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

. . and that’s more than any mother should be allowed to suffer.” So instead Leah volunteered to be an air raid warden in his hometown of Coventry, ninety-five miles north of London.
    CHARLES LEAH, AIR RAID WARDEN
    Bellgreen, Coventry, England
30 September 1940

    I was born and brought up in Bellgreen, on the outskirts of Coventry. In 1938, everybody in England expected the war with Germany. Prime Minister Chamberlain went over to Munich and came back waving a piece of paper and said, “Peace in our time!” which nobody believed. But it gave us a bit of time to prepare anyway.
    My three older brothers all joined the forces—one went to the Navy, two in the Army. When the war started in 1939, I was going to join but my mother appealed to me to stay home so I joined the Air Raid Precautions organization. She thought my only job was to watch over a section of our neighborhood, the streets around our area.

    But I didn’t tell my mum what an ARP warden does during a raid. If bombs come down, the ARP has to log where they fall. If they’re already exploded—it’s not a problem. But if they are unexploded, or have a delay fuse, it can be a bit dangerous. My mum thought that all I did during the war was to make sure people observe the blackout, and not show any light.
    In the summer of ’40, the German bombers came over the Channel, over Kent, Norfolk, and the coastal areas. That’s where most of the dogfights took place in the attempt to stop them from getting in over our cities. And, of course our anti-aircraft guns would try and shoot them down, which they did often.
    In August of ’40, I was by the Jaguar Standard Motor Works and this solitary plane flew over. Nobody realized it wasn’t an English plane until it was about quarter mile away and it suddenly dropped two bombs onto the motor works. One bomb hit the paint shop, and there was an explosion and this huge plume of black smoke. The plane went off flying low, to get away, but an AA battery shot him down.
    Â 

    Londoners taking shelter in the Underground.

    We’d get a bit worried with the anti-aircraft guns shooting into the air because everything comes back down again, in little bits and pieces of shrapnel, and they would hit your helmet like rain. Late in the summer a German bomber dropped a load of incendiaries not far from my home and the public library burned down.
    In September of ’40 the Germans started what we called the “Blitz”—going after civilians in our cities. Then we had raids practically every night—the sirens would go and planes would come, and drop their bombs and head off again.
    In one of them, on November 14, I was at a place called Tile Hill. I had to walk to my home, and then down to the ARP station, about three miles. On my way to the ARP post, I came across a neighbor, Mr. Gough, who was leaning against a fence and groaning. Obviously something was wrong. I asked him, “Are you all right?” And then I said, “Come on, I’ll take you down to shelter.” But when I picked him up, he groaned, and died in my arms.
    One night the phones were down so I sent my runner to find out why. It’s a very old-fashioned way of doing things, but it works. He was gone for some time so I decided to go out and look for him. About three hundred yards from the ARP station, I heard four bombs coming down, so I dove into the gutter, where there was a little bit of cover. One of the bombs landed on the other side of the hedge where I was.
    Further down the street I found that the second bomb had killed Gordon, our seventeen-year-old runner. A third bomb had come through the center of three connected houses and wrecked them. I went inside one and found a father and his little girl—dead of course. I lifted the man out of the wreckage and laid him on the kitchen floor. Then I went and fetched the little girl, and laid her alongside daddy. And then I got the wife