BAF            Wartime memories                    Fri 17 Nov 2006

AGD covers V1s (Doodle Bugs).  Other memories are below:

The weeks leading up to the declaration of war on September 3rd 1939 were pretty sombre.  A lot of people remembered the First World War and were apprehensive of what was to come.  We took the Daily Herald (a Labour paper) and it had all sorts of suggestions about how to protect oneself and one's family from bombing and gas attacks.    The government did its duty in providing help in the protection of the populace.  Everybody was issued with a gas mask and I remember being fitted with mine at school (Teddington Council School in Fulwell).  The papers explained how to make one room in the house gas-proof.  Details were given of how Air Raids would be signalled, and how Air Raid Wardens would signify that gas bombs had been dropped.  A football rattle would be sounded in the street warning that one should put one's gasmask on.  The all clear would be a hand-bell.  But Churchill's warning to the Germans that if they used gas, we would retaliate in kind, probably deterred the Hun from using the stuff.

At the beginning of the war an air raid siren would be sounded if an unidentified aircraft was seen approaching the east coast.  They sirens became known as wailing winnies. The all clear was a two-minute steady note from the siren rather than the rising and falling note of the original warning.  The sirens were fitted on the roof of prominent buildings every half a mile or so.

At the beginning of the war, the "phoney war" was in being.  It was not until later that bombing began and the heavy bombing of the east end of London became known world-wide.  The London underground railway (the tube) became the regular shelters for a lot of folk in the East End.  The docks were the target, of course, but the City of London was also something worth aiming for.  Out in the western suburbs, where I lived, bombing was much less intense.  Richmond and Teddington both have large parks, and these got a lot of the bombs with little damage.  Later, of course, Bushey Park in Teddington became home for a large number of American soldiers.  There was even an airstrip built there that allowed  Eisenhower to come and go as part of his efforts.

Almost every little workshop in places like the back of garages were taken over by the MoD.  A rather clever system of production of widgets was set up.  MoD inspectors and technical staff used to provide machine tools that were used by local people to make bits and pieces for tanks and aircraft that were then delivered to the bigger factories that produced the completed machines.  A capstan lathe became well know as a simple lathe that a semi-skilled person (often a local housewife) could use and make the appropriate widgets.  The setting up of the lathe would be carried out by a skilled fitter employed directly by the MoD.

Churchill had a friend named Beaverbrook (nicknamed 'the Beaver').  Beaverbrook got his peerage sometime earlier and he owned the Daily Express.  The Beaver became Minister of Aircraft Production.  He was a real shaker and a mover.  The Civil Service has always been renowned for its red tape and doing everything by the book.  Beaverbrook appalled some of the Whitehall mandarins by his methods.  If the particular department wanted to gee-up a certain delivery of something or other that was wanted urgently, the minister would instruct  a senior Civil Servant and he would then tell a lower being to chase up the factory manager.  Not so under Beaverbrook.  He personally would get on the phone to blow up the factory manager.  Direct dialling only happened within the London area then so  if a call had to be made to Bristol, for example, it had to go through the operator.

The Beaver would pick up the phone and bark at the operator:
"get me Mr Bloggs at so-and-so aircraft factory."
Being a Canadian, Beaverbrook's voice was known to everyone.  You can imagine the trepidation at Bristol when the switchboard operator got a call from Whitehall, and was shouted at by the Canadian voice:
"Put me through to Mr Bloggs"
" I'm sorry sir but Mr Bloggs is out at lunch"
"What's he doing feeding his face at a time like this?  Get off your arse and get him here at once."  And Beaverbrook would add a few other expletives to stress the point.

You can imagine the consternation when some office lackey finally found Mr Bloggs:
"The minister is on the phone sir, and he is going mad because you are not at your desk.  He is on the phone and wants to speak to you"

Bloggs may have been the big boss in his factory in Bristol, but he would have been cowed by a call from Whitehall by the minister.  And when the conversation was over Bloggs had learned a few new swearwords.

Like Mussolini on the other side, Beaverbrook didn't mince his words.  But we won the war, and the Beaver played a significant part in it.  He may have been a Lord of the Realm, but he didn't act like one.

In one of Churchill's speeches he used the phrase "our finest hour".  Looking back and trying to be objective, I believe it was.  But we wouldn't have won the war without the American intervention.  And as the Yanks lost a lot of their young men in WW1, they were reluctant to get involved in a second war within a generation.  It was two things that finally tipped the balance.  The Japs were stupid to bomb the American fleet in Pearl Harbour, and Churchill persuaded Roosevelt that a piece of intelligence we gathered, that Germany had a plan that once it had beaten Britain, it's next aim was to attack the USA.  Remember they too were working on the atomic bomb.  But regular British bombing of heavy water plants in places like Peenemunde kept the research at bay.  At the time few people had any idea what heavy water was when it was announce that our bombers had attacked plants in Holland et cetera.

We had a lot of help by our crafty tactics.  We captured an enigma machine despite Hollywood trying to convince the world that it was the Yanks  that pulled that one off.  And as the Germans thought their coded messages were secure, we learned a lot of extremely useful information.  One of the clever spoofs was
'that our airmen were fed large amounts of carrots to improve their sight'. This would seem plausible because one of the chemical in carrots also exists in the eye, and this was know then.  This ploy was used to explain why our airman saw the German planes before their crews saw us.  What they didn't know was that we had discovered how to use radar.  Even the fact that we could pick up Paris TV helped us.  Our TV was closed down at the beginning of the war and Jerry didn't know that a station on Beachy Head near Eastbourne could receive the Paris TV transmission.  The local people were led to believe that the radar dishes were sort of new radio communication.  This, of course, was true.  But not in the way that most people thought.

We were a crafty load of buggers!