The Inside Story - Anthony Westell

Скачать книгу

      My image of America, like those of millions of other around the world, had been shaped by Hollywood movies, but the American soldiers tended to confirm our good impressions. They were on average bigger than our own soldiers, better uniformed, better educated, and with better manners. They were instructed in how to treat British civilians, and their military police were quick to remove anyone who seemed to be causing trouble. So while there were incidents, mainly over women, most Britons tended to see Americans as saviours whose presence guaranteed victory over Germany. That may be why, many years later, I could not sympathize with the anti-Americanism of many Canadian nationalists who saw, indeed, still see, the United States not as an ally but as a threat.

      I became a “Firewatcher” while still at school. The job was to watch for incendiary bombs and, if possible, put them out before they started a major fire, with a bucket of sand or a stirrup pump — that is, a pump with one leg in a bucket of water to suck, and one leg outside on which the pumper stood to stabilize the operation. Stirrup pumps were distributed by the thousand, and if they sound like an poor way to tackle a bomb, the girl who later became my wife actually made it work: she and an aunt rushed our in their nightdresses when an incendiary fell in the garden and put it out. Even more remarkably, an incendiary fell through the roof of the house next door and was promptly kicked downstairs by an old lady and extinguished. Nothing as exciting as that happened to me.

      With a friend, I spent an occasional night firewatching at our school. We played chess and the headmaster came down in his dressing gown and trounced us both. At home, when air raid sirens sounded I put on my steel helmet and, with my father, turned out to patrol the crescent in which we lived. But not as promptly one night as I might have done, because I had got too accustomed to sirens when German bombers passed over, going to or from Devonport, a major naval base about forty miles away, or Bristol, an industrial centre seventy miles away. Sometimes the planes dumped their bombs on us when they couldn’t find their real target, or perhaps were being chased by night fighters. There were in fact nineteen raids on Exeter between August 1940 and May 1942, most of them minor affairs.

      I was in bed on the third floor of our house — on a hill about a mile from the city centre — on the night of May 3-4, 1942 and did not pay much attention when the sirens went and I heard bombs exploding a couple of miles away. But then I saw the night sky turn red and realized there was a major fire in the city. In fact, great stretches of the High Street were ablaze, including Tudor era buildings which burned all too easily. My father and I donned our steel helmets and went outside, while my sister, our housekeeper, Alice, and the dog, and a new kitten, promptly named Blitz, took shelter in a sort of store room between the sitting and dining rooms. When, a little later, I tried to check on them, I had a struggle to open the front door; blast had lifted the linoleum throughout the house, jamming the doors. I don’t know what caused the blast. No bombs fell very close to us, but nearby, on the county cricket ground, anti-aircraft guns were blasting away. Or perhaps the great fire in the centre caused a powerful wind as it sucked in oxygen.

      We learned after the war that 40 Junkers 88 bombers flew up the River Exe to find the little city of about 80,000 people, and dropped 10,000 incendiaries and some 160 explosive bombs to spread the blaze. About 160 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. One bomb fell through the roof of the cathedral and exploded, but they built medieval churches to last and, with a huge tarpaulin over the roof, the place survived until it could be repaired when peace came. The new library and a million books burned, much to my dismay: I was a great reader, even then, and it had been my custom to stop at the library on the way home from school to replenish the supply of books — G. A. Henty’s stirring stories about boys adventuring in the Empire, and, always favourites, yarns about boys who ran away to sea. I remember the indignation of a librarian when I borrowed a short book, read it over tea, and tried to return it the same evening: Not allowed!

      We didn’t know at the time why the Germans had picked on Exeter, a city of little or no obvious military or industrial importance. There were rumors but censorship was tight; I had just begun work as an apprentice reporter and spent the next few days phoning our reports through to London for censoring. We were allowed to announce that there had been a raid on a place in the southwest, and to describe the damage in general terms, but not to name the city because, it was ruled, that would show the Germans, who might have been lost, where they had dropped their bombs. Actually, as we found out after the war, the Germans not only knew they had blitzed Exeter, but also why, and were boasting about it. The raid was in fact a reprisal for an attack by the Royal Air Force in March on the historic German city of Lubeck, on the Baltic. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of bomber command and known popularly as Bomber Harris, had come to the sobering conclusion that night bombing of specific German targets was so inaccurate as to have little value, and he decided to try the tactic of attacking whole German cities, setting them ablaze where possible. Lubeck was chosen as an experimental target because it could be approached over water where there were no A-A guns, and because it was “flammable,” many of the buildings being medieval. The raid was a success in the sense that Lubeck was set ablaze, but Hitler, outraged at this uncivilized form of warfare, ordered that reprisal raids be carried out on historic British cities. The targets were picked from the famous German guide book, Baedeker, and so the raids on Exeter and other cathedral cities were called Baedeker raids.

      When I told this story some fifty years later in the course of a travel article about Exeter published in The Globe and Mail, I was attacked by an Ontario judge who had been a bomber pilot in Britain and had taken part in the raid on Lubeck. He insisted that old city was a legitimate target because it was a port and an industrial city manufacturing U-boat components. Perhaps so, but that was not why Harris made it the target for the new form of fire bomb attack — terror bombing, as it came to be called. Similarly, the British Admiralty’s chart-making division had been evacuated from London to Exeter, but that was not why Hitler ordered the attack on the city. The Germans were wrong in claiming that Exeter had been destroyed, but acres of the ancient centre were, and the city has never recovered its former charm. In the postwar rush to rebuild, more attention was paid to commerce than to history and culture.

      For me, these first years of the war were a waiting time. I wanted desperately to join the armed services, preferably the navy. Why? Adventure, I suppose, a challenge, new experiences, independence in the sense of leaving home and becoming a man. I believe those are the reasons most men, and most women, volunteer in a war. It’s absurd to call us heroes just because we served, or to pretend that we all marched off to defend liberty — and even more absurd to call those who were conscripted against their will heroes and martyrs. There were of course heroes, men and women who served far beyond the call of duty, displayed unusual courage, gave their lives to save others. To call us all heroes demeans those who deserve the title. I registered as a volunteer as soon as I was old enough, which was seventeen years and eight months. A close friend who also was working as an apprentice reporter volunteered with me, and we were called on December 23, 1943, two days before Christmas and four weeks before my eighteenth birthday.

      The navy gathered most of its recruits in what had been a holiday camp — Butlin’s Holiday Camp — near Skegness on the flat North Sea coast of Lincolnshire. In times of peace, workers and their families enjoyed cheap holidays, living in long lines of wooden huts, grandly called chalets, and eating and playing in vast, jerry built halls. Over the entrance there hung a welcoming sign that said, as I recall, “Your Pleasure is Our Endeavor,” and it remained there, heavy with irony, when the Admiralty took over. Pleasure was not on the agenda for the scores of thousands of aspiring sailors who passed under the sign; basic training, square bashing, discipline, indoctrination, inoculation and immunization, and more discipline were. For a well-brought-up middle-class youth, the culture shock was severe. My shipmates — in the navy they are shipmates even in a shore establishment — came from all parts of Britain, and Ireland. There were volunteer youths of my age, and older men with families, because by 1943 Britain was calling up men in their late 30s. For the first time in my life, I was living, and suffering all sorts of indignities, with mates from the working class and with accents I could hardly understand. I have a group photo taken at the time in which I am a pudgy youth with owllike glasses, with my head on one side, of course.

      The living huts had never been intended for winter and were perishing cold. There was no hot water in

Скачать книгу