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Making History
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Go to the Listen Again page |
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 Tuesday 3.00-3.30 p.m |
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Sue Cook presents the series that examines listeners' historical queries, exploring avenues of research and uncovering mysteries. |
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Children strafed by enemy planes in World War Two
A brief mention of a listener's childhood experience of being strafed by enemy planes in the street when a schoolboy during the Second World War has brought in a flood of similar accounts from all over the country.
Joyce Eaton says she and her mother were walking along Hospital Bridge Road in Whitton near Twickenham when an enemy plane began machine-gunning them. Joyce says: "Chips were sent up from the road around them while we lay on the ground sheltering behind a small garden wall."
It was not just in the London area. Simon Stanley says that his grandmother, then living in Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, was attacked by an enemy plane while hanging out the washing. Simon's mother, then a little girl, clearly remembers seeing the pilot sitting in the front of the plane with a gunner immediately behind him, facing backwards. The gunner saw my grandmother, took aim and fired as she ran back into the house. A number of bullets were subsequently dug out of the wooden walls of the garden shed.
From Devon:
"A friend, now 75, remembers vividly when Newton Abbot railway station was bombed at 6pm on August 20th, 1940. She remembers playing with her friends in a playing field near the cooling tower. Three German planes looped their way around the cooling tower and she saw the bomb doors open and bombs dropped over the railway station. The planes then came back and she remembers seeing the face of the pilot who fired the machine gun onto the playing fields and at least one child was hit."
So it didn't just happen in London, and the machine-gun fire was not a way of clearing the decks before the bombs were dropped.
Jean Penny remembers being strafed by a German plane on the beach at Exmouth in the summer of 1943. She was playing on the beach with some other children being looked after by a group of mums. They saw the plane and the mums gathered the children behind some large rocks on the beach before the shooting started. Jean's mother remembers the bullets hitting the sand.
David Cross says:
"In the summer of 1944 (aged 12) I was living in Teignmouth in South Devon having been evacuated from London. The front beaches were heavily covered with barbed wire but a beach on the river estuary was open and we had the use of a beach hut. One afternoon we were playing on the beach when a small aeroplane appeared low over Haldon Hill. We assumed it was one of ours when suddenly it opened up its machine guns. My mother screamed at us to lie down and I have a memory of the sight of bullets splashing into the water. The plane disappeared behind the cliff at Shaldon and we ran up the beach to take cover in the hut. To our horror the plane made another sweep and we heard the sound of bullets and shell casings rattling on the roof of the hut. Later we heard that it had dropped some bombs aimed at the railway which runs beside the sea. Only one person was injured, with a bullet in his leg."
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Vanessa has presentedÌýscience and current affairs programmes for ±«Óãtv, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Discovery and has presented for ±«Óãtv Radio 4 & Five Live and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, Scotsman and Sunday Herald.Ìý