From: Arthur Pay (arthur@ARTHURPAY.DEMON.CO.UK)
Date: Sun Feb 21 1999 - 08:55:30 PST
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 15:42:38 +0000 (GMT)
From: Arthur Pay <arthur@arthurpay.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Life of evacuees in World War II
To: "tom.holloway@u3a.org.uk" <tom.holloway@u3a.org.uk>
On Sun 21 Feb, Tom Holloway wrote:
> .
> Peter Oviatt at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary asked.....
>
> > evacuees. Would you mind asking your panel of elders > > to answer the
following questions? Thank you.
Dear Peter,
I wasn't an evacuee, but one of the awkward squad that refused to play
soldiers,
A brief account of my own War experiences is told on website
http://www.rmplc.co.uk/eduweb/sites/chatback/arthurp/arthurp.txt
However, it was necessary occasionally for me to demonstrate to myself, and
to other people that it wasn't cowardice that motivated my stand against the
war, and I got up to many daft and foolhardy tricks just to prove it.
Tom Holloway suggested that very little reference is made to the V1 or
doodlebug attacks which were made against SE England during the invasion
period 1944, and thought you might be interested in a quite close encounter
with one when I was posted at Eastbourne, which is a seaside town on the
southcoast, some thirty miles from occupied France.
Their target was London, but they came across the coast quite low,
presumably because they were laden with fuel supplies, to get them to their
target, and also because they hadn't been launched far enough away to have
gained much height.
I don't know if you have heard of V1's but they were essentially a
twothousand pound bomb, with wings attached, and a ramjet engine at the
rear, with a very distinctive noise, which were pointed at London, and
launched from mobile launching pads in Northern France. They were
completely indiscriminate and came down and exploded when they ran out of
fuel,or were shot down by Spitfires or Hurricane fighter planes and because
they mostly landed softly like paper dart, they caused tremendous lateral
damage when they exploded.
Anyway, I was on leave in Eastbourne with my wife Charlotte, who was a
nurse, and shared my views about the War, and was on leave from her hospital
in London. Incidently, despite all the Security for the Invasion, she
travelled by rail, without any Identification Papers, unchallenged.
We decided to go for a walk along the front to the path leading to Beachy
Head, when there was an Air raid Alert and also the Local immediate danger
alert, whilst we were on the path halfway up, and a Flying bomb zoomed in
from the sea. It was so close I felt that I could have scratched it belly
with a clothes prop. To add to our discomforture, some soldiers opened up
on it from the top of Beachy head. apparently with some success because it
veered to the left and landed in Eastbourne Town.
I remember that the Sergeant was very concerned because he felt that had he
not fired at the thing it wouldn't have come down in the Town. He needn't
have worried because the only casualty on this occasion was a dead man who
was awaiting burial
I recently had a visit from a young German student, and whilst showing her
around our neighborhood in Leyton I pointed out the various bombsites
where they have been replaced by new houses and flats, and was somewhat
disconcerted when she told me that her own town of Borken was 80 per cent
destroyed in two weeks, by British and American Air raids in 1945
.
-- Arthur Pay