Home » History » The Third Reich » D-Day 6th June 1944 - Part 1

D-Day 6th June 1944 - Part 1

© William Waller

Directly opposite the end of the road was the entrance to the park. Once, there had been gates and railings but they had disappeared long before, at the beginning of the war, when metal of all sorts had been taken for armaments. Now, every night, people trudged through the entrance pushing old prams, bicycles, boxes on wheels, wheelbarrows, loaded up with mattresses, blankets, thermoses, torches, and everything to create a home away from home during the night hours in the shelters.

These shelters, the most successful of many designed during the War, were made of curved iron sheets, supported by hoops of angle iron, half buried in the earth and completed with a thick covering of soil. Through the years, the grass grew over them so that, from a height, the groups of shelters built in most public parks were indistinguishable from the fields in which they stood.

By June 1944, the worst of the bombing was well over but Hitler, in classic mad-scientist style, had been encouraging his inventors to come up with even more weapons of destruction. The result had been, first, the flying bomb, given the derisive name of doodle-bug, or buzz bomb, by a people who found that this late trick was more scary than they wished to admit. Later there was the original of the ICBM, but people did not bother about sheltering from these. The buzz bomb was a different story. The all-pervading and distinct sound of its engine instantly drew up every head as people tried to assess the direction from which it was coming and whether it would go by far enough away not to prove a danger to them. Faces became set in grimaces as it was realized that this one was coming their way. In the shelters at night, far from any form of traffic, the sound of the engine filled the sky. People fixed their eyes on the part of the roof through which they felt they could have seen the exhaust flames as the bomb ‘doodled’ its way slowly across the sky. They prayed for the engine to keep running and take the bomb somewhere else. Very often it did but enough times there would be a sudden silence, just as the bomb seemed to be overhead. The strain of the next few seconds was almost unbearable. Often the sound of the air whistling in the ailerons could be heard, even inside the shelter, and everyone simply waited, suspended, for the explosion. The short wings on the bomb had been designed to maintain the bomb in a straight path once it set off from one of the launching sites along the Channel but once the engine stopped it was notorious that these same wings could guide it in any direction in free fall, sometimes gliding long distances, sometimes falling just like a bomb, straight down. For about nine months, from June 1944 to March 1945, thousands of the bombs were sent over. Only about a third of them reached their target in and around London and many were destroyed by anti-aircraft fire or by fighter planes. Some were even diverted back to their starting point by daring pilots who found that they could, if they got close enough, use the airflow over their own wings to tip the wings of the bomb to make it bank round. By the standards of the day the bomb, powered by a jet engine, travelled fast at over 350 miles an hour and so was not easy to catch up with.