Remembering ‘The Blitz’ on VE Day

Now resident in Londonderry, the night of the first of the truly bad raids occurred the night before his 16th birthday, and he left the air raid shelter to find his home damaged and devastation everywhere he looked. The night before the raid he had been dressed in his best bib and tucker to go out with a friend to celebrate, that morning his friend’s home had been utterly demolished.

At the start of the war late in 1939, Arthur was a 14-year-old boy, living in the East End with his folks. The only real protection they had against the impending raids were the government-made Anderson Shelters in their gardens.

“The only shelters we had were the ones in people’s back yards, but they started to build brick ones in certain parts of the street for any pedestrians caught in the street when the air raids was on,” he said.

“Apart from that most of London had where the Tubes are and people slept down there in the Tube stations. They had a law made that they cut the Tubes off in the stations at a certain time of the night in case people would fall on the lines. So people could bring down their mattresses and other stuff and sleep on the platforms until the morning. So they cleared out the station at a certain time so you could get people getting the Tube to work. Apart from that there was no other kind of cover at all,” he said.

“I used to say to myself ‘They are only women and children, they can’t fight back and I can. I wish I could join up’, you know? Even at 14 I wanted to get into the Forces because I would have been more satisfied,” he said.

It was two years later, on the eve of his 16th birthday, that sealed the deal, as it were, for Arthur. When the East End of London was blitzed.

“The siren went and my father told me to get in the shelter quick. They got word from ‘The Coast’ that it was a massive air raid. Before our boys would have got turned back because they wouldn’t have been coming over. But this time the Germans sent over hundreds of them and the Air Force couldn’t cope. There were hundreds of then, the sky was black, the sky was completely black with German Bombers and their aim was to drop bombs down over the top of us. “

Describing the scene of devastation which met him on his birthday as he stepped out of the air raid shelter, Arthur said: “The air raid was still on and it was still dark. You could hear these people screaming and crying and youngsters crying and the smell of gas. My mother... she would not come out. Nextdoor’s house was on fire.

“My father told me and my mother to remember the iron chest and he told us to always keep a change of clothes in that and to leave it out in the yard, which we did. We had to take it with us when we went out to the air raid shelter in case anything happened to the house and it was ruined. So when I came out of the shelter and made my way through to the street that is when I saw the devastation. Houses up and down the street were burning away and there was the smell of gas; rooftops were blown up and there were people lying on the floor crying and screaming and bits of bodies... it turned my stomach to see it,” he said recalling the horror.

That is was put Arthur in the mind to “join the forces” as he called it: “I sat back and looked at it. My mother came out and she started to scream and she wanted to know where her mother was because my grandmother lived down by the dockyard,” he said.

The upshot of the horrific scene that day prompted Arthur’s father to evacuate family members away from the East End. His brother went to a friend’s house in the country and his sisters were taken out of the city. Arthur, however, stayed, living with his grandmother until he could sign up. To this day he says he cannot get the images out of his mind.

“Sitting here at night and now, in the mornings watching the programmes for Remembrance Week, taking people back to the First World War and the Korean War and all that, and Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, it just brings it all back. At night time sometimes I’m sitting there and sometimes I cry when I think of the things I have seen. There are not many people my age,” he says.

Earlier in the year The Sentinel reported on how Arthur had been awarded the Artic Star from the War Office. He is now waiting to find out where and when he is to travel to receive the Russian equivalent.

“There are probably only about 400 people in Northern Ireland entitled to receive it. There are not many people left who were on the Russian convoy. I used to tell my boys about the tea freezing in the cardboard cups and I used to put a spoon in the cup and after about five minutes I’d tear the cardboard off and lick the tea like an ice lolly because it had frozen,” he laughed at the memory.

However, keeping HMS Torrington and the other escort ships ice-free was no joke. On deck chores included the manual removal of sea ice from the decks and everything else exposed, including the guns.

“It was very cold. You could not touch anything outside the ship at all with your hand because you would stick to it. We had to just keep chipping the deck to keep the ice off it. They say salt water does not freeze, but that froze, you know? We had to do a practice every day on the guns to keep the ice melted, but down below was warm enough.

“I never did it, but others used to throw a cup of water over the side and watch it immediately turn to snow. It was freezing. People said that they used to spit on the deck and it would freeze straight away. We never landed, but we were on patrol off the coast of Murmansk with the convoy,” he said of his time at sea in the Arctic.

Despite the threat to life and limb, Arthur, a painter and decorator, worked in London during the day before he enlisted. He recalled that, after the two big waves of German planes, help came from the Americans.

After the mass formation air raids the Germans changed tactics, and flying bombs became the new enemy in the skies: “For the next couple of months and years they started to send over these ‘Doodlebugs’ or flying bombs, which they called V-1’s back then. You never heard them until they exploded. The Doodlebugs, the first ones, were very fast and looked just like a little plane and the Spitfires couldn’t shoot them down, so our boys went and found where they were getting launched and bombed the runways so they couldn’t take off,” said Arthur.

“These were unmanned, flying bombs, I remember you heard ‘em and seen ‘em flying over. You used to pray to God that they would go over the top of you because if they stopped they would come down then, so you prayed they would go past you ‘cause you knew you were safe then. If they stopped in front of you well, then you knew they were going to come down on top of you. People used to run everywhere to get away from them, you know?

“I remember the one they called the V-1. That used to be fired from the French coast and you never heard or seen it ‘til it exploded. You could be walking along the street and the next thing the top of the street would be blown up,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s what used to put me mad, that the civilians could not fight back, they just had to take it. A can honestly say I seen more dead people in them two years than all of the time I spent in the Royal Navy. That’s true. I seen more people getting killed as a young man than I did when I served me time in the Navy and I served four years in the Navy,” said Arthur very sincerely.

In addition to patrolling in the Artic - more of which later, Arthur was also involved in escort duties on board HMS Torrington in the English Channel on D Day, ensuring the Allied fleet made its way to the famous Normandy Beaches.

Far from being terrified, Arthur recalled how having a gun and being part of a team on board HMS Torrington that could fight back, but he was also very aware of people being shot by the German Army as they tried to get ashore.

“I was at the Normandy landings; Sword and Omaha beaches. Those two beaches were together and we was escorting the troops’ landing craft, the Yanks and the Canadian and the British. So I was in that, you know. It wasn’t really that frightening for me, because we had guns to fire and we were getting action and the fear did not come into that. The fear seemed to go because we had something to fight back with because we had guns, so that took the pressure off you.

“The only thing about D Day was that we had to pass our big ships. They lay back about 20 mile from the coast and fired their shells at the coast. You needed earplugs passing them. The shells were very big and the explosion was very loud. That scared me more than someone lying in the sand,” he said of the Allied invasion.