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A dark, cramped space of stagnant air, the bomb shelter’s interior smelled of cold mortar and stale sweat. A stone seat ran the length of one inner wall, while, on the floor, an electric lantern cast a pallid circle of light across the morbid discovery made earlier that morning. The brick-built shelter was one of several on Montague Place, Marylebone—near Regent’s Park in Central London—and one of countless similar structures that lined the streets of the capital. It was just shy of nine o’clock, and a harsh winter’s sun backlit the city’s shattered skyline. Daybreak came hard to London, a metropolis whose landscape had been forever altered by incendiary and high-explosive—but the air-raid sirens had remained silent the night before.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blackout-Murder ... 457&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Story-Blacko ... 849&sr=1-1
Gordon Cummins
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gordon Frederick Cummins (1913 or 1914 – 25 June 1942), known as the Blackout Killer and the Blackout Ripper, was an English spree killer who murdered four women in London in 1942. The Ripper tag came from similarities with the Jack the Ripper murders as both killers mutilated their victims.
Background
Cummins was born in York in late 1913 or early 1914. He married a theatre producer's secretary in 1936. He was a Leading aircraftman in the Royal Air Force where he was nicknamed The Count because of his claims to have noble heritage. Cummins had volunteered to retrain for aircrew duties and had been posted to RAF ACRC (Aircrew Reception Centre) Regents Park, London. There serving members of the RAF and new recruits were assessed for training. This intake ran from 2nd to 25th February when trainees were posted to ITW (Initial Training Wing) at home for 3 months ground training before commencing flying training, or to Blackpool prior to going overseas for training.
Victims
Over six days in February 1942, Cummins took advantage of London's night-time blackout conditions to murder four women and attempt to murder two others. He mutilated the bodies of three of his victims:
Evelyn Hamilton
On Sunday 9 February 1942, the body of 40 year old pharmacist Evelyn Hamilton was discovered in an air raid shelter in Montagu Place in Marylebone. She had been strangled and her handbag stolen.
Evelyn Oatley
On Monday 10 February, the naked body of 35 year old Evelyn Oatley (also known as Nita Ward) was discovered in her flat on Wardour Street. As well as having been strangled, her throat had been cut and she had also been sexually mutilated with a can opener. Fingerprints found on the can opener confirmed earlier suspicions that the strangler was left-handed.
Margaret Lowe
On Tuesday 11 February, a 43 year old prostitute, Margaret Florence Lowe (also known as Pearl), was murdered in her flat in Gosfield Street, Marylebone. She had been strangled with a silk stocking and her body mutilated with a variety of implements including a razor blade, a knife and a candlestick. The pathologist, Bernard Spilsbury, after seeing her injuries commented that they were "quite dreadful" and that the murderer was "a savage sexual maniac".
Doris Jouannet
On Wednesday 12 February 1942, 32 year old Doris Jouannet (also known as Doris Robson) was murdered in the ground floor flat that she shared with her husband. She had been strangled with a scarf and her naked body sexually mutilated. It was at this point the newspapers began to describe the killer as the Blackout Ripper, in reference to the similarities with Jack the Ripper.
Greta Hayward
On Friday 14 February 1942, Greta Hayward was attacked in a doorway near Piccadilly Circus by a man in RAF uniform whose sexual advances she had previously rejected. She managed to escape as her attacker was interrupted by the arrival of a delivery boy making his rounds. The attacker then ran off.
Mrs. Mulcahy
Shortly after the attack on Greta Hayward there was another attack. Mrs. Mulcahy, a prostitute (also known as Kathleen King), was attacked by a customer in her flat near Paddington Railway Station. She managed to fight off her attacker, who gave her an extra £5 before running off leaving his belt behind.
Arrest and trial
When Cummins had been disturbed by the delivery boy during the attack on Greta Hayward, he left behind his gas mask case. The gas mask container had the service number 525987 on the side, identifying it as belonging to Cummins.
Cummins had neither a criminal record nor a history of violence. He was arrested on 16 February and when his quarters were searched various items belonging to his victims were found. His fingerprints were found in two of the flats where the killings took place, and his fingerprints also matched those found on the can opener used to mutilate Evelyn Oatley.
Cummins's trial for the murder of Evelyn Oatley began on 27 April 1942 at the Old Bailey. The evidence against Cummins was conclusive and after a one day trial the jury took just 35 minutes to find him guilty of murder. He was sentenced to death by hanging and was executed on 25 June 1942 at Wandsworth Prison, during an air raid.
Scotland Yard later claimed that Cummins had murdered two other women during air raids in London in October 1941.
The foremost fingerprint expert of the day, Detective Chief Superintendent Frederick Cherrill, was instrumental in proving the case against Cummins.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Cummins
Loose women, looting and murder... the darker side of the Blitz Spirit
By Juliet Gardiner
UPDATED: 22:25 GMT, 30 August 2010
Seventy years after Hitler launched the Blitz, our series brings it back to life in vivid detail. Yesterday, we told of the horrific conditions in London's underground air raid shelters. Today, in the final part, we go behind the blackout curtains to reveal how ordinary Britons sought refuge from the bombings - in the bedroom and the bottle...
Against the dates November 14 and 15 on the 1940 calendar was an empty circle, the symbol for a full moon: in peacetime a poacher's or a hunter's moon, now, two months into the Blitz, chillingly renamed a 'bomber's moon'. Britain braced itself for an attack.
At 7.07pm on the 14th, the message 'Raiders Approaching Your Area' flashed up at Coventry's council headquarters. Three minutes later the signal changed to 'Raiders Overhead', and as the mournful notes of the siren hung in the dark, the first bombs began to fall. The attack that would lay to waste an entire city had begun.
By 8.30pm 'Coventry appeared to be ablaze from end to end', according to one contemporary report. An hour later 'a halo of red flames' could be seen clearly from Warwick, seven miles away, and Birmingham, 18 miles to the west, as fire engines from both cities hurtled along the country lanes to help fight the inferno.
The Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital, near the local ordnance factory, displayed a lighted red cross on its roof to indicate its status. But to no avail: a huge bomb came crashing into one of the wards, and surgeon Dr Harry Winter watched 'a whole wall of the building fall slowly outward across the open ground where I'd been just a few seconds before'.
Afterwards he wrote: 'We put the patients on stretchers and blankets along the main corridor. Then the casualties started to come in, so fast that we didn't have time for detailed examinations. All we could do was divide them into resuscitation cases and those requiring immediate surgery. I suppose I did about 15 operations throughout the night.'
'Sexual desire in women intensified during the Blitz'
One of the student nurses at the city's Gulson Road Hospital, now in her 80s, has similar memories. 'The beds began to fill up very quickly,' she remembers. 'Sometimes we would have to clear away thick dirt before seeing the patient: they seemed to have been dug out of the ground. Everyone was working as a member of a team - even the consultants, who were normally treated like gods, became human.
'Until then, I had always had the fear of being left with the limb of a patient in my hand after amputation. The Blitz on Coventry changed all that for me. I didn't have the time to be squeamish. Thousands of patients passed through the hospital that night. If a patient died, they were just taken out of the bed and it was remade for the next patient.'
All night, huddled in public shelters, frightened citizens would hear snatches of news from Air Raid Precaution wardens who poked their heads in: 'The Birmingham Road's blocked'; 'Woolworths is gone'; 'The cathedral's on fire.'
Just before midnight, a further wave of bombers swept across Coventry. They had no need of navigational aids now: the burning city was a beacon, their targets illuminated as clear as day. By 1am, all the windows in the operating theatre at the Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital had been blown out.
'It was an amazing scene,' said Dr Winter. 'Patients were lying head to toe on every inch of space. Near the entrance lobby I noticed the hospital superintendent. He was kneeling beside the patients lying on the floor, and as I passed along I could hear a few words of their prayers.
'Although we had only 440 beds, we had 275 patients when the raid started, and hundreds more were admitted during the night. New patients were put on top of the beds while the old patients sheltered underneath them.
'At 4am our emergency light failed as I was in the middle of an operation. We quickly rigged up an automatic headlamp to a battery set and I finished the job. Bombs were still crashing down and every few minutes hunks of earth and debris crashed against the brick wall outside the theatre. By this time no one even bothered to duck.'
Police officers accompany a mother and her two young daughters past an unexploded bomb sign in London
Mass-observation investigators, whose job was to monitor the all-important levels of public morale seen as essential to the war effort, found 'an unprecedented dislocation and depression in Coventry' the next day. 'There were more open signs of hysteria, terror and neurosis observed in one evening than during the whole of the past two months together in all areas,' they reported
'Women were seen to cry, to scream, to tremble all over, to faint in the street, to attack a fireman. The overwhelmingly dominant feeling was one of utter helplessness. The tremendous impact of the previous night had left people practically speechless.'
The report concluded that the same shortcomings applied in the provinces as they had in the capital: 'Plenty of forethought given to the material damage caused by an attack - casualties, dealing with fires, clearing up debris, etc - but woefully little to the social and psychological effects.'
These wartime psychological effects included, according to one wartime specialist, Dr George Franklin, not only such hysteria and shock, but also what he described as 'jaunty behaviour' or 'defence through defiance', brought about by heightened anxiety.
'Apparently normal people drank more alcohol,' wrote Dr Franklin. 'Sexual desire, especially in women, was much intensified during the Blitz. A number of men complained to me about their wives making excessive demands, and I know of very many who were unfaithful to their husbands.'
The destruction of Coventry's magnificent 600-year-old cathedral became a potent symbol of what one writer described as 'the fathomless barbarity which has been released on civilisation', just as the survival of St Paul's Cathedral in London would later come to represent Britain's indomitable will to resist.
With the devastation of Coventry, the Blitz had begun to take a different turn. Instead of concentrating its efforts on London, the Luftwaffe broadened its range of targets to take in other strategically placed cities. By the end of 1940, bombs had rained down on targets from Aberdeen to Cornwall. In the Midlands, Birmingham had endured 36 raids and Coventry 21.
While London held the unwelcome record with 126 attacks, Merseyside - including Liverpool and Birkenhead - was Hitler's number-one target outside the capital on account of its links with the Atlantic. On November 28, more than 350 tons of high-explosive bombs, 30 large land mines and 3,000 incendiaries carpeted the area, killing almost 300 people.
One of the most distressing incidents of that dreadful night happened at the Ernest Brown Junior Technical College in Liverpool's Durning Road, the basement of which had been converted into a large public shelter. When the alert sounded, two trams stopped outside and the passengers streamed into the already crowded space. At 1.55am the school took a direct hit.
The three-storey building collapsed into the basement shelter, killing some people outright and burying others alive. Gas and boiling water from the fractured central-heating system poured in, and wooden beams ignited - 164 men, women and children were killed in the shelter and 96 were seriously injured.
The Lucas family lived in nearby Chantry Street. They used the school shelter nightly, but on November 28 Mrs Lucas had decided to stay at home with baby Brenda and six-year-old Joe, because people in the shelter had complained about Joe's whooping cough keeping them awake.
She sent her other four children to the school in the care of 17-year-old Florence, the oldest. All four children died in the shelter: Florence, George, aged four, Frances, nine, and Winifred, seven. 'The trauma of that night was so terrible that for six months my mother couldn't speak,' remembers Joe Lucas, now 76. 'She never spoke a word. Brenda was only a babe in arms, but for a long time Mam wouldn't let us more than an arm's length away from her.'
Other key cities that suffered horrific damage and sustained vast numbers of human losses included Plymouth, Bristol, Glasgow and Hull. Cardiff was another identified by Hitler as a 'vital harbour installation', and on January 2, 1941, more than 100 Luftwaffe planes dropped high-explosive bombs and 14,000 incendiaries on the city.
More than 60 civilians were killed in one residential suburb within the first half-hour of the raid. In one of its streets, a rescue party dug for several hours to free a six-year-old child trapped under a staircase.
Throughout the rescue operation the boy was reported to have sung God Save The King. He had learned from his father, a coal miner, that when men were buried underground they kept on singing, and he said that the national anthem was the only song to which he knew the words.
Thieves eased rings from dead peoples' fingers
But it was London which continued to bear the brunt. On March 8, 1941, after two virtually raid-free months, 30,000 incendiaries fell on the capital.
In the West End, two 110lb bombs fell near Leicester Square, damaging the Rialto Cinema and crashing down into what was advertised as 'the safest and gayest restaurant in town, 20ft below ground', the Café de Paris, where the phenomenally popular singer Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson had just started to croon the second chorus of the Thirties revival Oh Johnny (How You Can Love). One bomb failed to explode and split open, spilling its contents on the floor; the other exploded in front of the stage, killing Johnson, a member of his band and the Café's head waiter. The room was packed, with a smart crowd of officers on leave and elegant women in evening dress sipping cocktails and enjoying the music. Thirty of them were killed and many more injured, including Betty, the daughter of the pre-war Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
A dustman who happened to be passing the club wept at the sight of 'young men in uniform carrying out their dead girlfriends'.
The tragedy caught the imagination of the newspapers of the time, and for several days they were full of the bravery of girls who had torn their expensive dresses into strips to make bandages for the injured. But there was one aspect of the tragedy the papers did not report.
As the dead and injured lay among the debris, looters had picked their way among them, easing rings from dead fingers or, so rumour had it, even cutting off the fingers with a penknife; denuding corpses of earrings and necklaces and stuffing gold compacts and cigarette cases into their pockets as quickly as they could.
Looting was the shameful antithesis of the Blitz spirit about which very little was reported at the time, so detrimental was it thought to be to the nation's morale - and it was widespread. 'I lost more through looting than by bomb damage,' said one London trader in 1941.
Some looters were bomb-chasers: when a raid was on, they would converge on a target area and smash shop windows as the bombs fell and official attention was distracted and the streets empty.
The Blitz, like the blackout, provided cover for all sorts of nefarious activities - in one case, a murder was passed off as a death in an air raid: pickpocketing was rife and racketeers charged exorbitant sums for 'reserving' a place in a shelter.
People made false claims for the loss of ration books or ID cards, or said they had been bombed out when they hadn't: one Wandsworth man claimed to have been bombed out 19 times in five months before the authorities realised his game and he was sent to prison for three years in February 1941.
Many looters were petty criminals who found the Blitz provided unprecedented opportunities. Others were in the right place at the right time, pouncing when they saw watches, jewellery, radios and cartons of cigarettes spilling out from the windows of a bombed shop.
But some were previously honest citizens who had lost virtually everything and who were yielding to temptation during a period of enormous stress, picking up what could seem to them like discarded goods: extraordinary behaviour brought about by extraordinary times.
The end of the Blitz, when it finally came, was as brutal as the start had been. During a single raid on the night of May 10, the capital sustained the most devastating losses in its 2,000-year history: 1,436 people were killed and many more would die of their injuries; 1,800 were seriously injured, 11,000 houses were irreparably damaged and 12,374 people were made homeless - not that anyone knew that appalling toll as they waited for the alert to sound again the next day.
It came at 9.30pm. 'We've had it,' the firemen said to one another. But it was a false alarm and 30 minutes later the all-clear sounded. The Blitz, in London at least, was over, although smaller raids would continue elsewhere for a few weeks.
'It took a long time to realise that the raid on May 10 was the last one,' recalled East End fireman Cyril Demarne. 'We'd been so used to having a raid every night, or them stopping and then starting again. And then, of course, we got the answer. Hitler had attacked Russia - what Churchill called the biggest blunder in history.
'And we realised that the Luftwaffe couldn't possibly come to us now, so it was safe to go to bed at night and have a good night's rest, dry our clothes and get our breath back.'
During the eight months the Blitz had lasted, the capital and much of the rest of the country had suffered grievously - particularly Britain's ports and industrial centres. More than 43,500 civilians had been killed nationwide during those seemingly endless 243 days.
Officially, 71,000 people were seriously injured and 88,136 slightly injured. The true total is probably higher, since records were not always kept fully at times of crisis.
But what can be definitively said is that during the Blitz, Britain's civilians were on the front line of battle - it would not be until the autumn of 1942 that the enemy would have killed more British soldiers than civilians.
'Of course, we knew the map of London, we knew it very well,' said Hajo Hermann, a Luftwaffe bomber squadron leader. 'And my thought was that London is too big. What should we do to destroy London? That is quite impossible.'
And for London, read Britain.
Extracted from the Blitz: The British Under Attack, by Juliet Gardiner, published by HarperPress tomorrow at £25. Juliet Gardiner 2010. To order a copy at £22.50 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... pirit.html
London in the blitz: How crime flourished under cover of the blackout
As the 70th anniversary of the start of the blitz approaches, Duncan Campbell reveals how black marketeers, thieves and looters took advantage of the misfortunes of war
The first people to be liberated by Britain in the second world war were our own criminals. As the declaration of hostilities was announced in 1939, the gates of the country's prisons swung open for any inmate with less than three months left to serve and all the Borstal boys who had completed six months.
Next month sees the 70th anniversary of the start of the blitz and there will be, quite rightly, many celebrations of the courage and stoicism displayed during it. What may receive less publicity are the activities of those who took advantage of the confusion to make their criminal fortunes because, as most of the nation pulled together to help each other, others were very busily helping themselves.
One of the first lucky ones to pick up a get-out-of-jail-free card was Billy Hill, the dapper gangster from Seven Dials central London, who would emerge from the war as the leading figure in the capital's underworld. He immediately appreciated what a fabulous opportunity the war presented. "I don't pretend to be a King and country man, but I must say I did put my name down to serve and until they came to get me I was making the most out of a situation," said Hill in his ghosted autobiography, Boss of Britain's Underworld, published in 1955. "So that big, wide, handsome and, oh, so profitable black market walked into our ever open arms. Some day someone should write a treatise on Britain's wartime black market. It was the most fantastic side of civilian life in wartime. Make no mistake. It cost Britain millions of pounds. I didn't merely make use of the black market. I fed it."
Hill also realised that the departure of so many young men to war would soon lead to a weakened police force, as indeed it did. Early in the war his gang staged a series of jewellery robberies in the West End, including one in which they smashed their way with a car-jack into Carringtons in Regent Street and made off with £6,000 worth of goods. Within weeks of wartime rationing being introduced, Hill was selling everything from whisky to sausage skins at £500 a barrel. Despite spells back inside, he emerged from the war a wealthy man.
During the blitz, one standard ruse for thieves was to kit themselves out with an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden's helmet and armband and smash their way into shops when no one was looking. Such was the power of the armband that the public would dutifully help load up a car, believing that the goods were being removed for safe keeping. Some unscrupulous villains used vehicles disguised as ambulances for their getaways.
But while it was predictable that professional criminals should seek to profit from blitz and blackout, what was more surprising was how many others joined them. Rationing, introduced for food and luxury goods, led to widespread abuse by people who would never have considered themselves lawbreakers. In 1943, in one operation, five million clothing coupons were stolen and the government had to cancel the entire issue. By 1945 more than 114,000 prosecutions for black market activities had taken place, sometimes for remarkably minor and understandable breaches of the law.
Prosecutions for breaching regulations were no respecter of rank. Ivor Novello, composer of the famous first world war song, Keep the Home Fires Burning, was sentenced to eight weeks – reduced to four – in 1944 for the fairly minor misuse of petrol coupons offered to him by a female fan. But perhaps more remarkable was the number of people who took part in another growth industry of the blitz: looting.
Juliet Gardiner, the social historian and author of Wartime: Britain 1939-1945, says that, while most people found looting despicable, examples differentiated between stealing someone's property and spotting a wireless or jewellery lying on the pavement after an air raid and reckoning that, if you didn't take it, someone else would. "Looting can be a rather elastic term," says Gardiner. "There are stories about rescue parties going to a pub and having to dig for bodies, which is a very grisly task; one of the leaders of such a rescue party found a bottle of brandy and passed it round his men to have a swig to stiffen their sinews and he was actually sentenced to six months in prison. It was mitigated on appeal, but it gives you an idea of what a broad spectrum the notion of looting could cover."
In the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London, there are detailed records of people's experiences during the blitz. The Rev John Markham, vicar of a church near the Elephant and Castle and a chief fire warden, was one who kept a detailed log. He described how one "volunteer" warden had offered to join the team. "I made a few discreet inquiries and found out that he was a burglar and that his van was full of tools," wrote Markham, "and that he'd made a point of driving all over the borough, particularly to business premises when they were hit, and diving straight into the ruins to find the safe. His only concern with us was that he wanted the cover of a warden's badge as an identity card." Markham's team would take bodies to the crypt of his church and have them guarded by a warden because otherwise people might steal their wallets or wedding rings.
One trader in east London at the beginning of 1941 reckoned that shopkeepers lost more from crime than they ever did from German bombs. When the Café de Paris, which had a supposedly secure underground ballroom, suffered a direct hit in 1941, rescuers were shocked to find that looters were among them, yanking brooches and rings from the bodies of the revellers.
The courts were kept busy. In December 1940, Sheffield Assizes set aside two days to deal only with looters. And the press were in no doubt as to the heinous nature of the offence. "Hang A Looter And Stop This Filthy Crime!" exhorted the Daily Mirror in November 1940.
There was little the police could do to protect wrecked shops whose smashed windows were often just replaced with cardboard or plywood. Police cars were subject to the same petrol shortages as everyone else and pursuits during the blackout were almost impossible. Bill Biggs, now 100, was a police officer in London during the war and remembers spotting three men breaking into a clothes shop to steal suits and dressing gowns. "Clothing was rationed and to buy a suit you needed any amount of coupons," he explains. "If you could acquire some coupons, you did very well."
Some crimes were related purely to the war: for instance, some doctors took bribes to sign people off as unfit to serve. Canny souls with gammy legs or some other disability, would, for up to £150 a time, assume the identity of someone who had received call-up papers and attend the medical on their behalf, ensuring that they were excused service.
Another scam came into play after every Luftwaffe raid. The government paid £500 to those who had lost their homes through the bombing, plus additional compensation for damaged furniture and clothing. One enterprising chap, Walter Handy, claimed to have been "bombed out" 19 times in a five-month period. His luck eventually ran out and he was jailed for three years. The blackout was also the pickpocket's best friend.
Prostitution flourished. The "Piccadilly commandoes", as they were nicknamed, plied their trade in Soho, catering to the thousands of soldiers about to depart for the front. The relaxed mores of the time were reflected in the ditty I've Got the Deepest Shelter in Town, sung by the cabaret singer, actress and impersonator Florence Desmond: "Please don't be mean/ Better men than you have been/ In the deepest shelter in town." It was a golden era for double-entendre lyrics: rationing prompted the cheery ballad, "Everyone's pinching my butter/They won't leave my butter alone."
The people who attracted less opprobrium but also found wartime a bonanza for crime were the "legitimate" businessmen who realised that they could charge the government pretty much what they wanted for vital services. "The war was regarded by many businesses as a fantastic entrepreneurial opportunity," said Professor Dick Hobbs of the London School of Economics, who specialises in the study of organised crime. "The government was seen by many businesses as fair game for fraud, so all kinds of ghost workers would be put on payrolls."
Hobbs reckons that one side-effect of the war was the change in the public's attitude to crime. "It introduced people to crime and the possibilities of crime that they hadn't necessarily been aware of before, whether it was actually doing the crime itself – going out and stealing or poaching rabbits and selling them to the butcher or the neighbours – or whether it was just buying and selling stolen goods."
However, while the "spivs and drones", as the BBC described them at the time, may have had their "finest hour" and the crime rate increased by 57% from 1939 to 1945, there was never the descent into the kind of civilian lawlessness that has characterised so many other wars over the past half century.
Juliet Gardiner says: "Even though looting and incidents of crime shot up during the war, I still think the British people did pull together."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/ ... h-blackout
I was watching some lengthy compilations of every kind of camera footage you could imagine from New York on 9/11 last night, and I saw a few things - here and there - people being trampled, a fight that flared with a police officer, screaming and swearing at fire-fighters and each other - that sparked memories of these kind of Blitz tales. I wondered whether there had been any stories of looting or theft under the screen of evacuation, smoke and panic in New York that day - I'm still wondering, in fact. Of course, the Blitz was a more deadly and prolonged affair, but it's interesting to observe how people act both in extreme circumstance and when the fear of discovery, capture, opprobrium and punishment abates. It is widely believed that those who lived through the Second World War - soldiers and civilians alike - experienced an intensity of life that they could never rediscover in peacetime: the excitement and fear of combat, whirlwind marriages and affairs, the juxtaposition of life and death, &c., &c. The stories above show that this intensity could be channelled in all directions - some healthy, some not. Please post anything of a similar nature you find here.
Harry Meacham worked as an air-raid warden during the Second World War. He was interviewed for the television documentary in The People's War (1987).
The streets were lit up like day. Houses were burning, shops were burning, it was a proper inferno. Heat was something terrible. The soles of your shoes were being burnt because of the heat of the pavement. In one period I never took my clothes off for six weeks.
There was one outside shelter with I suppose fifty or sixty were in the shelter. When I got to the shelter we could do nothing for them. They were literally blown to pieces. The next morning you could see pieces of them in the trees. Another time I came across nine bodies dead at a factory bench with no visual signs of injury. Blast had caused it. It had blown all their clothes off, including their socks.
On another occasion people were walking over heads that had been blown off bodies. We brought out forty people on pieces of corrugated sheets. We used anything we could find. I remember bringing out one fellow who had lost his face down one side. His arm was gone. His leg was gone. He looked up at me and said: "Have you got a cigarette, mate? I lit it up for him and put it in his lips. He took a couple of puffs and said: "Will you tell me landlady I shall not be home to tea." And with that he closed his eyes and was gone.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWblitz.htm
