Rockets, doodlebugs and fire bombs

"Well actually the doodlebug thing, was the type of bomb that wounded my sister so badly. With the rockets you just had no warning with them. With the doodlebugs you could sort of count, one, two, three, four and then directly when the engine stopped it would drop straight on, where ever it was dropped, it would come down vertically, like that. With the rockets there was no warning. You simply got the, if it was quite near, you got the sort of back draft from it. It would blow you across the road and things like that. But fortunately the war, as I say, ended, and it wasn’t too prolonged. It was more or less at the end of the war — the last resort. [My dad], yes, he was in the City and he was going up to, where he worked, and he was going up to the Great Eastern Hotel, where he had his lunch, which he always did. He was blown, finished up in a florist’s shop went with it, and he finished up on the slab with all the flowers round him. He joked about it, and he made a big joke, but it did injure his back, which sadly years after he had had problems with it. But he said when he came too, he thought he was in heaven — with all the flowers [laughs]. Dad was like that, he, he joked, but there is one thing I shall never forget. He said, which was proved correct, it was one night I was on leave and staying there, and they were dropping these fire bombs. Of course your coal was rationed; sometimes people didn’t have enough coal to have a fire. And it coincided with a little delivery that you used to get. My mother got terribly worked up. She said “Oh John, how long do you think this war will go on?” and my father said “Well there was a war lasted a hundred years”, and my mother said “Don’t be silly, don’t be silly”. He said: “Well I am serious now” he said “I’m going to tell you all, when the peace, after the peace of this war comes, the peace of the future is going to be terribly hard to keep”. And how true that is. I shall always remember that night. Yes."

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