Blitz Kids, page 53
Leaving the corpse in a ditch, Hulten and Jones returned to London in the grey Ford. It was a foolish act that characterized their poorly planned and hastily executed crimes. Although it was three days before Heath’s body was discovered, Hulten had not yet got rid of the car. Their failure to erase the trail of clues was their undoing. An alert was issued and the police located the vehicle. Officers watched and waited, hoping the driver would return and on Monday, 9 October 1944, as Hulten approached the car, the officers rushed him, pinned him against a wall and arrested him on suspicion of murder. As they searched the car, Hulten’s Remington pistol and ammunition were found. When questioned that morning Hulten told the police he had spent the previous night with a ‘commando’ – or prostitute – named Marina Jones.
The trail then led to Elizabeth Jones. Interviewed by police, she soon incriminated herself – first denying any involvement and then saying she looked tired because of what she had seen. Later she admitted she had been there when Hulten shot Heath. She also admitted to robbing Heath’s body. On the 23 January 1945 they were both sentenced to death. When the sentences were passed, she was led screaming from the court. Six weeks later King George VI signed a conditional pardon and her sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. Prisoner 11393 K. G. Hulten was executed at 9 a.m. on 8 March 1945 at Wormwood Scrubs. He was twenty-two years old.
Four years on from his own early forays into criminality, eleven-year-old Fred Rowe hoped the flying bombs might give him an opportunity to loot food. He rushed to the scenes of explosions in the hope of filling his ever-present shopping bag. Once again, the scenes of carnage made a terrible impression upon him:
What a fucking mess they made! Even behind a wall you could feel the blast. All the debris would come down from the sky: bits of wood, windows, glass. It was like a rain of bricks and mortar. Then a dust cloud came down. There were people running around with blood pouring out of them. I remember one old bloke with no arm. It was just tattered flesh hanging there. It was pumping out blood. He fell down and died in front of us. There was a kid running about with half an arm hanging off. I felt so fortunate ’cause I’d never gone in the shelters, and that had never happened to me. It was only as you grow up that you realize the risks.
Just as the threat of the V1s began to recede, a new threat entered the airspace above London and the south-east: the V2 missile. This arrived silently and so couldn’t be predicted. There was no time for those in its path to take cover. It simply raced down from the sky and unleashed its fury. There was none of the old tension of sitting in air raid shelters listening to bombs coming closer. It was instant and deadly, causing levels of destruction previously unseen by single bombs. The four missiles that landed in Croydon each damaged an average of 500 homes.
The speed with which this new missile travelled meant that few people ever actually saw one. Terry Charles was one of the few to witness the missile in action:
I actually saw one arrive. I couldn’t hear it, but I did see it. As I was walking home after school I crossed a bridge over the railway lines behind Paddington station. It was completely overcast, clouds were filling the whole sky. I was thinking of nothing in particular. Suddenly in the sky a hole appeared in the clouds – a red ring. I knew instantly what it was – a V2. I hit the deck and stayed down. Seconds later it landed a mile or so away.
In a similar experience, Reg Baker saw what he thought was a falling star and – following the old superstition – he thought a new baby must have been born. Then he heard the explosion and realized it had been the glow of a V2 rocket.
Growing used to the destruction, Roy Bartlett became curious about the rockets and missiles and so, whilst with friends, he heard the boom then blast of a falling missile and decided to investigate:
We grabbed our bikes, thinking can we do something? It was about a mile away. We rushed down and found it had struck the Packard Car Company on the Great West Road. By the time we got there US servicemen were helping out and had set up a mobile hospital. There was nothing we could do. One of my most vivid memories is seeing the bodies being laid out on the pavement outside and the blood running into the gutter. I was terribly upset.
Thirty-two workers were dead and more than a hundred were seriously injured in the explosion. The scenes that he witnessed stayed with Roy: ‘Tragedy and trauma making an indelible imprint when the young brain is at its most retentive.’
Fred Rowe also witnessed the aftermath of a V2 rocket attack:
I’ve never heard such a massive noise in my life. I was at least half a mile away. The sky was filled with glass and debris. People who weren’t that close were wounded. I saw a bloke who’d lost an eye. And a woman with her hair burnt off. It was fucking awful. Before that, we had thought the war was over.
He soon found that the destructive power of these new weapons undermined his criminal ventures: ‘It was ghoulish, but we went there to see what we could nick from the shops. But these places were pulverized. There was nothing left. Where was the grub? There was nothing left to nick.’ On 24 March 1945, just weeks before the war in Europe came to an end, the final V2s fell on England. One landed in Orpington, causing a single fatality. The other hit a block of flats in Vallance Road, Stepney, killing 134 people. It was less than two miles away from Grove Road where the first V1 had landed.
When the flying bombs had first appeared thousands of children had once more been evacuated but, with the threat over, London’s children flooded back to the capital. In the spring and summer of 1945 the Metropolitan Police reported children being responsible for a new wave of juvenile crime, in particular petty theft from shops and vandalism. The police station at Lavender Hill in south London noted: ‘Since the return of the evacuees, a very marked rise in this class of offence was recorded at this station’.1
What was noted was the extreme youth of some of the offenders. A nine year old and an eleven year old were found in a bomb-damaged Battersea house that was being repaired. The children were discovered painting the bath, having pierced several tins of paint. The paint then seeped through the floor and ruined the freshly plastered and painted ceilings in the rooms below. Similar cases went through the juvenile courts. In June 1945, a group aged six, eight and ten broke into a shop and spread foodstuffs over the walls. A storeroom at a goods depot in Battersea was forcibly entered and extensive damage caused to building materials. Paint tins were punctured with nails and chimney pots, which were to be used to repair bombed houses, were smashed up. As the police reported, it was: ‘Obvious that the place had been used as a playground.’2 The suspects were aged between seven and ten.
The exasperated local police reported on the source of the crimewave: ‘There is little doubt that the increase of crime on this section is due to the returned evacuees, who look upon bomb-damaged property as a legitimate playground, and during their leisure time gain access to other property adjoining and commit offences.’3 In particular, two young brothers – returned evacuees – were blamed for a large number of crimes.
The truth was that it was not just the returning evacuees who were destroying the buildings. Local boys who had remained in London throughout the war were also responsible. Twelve-year-old Fred Rowe was among them:
We wrecked the places. We smashed up everything. It was all due for demolition. The ‘spivs’ were coming around taking all the nice doors from the houses, or the lead. They’d kick us out, or tell us to be quiet until they’d gone. They didn’t want the Old Bill coming down. When they’d gone, we’d come back and start it all again. The Old Bill were worried about the houses falling down on top of us and killing us. Of course, we didn’t see the dangers. We thought, ‘Fuck it! Bosh!’ There were gangs of us. There were about fifteen of us in my gang. We’d do a whole street. The Old Bill would come and we’d shriek with delight and run off. They’d try and catch us on their bikes.
Having witnessed so much horror and destruction, often having themselves been bombed out, the local kids saw no value in the wrecks of what had once been their homes:
I used to love to wreck stuff. It was a joy to see a house collapse and think you’d done it. You’d kick the floorboards in, get a stout piece of wood and start hitting the window frames out. It was lovely – I used to nick my dad’s hammer to smash stuff up. Brilliant – excellent stuff. We used to cut through the roofs. One time we were running through a house and my mate fell through the floorboards, landed a floor below and twisted his ankle. We’d go home rotten – filthy and dirty. I’d get a clip round the ear for that.
The rising crime levels inspired the local police station to request permission to take positive action. They visited schools, many of which had recently reopened after repairs to bomb damage, to give talks on vandalism. The talks attempted to make the children understand that the police did not blame them for their actions, but simply wished them to think about what they were doing. The talks opened with the words: ‘A boy or girl who has never got into mischief has never been a boy or girl.’4 It was an attempt to engage with the children, in particular the returning evacuees, and empathize with their shock at returning to a landscape utterly transformed by war. The talks highlighted the natural, and understandable, desire of children to break things, telling the audiences: ‘Boys like breaking things … in the same way as puppies like gnawing old shoes or pieces of wood.’
But the tone of the talks changed, pointing out that smashing up abandoned buildings was criminal: ‘Many of these things start quite innocently, but might end up in some little boy or girl appearing in front of a magistrate.’ The lecturers gave the example of a boy who just wanted to impress his mates: ‘He thought he would not get caught. Of course he got caught. They all get caught sooner or later.’ More importantly, there were warnings about the genuine dangers of collapsing buildings, especially for lone vandals: ‘It is possible no one will find you until it is too late to help you’. The police warned that, if the young vandals continued in that manner, they would eventually find themselves in prison. It was a warning Fred Rowe should have heeded.
Notes
1. National Archives MEPO3/1965.
2. National Archives MEPO3/1965.
3. National Archives MEPO3/1965.
4. National Archives MEPO3/1965.
CHAPTER 24
To the Bitter End
‘At last we were “going up”. We had been destined for this moment ever since we had been kids in short pants … Now we, too, were going to do our bit, as the phrase of the time had it. We were going to fight the battle that would achieve victory for our country.’1
Charles Whiting, who volunteered for the Army aged sixteen, describing his approach to the front line just days after his eighteenth birthday
With the Battle for Normandy completed, the British Army broke out from the bridgehead across the Seine at Vernon. For seventeen-year-old Bill Edwardes, who had seen so much suffering and sacrifice in the weeks leading up to the crossing of the Seine, the aftermath of the battle was a wonderful period. His unit’s transport was taken away and they were left far behind the line, ‘licking their wounds’ and enjoying a brief respite from the horrors.
Far ahead, other units drove forward towards Germany. This rapid advance, christened ‘The Swan’ because the Army was ‘sticking its neck out’, took them sweeping across northern France, into Belgium and up to the Dutch border. Most importantly, it took them through the areas being used to launch the V1 rockets that had been raining down on London and south-east England. Former Home Guard Geoff Pulzer, by now serving in the 11th Armoured Division, recalled: ‘The advance was calm but exhilarating. It was amazing how the population came out to meet us. We were in the lead all the way to Antwerp. There were lots of clearing-up jobs on the way.’ Upon arriving in Antwerp, Geoff’s tank went straight into the city centre where they engaged the enemy: ‘We were almost in the centre of Antwerp. There were Germans in dugouts on a bombsite on top of a little hill. We ferreted them out of their positions with our machine-guns. They came out holding white shirts above their heads. We took them prisoner.’
Nearby, in a block of flats, two British teenagers heard what was happening and realized that they might soon be free. The Vanhandenhoeve sisters, who had been stranded in Antwerp since 1940 when their ship was sunk, watched the scenes unfold: ‘We saw the tanks rolling in. It was great excitement.’ However, with British troops occupying the city and the docks becoming operational, war soon returned to Antwerp as the Germans targeted the port with V1 flying bombs and V2 missiles, as Yvonne Vanhandenhoeve later recalled: ‘I hated that. You could hear them coming then it went quiet. It really frightened me. We didn’t have shelters or anything. We just had to put up with it – we didn’t get any time off school.’ Meanwhile, her younger sister Julienne had little idea of the impact the arrival of the 11th Armoured Division would have on her life when she finally returned to England.
As the British Army prepared itself for the inevitable assault into Germany, there was a desperate need for fresh infantrymen. The heavy toll of casualties on the battlefields of Normandy left the Army needing thousands of new recruits. Older men who had spent years at depots across the UK were briefly retrained and sent to the front and the hospitals were scoured for men fit for service. However, not all those who had recovered from wounds were considered suitable for service. The Worcestershire Regiment discovered that one of its wounded ‘men’ was a boy of just sixteen. He was taken before officers and told that he would not be allowed to return overseas. Hearing this, the soldier informed them that he would simply desert and re-enlist. A compromise was reached: he was allowed to rejoin the regiment as a cook, but not allowed on to the front line. He eventually stayed on with the regiment, retiring from the Army with the rank of major.
In September 1944 the British launched ‘Operation Market Garden’, the ill-fated attempt to use airborne troops to capture a series of river bridges between the Belgian–Netherlands border and the town of Arnhem. During the final stages of the battle, as British infantry attempted to push north between Nijmegen and Arnhem, the 1st Worcesters were thrown back into action. Bill Edwardes, still two months away from his eighteenth birthday, was among them: ‘The day we attacked Elst was the worst day of the war for me. It was key for both sides to retain it and so it was a fierce old battle.’ He was at the battalion HQ whilst the infantry held a vital crossroads they had been ordered to occupy. However, the divisional commander, General Thomas, arrived and issued new orders:
He was ranting and swearing – ‘I don’t want you to hold crossroads! Get into Elst – now!’ It was just one hour before darkness, but the lads climbed on to Sherman tanks and advanced. They reached the edge of town, bunkered down for night, then the battle started in the morning. We were unprepared. There was no real plan, just a head-on assault. We should have encircled the town, but there were not enough troops, and the boot of the commanding general was behind us.
During the following day’s battle, Bill found himself thrown back into the world of bullets, blood and death that he had so violently encountered in Normandy. He worked tirelessly to save and evacuate the wounded, and watched as some twenty-seven men were killed. The only difference between this and the fighting in Normandy was that there were now plenty of walls to shelter the wounded behind. Watching the carnage, he soon returned to his fatalistic mindset: ‘It’ll happen one day, so I might as well just get on with it.’ He once again found the ability to make light of their situation. By seeing the funny side of what was dangerous and horrifying, he felt better able to cope with war than many of his comrades.
Arriving in the Netherlands, Eric Davies had an encounter that recalled the life he had enjoyed before war had engulfed his world. Near Tilburg he had a chance encounter with Gareth Evans, an old school friend, whom he had not seen for many years. In the lull of battle, they took the chance to catch up, talking about the old days back in south Wales: ‘We stood talking at the corner of a house – he was on one side, I was on the other. After a while he stopped talking. I went down on all fours and looked around the corner. He had been shot and killed by a sniper.’ One moment Eric had been recalling his school days, the next he had reverted to the soldier he had become. Fetching his carrier and a tank, they opened fire on the house he believed the sniper to be in, destroying it and sniper within.
For Eric, it seemed that he had been unbelievably lucky. He had somehow survived the campaign in Italy and then managed to last for months in north-west Europe without being killed or wounded. He had seen friends and comrades wounded or killed and had again been promoted, reaching the rank of sergeant major while not yet twenty years old. In peacetime such rapid promotion would have been unthinkable, in wartime it seemed inevitable. He had survived many close shaves and felt luck had been on his side. On more than one occasion he had made sudden decisions to move the carrier, only to see the spot they had been waiting in hit by a shell. Such moments gave him a feeling that a guardian angel was watching him, but deep down he knew there was little chance he would get through the campaign unscathed.
The moment he had been waiting for came during an advance over open ground to occupy a village, followed by an attack on some woods occupied by an SS unit. Due to the roads of the village being blocked, Eric had left his carrier behind and advanced on foot. Reaching the edge of the woods, all hell let loose:
