Music and singing played an important part in village life, as at Spondon, near Derby, where a choral group formed in 1941 grew rapidly until it became a well-balanced choir of eighty. In the words of one member, Gwendolyn Hughes, ‘It gave people something different to think and talk about, instead of surmising and worrying about the war.’ But the war was constantly on every villager’s mind, and event after event – dog show, pony show, garden show, baby show, whist drive, fête – was organized to raise money for some sector of the armed forces. In the summer and autumn of 1941 the village of Foxholes, near Driffield, raised £212 for the Red Cross Agricultural Fund – part of a total of £48,000 collected in Yorkshire.
Seven
Through many a day of darkness,
Through many a scene of strife,
The faithful few fought bravely
To guard the nation’s life.
Hymns Ancient & Modern, No. 256
Forecasts of German airpower made in the early 1930s soon proved to have been wildly inaccurate. The Government had assumed that even if war opened with a blitz on London, the limited range of Luftwaffe aircraft would mean that destruction would be confined to the south and east of the country. The rest of England, north of a notional line from the Wash north of East Anglia to the Solent on the south coast, was reckoned to be relatively safe from bombardment.
Perhaps that was true in 1939; but with the fall of France in the summer of 1940, the picture suddenly changed. Taking off from captured airfields closer to England, German bombers could reach targets much farther inland, and to the north and west. One of the first daytime raids on the United Kingdom was an attack on Wick, at the extremity of Caithness – about as far from the Channel coast as any point in Britain. The object of the attack may have been to disable the RAF fighter squadron based on the airfield just north of the town, which was there to defend ships in the anchorage in Scapa Flow. The Luftwaffe raiders came in at teatime on 1 July, a fine summer’s day, and whether they meant to hit the airfield or the harbour, a stick of bombs fell in the middle of Bank Row, a narrow road alongside the port, killing fifteen people, including eight children (the youngest not quite five) who were playing on the bank. After its first run one aircraft turned and came back, machine-gunning along the river. In all Wick was raided six times, the last on 26 October, when three Heinkels dropped twenty high-explosive bombs on and around the airfield.
All summer the Luftwaffe carried out sporadic raids on convoys in the Channel and on south coast ports, from Dover in the east to Swansea in the west in what Hitler called the Kanalkampf – the Battle of the Channel. Key targets were Weymouth (which suffered forty-eight raids in all during the war) and Portland, home of the Whiteways Royal Naval torpedo works. On 9 July twenty-seven people were killed in Norwich. Southampton and Coventry were also heavily bombed.
People soon learned to identify the marauders, especially when they attacked at low level. The Heinkel 111 – a twin-engined medium bomber – was easily recognized by its bulbous cockpit with curved, clear panels through which the crew were visible. Also all too familiar was the Junkers JU 88, a fast and versatile twin-engined fighter-bomber with low-mounted wings, and the JU 87, also called a Stuka, or dive-bomber, distinguished by its upwardly bent wings and fixed undercarriage (with wheels permanently down). The Dornier D-17, known to the Germans as der fliegende Bleistift (the Flying Pencil), was recognizable by its slim body and twin tail, especially in its low-level role. Even schoolboys could soon identify fighters like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the twin-tailed Bf 110 by the noise of their engines alone.
On 16 July Hitler issued Directive No. 16, which authorized detailed preparations for Operation Sealion, the invasion of England. Three days later he proclaimed his ‘Last Appeal to Reason’, still pretending that he did not want war with Britain, and demanding that the nation surrender. When this rant failed to produce the required result – even after leaflets of the text had been dropped over England – he changed tactics and in Directive No. 17 ordered the destruction of the entire RAF – aircraft, airfields, supply organizations, factories – a task which the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, the sybaritic, elephantine Hermann Goering, assured him could be accomplished in four days.
On 24 August bombs fell on central London for the first time, killing nine people. In fact the docks had been the target, and the German navigators had lost their bearings. But Churchill was so outraged by the strike on the heart of the capital that the War Cabinet countermanded Bomber Command’s plan to hit Leipzig in retaliation, and on the night of 25 August a force of seventy aircraft went out to bomb Berlin.
Hitler, infuriated in turn, set in motion Adlerangriff (Eagle Attack), his attempt to destroy the RAF and its bases. Preliminary raids were launched on 12 August, and heavier ones on the 13th (Adlertag – Eagle Day); but all else paled before the mass assault on 15 August, when 2000 aircraft attacked. Seventy-six of them were shot down, but the raids continued and many key fighter airfields – Biggin Hill, West Malling, Croydon, Kenley – were badly damaged.
As battle raged in the sky, of all the counties Kent was at the greatest risk. Any Luftwaffe raid made life in the countryside hazardous, for the danger area extended far beyond the perimeter of whatever airfield the Germans were attacking, with stray bombs falling, aircraft crashing and shrapnel cascading down. One farm lost forty sheep to bombs and bullets, and its pastures were pitted with ninety-three craters, the biggest forty feet across and more than twenty deep. With such dangers prevailing, it was hardly surprising that many Londoners decided not to take their annual holiday hop-picking. To fill their places 2000 soldiers were drafted in, and local schools waived normal rules so that children could help with the harvest. Elaborate precautions had been made to protect those taking part: shelter trenches had been dug, casualty stations built and camouflaged. One of the most evocative images of the whole war is a photograph of a dozen small children crouching in the bottom of a freshly dug slit trench, gazing upwards at a dogfight in progress high overhead.
Farmers naturally wanted compensation for damage to their crops, and to their land. If the army could provide labour to carry out repairs, there was no problem; but if no military help was available, farmers often called on rural solicitors to make their case to the War Department. A 250kg bomb created a sizeable crater and scattered earth for hundreds of yards, which made filling in the hole a laborious and expensive business. Damaged trees also gave rise to disputes. Branches blown off of an oak (for instance) could be burnt in situ, but if bomb splinters were embedded in the trunk, no timber merchant would look at it, for fear of wrecking his saws. Market gardeners – especially those with big greenhouses – were particularly vulnerable, and often had an entire crop destroyed by a single explosion.
Northern farmers were hit as well. ‘Eh! Just fancy! Bang in the middle of Ford’s clover root,’ wrote the Mancunian diarist Arnold Boyd. ‘These Jerries will stick at nothing.’ Another diarist, identified only by the initials M.A., reported the effect of a bomb which fell in a woodland copse in the winter of 1940:
The small symmetrical crater was ringed round by the now-familiar mound of earth, and the surrounding bracken and grass was mown close to the soil. About thirty yards away from the crater a large number of beech saplings had had their heads cut cleanly off with a cut that ran parallel to the earth and not, as one would have supposed, at an angle to it. The larger trees that had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of the shell splinters received deep, clean cuts often six inches deep and the width of the bole.
In spite of the obvious danger, country people