A Child's War Read Online Free PDF Page B

Luftwaffe, flung his planes into an all-out assault on the RAF, attacking the airfields, command posts and radar stations. This became the crucial period in what Churchill called ‘the Battle of Britain’. Heavily outnumbered, the fighter pilots of the RAF went up time and time again to take on the Luftwaffe’s massed attacks. All over the south of England people watched the dog-fights going on overhead. George Parks of Deptford vividly remembers them: ‘We used to stand and watch the dog-fights, way up in the air – vapour trails weaving in and out. Then one of them would come down in flames – we’d all cheer like mad – of course we didn’t know who it was, but we were sure it must be a German!’ But of course they weren’t all Germans – John Merritt of Virginia Water, Surrey: ‘A vivid memory of those early war years concerns a Hawker Hurricane fighter that flew over the school one playtime. Suddenly, and to our horror, the whole tailplane fell off and the Hurricane spiralled down and crashed into the local gravel and sand pit. The pilot was later found dead, still in the cockpit. Of course that sand pit became famous as the Thorpe Park Leisure Centre.’
    Then the target changed: the bombers turned north towards London. At teatime on Saturday 7 September 1940 the Observer Corps (whose job it was to keep track of enemy aircraft) watched a large force of over 300 German bombers as it flew north over Kent to the Thames estuary, turning westward to follow the river into London. In the late Saturday afternoon, Londoners watched as the planes flew steadily on; then, over the dock areas of the East End, they began to drop their bombs. Smoke billowed as one warehouse after another was hit and caught fire; then, as night drew on, other waves of bombers came, using the fires started by the first wave as a target. And what a target – the flames could be seen for miles, warehouses full of spirits, sugar, wood, and other inflammable goods blazed. Barbara Daltrey lived in Windsor: ‘I remember when they bombed the London Docks, we were 25 miles away but the whole sky was lit up with a red glow.’
    Sylvie Stevenson from Chingford saw the devastation at close quarters: ‘My grandfather was a fire-watcher at Lyon’s Corner House in Piccadilly. The morning after the first big raid on London he didn’t come home, so Mum took me on a bus down there. He was all right, and I remember he took me up on the roof, it was unbelievable – over to the east there was smoke and rubble everywhere and buildings were still on fire.’
    Derek Dimond lived in Tottenham: ‘I remember going up to Liverpool Street from Stanstead with my Dad. I was deeply struck by the bomb damage – smoke and ruins everywhere.’
    That night 430 civilians were killed and 1,600 injured. The next evening the Luftwaffe came again, and the next. The RAF fought back – the Battle of Britain reached its peak in mid-September. London was to be raided almost every night from 7 September to early November. But it is all too easy to think that London was the only target – on 14 November, instead of hitting London, the bombers flew on into the Midlands; this time the target was Coventry. The destruction was appalling; one third of all the houses in the town were destroyed, and the Germans started to use a new word, to ‘ coventrate ’: it meant the destroying of a city.
    Carol Smith saw, and heard, the planes going over Dunstable: ‘The night Coventry was bombed planes came over our house in droves, it was a continuous drone – we could see the sky lit up like a bonfire, it was like it was just down the road. Next day we couldn’t believe it was as far away as Coventry, all of 70 miles.’
    Eric Chisnall witnessed the after-effects, when he visited the city with a party of Scouts:
    I shall never forget seeing the state of Coventry Cathedral after the German bombers had done their worst. On small pieces of walls that were still standing we could see where