Well the big local news this is that the unexploded German bomb discovered in a Plymouth garden is to be taken out to sea and detonated there. This bombshell came after several days with the area cordoned off while experts assessed the state of the weapon. Suella Braverman, always on a short fuse when it comes to unwanted foreigners overstaying their welcome, weighed into the matter by insisting the bomb should be sent back where it came from. The Foreign Office pointed out though that Germany had a lot more of our bombs and American ones too than we had of theirs and that such a step could cause incendiary or even highly explosive retaliation. Local protestors, who have nothing to interfere with now the Armada Way gardening scheme is settled, are expected to raise concerns about the effect of the bomb on the weeds and crawly things that live in newly established Plymouth Sound National Marine Park. It is hoped that they are hugging trees elsewhere and that the whole thing will just be a damp squib.
Two new developments. Just after I wrote the above, I had the bejayus frightened out of me when I got the Council Emergency message to say they were moving the bomb and adding unnecessarily that I should stay away. What a noise that thing makes! Secondly, the BBC have done the thing that infuriates me most. There they are cutting local services and what do they do as soon as a big story crops up locally? Use the journalists from Seymour Road? Not likely! Send a journo and camera crew down from London or Manchester, wherever they live now. Talk about wasting money……
Blimey notDistant....you could have duplicated this lot on to the Grumpy thread as well and given us a double dose of excitement.
So Plymouths' claim to fame at the moment was exploded outside the breakwater last night at 21.51.....did any of you hear it or feel it....? I would think it got a few people thinking how many more there might be around.....and noDistant have you got a twitch starting over that metal doorstop you've been taking for granted for many years ?
On the advice of our surveyor, we did a survey when we bought the house. It's not a heavily bombed area - the nearest bomb from us was about 100yds north east. Probably from the same stick, a bomb also hit what is now our doctors surgery. All of the raids are documented in the Plymouth "bomb book" now lodged and digitised in The Box. https://web.plymouth.gov.uk/archivescatalogue/?criteria=bomb book&operator=AND
During the war as a kid I lived in RAF married quarters.....one place was RAF Manby in Lincolnshire ....we spent night after night in the air raid shelter as bombers flew over head..... heading for the midlands. One night when my mother was distracted I decided to wander outside to admire all the bright flack in the sky from the RAF camps guns as they tried to shoot down these German aircraft.....after awhile my mother realized that I was missing....and panic set in and it wasn't easy finding me wandering around outside having a great time....I still remember the clip around the ears I got when I was found. Sobering thought all those bombs heading to places like Coventry night after night......I never wandered out side again.
Well the survey is of known bomb impacts to identify possible concealed structural damage, not unexploded bombs. It’s the same as doing mining surveys as we did in Derbyshire: there was an opencast coal mine still in operation a few miles south and one of the pubs in the village had at one time been a water powered screw and bolt factory, which implies the existence of metals being mined. Having said that, bombs dropped by each aircraft land in straight lines and are roughly evenly spaced. You can see that in the maps. Some effort would have been made to find any “blanks” which would be likely to contain an unexploded bomb. Obviously, this one got missed. The surveys cost - and I’m guessing here - £50 - worth doing when you’re buying a house. Probably not needed - the bombs were aimed at the docks, the dockyard and the railways. We’re well away from that so most bombs that dropped here would have been way off target. Looking at a few of the maps though you can see some odd little clusters. It looks as though there might have been a raid on the underground reservoir at Hartley. Perhaps there was a military presence in the Palmerston forts. Manadon would still have housed the RN engineering college. I think in the early months of the war, the RAF were flying from what became Plymouth airport before moving out to Yelverton. Those sorts of places could have been targets for small scale attacks.
My father’s memories of the war included being able to see Plymouth burning from 40 miles away in mid-Cornwall.
Way back in the late 50s i started rifle shooting, i shot for Plympton Rifle Club and Yealmpton. Now all those years later here in Canada i still shoot twice a week both smallbore .22 and fullbore 308. Do you guys have any experiences shooting in the Service ?
Just while doing basic training during my National Service time in the RAF....did get awarded a marksman's badge....on the dear old 303 Lee Enfield and for single shot use of the Bren gun. This was back in 1960.....we had just moved on from the catapult and five smooth stones in basic training....luckily I didn't come across any Goliaths' out in Aden....only a well used beach towel and the ability not to get attacked by sharks in the open sea (the net protected Lido was rather overcrowded with families). We did get regularly told it was forbidden to use the open sea....but most of us where a little deaf over that....although we did get a reminder once that the sharks were there....when an Arab Dhow capsized off shore and there did seem to be a lot of thrashing around in the water around the Dhow....I didn't let my imagination dwell on the subject to long.
While the bomb episode is still fresh in our minds, I thought this was interesting - and of typical the odd-ball creative ideas that helped to win WW2 e.g. the Mulberry harbours and The Great Panjandrum used on and after D-Day. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-68383619
Everyone in the good ole days who did service time got to shoot a rifle and sometimes even a bren and pistol. I was ok with the rifle but having small hands I found the bren a little difficult. When in Bahrain I used to do a bit of sailing on those surf boards with a sail on them. Spent more time in the water than sitting on it. I then went fishing off a Dhow one afternoon. It was just after the last time I went sailing. What came out of the water did not look friendly at all and sort of put me off. My dad was in the RAF during the war. Nothing glamorous just runway construction stuff. He was posted to I think it was called RAF Harabere which was in essence Yelverton. He told me that you could stand outside at midnight and read a newspaper from the glow that was Plymouth. He met my mother on that camp and stayed here when he got demobed. Before the war he was a stable boy for a famous trainer called Captain Sir Boyd-Rochfort at Newmarket and I have a photo somewhere of him leading in the winner of the St Ledger way back in the day. He was only a little chap and would have been a Jockey had the war not happened. He joined up, put on weight and never went back to it after. Lifes a funny old thing aint it.
So one person with a dicky ticker sorting out dicky tickers then............you couldn't make it up could you.
RAF Harrowbeer, on the left of the A386 just before Yelverton. It’s a public open space now. You can still see dispersal pens where the aircraft were parked surrounded on 3 sides by earth banks to limit the ability of attackers to fly down a line of planes strafing the lot in one go. When I was little and I came up to Plymouth (to Argyle) with Dad and perhaps Grandad, we’d go up there, kick a ball about and eat a pasty. Airfield or not, Plymouth was poorly defended in 1941. Dad also had Johnny Johnson’s book. He was the top scoring British fighter pilot of WW2. They flew some night sorties in Spitfires from their base in Kent during the London blitz but he says it was virtually impossible to fly, navigate and find the enemy in a single seat fighter at night. Radar small enough to fit in an aeroplane didn’t come along until later.
I have spent some time online trying to track down some of the RAF camps that I lived on as a kid....Google maps help a little. 1.....RAF Topcliffe in Yorkshire...I was probably about 8 yrs old....doesn't exist any more....maps suggest that there might be a small aviation set up there but nothing else....I do remember coming home from school in a RAF coach one day to find the camps fire crews and ambulances quite near the married quarters....just opposite in a ploughed field was a large smouldering hole with the remains of two Wellington bombers spread all over the place.....I was told that one was taking off and one was landing with the bright sunlight being a factor....I don't know how they were on the same flight path and how it could have happened....but a total of 8 crewmen perished that day when I was at school.....our house was about 200 yards from the accident spot. My Father was the Stations senior non-commissioned Officer,,,the SWO and we put up many time grieving relatives who would pop along to visit their relatives grave which was in the adjacent village. 2.....RAF Walney Island...(Barrow and Furness)....no sign of it on maps any more....I was probably about 6 years old (end of the War) a dodgy spot right next to the docks in Barrow. 3.....RAF Upavon, Wiltshire...I was about 10 years old....we lived in the village....no sign of this camp anymore....I used to walk 2 miles across the fields to go to school in a nearby village called Rushall.....this is where I saw V Bombers flying out of RAF Boscombe Down on trials...also saw the Brabazon once clawing its way into the sky. 4.....RAF Manby, Lincolnshire....no sign of this camp either. 5.....RAF Cardington, Bedford....with its two giant hangers for the R100/101 Balloons....I lived there when I was 13 yrs old and also spent a few days there later on when I got kitted out during National Service....another place where I walked over the fields to school at the village of Elstow (John Bunyan fame ).....no sign of a camp now but the Married quarters show up on the map as Shortstown a suburb of Bedford.
My uncle did his National Service in the RAF at Cardington, not at the airship sheds (they weren't balloons, they were dirigibles) but at some sort of depot site further up in Shortstown. I used to drive through there regularly to get out to the A1 (M) southbound.
