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JUST as babies have no developed fear of snakes or spiders, I don't think we children were ever old enough to be mortally afraid of war. We were more curious about, than frightened by, the Blitz. In about 1940, when I was two, a Heinkel bomber crashed in the Bluebell Woods, and we sometimes picnicked near the wreckage. My older brother John picked over the remains and found a flying boot containing the pilot's toes. He brought it home with visions of boundless popularity at school arising from this gruesome find; our mother had no such vision, and tossed the boot irritably away (so he tells me now). I do recall that he swore to me at the time that the Heinkel had been piloted by a Red Indian and a cowboy, and I saw no reason to disbelieve that throughout the war. Exploring those same woods later in the war, or perhaps after, my friends and I came across a bomb dump, a shallow pit filled with fragments of bombs, though whether they were British or enemy I don't know. Later, the fields around our houses were decorated with garlands of tinsel foil, painted matt black; that must have been after the RAF started dropping "Window" -- metal anti-radar foils -- on Germany in the summer of 1943, and the Luftwaffe lifted its own foolish embargo on using this secret device. No boy of five or six was accepted by his pals unless he knew and could identify all the Jerry bombers and fighter planes just by the sound of their engines. Playing with the urchins from Hutton Village, we briefly stopped at the sound of airplanes duking it out high over our heads; we could not see them, but we knew all about them, those Heinkels and Junkers and Dorniers, just as children now have their favourite sneakers or pop stars. The Heinkel 111 was the workhorse of Hermann Göring's bomber fleet, it carried the Luftwaffe's heaviest load; it droned stealthily up the Thames estuary and headed northwest into Essex -- the ball-bearing works of the Hoffmann Manufacturing Company was at Chelmsford. Its twin Daimler-Benz 601 engines ran slightly out of sync; the engine note rose and fell. "Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?" it crooned, or so it seemed to the ear of Graham Greene's little murderer on the run.* On mornings in 1944 and 1945 we stood on our tennis lawn shading our eyes and peering up at the awesome spectacle of the Flying Fortresses of the U.S. Eighth Air Force glittering high overhead, flying in perfect box formation as they circled over East Anglia to gain height and set course for Germany. Later we would see the same squadrons return, with some planes missing from the box but the rest still holding tight formation. Death meant nothing to us children. I had a soft-plastic black model of a Stirling bomber -- a Lancaster would have been worth more. We bought and bartered such things by swapping them for marbles or prize conkers. Recollections of the war are few but vivid: I saw a V-1 doodlebug, a flying bomb, a buzz bomb -- it was called all these things -- growling one night swiftly across my field of vision, from left to right, as I stood on tiptoes and looked out of our bathroom window one evening in 1944; it must have been about a mile away and running quite low. The V-1s impacted all over the Essex countryside; one "came down" near Mountnessing, another half a mile away from us. On the way up to church we visited the crater near the Hutton village school: around the rim lay scattered the tangled wire and metal of this contraption. As distant detonations rattled the house and windows, cracks appeared in the ceiling. It was of course nothing compared with what life in the cities must have been like; in retrospect, it is hard to imagine the anguish that a mother of four children, away from her husband who is away at sea, must feel every time the planes or missiles were heard going over. We children certainly had no fears. We slept at night in the rusty steel Morrison shelter -- a solid table of sheet steel and angle-iron -- which had been painted with a kind of pink distemper and covered with a tablecloth to serve as a table by day. If the house had collapsed, we would have been safe inside.
FROM all around the silent horizon, that summer of 1944, day and night, there emerged this deep penetrating tone, a kind of animal growl on one single frequency, and we infants huddled in the Morrison shelter and waited out the five minutes of suspense which that sound pushed ahead of it. We six-year olds knew the ritual by now. Out here in the country we heard every sound that these weapons, the V-1s, made. No sirens sounded. Their own organ note heralded their approach. We hadn't been frightened by the stories of butterfly-bombs; we had rather liked the Christmas festoons of long silver paper strips that the planes dropped over our hedges and fields; but the V-1 was different and evil.
The V1's Argus Tube ram-jet engine was built in the underground Mittelwerk plant near Nordhausen, captured by the US Army in 1945 If you caught sight of the evil thing, it was scudding at low altitude across the sky in a straight line, a stab of flame streaking behind its engine. Usually the robot just carried on in a straight line -- it had no pilot to be daunted by ground fire; but there were times when the weapon's heart-throb, a note I still can't hear on the old BBC recordings without an icy chill, suddenly cut out. Six-year-olds don't fear death, but our mother and all around us must have prayed to the Lord each time that engine note cut out. Every one of us knew that you counted twenty-five as the missile hurtled down in its silent death-glide to the ground. Then it detonated with a sudden white flash -- against which all the trees and animals and houses on the horizon were silhouetted in black, even in daytime. It was an illusion of some kind, but I always thought I heard a shower of glass follow the bang. It was that, being sliced by the broken glass, that the younger women most feared. (Government studies showed this: I wrote about it all, twenty years later, compiling the biography of the German field marshal who had sent these weapons over to us. Their one ton warhead carried an aluminized explosive that packed twice the punch of TNT). Other than the low jungle growl of the distant pilotless
V1s or doodlebugs as they scudded undismayed past the
horizon, no sound recalls for me the years of World War II
as does the English air raid siren. It had its own accent. I've heard sirens since then from Illinois (tornado warning) to Austria (prison breakout) and they leave me unmoved; but the ghostly lament of the 1940s English siren, actually two tones working in incongruous tin-whistle harmony, is hard-wired into our generation's memories and it still halts my heart when I hear it in old recordings. Unforgettable too, its final dying moan -- it was a long-drawn out "oh"-sound -- as it then sounded the all clear: its power switched off, the siren's rotors freewheeled on, gradually slowing, the moan descending through quantumless octaves and decaying for a minute or more until its last whisper was carried away, like the spirits of the newly dead, into the darkness of our Essex countryside. And we children lay there listening. We heard Mr Butler the Butcher, now a blue-dungaree'd and tin-hatted air-raid warden, wheeze importantly past on his bicycle, still looking for chinks in the window blinds. "Put out that light!" Sirens, darkness, comfort. Carry on, England. © Copyright David Irving and Focal Point, 2007
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After
a minute or so, as the speeding weapon came into sight --
too fast for any but the new Meteor jets to catch, and those
we never saw -- the full roar of its ram-jet engine came,
vibrating through the trees and across the cornfields,
louder and deeper than the deepest double-diapason note of
which our village church organ was capable.
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