04. THE  BLITZ

Carnation

On seven nights of just one year, March 20th and 21st and April 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 28th and 29th, the centres of Plymouth, Stonehouse and Devonport were laid to ruin by the German air raids with the idea to destroy British morale. I was approaching my eighth birthday.

For the defence of Plymouth, there were only four Gloster Gladiator biplanes. 

After the second night, only two buildings survived in the City Centre: the National Westminster Bank in Bedford Street and the office of the Western Morning News Company in Frankfort Street.

First came a group of Heinkel III bombers flying at between 9,900 and 11,500 feet. Included in the load of bombs they dropped were 34 delayed action high-explosives, the Pathfinder Force, followed by 12,500 incendiaries and other high-explosive bombs. 

Two further squadrons dropped their bomb loads, which included 17 blockbusters, each weighing a ton. To  further add to the terror which was raining down on the city, a squadron that had been sent to bomb the Westland Aircraft factory at Yeovil diverted to direct their bombs on Plymouth when bad weather prevented them from finding their original target.  

Friends and neighbors all thought that the worst was over, but they were wrong. Nevertheless, despite the destruction, only a small fraction of the quarter of a million people died, most safely tucked away in shelters, while the bombers passed by the Navy centres and the port area.

I watched the flames like a great unstoppable forest fire in the distance and there was no wailing and grieving, except among those who had lost kin. There was rather a sense of "all right, you haven't won yet". For me, as a child, that spirit of co-operation in difficulty was really apparent as I watched family help family in a united spirit that, after leaving England, I never encountered again except at the end of the Carnation Revolution when I was in Lisbon and witnessed the birth of Portugal as a democratic country.

Where has that human solidarity gone today, for war is not distant from us every day? I was never in the midst of blazing buildings. I never lost family or friends. We suffered only the loss of Rose's fiancé, who went down with his ship in the Navy.

But the sense of solidarity went beyond mental empathy to a unity of purpose and dignity. Today I see human disasters passed over to see a football match in order to laud heroes, when the true heroes are those without a future who still keep their dignity and honesty when they have nothing.

I was ten and war had not touched me, but the spirit of solidarity in the face of threat to survival did. I learned that one must never, never give in.

It was the force that drove my father and grandmother while my mother and her father picked up the pieces whenever there was a falling down. It was the force that gave Britain, with the help of the Commonwealth and the Americans, final victory. It is a debt that I shall always remember.

Yet surprisingly there was little cursing against the German people. Adolf Hitler was the villain and enemy and Churchill was the popular hero. All posters and all themes were directed correctly at the source of the evil.

When prisoners marched through the town, they were ignored.

Two reports say it all.

Infantryman Kurt Bock, who was captured in Holland in 1944:

"...hours later, a train took us elsewhere. It was not just an ordinary train; we sat on upholstered seats. There was no screaming and spitting at us like in Holland."

Hans Reckel, who was captured in France, recalls: 

"On 24th July 1944 on a dull almost foggy morning we stepped onto English soil at Gosport. In the streets almost all we saw were women in working clothes smoking cigarettes who barely noticed us".

As a child then I never encountered rancour, although it is true that in Britain we were never occupied.

Close to us, about a mile away at Stag Lodge, was a prisoner of war camp, the Hazeldene Camp, guarded by Americans... No one wanted to escape. I made friends with the Italians on the other side of the wire and with the Americans who gave me and other children food rations, chocolate and comics... I remember those comics... They probably influenced me a lot, for Superman was no common hero. He was always on the side of justice and won.

These are small insignificant events perhaps, but the human mind builds character upon these events in childhood and I cannot help but feel sad when I see the Game Boys and War Games practiced and the destruction within the child's mind that seems to do nothing else but provide it with a thirst for greedy violence. Then I feel fortunate that I lived in such a time.