World War Ii

[naomi24]

I watched a documentary tonight about Malta during World War II. Every time I see something like this I wonder how people coped. The bombs, the shortages, the fear .... it must have been horrendous!!

Do any ABers have experience of World War II, and if so would you care to share them? No arguments please - I'm just interested in hearing personal experiences.

[naomi24]

Mine too Em - at least where I was born in docklands - and that's only 8 months of the war!! Blimey!! Hard to comprehend!

[emmie]

some of the family did serve but i never did find out what service they were in.

[robert551069]

I remember being in an Anderson shelter, in south east London night after night for about 9 months when I was 9. The local schools were permanently closed which I was glad about. We had a wire-haired terrier that could hear the sirens sounding in the distance before we could. She got excited as she loved going into the shelter with my mother, sister and me. We were not bombed out, but the glass windows were broken by a bomb falling across the road and had to be covered with a white fabric.
One night the whole area was burning all around the shelter and the metal became hot. Incendiary bombs caused the fires.
Neighbours were filling buckets of water from our house and passing them from hand to hand to put out the fires.
It was such a relief in the morning to hear the "all clear" siren sounding.
Neighbours all helped each other to clear up.
On the London Underground. fabric was put on the windows to protect the glass in case of bombing when the trains came out of the tunnels and into the open air of the suburbs.
The trains had a notice in the carriages asking passengers not to peel away the protective fabric on the windows.
The notice showed one man (Billy Brown of London Town) saying to another "I trust you'll pardon my correction, that stuff is there for your protection"
Underneath, someone had written, "Thank you for your information but I can't see my destination".
Thousands of Londoners took shelter in the Underground stations at night time.

[Zacs-Master]

My wife's grandparents were in the Sally Army and when thier romance started to be known they tried to split them up but they always managed to get back together so as a punishment they sent them to the east end for the duration (yes Naomi, another example of religious persecution) and they were there thjrough the blitz.

[emmie]

did you get that from my link, our area was Camden and that took a hammering. They always show footage of the docks being bombed and the East End, but it was everywhere.

[naomi24]

Em, I presume you're talking to me. Yes, I did get that from your superb link. Thanks for posting it. I'm sure it will be of interest to a lot of people.

[Flyhalf]

Wasn't around for it myself, and parents and older sister ( herself only a toddler in 1945) didn't talk about it.
However , my friend's mother once recounted seeing a cemetery in Clydebank being blasted to bits, and the effect it had on her teenage self.
Also, in the 60's I was being ferried across Liverpool, to Bootle, and asked my aunt why they built the street terraces with all the gaps. She pointed out that Hitler's bombers had done that - it later made me realise why the local post office and doctor's surgery in Townhead in Glasgow only had a ground floor and were dwarfed by the tenements around.

[emmie]

as i said, i was going to post this a while back. Though not 100 percent sure, i think it was a woman who started it, but would have to look at the site again to see. The pictures are particularly poignant.

[emmie]

not sure if it's in amongst these, but there is a very famous picture of a London bus that got blown up and ended up propped against a wall

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2016667/Colour-pictures-revealed-London-blitz-Nazi-bombers-World-War-II.html

[tonyav]

Great Spitfire pic on that link em.

[sidkid]

I got chatting to an old man on a train when I lived near Upper Norwood, South London. He told me about one night during the blitz when he stood at the top of the hill near Crystal Palace park and watched London ablaze. I'll never forget the look on his face as he remembered that night.

[emmie]

i still can't find this particular photo, it is quite famous, the bus is completely upended, propped against a building.

[emmie]

one very old friend who died a couple of years ago, used to regale us with tales of his time in the merchant navy. He was on one ship that was torpedoed and sank, he was eventually rescued. The next merchant ship he was on suffered the same fate, he survived obviously but the experiences never left him. He hated the Germans and the Japanese, and said so at every opportunity. Wasn't always pleasant listening, but sometimes there was a snippet of info you hadn't heard before, he was quite a character.
A friends father became a prisoner of war of the Japanese and helped build some of the bridges, he never recovered from the deprivation and harsh treatment, and died of stomach cancer when still relatively young.

[Scylax]

Sunderland's railway station was below street level. In one of the umpteen air-raids the station was hit and a complete railway carriage was blown into Union Street, immediately above. It stayed embedded into a sports shop for weeks until the station was rebuilt.
In Jan. 1942 my father, a soldier came home on leave with a 48 hr. pass. From Thirsk he managed to get a lift to Chester-le-Street, then started to walk the rest of the way, to Sunderland. At 2am. he reached Penshaw, about 4 miles from the town.. Many people were in the streets gazing at the red sky to the east. 'Where are you going, soldier', someone asked. 'Into Sunderland', he replied.'my wife and family are there'. 'Don't bother',said the man,'there's nobody left in that lot. Jerry has been plastering it for days now'. My father, in full kit and rifle ran the remaining 4 miles into the blazing town. My mother, baby brother and I were safe amid the carnage, taking refuge in a cupboard under the stairs. We had been there for three days.
Sunderland was the largest shipbuilding town in the world, in its day, and received due attention from German bombers for many months. I remember it vividly.

[chakka35]

Although I was evacuated to North Wales in the early years of the war, I came back to Liverpool in 1942 to join grammar school. The bombing was still going on and my stepfather would return from the docks after a raid with his heavy boots caked with molten rubber, sugar and all manner of other signs of the hell that the ships and the docks had gone through.
Our shelter was the cupboard under the stairs and there was an ack-ack gun in the next street which deafened us so much that we could hardly hear the bombs.
In the morning, on my way to school, I'd see neighbouring streets reduced to rubble.

But nothing - nothing- to compare with the awful experiences of the people of Malta as shown in that film.

[emmie]

chakka, true, mind you no one got off lightly, the damage the Germans did in Greece lives on, i know many who never forgave them for what they did.