’s plans and inspected its preparations.
He was right: West Ham’s plans would soon be tested, and they would fail.
The barrage balloons were the most visible sign that
London was at war. Over a thousand of these great silver blimps hovered over
the city, trailing thick steel cables designed to force bombers to fly higher
than normal, spoiling their bomb aiming. Giant searchlights were also set up
all over the city, strategically placed so that they could trap bombers, illuminating
them for the anti-aircraft guns that would fire from parks and other public
spaces. It all looked very impressive, but many wondered how effective these
defences would be if the German bombers tested them.
All that summer, while people in London were bracing
for the coming attack, June Napier was plotting for ways to escape from the safety
of Loughborough to her family in East Ham.
Her Aunt Millie was a cold unfeeling woman, never once
giving June a hug or a kiss or any sign of affection of any kind. She and her
husband, Fred Baxter, had moved to Loughborough to escape from working class
London. June believed her Aunt and Uncle had ideas “above their station” and
thought they had become “better class.” They looked down on June, tolerating
her only out of necessity. They believed if the government was going to force
them to take in evacuees from London, it was better to have poor relations
living with them than strangers. In all they took in three children and for a
while they also billeted a captain from a nearby barracks. As June said, “to
Aunt Millie this was rather grand - she would never have considered a private!”
“Aunt Millie
was a real martinet. Everything had to be done just so. I had to come home from
school, come in the back way, take my shoes off on the doorstep and change into
slippers, put on a pinny, do my homework, etc. At lunchtime I had to go home
(if Aunt Millie was going out to the various things she belonged to) and do her
hair for her. I had to pin it with great metal hairpins into big fat sausages
all round her head. She used to take me to things like ‘Knitting vests for
African babies,’ held in the Mayor’s parlour (very posh!), and ‘Rolling
bandages for our troops’ and so on. I joined the St John’s Ambulance Brigade
(under age at 12, but it was wartime and they turned a blind eye) and gained my
First Aid certificate. At night, if I hadn’t had enough calories and vitamins,
I had to have a lettuce sandwich with brown bread.
“Everyone had to be quiet for the news at 6 PM and 9
PM, and Uncle Fred used to go apoplectic (really purple, and his eyes would
bulge) if anybody dared to utter a word while it was on. He was a strange man,
with a shock of hair that stood up on end and very prominent eyes, which glared
at me, and they always seemed to be popping out at me with indignation, though
I was never sure what I had done to be in disfavour. He was fanatical about
cards, and made me play cards with him just to make up the numbers, and if
whilst partnering him I dared to do anything that caused him to lose, he would
be beside himself. He used to throw his cards down and stomp off into the other
room. He was known in the family to be a very bad loser, and everyone was
cheating except him!”
While June was suffering in Loughborough and writing
to her parents, campaigning to be allowed to come back to London, Dick Campbell
was just as determined to get away.
Dick had taken advantage of the rapid build-up in war
production by finding a position in Quality Control at the Woolwich Arsenal,
escaping from his old job as a “Brickie” (a Bricklayer’s Mate) on construction
sites. But now, in the summer of 1940, as it became obvious that war would be
coming to Woolwich and Eltham, he started looking for work in other cities.
At one point, he thought there might be something in
Manchester and went up there to see what he could find. Not once had Elsie ever
spent a night apart from her husband since they had married. Now, with Dick in
Manchester, she was very lonely, and, as it turned out, so was Dick.
One afternoon Margaret, who was playing in the front
garden, looked up to see her daddy struggling down Glasbrook Road with his huge
suitcase. He had lasted just three days. The separation from his family had
been unbearable; he had decided to give up on Manchester and come back home.
Dick didn’t stop his efforts to get away from the
city, but he now decided he would only leave London when he knew a firm job was
waiting, and when his family could join him right away
There were others trying to leave too. In May the
United States Embassy had advised all American citizens in Britain to return
home as soon as possible. Those who couldn’t leave were encouraged to “seek
accommodation in uncongested areas, as far as possible from metropolitan centers
and points which might be considered strategical from a military point of
view.” The next warning, in June, was much stronger, stating, “This may be the
last opportunity for Americans to get home until after the war.”
All through the summer, British intelligence monitored
the relentless German build-up. By late July 15 divisions of assault troops,
more than 300,000 soldiers, were in the occupied ports facing England. By then,
continuous German air attacks had cleared the Royal Navy from the English
Channel. Britain’s defences were starting to thin.
The Germans chose Tuesday, August 13th to
be “Eagle Day,” the start of the final campaign of all-out bombing and fighter
sweeps that would drive the Royal Air Force from the skies over England,
clearing the way to launch the invasion before the end of the summer.
On that day, the Luftwaffe hit southern England with
more than 500 bombers and fighters. Thirty-nine didn’t return. The Royal Air
Force appeared to win the day, losing just fifteen aircraft, but it was a
hollow victory – five British fighter pilots were killed. The system the RAF
had established could quickly repair or replace lost fighter planes, but it
could not replace fighter pilots.
The weather the next day was bad for flying, thwarting
German plans for widespread attacks. Even so, the Royal Air Force lost four
more pilots.
On Thursday, August 15th, the Germans
launched their largest and deadliest attacks yet. Almost 1,300 aircraft swept
across the English Channel to attack airfields, railway lines, oil storage
facilities and aircraft factories, and to draw the Royal Air Force into the
air, where the German fighters could shoot them from the skies. In Plumstead
Jack Nice sat with his son, Eddie, on their front step, watching the German
fighters and bombers and the defending Spitfires and Hurricanes dancing in the
skies, drawing intricate patterns of vapour trails, as they fought high over
London and southeast England. By the end of the day, the Germans had shot down 34
Spitfires and Hurricanes, and 15 British pilots were dead or missing. The
German losses had been much greater – 76 aircraft and 187 aircrew – but the
Luftwaffe had more in reserve.
In the five days following Eagle Day, the Royal Air
Force lost 68 pilots killed or missing and another 70 wounded and hospitalized,
while in all of August to that date, the RAF received only 70 new replacements.
By now, the RAF could field less than 800 Spitfires and Hurricanes. The Germans
were still opposing them with almost 2,000 aircraft. This war of attrition
could not continue much longer.
It was a glorious summer in London, but few were
relaxing. The war was creeping closer and the omens of what awaited our family
were growing stronger and more obvious every day.
A brother and sister, evacuated from London to
Ashford, in Kent, where the Campbell children had been sent back in 1939,
remembered watching “endless dogfights take place over our heads. We children
would stand outside and watch them, enthralled, until we were driven in by an
irate Home Guard man in his tin helmet . . . We were shot at by a low-flying
German aircraft . . . when we were biking along an open road and had to take
refuge in a ditch. The German pilot waved at us as he took off, and I remember
being intensely amazed.”
The first bombs to hit London fell on Woolwich and
Eltham in the early hours of the morning, on August 17th. A few
incendiary bombs landed on the roof of Halford’s bicycle store at 81 Powis
Street, but the Auxiliary Fire Service quickly extinguished the resulting fire.
The other incendiaries only started grass fires and broke a few pavement
stones.
It was almost a week later, on Saturday, August 24th,
at 11:30 PM, that London suffered its first night raid – a widespread attack by
three squadrons of bombers that hit docks, factories and residential areas in
the east and southwest of the city, including the first bombs to fall on East
Ham. Although no bombs hit Woolwich, people as far away as Plumstead and Eltham
could clearly hear the anti-aircraft guns on Woolwich Common firing at the
attackers as they flew overhead. It was a minor raid, with perhaps just 40
German bombers, but the anti-aircraft guns made everyone aware of the attack.
The next evening, London’s 13th air raid
alert sounded, just ten days after the first. For four long hours, people listened
to the anti-aircraft guns, the drone of aircraft engines and occasional bursts
of machine gun fire. Then, just moments after
the All Clear had finally sounded at 1.30 AM, as Dick Campbell and his family
were climbing out of the Anderson shelter in their back garden; a lone bomber
dropped its load of four incendiaries over Beckenham and Sydenham, three miles
away. Two bombs fell into allotments and gardens on a housing estate, damaging
35 homes, but causing only minor casualties. The third crashed into the
Columbia Ribbon and Carbon Company factory, setting it on fire, and damaged
Baird’s TV Works, in the adjacent building. The last bomb smashed two more
homes, bringing down whole walls.
There were actually few bombs falling, but air raid
warnings were sounding every day now. This meant people were constantly on edge.
On Tuesday, August 27th, an air raid warning quickly led to hysteria
on Mile End Road in Stepney. “Everyone ran. No matter where, they just ran.
Shelter! Quick! People running in all directions. People screaming.”
From then on, bombers attacked London every day,
flying hit and run raids that targeted docks and factories, but often hit the
residential streets and shopping districts clustered around them.
This steadily increasing violence added to the tension
and sense of impending doom, but many Londoners were determined that their
lives would go on. In East Ham, no threat of German action was going to
interfere with twenty-two-year-old Florrie Hickford’s wedding.
Like most of the extended Hickford family, Florrie
lived on Roman Road, where she shared a tiny row house with her parents, Albert
and Mina, and her younger sister, Dorothy. She was working in a shop close to
the docks and factories of Silvertown, north of the Thames. This is where she
had met young Sid Wibrow, a butcher’s helper working in the shop next to hers.
The war intruded on their romance when Sid received his call-up notice, but it
didn’t stop the couple from seeing each other whenever they could. Now they
would be married.
The wedding was set for the afternoon of Saturday,
August 31st, at the parish church in East Ham. That day was a bad
choice. Air raid alerts sounded at 8.25 AM, 10.40 AM and 1.00 PM. As the guests
made their way to the church from Roman Road, from Silvertown and from across
the river in Eltham, many wondered when a family gathering like this would
happen again.
The last air raid warning interrupted preparations in
the church. From there, the explosions of the bombs sounded far away, but for
many in the wedding party, including bridesmaids Babs Campbell and Dorothy
Hickford, it was hard to be calm. Most of them knew that the docks around
Silvertown and North Woolwich were the most likely targets for these bombs, and
they knew that Sid and his best man were traveling from Silvertown to get to
the church.
Sid was behind schedule, still not finished dressing,
when the bombs began falling around the docks very close to the old row house
where he was living. Now he crouched under the stairs, destroying the creases
in his freshly pressed uniform, and hoping the bombs would come no closer.
The attack didn’t last long, but when the all clear
sounded, rubble and debris completely blocked Albert Road and Woolwich Manor
Way, trapping Sid on the other side.
Tension was high in the church by the
time Sid eventually came through the door. He was safe, work crews had cleared
the roads enough for him to climb over the debris, the buses were running up to
East Ham, and the war wasn’t going to stop this wedding today.
The ceremony began without the best man. He was still
trapped behind the rubble somewhere, with the ring. Halfway through the service
the Minister turned to the guests to ask, “Does anyone have a wedding ring?”
Elsie Campbell sent hers up to the front and the ceremony carried on.
The Germans obliged Florrie by staying away until 5.45
PM, when the day’s fourth alert sounded. Florrie and Sid had already said
goodbye to their family and friends when they heard the fifth alert at 9.45 PM.
The sixth sounded at 11.20 PM. The couple spent their wedding night in a bomb
shelter.
That afternoon, while Sid had been rushing to his
wedding, brothers Eddie and John Nice and their friends were watching the
action high in the skies over Woolwich. One vapour trail erupted into a ball of
fire that began falling, right over their heads. As the object fell ominously
closer, they could see it was a plane out of control, one wing shot off, flames
shooting from the fuselage. Their eyes were wide open as they watched the plane
spiral into the ground half a mile away, where it exploded in a ferocious roar,
sending burning debris and ammunition shooting all over the neighbourhood.
Everyone in the area cheered when they learned it had
been a German Me109 fighter, shot down by the RAF, but they didn’t realize that
the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots they could see flying overhead were losing
the air war.
The RAF’s fighter squadrons were still flying up to
four sorties a day, but pilot losses were taking a terrible toll. Many
squadrons were at just half strength; three-quarters had lost their commanding
officers and were now led by junior pilots with much less experience than the
dead men they were replacing. The intense air war was straining the intricate
system defending Britain from the Luftwaffe. Radar stations had been bombed,
opening up holes in the early warning system; telephone lines were down, so
that critical information couldn’t get through to the fighter squadrons;
hangars and ground equipment had been destroyed, so that it was more and more
difficult to repair and maintain planes. Britain’s defenders were at the point
of exhaustion.
By the first week of September, the Royal Air Force
was facing collapse. Aircraft losses were now running at twice the rate at
which factories could replace them and pilot losses had climbed to a rate of
almost 20 a day. Another week of fighting this intense would destroy Britain’s
air defenses and the Germans would have the air superiority they needed. They
could then launch their invasion, unopposed from the air.
As the Royal Air Force crumbled, the
government began preparing for the worst.
British Intelligence was now reporting an ominous
picture of German activity across the Channel and the North Sea. On August 29th,
aerial reconnaissance photographs revealed the build up of ships in ports that
had been empty two weeks earlier. Over the next few days aerial reconnaissance
revealed concentrations of ground attack squadrons opposite Kent and big
increases in the number of invasion barges in ports along the coast of Holland.
On Thursday, September 5th, the RAF began large-scale bombing attacks
on the masses of ships and supply dumps in the French, Belgian and German
ports.
That night, the Germans struck the area around
Woolwich. They were probably targeting the docks, but hit Eltham hard as well.
Bombs fell on the High Street, gutting the Woolworth’s department store,
Simpson’s the home furnishers, and, to Dick Campbell’s great sorrow, ‘The
Castle’ pub. Bombs also destroyed Barker’s Garage, set Well Hall station alight
and demolished houses in Lynsted Gardens, killing three people. Other bombs
fell seemingly randomly throughout southeast London, mostly causing light
damage, but destroying a number of homes in Plumstead.
German bombers returned the next night, dropping bombs
on Woolwich, Plumstead, Abbey Wood and Eltham, but this time Lewisham bore the
brunt of their attention. Bombs fell on the houses along Engleheart Road, just
ten minutes by bus from where the Campbells lived in Eltham.
That evening, while Londoners were cowering in their
air raid shelters, German propaganda broadcasts were advising, “Hitler may at
any hour give the order for invasion to begin.”
During the night, British patrols discovered 60 enemy
vessels in the Channel off the coast of France. Commanders alerted all forces
that invasion was imminent, perhaps within just 12 hours.
In reality the Germans were far from launching their
invasion. They believed they still couldn’t establish air superiority over the
beaches of southern England. In fact, it seemed to them that they were losing
the Battle of Britain.
The Luftwaffe had by then lost a third of their
aircraft, with almost half of their airmen killed, captured or wounded – a rate
of loss proportionately far higher than they were inflicting on the British.
German aircrews were flying sortie after sortie, deep into enemy territory, all
through the daylight hours, day in, day out, with the seemingly certain
prospect of eventually being shot down and captured, or even worse, to face a
horrible death in the flaming wreckage of their aircraft. After three months of
this, the Luftwaffe crews were exhausted and demoralized and close to the point
of rebellion.
Despite their bravado and public pronouncements about
the destruction of the Royal Air Force, the Germans were frustrated with their
inability to inflict a fatal blow. It seemed to them that it didn’t matter how
many sorties they flew, and how many aircraft they shot down, there were always
more Spitfires and Hurricanes ready to face them again. And so, at the critical
moment, when, unknown to them, victory in the Battle of Britain was within
their grasp, Hitler ordered a new strategy, one he believed would break the
back of the British people, destroying their will to resist and leaving them begging
for a humiliating peace.
The story of that decision goes back to the first
German night raid on London on August 24th. At the time the raid had
seemed almost minor. Some even believed it was an accident. The scale and
circumstance of the attack didn’t matter to Churchill – London had been indiscriminately
bombed, and he was determined to respond. He ordered reprisal attacks on
Berlin.
In an almost farcical effort, fewer than 100 outdated
British bombers made the first attack of the war on the German capital on the
night of August 28th. Only 29 of them found Berlin. They only
slightly damaged two buildings – most of their bombs landed in open fields. The
RAF followed up with more raids over the next week, eventually killing German
civilians.
Hitler’s anger knew no bounds. At the height of his
greatest triumph, with Poland, France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway
all prostrate at his feet, he had been very publicly humiliated by the bombing
of Germany’s capital city.
Until then Hitler had spared British cities from the
kind of havoc wrought on Rotterdam and other towns on the Continent. The
destruction of central Rotterdam by aerial bombing had led to widespread panic
amongst Holland’s civil population, leading to the Dutch government’s collapse
and capitulation.
Hitler decided he would now avenge the bombing of
Berlin by applying the same tactics to London and other British cities. He
would rain such fire and fury on the ordinary people of Britain that their will
to resist would evaporate. He would bring the English to the point where they
would be begging him to make peace.
On September 4th, he made a speech before a
group of nurses and women social workers, all enthusiastic Nazi supporters. His
audience was waiting to hear how he would respond to the British attacks. “The
English are full of curiosity,” said Hitler. “They keep asking, ‘When is he
coming?’ Don’t worry,” exclaimed Hitler. “He’s coming! He’s coming!”
He then gave the order for the
destruction of London.
