Authors: Sean Longden
Blitz Kids (7 page)
Though his academic work had been unremarkable, Geoff had taken an interest in one element of public school life: the Officer Training Corps (OTC). âI had taken the OTC seriously enough. I wasn't academic or a great sportsman. But I was very good with the rifle. I was in the school shooting team. I shot for the school at Bisley and we won the shield. I enjoyed it.' He soon began to realize this was one talent that might be useful. Previously, he hadn't taken much notice of the newspapers or the radio. In May 1940 Geoff suddenly realized that the war was very real. Upon hearing about the creation of the Local Defence Volunteers, he discussed it with a friend and decided to volunteer: âMy mother wasn't very happy about me joining. At first we just had the armband â nothing else. It was quite funny. It seemed silly walking around with just an armband. But then we got our first rifles â Lee Enfield 303s â our uniforms, hats and badges.'
With their rifles having arrived, Geoff was finally able to get fully involved in the war effort:
My training in the school OTC was very useful. My mate Derek Dashfield and I, who had both done our military training at school, were telling the old boys â men in their twenties and thirties â how to march and how to do their drill. They were too young to serve in the Great War and too old to be called up in 1939. We instructed them in how to fire their rifles. And when the unit got a Bren gun, we had nimble fingers and learned to strip it down. So we acted as instructors for the others in the unit.
As Geoff later recalled, the older men seemed quite genuine in their willingness to receive military instruction from two boys just out of school: âThey were so kind to us, but they probably thought we were a pair of upstarts.'
There were other, even younger boys who assisted the Home Guard with their training. In West Wickham, thirteen-year-old Peter Tiling â whose father was a rifle shooting champion â trained the local Home Guard on a rifle range. In the period before systematic training of Home Guard recruits could begin, they had to get lessons wherever they could. Some LDV recruits were sent to public schools where senior pupils, usually NCOs in the school OTC, gave instruction on rifle ranges with the school's weapons. Some public schools, including Eton College, even established their own branches of the Home Guard, in which boys in their final year were able to serve, thus giving them additional military training in the final year before conscription. At Westminster School, Anthony Wedgwood Benn joined the Home Guard unit in 1941, aged sixteen, working his way up to the rank of sergeant:
I joined the Home Guard in 1941 and was trained as a terrorist â how to use a rifle and throw grenades. I was well trained in the Home Guard â if the Germans had arrived I'd have thrown a bomb or a grenade in a restaurant. I don't know if I was any good at it â when you are that age it is just a lark but I was well aware that we might be invaded.
The initial period of inspired innovation, as shown by Home Guard's units that developed their own weapons and used children as instructors, was what Geoff Pulzer referred to when he admitted: âThe TV series
Dad's Army
was brilliant. Everything they did was right.' He recalled how night duties were made more pleasant by his officer who was the manager of the local branch on Marks and Spencer and arrived on parade with sandwiches and cakes. Geoff also reflected on how much his life had changed since he had left school. At the end of 1939 he had been a schoolboy; by summer 1940 he was a part-time soldier, with a rifle in the cupboard at home, helping train men many years his senior ready for an invasion that was expected at any moment.
Despite its frequently comic appearance, the force played a genuinely important military role. The government acknowledged that the existence of the Home Guard made it possible to send desperately needed reinforcements to the Middle East. The role of the Home Guard included far more than simply parading in church halls and waiting for the enemy to invade. Frank Whitewood, a fifteen-year-old Home Guard volunteer, soon found his nights filled with activity. After a day's work, he returned to home ready for evening duties:
In those days it was called the Local Defence Volunteers, or the LDV. We called it âLook, Duck and Vanish'. We were supposed to be defending this part of the Thames. The Home Guard and the Air Raid Wardens were in the old Greenwich Town Hall. We had parades and exercises against the Army. One night we were supposed to attack the college as part of a training exercise. They turned the hoses on us so we fixed bayonets. We got in trouble for that. Then on Blackheath, we used to be in the trenches or doing guard duties on the roofs of some of the big houses.
It was from these positions on Blackheath, with their commanding view across east London, that Frank watched the opening of the Blitz and the destruction of so much of the industry on the north bank of the river Thames.
For younger children, the formation of the Home Guard brought war one step closer. Fathers were soon sporting armbands, then caps and uniforms. Next came rifles and even machine-guns that were
stored at home, much to the fascination of young boys. Many children watched as Home Guards paraded on the only available open spaces, often school playgrounds, where the children watched and wondered if this force could hold off invasion. When Roy Bartlett watched his local Home Guard he noticed the company had just one .22 rifle and two shotguns between them. It was hardly reassuring. Aged ten, he was starting to realize war was a serious business and there seemed to be nothing standing in the way of invasion. All anyone talked about was invasion and his parents were increasingly nervous for the future. Even for the children, it seemed the novelty of war had finally worn off.
Teenage evacuee Tony Moynihan, whose school was at Hartfield in East Sussex, joined the Home Guard as soon as he was old enough: âI was the “Private Pike” â the youngest member of the platoon.' He soon grew accustomed to the struggle to provide sufficient weapons:
There would be two of us on duty, walking up and down the village all night. There was Sir Dougal Malcolm, who had a magnificent shotgun in a leather case, whereas I had a rifle but no ammunition. One day when we were on duty, I asked to see the gun. We sat down and it took him about half an hour to get it out of the case and assembled. We were useless! I could have got my gun ready in seconds but had no ammunition. He had ammunition but it would have taken him half an hour to get it set up.
It was a strange existence for Tony Moynihan: He carried out Home Guard patrols by night, then went straight to school in the morning. He also experienced the rather haphazard way that Home Guard preparations were carried out:
One day they delivered huge barriers to stop tanks. They dug holes across the main road and put wood across the road. However, the weight was terrible â one of the men made a trolley with wheels for it â and finally we managed to take them. They were so heavy, but at last we managed to drop them in. However, we couldn't get them out again. The captain â who was the headmaster of a school â had to call out the Army to get them to take them out.
After struggling to erect the anti-tank barriers and then struggling to take them down again, they came to an interesting conclusion: âWe didn't know which direction the enemy would come from anyway.'
It was not just the Home Guard that readied itself for invasion. Whilst many teenagers who were not yet seventeen had been accepted into the Home Guard, there were other eager youngsters whose obvious youth meant they would never be accepted. For them, defiance of the enemy was displayed by joining the Army Cadet Force. One recruit was fourteen-year-old Reg Fraser who, whilst working as a gardener in Staines, volunteered for the Army Cadets. During the 1930s he had already been active against the rise of fascism:
I'd nick the eggs and throw them at the Blackshirts' office. They'd all come out and chase me. I had a big mouth. I'd shout at them, throw eggs and run off. They never caught me. I had seen them shouting at the old people, so I didn't like them. They were bullies.
Now ready for a more organized resistance to fascism, the only problem was that his unit had neither uniforms nor rifles. All they had were armbands and broom handles. Despite their lack of equipment, the boys paraded alongside the Home Guard, eager to show their martial qualities. The armband marked the first of four uniforms he would wear before the war was finished.
In London, sixteen-year-old Irish-born Bill Fitzgerald joined a branch of the Army Cadets based near Paddington Station. With his mother and young sisters evacuated from London, he needed something to fill the hours between work and the inevitable trip to the air raid shelters. As he later admitted, he felt lost without the family around him and with only his father for company in the evenings. With so many friends displaced by bombing and others having left the city, the evenings needed to be filled. After all, even the local girls seemed to have been confined to their homes and dates were hard to come by:
I joined with my friend Jimmy. We were based at St Saviour's School in Shirland Road. I heard about it and wanted to know what they were doing â I just wanted something to do. When we got there we saw the
uniforms â they were from the First World War! We had the flat hat and we wrapped puttees around our legs.
Though their uniforms were out of date, the boys remained enthusiastic:
That was our life. It meant there was something to do all the time. We trained with the cadets three nights a week. Over at Royal Oak station there was a Territorial Army barracks, where the Home Guard was based. They taught us drill and trained us with rifles. We used to go to Camden Town to do parades down there and we went on a firing range so we could get used to the kick of the rifle. As we got really into it, we went to the Home Guards and trained with them. It was strict but we really liked it. I learned what the Army was all about.
His father, an ex-regular soldier whose arm had been partially paralysed in the Great War, was happy Bill had joined the cadets. After all, by 1940 it was clear the war would not be over quickly and that boys of his son's age would eventually be called up. At the time the young cadets had no idea how soon their services might be needed:
At that time, they still expected the Germans to invade. The Home Guard took us to Little Venice and showed us a house on the corner of Howley Place. They told us, âThis is one place you've got to remember.'We asked why? âIn case anything happens to the barracks, you'll find a lot of arms and ammunition here.' This was our unit's fall-back position in the event that the enemy invaded and captured our barracks. We could fight from this house. They had scattered the stuff around the area. So in the event of an invasion, we would have fought alongside the Home Guard.
The threat of invasion did not only impact upon boys who joined the Home Guard and Army Cadets. Girls also threw themselves into organized activities. In one Girl Guides patrol it was decided they would be prepared for invasion. Their plan was use treetop lookouts to pinpoint the enemy, then signal by Morse code to those waiting on the ground, who would lure the Germans into clumps of nettles, and then attack the Germans with stinging nettles and penknives. It was
lucky the girls never needed to put their foolhardy plan into action. In other locations, the Guides found more practical ways to be of assistance, acting as messengers for Home Guard units. In the event of invasion, their role was to cycle around alerting the men of the Home Guard and telling them to assemble ready to meet the enemy. Other Guides found themselves training Home Guard units in Morse code. One group, whose fathers were zookeepers who had trained the girls to use rifles, helped the Home Guards by challenging them to shooting contests: the Guides always won.
In May 1940, the British Army and its allies were unprepared for the scale of the onslaught that hit them. As they were relentlessly pushed back towards the English Channel, it became increasingly clear there was only one course of action: evacuation. Operation Dynamo, more commonly known as the Dunkirk evacuation, soon became legendary. The Royal Navy, valiantly supported by hundreds of merchant ships and the legendary âlittle ships', was somehow able to rescue more than 300,000 servicemen from France. It was little short of a miracle. Under ever-growing pressure from the enemy, British, French and Belgian soldiers boarded the ships that would take them to safety.
As with almost every military operation of the Second World War, the youth of Britain played an unheralded role in the operation. Almost all the merchant ships carried galley boys and cabin boys, whilst most Royal Navy ships also carried lads too young to be conscripted. One seventeen-year-old merchant seaman recalled travelling down from Liverpool to Dover and being assigned to operate a machine-gun on a merchant vessel. His role would be to offer a measure of anti-aircraft cover whilst his ship picked up escaping soldiers. Despite having no military training, he was put into a four-man team and given a Great War vintage Lewis gun. In the days that followed, he and his new mates manned the gun whilst his ship ferried thousands of sailors home.
Among the youngest of those to witness the miracle of Dunkirk was Albert Barnes, a fourteen-year-old cabin boy onboard a Thames tugboat, the
Sun XII
. When his boat was ordered to France to assist the evacuation, Albert went with it. Officially, because of his youth, he should not have sailed with the craft, but he was below decks when the news came to depart and the rest of the crew did not realize he was there. Once they had set off on the first stage of the trip, there was no
chance to send him ashore. At Gravesend, they were given orders to tow two barges to the beaches of Dunkirk, where they could be loaded with troops and then towed back to England.
Across the Channel, Albert witnessed things he had never expected when he took a job working among the docks and wharfs up and down the Thames. With the sky lit by the flames of the town, he entered a world of sunken ships, their funnels sticking up through the waters of the port. Sixty years later he described it as a âgraveyard of ships'.
3
Everywhere were the bodies â some complete, some in pieces â of soldiers who had died whilst attempting to escape. It was the first time the youngster had even seen a dead body. After towing back one barge, the other having been destroyed by German bombing, the
Sun XII
returned to France towing lifeboats that were used to ferry soldiers from the beaches to destroyers offshore.