Re:American WWII bomb explodes at Japanese airport, causing ...
by ggm on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @03:50PM
(#41724408)
My mum and dad were teenagers during the war and did fire-watching, notoriously avoided if at all possible (they said) so given to anyone biddable or old. It got a bit hair-raising according to my dad, he stood in a doorway near Imperial College watching a plate glass sheet decide if it was going to fall on him or into the building. Walking through labs with bombs dropping was .. intense.
If you had an "anderson shelter" in your garden you were lucky. Many poor working class families got a "morrison shelter" which was basically a steel table you could use in a dining room or kitchen and then hide under. In some ways more convenient I guess? (Anderson shelters got cold and damp)
He was bombed out of a house in Stepney. They lost everything. I can't decide if he missed more the entire collection of the first 50 penguin books, or a lump of melted glass he scavanged from the fire of crystal palace in the 1930s: these are the two things he remembered in the 60s and 70s talking about it.
He was studying electrical engineering and maths at university by the end of the war and so not called up. He said they trained in how to manage live power cables with wooden "tongs" and were part of rescue crews when buildings collapsed. My mum was tracing maps for D-Day, and packing munitions and my Aunt did technical drawing on the "mulberry harbour" concrete caissons floated over to the beaches for D-Day.
A good read on the blitz would be "the people's war" by Angus Calder, which in large part is made up from "mass observation" recruited/organised diaries kept during the period, and donated to the University of Sussex. My mum kept one of them.
A standing joke in Architecture circles is that the greater london council destroyed more Wren churches in London than the Blitz. UCL used to say the basements where compsci was sited were kindly dug by the Germans.
Postwar housing was a mess. My aunt lived in a 5 story block of flats in Paddington she got on a long lease as bomb damaged property, my Uncle bought into commercial premises around Farringdon in a deal which demanded he do structural repairs immediately. There was a huge housing shortage and for years you could still see the pre-fabricated houses around Lambeth Palace which were a godsend of temporary housing but persisted into the 60s. Stepney where my dad grew up was a wreck, anywhere around the docks basically. It was a patchwork.
The documentary film "Fires were started" by Humphrey Jennings has some iconic footage of the dock firestorm (not to be compared with Dresden, but it was severe) You would recognise the shots of the fronts of builings collapsing and firemen holding hoses wearing brodie helmets.
Comparisons are evil. Coventry was really badly affected and the modern day cathedral stands next to the wreck of the original gothic one. It's like the Kaiser Wilheim spire in Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, a very pale shadow of the reality at the time. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Rotterdam were all significantly worse affected than London in the end, but to anyone in London I doubt it felt like it. The bombing in Japan was on an altogether different scale.
If you had an "anderson shelter" in your garden you were lucky. Many poor working class families got a "morrison shelter" which was basically a steel table you could use in a dining room or kitchen and then hide under. In some ways more convenient I guess? (Anderson shelters got cold and damp)
He was bombed out of a house in Stepney. They lost everything. I can't decide if he missed more the entire collection of the first 50 penguin books, or a lump of melted glass he scavanged from the fire of crystal palace in the 1930s: these are the two things he remembered in the 60s and 70s talking about it.
He was studying electrical engineering and maths at university by the end of the war and so not called up. He said they trained in how to manage live power cables with wooden "tongs" and were part of rescue crews when buildings collapsed. My mum was tracing maps for D-Day, and packing munitions and my Aunt did technical drawing on the "mulberry harbour" concrete caissons floated over to the beaches for D-Day.
A good read on the blitz would be "the people's war" by Angus Calder, which in large part is made up from "mass observation" recruited/organised diaries kept during the period, and donated to the University of Sussex. My mum kept one of them.
A standing joke in Architecture circles is that the greater london council destroyed more Wren churches in London than the Blitz. UCL used to say the basements where compsci was sited were kindly dug by the Germans.
Postwar housing was a mess. My aunt lived in a 5 story block of flats in Paddington she got on a long lease as bomb damaged property, my Uncle bought into commercial premises around Farringdon in a deal which demanded he do structural repairs immediately. There was a huge housing shortage and for years you could still see the pre-fabricated houses around Lambeth Palace which were a godsend of temporary housing but persisted into the 60s. Stepney where my dad grew up was a wreck, anywhere around the docks basically. It was a patchwork.
The documentary film "Fires were started" by Humphrey Jennings has some iconic footage of the dock firestorm (not to be compared with Dresden, but it was severe) You would recognise the shots of the fronts of builings collapsing and firemen holding hoses wearing brodie helmets.
Comparisons are evil. Coventry was really badly affected and the modern day cathedral stands next to the wreck of the original gothic one. It's like the Kaiser Wilheim spire in Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, a very pale shadow of the reality at the time. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Rotterdam were all significantly worse affected than London in the end, but to anyone in London I doubt it felt like it. The bombing in Japan was on an altogether different scale.