The Secret History of the Blitz Read online

  Albert Dance – photographed later in the war as a staff sergeant in the Glider Pilot Regiment.

  Albert spent the subsequent days at the hospital, and the nights at his mother’s house. He remembers the smell coming from underneath Maisie’s plaster casts; to distract her from it he started bringing in bunches of lavender. After a while, to his relief, her spirits seemed to lift. But throughout this time, the doctors were able to tell him very little. ‘They didn’t know what she’d be like when she came out,’ he says.

  After a few weeks, Maisie was moved to a hospital in Darenth, and Albert returned to his unit. He had been gone just three days when a telegram arrived. Maisie had developed tetanus. Albert hurried back – to find his wife unable to recognise him. Her body was rigid and her face was locked. He fell to his knees and prayed to God to end her suffering. ‘I walked out to get a nurse and a doctor,’ he says, ‘and as I walked back in, she died.’

  Albert Dance was interviewed by the Imperial War Museum in 1999, specifically about his experiences at Dunkirk and, later, in the Glider Pilot Regiment. This story of his wife’s death was not the main focus of the interview. It was incidental and nearly lost to the years, as have been countless other stories. And just as there were all sorts of different kinds of behaviour during the Blitz, so there were different reactions to the grief it caused. Joan Batt was living in Coventry in November 1940 when the city centre was all but destroyed. Years later, she said, ‘I still feel hatred for the Germans, they took everything off me.’ Ethel Clarke’s son was killed in an air raid, but she felt empathy with the Germans: ‘They didn’t ask for war. They lost their sons, we lost our sons.’ However understandable it is that a particular reaction be viewed as the only possible or rational one, however neatly it slots into the received wisdom, we must remain alert across a much wider spectrum.

  And if it is human nature to fail to acknowledge the attitudes of others, it is equally human nature to become set in unquestioned ways of behaviour. All of us do it all of the time – and it can take a startling event to wake us up to other possibilities. The Blitz was such an event: it shocked people out of their rhythms. It encouraged unaccustomed ‘good’ behaviour and unaccustomed ‘bad’ behaviour – sometimes from the same individual. The Blitz was, above all, a time of extremes. Extremes of experience, extremes of behaviour, extremes of reaction. In all directions.

  A very small thing happens in Patrick Hamilton’s beautiful wartime novel, The Slaves of Solitude. Miss Roach, a sensible young middle-class woman, is staying in a boarding house in a suburban town, beyond the reach of the bombs. While living this unfamiliar life, she enters a pub and has a drink. She is alone. There is no one else with her. And then she shares a drink with, and gets drunk with, a male stranger. As a poster girl for rebellion Miss Roach hardly stands with Emily Davison or Rosa Parks – but she is a rebel, all the same. She would not have contemplated such behaviour before the war. The Blitz was a time of intensity; people took risks, and they did new things – to greater and lesser degrees. They related to each other in wholly new ways. And their social, economic and political expectations grew as the world became a less permanent and more mobile place.

  The year 2015 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the start of the Blitz – and this is a significant time-lapse. It marks the point where living memory starts to turn into history, when the muddy soup of perceptions, memories, and interpretations – or ‘real life’ – begins to thicken into historical fact, ready to be used to shore up old prejudices. But before it solidifies, we have a chance to look closer. To speak to survivors, to search out old interviews, to study newly released documents.

  And let’s not focus on the familiar stories, but on a wider picture of Britain around the time of the Blitz. Not in order to prove a point, or to confirm a thesis, but to gain a sense of a complicated, nuanced, uncertain time. Don’t allow the myth-defenders to convince you that people behaved in a certain way. And don’t let the myth-deniers tell you that they didn’t. For a little while, at least, let us look beyond the theories that pretend to account for the entire throbbing mass of free-willed Britons.

  We could start by probing a fact or two. It is well known, for example, that the Blitz began on 7 September 1940. Certainly, that was the day that Hermann Goering took personal command of the air offensive against Britain, and the day when that offensive was directed on London. In Goering’s mind, a concerted attack on London made sense. It was an attack on the Port of London through which food and supplies arrived, on the political and administrative centre of Britain from which the war was run, and on densely populated urban areas whose morale could be affected. But from the German perspective, this attack on London heralded no change in strategy. It was simply the continuation of Adolf Hitler’s effort to bring Britain to heel, whether by invasion, negotiation, or popular uprising. For the British, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz were fought over different territory with entirely different forces. But for the Germans, it amounted to a single aerial assault, carried out by the same forces from the same airfields with the same basic objectives.

  And 7 September was not even the first attack on London. That took place a fortnight earlier. For a period of about four-and-a-half hours, from 11 p.m. on 24 August, bombs were dropped across the capital from West Ham, Stepney and Bethnal Green in the east to Esher and Staines in the west. Two weeks before ‘Black Saturday’, the London sky had glowed red.

  And the serious bombing of British civilians had already taken place sometime before that. On the night of 18 June 1940, a bright ‘bomber’s moon’ had shone over southern and eastern England as seventy-one German aircraft set out across the Channel. Some were attempting to destroy the oil storage tanks at Thameshaven, others were targeting the airfields at Mildenhall and Honington. Heinkel 111s of Kampfgeschwader 4, meanwhile, were on their way to attack railway installations. It represented the first major raid on Great Britain.

  That night, Michael Bowyer, a schoolboy living near the river in Cambridge, was at home with his parents. Michael knew a lot about aeroplanes; he could distinguish the unsynchronised revving of a Heinkel 111 from the rattling of a Dornier 17 and the smooth tone of a Junkers 88. And so he was excited, just before midnight, to hear a Heinkel passing low over the house. This was followed by a piercing whistle – the sound of bombs falling, and then by two huge explosions. The windows rattled, the pressure in the room changed suddenly, and a pig’s carcass, hanging from the ceiling, swung to and fro. ‘Oh hell!’ Michael exclaimed. ‘Don’t swear in front of your mother!’ said his father. A few seconds later, a British Merlin engine roared overhead, and then came the sound of human activity outside. An excited air raid warden blew his whistle and swung his rattle, before hammering at the front door, and shouting for the Bowyers to follow him into the shelter opposite. They did as they were told. Michael’s father brought with him an attaché case that he had ready. It contained his will, savings certificates, cheque book, some cash, and the deeds to the house. He looked, says Michael, as though he was going on holiday. Inside the shelter, Mr Clover, the chief warden, made a solemn announcement: ‘Bombs have fallen. There have been casualties. I am not permitted to tell you any more.’ At that moment, a man rushed in, shouting, ‘They’ve got Vicarage Terrace.’

  Vicarage Terrace was a few minutes’ walk away. It consisted of modest two-storey houses, with front doors leading directly into front rooms, and toilets in sheds at the bottom of gardens. The terrace had no electricity, only gas lighting downstairs and candles upstairs. For its residents, and for the country as a whole, the last month had brought a flow of depressing news. German Panzer divisions had thundered through the supposedly impenetrable – and barely defended – Ardennes area, forcing the British army to withdraw haphazardly to the Channel coast. A desperate operation had managed to bring its remnants – men such as Albert Dance – back to England. Holland and Belgium had quickly surrendered, and just four days earlier, the first Ge
rman troops had entered Paris. France was falling, and church bells in Britain had been silenced to be rung only in the event of a German invasion – as now seemed likely.

  The air raid siren had sounded in Vicarage Terrace just before 11.30 p.m. that night. There was nothing unusual in this. Sirens had been sounding across the country for eight and a half months. When they had first sounded on the morning of 3 September 1939 – minutes after Neville Chamberlain’s radio announcement that Britain was at war with Germany – people had genuinely expected the skies to blacken with Nazi bombers sent to deliver the ‘knock-out blow’. Private and public shelters had quickly filled with the stoic, the nervous, and the downright hysterical, all carrying their gas masks. The evacuation of hundreds of thousands of children from vulnerable cities to safer areas (such as Cambridge) had already begun, and hospitals had been discharging their non-essential patients to make room for the tens of thousands of air raid casualties expected imminently. But they did not arrive. The knock-out blow was not delivered. Weeks of waiting turned into months, and people, unsurprisingly, became less vigilant. A handful of civilians, it is true, were killed. One on Orkney, by a misdirected bomb, and two in Clacton-on-Sea when a Heinkel crash-landed into a house. But these were rare and isolated events. And so, when the siren sounded in Cambridge on 18 June, the residents of Vicarage Terrace felt they had little to fear.

  A few of the residents responded to the alarm by walking to the public shelter. Most did not. Olive Unwin, in number seven, was going over the details of her wedding, due to take place that weekend. On hearing the siren, she made her way downstairs to the front room, where she sat beneath the stairs. She was joined by the other four members of the family. This spot, they felt, was the safest part of the house. Further down the terrace, the Deere family – father, mother, and five-month-old baby – also moved downstairs, but after fifteen minutes returned to bed, believing this to be yet another false alarm. Others in the terrace took no precautions at all. Edna Clark was in bed with her younger sister, Gladys. As the Heinkel approached the terrace, she got up to ask her father whether everything was all right. ‘Yes, my duck, get back to bed,’ he soothed. Seconds later, at some point around midnight, the Heinkel 111, which had just passed over Michael Bowyer’s house, dropped two 50kg bombs on Vicarage Terrace. Numbers one to six were demolished; numbers seven to ten were badly damaged.

  The Unwins in number seven were fortunate. The roof collapsed, but the family was sheltered underneath the stairs. Olive’s brother was able to push aside timber and masonry to clear a path, allowing all five members to escape. The Deeres, asleep upstairs in the bedroom, fell through the collapsed floor, and were buried by the remains of the roof. They were eventually dug out by rescue workers; the parents survived but baby Heather did not. Edna Clarke was knocked to the ground, but her sister Gladys – in the bed to which Edna was returning – was killed by a falling beam. All three members of the Beresford family, in number six, were killed, including a two-year-old boy. Three hours after the explosion, faint cries were heard in the wreckage. A tunnel was dug, and forty-seven-year-old Lily Langley was dragged to safety. But her husband William and eighteen-year-old son Sam were both dead. In all, nine people were killed and eight injured by the bombs. One of the injured was Lily Itzcovitch, an eleven-year-old Londoner who had been evacuated to quiet Cambridge.

  At nine o’clock the next morning, Michael Bowyer cycled past Vicarage Terrace on his way to school. Seventy-four years later, I accompanied him as he retraced his steps. The terrace today consists of modern two-storey buildings with a gap at one end, and as Michael looked around, he was struck by how ordinary everything seemed. ‘You just wouldn’t know that anything terrible had happened here,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ His strongest memories of the morning after were of the powerful smell of dust, and the desperate feeling of invaded privacy: ‘I thought that was awful, your house and the miserable conditions in which you lived were exposed for the whole world to see.’ As we walked to the end of the terrace, Michael pointed out where a barricade had been placed, behind which officials were studying the state of the gas and water mains. And he recalled two particularly poignant sights: a piano standing in the middle of the shattered street, and a child’s doll, lying in the gutter, missing its head.

  For a while after the bombing, Michael says, local people started taking shelter whenever the sirens sounded. Only for a while, however. ‘Pretty soon,’ he says, ‘the attitude was, “Damn it, I can’t be bothered!’’’ And he is convinced that the Heinkel was intending to drop its bombs on the huge railway goods yard nearby. Having heard the sound of the engine change over his house, he believes that it was simply too low when it dropped its bombs. ‘If he’d been a little bit higher, he might have got nearer to the yard. There were something like fifty tracks there, so it was a prime target. But the bombs were dropped too soon.’

  Michael can remember that, late on the night of the bombing, the head warden returned to his shelter with an exciting announcement: ‘They’ve shot the blighter down, killed them all!’ ‘Where?’ asked Michael. ‘Ah, son, that’s a military secret!’ replied the warden who kept the secret for a few seconds before proclaiming, ‘Fulbourn!’ He then announced that a Spitfire had shot the Heinkel down, which Michael doubted. How could a Spitfire have downed a German bomber at night? When another warden added that the Heinkel pilot had been a Cambridge undergraduate, the tale’s peculiarity increased.

  Yet these Chinese whispers were not quite as fanciful as they seemed. Heinkel 5J+AM of Kampfgeschwader 4, piloted by Oberleutnant Joachim von Arnim, did indeed crash at Fulbourn in the early morning of 19 June 1940. Von Arnim, writing many years later to aviation historian Andy Saunders, related his surprise at being attacked by British fighters that night. He and his crew had been anticipating only anti-aircraft fire. It seems that his Heinkel was caught in a searchlight, and attacked by a Spitfire of 19 Squadron, flown by Flying Officer Petra, and a Blenheim of 23 Squadron, captained by Squadron Leader O’Brien. The Spitfire was about to open fire when the Blenheim arrived, so it banked away and started pouring tracer into the Heinkel from one side as the Blenheim fired several long bursts. Smoke started to gush from one of the Heinkel’s engines, but its upper gunner was now firing back at the Spitfire which was itself illuminated by a searchlight. Explosive bullets struck the Spitfire’s fuel tank, setting it on fire. Petra baled out with severe burns to his face and hands. The Blenheim also came under fire from the Heinkel’s guns, and went into an uncontrollable spin. O’Brien managed to bale out safely, but his navigator, Pilot Officer King-Clark, was killed by a propeller as he tried to jump clear, and his air gunner, Corporal Little, was killed as it hit the ground. The Heinkel, meanwhile, was sent out of control by the combined fire of the two fighters. ‘We had to bale out in a hurry,’ Von Arnim writes. He and two of his crew members parachuted down safely, while the fourth was killed. The survivors landed in a potato field, and two hours later, they were taken prisoner by Local Defence Volunteers – the forerunners of the Home Guard – and escorted to barracks in Bury St Edmunds.

  The first LDV to respond was Ron Barnes, a farm labourer. He had been woken by a commotion outside, and somebody shouting, ‘Paratroops have landed!’ As we shall discover, airmen parachuting from doomed aeroplanes were often mistaken for parachute troops: at a time of invasion fears, people saw what they wanted to see. Ron grabbed his rifle and set off across fields. After a while, he noticed movement, and shouted a challenge. A man – who was probably Joachim von Arnim – threw up his hands and replied in German. Ron escorted him to a searchlight post, and handed him over. Ron was later interviewed by the London Evening Standard, in which he was celebrated as the first LDV to capture a member of the German armed forces.

  Oberleutnant Joachim von Arnim and Feldwebel Wilhelm Maier in the cockpit of Heinkel He. 111H 5J+AM.

  The wreckage of Heinkel He. 111H 5J+AM at Fulbourn.

  So what can we make of the rumours heard by
young Michael Bowyer in his shelter? To begin with, a Heinkel 111 had crashed at Fulbourn. And it had been shot down (or shared, at least) by a Spitfire. There is little, however, to back up the warden’s claim that a member of its crew had spent time at Cambridge University. And this Heinkel, we can be sure, was not the aircraft that bombed Vicarage Terrace. Joachim Von Armin’s Heinkel crashed at Fulbourn over an hour after the bombs landed; Fulbourn is only five miles from Cambridge.

  All the same, this was clearly the night when the Blitz came to Cambridge. Even though, as any fule kno, it hadn’t started yet.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Homeless and Helpless

  Olive Unwin, the young woman due to get married on the Saturday following the Vicarage Road bombing, defied the circumstances and went ahead with the ceremony. On 22 June 1940 she married Private George Brown at St Matthews Church, only yards from her bombed house. Her wedding dress had not survived the raid, so she had little choice but to wear something borrowed.

  As she walked down the aisle, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at University College, Oxford, was awaiting trial at Stafford Assizes for a much darker act of defiance. His was the sort of crime that has, in recent years, become common in countries where firearms are freely available. In 1940 an unstable British teenager had little difficulty in finding a gun. In Hackney, in east London, meanwhile, an old woman was living in rented rooms with her blind husband. The couple had enjoyed a long and happy marriage, but the old man was becoming increasingly senile and dependent on his wife. Life was about to become even harder for them. The young Oxford student and the elderly London couple had little in common – but their extraordinary responses to national events reveal a great deal about Britain in summer and autumn 1940.