The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ clear. There were already nine fires designated as ‘conflagrations’ (when fires coalesce, burn out of control and spread rapidly), nineteen requiring thirty pumps, forty needing ten, and over a thousand smaller incidents.

      By now Surrey Docks was a square mile of fire. The paint on the fireboats attempting to douse the flames blistered in the intense heat, as cranes buckled and crashed into the river. At the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich many of the buildings on fire contained live ammunition and highly flammable nitroglycerine. Water mains had been damaged, and when the hydrants ran dry water had to be pumped from the Thames, reservoirs, even ponds and ditches. At Woolwich a fireman aboard one of six fireboats which had been ordered to return to London from a fire at the Shell-Mex Thameshaven oil refinery on Canvey Island at the mouth of the Thames, its 2,000-ton-capacity tanks ablaze after a bomb attack on 5 September, saw ‘an extraordinary spectacle. There was nothing but fire ahead, apparently stretching right across the river and burning on both of its banks. We seemed to be entering a tunnel of fire – no break in it anywhere. All the usual landmarks were obliterated by walls of flame. Burning barges drifted past. For many hours no contact with the shore was possible. We did what we could where we could. At one time we were just getting into position to fight a fire in a large warehouse when the whole of the riverside front collapsed into the water with a mighty splash. The contents of the building, bags of beans, pouring into the river made a sound like a tropical rain storm. Soon after, we were surprised to see two firemen and three firewomen picking their way along the shore in the direction of Southwark Bridge; they told us they had been cut off in a control room for several hours’ by the fires.

      During the raid, that lasted for over eight hours, 250 German planes had dropped 625 tons of high-explosive bombs and at least eight hundred incendiary bomb canisters, each containing 795 pounds of explosive. A thousand fire pumps were fighting the blaze at the Surrey Docks, with three hundred pumps and over a thousand men trying to contain just one of the largest fires. The firemen wrestled to control their heavy hoses, sending arcs of water through flames that seemed scornful of their efforts, their faces blackened by smoke and soot, their eyes pricking from the heat, their throats and lungs irritated by the smoke and the dust of falling masonry, their uniforms scorched and singed by flying sparks and heavy with the water from the hoses, hungry, thirsty, exhausted.

      F.W. Hurd, a member of the AFS stationed at East Ham fire station, was ordered to a fire at Beckton gasworks at nine o’clock that night.

      Chaos met our eyes. Gasometers were punctured and were blazing away, a power house had been struck rendering useless the hydraulic hydrant supply (the only source of water there). An overhead gantry bearing lines of trucks communicating with the railway siding was also … alight. And then overhead we heard [the German planes], the searchlights searching the sky in a vain effort to locate them. Guns started firing, and then I had my first experience of a bomb explosion. A weird whistling sound and I ducked behind the pump with two other members of the crew. The others, scattered as we were, had thrown themselves down wherever they happened to be. Then a vivid flash of flame, a column of earth and debris flying into the air and the ground heaved. I was thrown violently against the side of the appliance.

      … After a time things quietened down and we went out again. It was now about 10 o’clock and the fire had been burning unattacked by us for lack of water [when] a local Fire Officer arrived and informed us that he knew where we could obtain a supply! Our ‘heavy’ was sent about half a mile from the fire to ‘pick up’ water from three other pumps which were being supplied from hydrants. We relayed the water thro’ a chain of pumps to the fire. And then there was nothing to do except watch the hose and guard it where it crossed an arterial road (from being burst by cars proceeding at speed across it), so we had time to look round. What a sight. About a mile to our right was the riverfront. The whole horizon on that side was a sheet of flame. The entire docks were on fire! On all other sides it was much the same. Fire everywhere. The sky was a vivid orange glow … And all the time the whole area was being mercilessly bombed. The road shuddered with the explosions. AA [anti-aircraft] shells were bursting overhead. A Royal Navy Destroyer berthed in one of the docks was firing her AA equipment, as were other ships. The shrapnel literally rained down. It was now about midnight and still the racket kept on. It surprised me how quickly one got used to sensing whether a bomb was coming our way or not. At first we all lay flat every time we heard anything, but after an hour or so we only dived for it if one came particularly close … At 3am a canteen van arrived and served us tea and sandwiches. It was the first ‘bite’ any of us had had since mid day the day before, 14½ hours ago.

      Just then the bombing became more severe and localised. A brighter glow in the sky immediately over us, then we saw the flames. Another fire had started in the gas works, which by now after 6 hours concentrated work by us, had been got well under control. Then a huge mushroom of flame shot into the air from the docks followed by a dull rolling roar. An oil container had exploded. The whole atmosphere became terrible again with the noise of gunfire. Afterwards when London established its famous [AA] barrage we got used to it, but on that first night it was just Hell.

      Water mains had been fractured all over the East End, as had gas pipes and electrical and telephone cables. With no radio communication between the crews and control, messages had to be relayed by AFS and London Fire Brigade messengers, most of them teenaged boys with tin hats, riding motorbikes or yellow-painted bicycles. Sixteen was the statutory minimum age for such work, but checks were cursory, and many of those undertaking this hazardous and courageous work were younger. They set out to apprise District Control of the situation on the ground, to report the progress of the firefighting and request reinforcements, skidding through wet and cratered streets as the bombs fell, narrowly missing being hit, falling from their machines as girders fell in their path, negotiating piles of rubble, accelerating away to escape walls of fire, disorientated by the noise, the smoke, the confusion.

      One of ‘Gillman’s Devils’, teenaged boys organised by Bill Gillman, Assistant Controller of Operations at West Ham, found himself riding through ‘a patch of burning paint on the roadway in Silvertown from the burning paint works on the corner. Paint stuck to my tyres and set them alight but I rode on the pavement until the flames were out.’ ‘You’d go round a corner and there’d be a great big hole in the road where a bomb had fallen, or half a house had fallen and the debris was blocking the road, or there might be an unexploded bomb,’ remembers Stan Durling, an AFS despatch rider. ‘But that night when I reported for duty at Millwall, you just didn’t know where to look. The chemical works had been hit. Everywhere you looked was fire. Across the water, north, south, east and west, everywhere. It seemed as if the whole East End docks were on fire. It was unbelievable.’ Sixteen-year-old Stan Hook was in the bath when the bombs started to fall. ‘They scream through the air, and then crump, crump, and the bath shook and I thought Christ, bombs. I don’t remember drying myself. I don’t remember getting dressed. But I was on my bike and back to the [fire] station [on the Isle of Dogs] and that’s when I came to. That was the beginning at five o’clock and from then until five o’clock the next day I just lived in a daze. A smoke-filled haze covered everything and orders were flying around in all directions, and you were charging around, and bombs were falling and fires were starting, and it wasn’t until the next morning that I really thought, well this is war.’

      Uncontrollable by any blackout regulations, the river Thames served to guide enemy aircraft to their targets night after night during the blitz. A.P. Herbert, the lawyer, humorist and Independent MP for Oxford University, who had seen active service with the Royal Naval Reserve in France and at Gallipoli in the First World War, joined the River Emergency Service in the Second. This in effect mobilised the Thames as part of London’s defences. On the night of 7 September, Herbert was detailed to take his converted canal boat Water Gipsy from its mooring at Tower Bridge to pick up some wire from a Port of London Authority wreck lighter and take it to North Woolwich. Rounding Limehouse corner, he and his crew

      saw an astonishing picture. Half a mile of Surrey shore … was ablaze – warehouses, wharves, piers, dolphins, barges.

      The wind was westerly СКАЧАТЬ