How We Served, by John Kenneth Justin
Biography of David Searle-Baker
Royal Air Force: Ex Aircraft Apprentice, No. 1 School of Technical Training, Halton. Buckinghamshire. England. 46th Entry, Service as a Fitter II Airframes, in the Middle East and Western Europe,
1943 – 1950
Copyright David Newton Searle-Baker 1st. January, 2000. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or photcopying, recording. or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.
CHAPTER 1
1939-40
The war came slowly for Britain in that late summer of '39. The British Expeditionary Force went off to France and Poland was decimated after a three-week conquest.
In late September there was an urgent call put out on the wireless saying that Doctors were urgently required for the armed services.
Although father was then forty-six he immediately offered his services to the Army, where he was promptly turned down owing to the wounds that he had sustained during the first conflict. He then applied to join the Royal Navy but received the same reply. However, through friends, he was accepted for a commission in the Royal Air Force and rejoined six weeks after the commencement of hostilities, being stationed at Cardington, some forty miles outside of London.
Gradually, over the coming months, the shortages caused by the war started to appear. Food was put on ration, as was petrol, coal, clothing and all the other commodities that we take for granted. Sweets and chocolates disappeared from the counters and a blackout was enforced. With a gas attack being expected at any time, Gas Masks had been issued in the summer. These were contained in cardboard boxes and had to be carried with us wherever we went.
With my father away, my mother felt that she wanted one of her children to be at home with her .So at the end of the year I was withdrawn from my boarding school in Sussex, being accepted into a day school at Hampstead.
Winters in those days seemed to be much harsher than they have become and that first winter of the war was no exception. Coal had to be used very sparingly, as there was a limited supply. Consequently, one always seemed to be cold, with the frost on the inside of the windows being thicker than that on the outside, sometimes during the winter months. . When the weather was like this I quite frequently went off to bed in the evenings with my socks on, covered with three blankets and two eiderdowns just to keep warm. Things weren't made any easier when we were instructed that one could only have a maximum of four inches of water and a line was painted on the inside of the bath.
So, we drifted into an extreme winter and that fateful year of 1940. Nothing very much seemed to happen during the early months of the year. But suddenly April came and the invasion of Denmark and Norway took place. Another short campaign and Germany were masters of the Scandinavian coastline.
Almost immediately after the successful occupation of these countries the Battle for France commenced with the invasion of Belgium and Holland.
The woefully ill equipped British Army advanced into Belgium. But, once again as in the First World War, it was shortly forced to retreat, to avoid being outflanked by the juggernaut of the Blitzkrieg. Eventually, some 360,000 troops were evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk and taken safely to England. . Being saved in part, by the hundreds of small, privately owned pleasure craft, that set out from the holiday resorts of England, with their amateur crews.
So, Britain stood alone once again. With the army having lost most of its equipment and invasion expected daily. As Mr. Churchill so eloquently put it " The Battle for France is over. The Battle for Britain is about to commence ". Although his speeches were recorded after the war, they could never in a thousand years recapture the spirit of the time. And the mood of the people to whom they were directed, as he could only offer them Blood, Sweat and Tears! . His words were like a beacon shining in a very dark sky.
It was a glorious summer that year. In fact I spent the majority of the summer holidays going to the public swimming baths at Parliament Hill Fields. Whilst lying there in the sun, one could see the contrails of the aircraft high in the sky. As part of the Battle of Britain was fought out, sometimes directly over our heads. If the wind was right, the faint rattle of machine gun fire could be heard in the distance. How we all thrilled to the exploits of those very few pilots who saved Britain during her hour of peril.
When August came my parents considered evacuating me to Canada to stay with some friends who had offered me a home. There was a desperate flurry of activity that involved us in making a quick dash to Somerset House to obtain a passport, which duly came to hand. However, there just wasn't time enough to get everything ready for my departure, so the ship had to sail without me. As it turned out this was a blessing in disguise, the ship (Whose name I've forgotten) was torpedoed, with heavy loss of life amongst the children who were being evacuated. !
Each morning I would make my trek to school. This involved me in a by tram ride down to Camden Town Underground Station. A tube journey up to Hampstead, with a ten-minute walk when I got there. All told it probably took about three-quarters of an hour if everything arrived on time.
After the Battle of Britain, and the failure of the Luftwaffe to obtain air supremacy, they switched from daylight bombing into night bombing with Hitler directing his bombers onto London, and other large towns throughout Britain.
With the coming of the first night raid on London, early in September, all the occupants from the flats upstairs used to come down and sleep in our semi-basement flat. Having been told that under the stairs was the safest place; there we all lay in a row. Covered with various blankets and eiderdowns that our guests had brought with them .we all slept in our clothes in case we should have to dash out into the night. The alternative would have been to walk about a mile and a half carrying all ones blankets food, and clobber, to the nearest tube station. They're to sleep on the platform with the trains rumbling in until about midnight. It was no joke, but thousands of people took this option and the platforms were crowded, sometimes from 6 PM onwards. This was just non-acceptable to mother who was a fatalist. So it was decided that we should stay at home and trust to luck, which we did throughout the blitz. . Needless to say, we were all firmly of the opinion that no matter what you did, if a bomb has your name on it, then that is that, It is going to get you, no matter where you may hide. Night after night the bombers came over, the anti-aircraft artillery fire started up from nearby Regents Park. The shrapnel rained down, and it was woe to those who went out without a steel helmet on his head.
As for me, well I just lay there under the blankets, listening to the noise of the aircraft engines as they came closer and closer, hearing the whistle of the bombs as they dropped, wondering just how many there were in that particular stick and whether we would be struck?
With Camden Town being located just behind Euston Railway Station, with the main line shunting yards just behind we were a legitimate target. But, as with all bombers of the day, the target was very seldom hit and numerous strikes were recorded in our area, although we were certainly not as devastated as the East End of the London.
Towards the end of September I was awoken early in the morning, to find that it was almost as bright as daytime. In fact, I could have read a comic if I'd had one handy. I got up and went to the window, forgetting that it was one of the most dangerous places to be if a bomb should drop. The sight that met my eyes was unreal; it was the reflected glow of London burning from about four miles away. That night that St.Paul's was hit, with a large portion of Fleet Street and the City, going in flames during the next twenty-four hours.
One October night there was a tremendous explosion. just outside in the Camden Road. The force of the bomb blew out all of our windows and there was broken glass everywhere.
A parachuted landmine had exploded on the other side of the road about a hundred yards from where we lived. It demolished some three houses, killing the occupants and several people who were passing by, in the process. We rushed out to see if we could help, in the process tripping over a body that lay in the road. But there was nothing that we could do for this poor fellow as he was without his head. We then tried to find out whether there were any survivors under the rubble, but we couldn't find anyone. Very shortly afterwards the police, ambulance services and A.R.P arrived and took over the scene.
The next bit of excitement occurred when I was on the way to school, round about the middle of October. I waited for my usual tram but nothing came, so I walked the mile and a half to the Underground Station. There I found out the reason for the delay. A bomb had come down right through the cupola roof, down the escalator and exploded at the bottom. Needless to say this caused several hundred casualties amongst those who had taken shelter. … After that I had to walk some four miles up Haverstock Hill, on the way to Hampstead in order to attend school. I was excused for being late on this occasion! Owing to the bombing, for the next two terms lessons were held in the basement cellars of the school, which were of course unheated in any way. As the mercury dropped we seemed to sit there and shiver from one end of the day to the other.
There always seemed to be something happening during those months. One day the trailing wires of a Barrage Balloon got caught around the chimney. Somehow it had escaped from the winch to which it was tethered. There was great excitement whilst it was deflated and taken away. It is most fortunate that the whole of the chimney wasn't demolished in the process. Another time there was a dull couple of thuds on the roof. We dashed up to the top flat and found that a couple of incendiary bombs had exploded. Thanks to the handy stirrup pump and some sand these were quickly extinguished before the fire could take hold.
With all this bombing going on all our basic services were constantly being damaged and broken. Frequently, we were without any gas, water and electricity. As the mains had been destroyed due to enemy action.
On numerous occasions mother had to cook over an open coal fire which took an age. Whilst I had to go out with a couple of buckets seeking a stand pipe that had been set up to supply water to those whose supply had been cut off by the bombing. When this happened I usually had to walk two or three miles and frequently arrived home with only half a load in each bucket. The water having been spilt on the way, as they were just too heavy for me to carry when full.
As with all the youngsters of that era, we were great on collecting souvenirs. Arriving at school with odd bits of shrapnel, incendiary bombs that had failed to ignite, cartridge cases and other bits and pieces of aircraft that we managed to find. from somewhere?
By this time winter had arrived once again. The November fogs had started for the second winter of the war. London was a strange place in the blackout as quite a number of the streetlights had been dimmed, or put out of action. Black out curtains covered all the windows and doors in every house and only very low wattage bulbs (I think that they were 40 Watt?) were used for the electric light. In the event of the current being cut off nearly every house had a supply of paraffin lamps, candles or torch, for use in an emergency. All the vehicles had their lights masked with only a small slit for the driver to see the road through a thin beam of light. Apart from the military and buses, here was. Very little traffic at night in those days. This was due, in part to the petrol rationing, with the majority of the men being away in the services. But also there were very few cars being built for private use as all the production went to the armed services.
Sometime towards the end of the year my mother took me up to Leicester Square to see the first technicolour movie, The Wizard of Oz. I can hardly describe what an impression this film made on me. Coming from the doom and gloom of a blacked out, cold and dismal London, with the possibility of enemy action at any moment, it was an amazing transformation.
As you probably know the film starts off in black and white. But suddenly when she is transported to the Land of Oz, everything was in the most beautiful colours. For the next hour and a half there we were, following the yellow brick road to the Emerald City with Dorothy and her friends.
I only mention this because the difference was so startling when we left the cinema, having to resume our normal lives in the black out. But for those ninety minutes as we watched the film, it was as though we had been struck with the wizard's wand, pure magic!
At the end of November my father was given embarkation leave, he had been posted to the position of medical officer on board the SS Cythia. He sailed just before Christmas.
But, for security reason's, no one knew where he was going or how long he would be away. He just went off into the blue, as happened to so many people in those years!
Never, during the heaviest bombing, did I ever hear anyone suggest that Britain should surrender. In spite of the fact that invasion was still expected at any moment. I'm quite certain that had the landing ever taken place the British people would have fought the invaders with everything at their disposal.
We now know that had Britain surrendered during that fateful summer, the world would have descended into the unbelievable nightmare of Nazi occupation. With all that that would have entailed for the population and Humanity. So it was just as well that we held out.
My fathers parting gift to me before he sailed consisted of two boxes of 12 bore cartridges. These were given in the expectation that they might have to be used in close Quarter Street fighting, should the country be invaded. Consequently, each one had had the outer cardboard casing cut, so that when they were fired they would come out as a solid projectile, which could cut a man in half. Kept them for years until they were eventually lost in one of my house moves.
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----- David Newton Searle-Baker
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