Doodlebug Raids in London

As air raids seemed to be declining after three years of evacuation, it was agreed that I should go back home to London permanently - as it turned out, just in time for a resumption of regular night raids.

Now aged fourteen and no longer so puny, I obtained the steel helmet and Fire Guard armband that was obligatory for Fire Guards in the six-storey block of flats where we now lived. This involved patrolling the corridors to check for incendiary bombs and more interestingly, standing on the flat roof above the sixth floor, to watch the search lights pick out bombers and to see the anti aircraft shells bursting. Regular training and practice in the art of extinguishing incendiary bombs with the piddling jet from a stirrup pump in a bucket of water, taught us to crawl below the smoke and to direct the jet, holding the hose over our heads while another pumped, till the bucket was empty.

I was ready to go to bed one evening some hours before my watch duty time, when a raid was going ding dong, as I looked out to the North, with the black out curtains behind me. A stick of bombs started whistling towards us, each a little nearer and when the whistling reached shrieking level, I ducked back behind the curtain. The bomb fell a short distance away and the window I had been looking through shredded the curtain near my stomach. Soon the Chief of our Fireguard section was ringing our doorbell.

"John, take this pink form to the Auxiliary Fire Station at Beaufort Street School and tell them we need them to put out a fire on the corner of Gliddon Road. We already pulled an old lady out - except she insisted on going back for her false teeth. Be quick now."

By now having my own bike, earned by tilling Uncle Eugene's allotment for a shilling a day, I donned my "tin hat" and clutching the pink form, sped the half mile along North End Road, over never ending broken glass. When I arrived, the school itself was well alight and I was told to go back - they were busy putting out their own fire. I made the return ride over the glass, somehow without the tyres going flat and the fire in Gliddon Road just continued to burn.

I was sometimes late for school. Everybody was sometimes and at assembly, after the Headmaster had announced who had been killed in the previous night's raid, the late boys were paraded for their punishment.

I must have been fifteen when the Doodlebug flying bombs began to rain down at all hours. One of the first passed right over our heads as my brother Andrew and I were cycling into Kent one Friday evening for one of our many weekend Scout camps. The A2 ran dead straight southeast and the throaty ramjet roared ever louder as it approached to fly right overhead. Flak was bursting all around it - quite a spectacular show - till the shrapnel started to bounce off the pavement around us and we ducked into a doorway, later burning our fingers on the hot shards.

On the way home on Sunday, we passed the Streatham house of a good friend who was old enough to have been called up for Service. Their front door was missing and all their windows were blown in, so Mrs Randall asked us to go to her sister who lived near us in London, to tell her they were OK. We got back onto our bikes and passed the cause of the Randalls' damage - a whole block of houses flattened by a single Doodlebug, leaving little more than a big crater. We cycled on past our flats towards the Randalls' relatives in Hammersmith and racing south as the sirens wailed, we heard another throaty roar rapidly approaching. We had been trained to lie down in the gutter with our hands covering our heads and to wait until the engine cut. The Doodlebugs then pitched down to dive onto wherever they were pointing. It cut out very close to us, so we dived for the kerb and waited.

A great mushroom cloud rose where it had hit in the next street and we got back up. Before we could pass on the Randalls' message, Andrew who had started medical school by then tarried to render First Aid.

In the months while the Doodlebug campaign persisted, the air raid sirens sounded just about every few minutes, it seemed. Most people dived into air raid shelters - often down into the Underground, where at night many slept on the platforms. But as many Doodlebugs came during the day as at night and while our flats had a big basement that was used as a shelter, we boys only used it to practice our table tennis, while it was otherwise unused. As Mother found out only after the War was over, being up on the roof was more exciting during air raids.

The frequency of air raid warnings got so high, that taking heed would completely prevent all normal activity and for the first time in my school days, I determined never to be late. No way was I going to let Hitler dominate my life any longer! Air raid warning or not, I rode to Sloane School and thumbing my nose at Hitler, arrived on time without fail every day. When the V2 rockets began to fall, there was no warning and no way to hide anyway. Once you heard the explosion - followed by the whine of its supersonic arrival, it was obvious that some other poor bastard had bought it.

If only I could be a couple of years older - I would have given my right arm to fly a Spitfire like some of my brother's friends.

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