War Stories III by Oliver L. North Read Free Book Online

started. The daily melee in the sky above his homeland made an indelible impression.
    RON DICK
    Outskirts of London
11 December 1939

    When the war started I was nine and was told that we were all getting shot at, because we were British. People were expecting to be raided by the Luftwaffe. We had a choice of two sorts of shelters from the government
for our flat. One of them was called the “Militant Shelter.” It was a large steel box, which was erected inside the house. It had a very strong steel frame with steel mesh sides. You raised the sides of the mesh, put mattresses and the like inside, and the family slept there. If the house collapsed during a bombing raid, it would fall around you—but you’d eventually be dug out. And that kind of shelter did save a lot of people.
    My family didn’t go for one of those. We went for an “Anderson Shelter,” which was a corrugated steel arch delivered to your backyard. Then you dug a hole, placed the arch over the hole and poured concrete over the arch. It was sort of garden shed made of corrugated steel and concrete. Once set up, you’d put as much earth as you could on top of the thing and install a blast door on the front. After that you put bunks inside. We slept in that from the start of the air raids, until the spring of 1941. For the whole of the winter of 1940–41, we slept outside in the corrugated shed during the air raids.
    The early daylight raids were pretty obvious. This air raid siren would sound and we were all supposed to take cover. Sometimes we just stood about outside the Anderson Shelter watching to see if anything would happen. Eventually, you’d see the Luftwaffe fly over us on their way to the London docks. And once they started bombing we had to take extra care—we lived close to the target, so we were in the line of fire all the time. And we got heavily bombed during the Battle of Britain. During the daylight raids, you’d see these large formations coming over. I don’t know, they were up ten to fifteen thousand feet, I suppose. We could see the Spitfires going after the German fighters and the Hurricanes were mostly aiming at the bomber formations. And then we’d hear the gunfire: the machine guns and the heavier thump of the Me-109s’ cannon.
    And when our fighters were out of the way, there was a lot of anti-aircraft fire. That was the noisiest element of the whole performance, because we had anti-aircraft batteries all around us, and they made a tremendous racket. And at that point you more or less had to take cover because now there was shrapnel falling from the exploding anti-aircraft shells.

    It was a popular activity for schoolboys like me at the time, after a raid, to go rushing around the streets looking for these little pieces of metal, putting them in a cardboard box and collecting the shrapnel.
    There was a discussion between my mother and father about whether I should be evacuated safely out of the city. There were two evacuation options for British children. One was to evacuate to Canada. That was particularly attractive early in the summer of 1940, when a German invasion was a definite threat. A lot of people decided that they wanted their children safe overseas. The other choice was being evacuated to the English countryside where it was a lot less likely that the children would be killed in a bombing raid. Tens of thousands of young British children were relocated under this program but my parents finally decided they didn’t want to do that to me because I would become somebody else’s child. So, thankfully, I never left. I was there for the whole of the Battle of Britain and the “Blitz” afterward.
    The sound of an air raid has stayed with me. Although, the funny thing is, I suppose nine-year-old boys are very resilient creatures. I don’t remember being very terrified by any of this stuff. It was all a big adventure.
    By the autumn of ’40, the