THE FORGOTTEN CAMPAIGN

Four months ago, politicians, families, veterans and many others assembled in Normandy to remember the Allied invasion of Northern France eighty years previously, codenamed Operation Overlord. Yet a little over two months later Allied forces were landing in Southern France in Operation Dragoon, perhaps a forgotten action yet still vitally important in securing eventual victory in the the European war.

Originally both operations were planned to be carried out simultaneously but insufficient resources available at the time: men, fuel, equipment and so forth, meant that Dragoon was postponed, perhaps even cancelled. However, our old friend supply lines now came into play. The Channel ports couldn’t manage the huge the huge amount of materials being shipped daily from England and so Dragoon was resurrected with the twin objectives of seizing the French Mediterranean ports as well opening up a second front and driving the occupying forces out of France.

The operation began on August 15th 1944 with, as with Operations Husky (Sicily) and Overlord, a large naval bombardment, supported by more than three thousand aircraft.

The relatively weak German troops, fighting with inferior equipment, were soon on the run pursued by an Allied army comprising US, Canadian, British and forces of the French Liberation Army (FLA). Also playing an important role were various French Resistance groups (as with Overlord) who carried out numerous attacks and acts of sabotage to slow down the German retreat. By that time many resisters, but not all, were combining their resources to form the French Forces of the Interior (FFI).

The Germans were outgunned on land, sea and in the air and they were soon on retreating, heading north up the Rhone Valley. Meanwhile the most important Mediterranean ports, Marseille and Toulon, fell to the Allies. Battered on all sides, the Germans tried to set up a defensive line near the beautiful town of Dijon.

They failed to hold it and were soon scampering North towards the Vosges Mountains where they provided stiffer opposition. Other Allied armies were driving the enemy towards their own borders, having liberated Paris and other large tracts of Northern France, following the Normandy landings and actions. While the Germans were fleeing from Normandy and retreating into Belgium and the Netherlands, those from southern France established themselves in Alsace-Lorraine, a former French territory now part of the Third Reich although, as it transpired, not for long.

Behind enemy lines in the Vosges Mountain Area was the concentration camp of Natzweiler-Struthof, the only such on French soil where the climax of my novel ORDINARY HEROES takes place. The whole area had been under constant attack from units of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the French Resistance. You can read more about Natzweiler-Struthof and the SOE in earlier posts on this blog.

In the meantime, while not call in at my website http://www.davidlowtherauthor.co.uk and download a free ebook copy of ORDINARY HEROES. It has been very well reviewed and covers real events involving (mostly) fictional characters.

EIGHTY FIVE YEARS ON

Britain and France declare war on Germany. September 3rd 1939

There are a dwindling number of survivors of that terrible day in 1939 when Britain and France declared war on Germany. Legend has it that Hitler was expecting Britain and France to step back from the brink as they had, a little under twelve months earlier, over Nazi Germany’s aggressive policy towards Czechoslovakia. The Nazis excuse for this was that native Germans, living in the Sudetenland inside the Czech border, were being mistreated by the Czechs.

But Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, knew, in his heart of hearts, after signing an agreement with Hitler in Munich in the autumn of 1938, that war was inevitable. A little over 5 months later, the German dictator seized the rump of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain correctly identified Poland to be next on Hitler’s grab list. The British Parliament guaranteed Poland’s borders in March 1939.

From that moment on, it was an ever accelerating downhill path to war. Throughout the summer preceding the outbreak, Hitler made known his feelings about the treatment of native Germans living in the International City of Danzig (now Gdansk) inside the Polish border. Atrocities, manufactured by the Nazi press, fanned the flames.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939 and, two days later, Britain and France kept good their promise to Poland and declared war on Germany. Chamberlain spoke to the nation from the cabinet room in Number 10 Downing Street. Later on that same day, King George VI broadcast to the citizens, an event re-enacted in the Oscar and BAFTA winning film The King’s Speech.

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (top) and King George VI addressing the nation on September 3rd 1939.

The first thing that happened after the Prime Minister declared war, was an air raid warning and people dashed to public shelters or an Anderson Shelter in their own back garden. It was a false alarm. These events are chronicled in my novel The Summer of ’39.

The cover of my book The Summer of ’39 available from, and published by Sacristy Press PO Box 612, Durham DH1 9HT (www,sacristy.co.uk). Also available in paperback and ebook from Amazon and in paperback version to be ordered from all good bookshops.

The follow-up to this novel is Ordinary Heroes.

The cover of my book Ordinary Heroes, published by I M Books. Ebook available FREE on this my website http://www.davidlowtherauthor.co.uk.

The opening of this novel, after the Chapter One prologue, takes place six days later. (I should emphasise that both of these novels can be read as standalones). In the intervening period nothing had happened. City children, evacuated to the safety of the countryside to escape the anticipated bombing, wondered what all the fuss was about. Soon they were being brought back to their urban homes. The weather was beautiful in September and some families took a late holiday. George and Esther, the ‘ordinary heroes ‘ of the book of that title, carried on growing their romance, unaware of the horrors that lay ahead.

THE NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF CONCENTRATION CAMP 1941-1945

The Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp was located in the Vosges Mountains of Eastern France. It was opened in May 1941 and was the only Nazi Concentration Camp on French soil. However, during the Second World War when it was operational as a camp, Alsace-Lorraine, where it was located, had been illegally incorporated into the German Reich. Today, it is part of the Republic of France.

Natzweiler-Struthof played an important part in the climax of my novel, ORDINARY HEROES, published in November 2023.

In comparison with other Nazi Concentration Camps, this was small and housed about fifteen thousand prisoners at its opening. During the course of the war, a number of sub camps were established, mainly to house prisoners working in the nearby granite quarries, on construction projects and on camp maintenance. Prisoners built the original camp in 1941.

Natzweiler-Struthof was not an extermination camp. It was a slave labour camp and many of those imprisoned were members of the French Resistance and others captured agents of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). A small number of SOE agents were women, often in transit to the Ravensbruck women’s camp in Germany though 4 were murdered at Natzweiler-Struthof.

Somewhere around twenty thousand prisoners died in the camp, many through illness and malnutrition but thousands were murdered by hanging, shooting, poison and gas. An oven was used to dispose of the remains.

A number of the prisoners were Jewish. Most of them were murdered, usually by phenol or a small gas chamber. Their bodies were preserved so that a succession of doctors examined the heads and remainder of the skeletons to look for signs of racial inferiority. The revolting practice threatened to one of the ordinary heroes in my novel, probably at the request of Doctor August Hirt, was regularly carried out by doctors in many of the camps.

During the final years of the war arms manufacture became increasingly important at all slave labour sites. At Natzweiler-Struthof, small factories/workshops were dug into the side of the mountains to protect them from the bombing campaigns of the Allied Air Forces. In September 1944, the Nazis began to evacuate the main camp as Allied soldiers were approaching from both the west and south. Prisoners were sent by rail or in many cases by inhumane forced matches to Dachau.

After the war, the camp was used by the French government to intern suspected French Nazi collaborators until 1949. Today it is open to visitors as a museum as is designated as the European Centre for Deported Resistance Members (CERD)

A memorial to those murdered at the camp was unveiled by the then French President, Charles de Gaulle in July 1980.

Retribution for many of those responsible for the horrors of the concentration camp system began almost as soon as the war ended with thousands of arrests of suspected war criminals. The Commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof at the time of Ordinary Heroes, Fritz Hartjenstein was initially convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment. Later, fresh evidence came to light and he was condemned to death but died of a heart attack while awaiting execution in 1954. Doctor August Hirt committed suicide in June 1945.

THE LONDON AUXILIARY AMBULANCE SERVICE

The London Auxiliary Ambulance Service (LAAS) played a crucial role in Civil Defence in the Second World War, not more than other sections nor less but absolutely vital. This post is focused on London but that’s not to say that heavily bombed urban areas in the United Kingdom didn’t receive magnificent support from similar ambulance services.

Esther, one of the Ordinary Heroes in my novel of that name, enlisted with her friend Mary, in the LAAS during the latter part of the war, both having been interned on the Isle of Man and, following release, served hot drinks and food at a WVS stand outside Liverpool Street Station during the blitz and afterwards. The blitz had long since finished but what they faced after enlistment and training was even more damaging and dangerous than the blitz; the V1 and V2 rocket attacks on the capital.

The cover of my book ORDINARY HEROES which shows Esther, one of the heroes with the other, Lieutenant George Aaron. The book is available in both ebook and paperback from Amazon or by order from your local bookshop. A FREE ebook is available by visiting my website http://www.davidlowtherauthor.co.uk.

A London Ambulance Service (LAS) did, of course, exist before the war. Anticipating far greater threat from Hitler’s Luftwaffe, the LAAS was formed to bolster the city’s response to the horrors of the blitz. It was staffed predominantly by volunteers, many of whom were women. With London under attack from the air, it soon became obvious that there was a drastic shortage of suitable vehicles. All kinds of remedies were tried to address this shortfall, converting trucks and buses and even motor cars amongst them.

An ambulance converted from a van c 1940.

These ambulances were a far cry from the superbly equipped and staffed ambulances of today but they had a task to perform and those charged with operating them just had to get on with it. Of course, training was absolutely essentially essential. The men and women had to learn to drive. There were few women drivers on the roads in the 1930s but now recruiting them became a top priority. (I’ll deal with the changing role of women during the war in a later post). The ambulances weren’t fitted with automatic gearboxes and changing gear was often a bone shaking experience. Having passed that test, they then undertook a demanding First Aid course. On arrival at the site of a rocket attack, the ambulance crew had first to determine the extent of any injuries. Minor cuts and bruises were dealt with on the spot and more serious cases rushed straight to hospital. To get to the site of an incident, the women often had to navigate a deadly obstacle course, consisting of roads full of holes, fallen telegraph poles, dismembered buses and other vehicles, bridges destroyed and collapsed buildings yet they knew they had to reach their destination as quickly as possible to save the lives of others. Once at the site, they faced further perils with a second rocket exploding in the vicinity where they were working.

Unlike the blitz, where the majority of raids were at night, V weapons could drop out of the sky , without much warning, at any time, day or night. V1 buzz rockets were comparatively slow and many were downed by RAF and USAAF fighter planes. The V2 rocket was a totally different proposition, faster and with greater destructive power, the forerunner of today’s guided missiles.

The LAAS, like all sections of civil defence was brilliantly organised. London was divided into sections with ambulances and crews assigned to each sector. There were smart uniforms and ranks, just like the fighting services. Status was shown by the number of chevrons, or stripes, on the uniform jacket. Our hero, Esther, reached one stripe level by the end of the war.

This was the world inhabited by Esther and Mary in the closing stages of the war. Danger and threat to life were interspersed with quiet moments when women knitted, slept, drank weak beer, smoked and chatted while waiting for the next rocket to fall.

A smartly dressed LAAS operative proudly showing her two stripes.

The London Auxiliary Servicehas been called the forgotten service. I hope no longer.

RECOMMENDED READING

The Forgotten Service. Angela Raby

Published by After the Battle

D DAY and the SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE

Eighty years on from the launch of Operation Overlord, the cross-channel invasion of Normandy which hastened the end of the Second World War, it seems appropriate to take a brief look at the part played in this monumental event by the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Unashamedly I do this because the climax of my novel ORDINARY HEROES follows the hazardous adventures of the SOE in Eastern France who, working very closely with the French resistance, created as much havoc as they could which, first of all, prevented German reserves re-enforcing their troops on the Normandy front and, later preventing escaping defeated Germans reaching their homeland.

Overlord, the invasion plan, embraced many different plans. It was a logistical challenge that defied belief and encompassed the biggest combined air, sea and land invasion in history, overtaking Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily eleven months earlier. That campaign also plays its part in ORDINARY HEROES.

But the D Day landings were not just about soldiers, sailors and airmen but were a huge part of a wartime action that had been planned for a very long time. A significant role was played by Operation Fortitude in which dummy aircraft, tanks, landing craft and airfields, were established in South East England, East Anglia and Scotland, to mislead the Germans into believing that the invasion would come via the Pas de Calais or even Norway. The German High Command would have known of this through aerial reconnaissance but not that they were dummies. For this confirmation they relied on their spies on the ground in the UK. What the Germans didn’t know was that all of the spies had been arrested and had either been executed, imprisoned or turned and persuaded to work for us. This is the subject of Ben Macintyre’s superb book Double Cross. Collectively, the subterfuge of Fortitude and XX persuaded the Germans, whose defensive forces were predominantly in North East France, that the invasion would be launched in the Pas de Calais, the shortest channel crossing. By the time the German Generals realised they’d been duped, it was too late, though the death toll amongst Allied soldiers in Normandy was still very high. Code breakers at Bletchley Park had been reading German messages throughout the war and were able to confirm that the Germans had swallowed the deception hook, line and sinker.

The role of the SOE and their friends and allies in the French Resistance was vital. They were responsible so that everybody in France involved in one way or other in the invasion was ready. The more trouble they could cause in the run up to D Day, the better. Sabotage was the name of their game. But both the SOE and the resisters had to be ready and needed to know the projected course of events. To this end, the foreign service of the BBC sent messages which gave precise instructions as to what was to happen when and where. These messages were nonsense. Only those in receipt of them knew what they meant. The Germans, who would have no problem in intercepting them, were baffled as to their meaning.

‘Long sobs of autumn violins’

’the dice are on the carpet’

John has a long moustache,

The flag of the French Resistance 1940-1944

So the SOE and their resistance comrades knew exactly what to expect and acted accordingly, causing havoc throughout occupied France; railway lines were blown up, canals blocked, telephone lines brought down, power supplies interrupted, roads blocked, bridges destroyed and so on. This kind of sabotage had been commonplace for a number of years but at no time was it as important as in the days leading up to June 6th 1944.

Many of the SOE agents heading to France flew in Westland Lysanders from RAF Tangmere near Chichester. Tangmere is no longer a working airfield but there remains a fabulous Military Aviation Museum, a significant part of which is dedicated to the SOE. The staff there are wonderful guides. Tangmere is very much worth a visit.

Tangmere Military Aviation Museum

And don’t forget you can download a free copy of my novel ORDINARY HEROES by visiting my website Davidlowtherauthor.co.uk

The Special Operations Executive 1940-1946

’Set Europe Ablaze’ were Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s orders when the Special Operations Executive was established to begin work on June 13th 1940. The brief for these extraordinary brave men and women was to carry out very dangerous missions in territory occupied by the enemy. Predominantly their missions were to throw a spanner in the occupation forces’ works through sabotage and establishing secret armies consisting of citizens of the occupied countries.

A small workforce began work initially and this grew to 13,000, including 3200 women, by the end of the war. Not all were field agents of course but also included administrative support staff, communications officers and instructors. Those risking their lives behind enemy lines modelled their approach on the IRA’s terrorist activities.

The SOE expanded to operate in all zones where the Axis and their allies were at war: Europe, North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle and Far East. For the purposes of this post and my novel ORDINARY HEROES, I’m focusing on Section F France. Many courageous agents died either in the field and during imprisonment after arrest. Nor were these men and women forgotten after the war and, amongst many others, there are memorials in Westminster Abbey and on the Albert Embankment.

SOE Headquarters were in Baker Street London and there were numerous training and other bases in all corners of the UK including Winterfold Cranleigh and Wanborough Manor (both in Surrey), Arisaig House (Scotland) and sites in Beaulieu (Hampshire)

The cover of Maurice Buckmaster’s book. Buckmaster was Head of SOE Section F.

Once in the field, teams were organised into circuits of SOE agents, local resisters and included at least radio operator. Communications between members of the circuits was carried out via telephone, letters (sometimes using invisible ink) and radio. All of these were dangerous. Letters could be opened, telephone calls tapped and radio locations identified by the ever present German detector vans. The safest and best way to communicate was by courier, often riding a bicycle. In the run-up to D-Day the BBC sent nonsensical messages which both the SOE and resistance groups listened to (illegally) and which gave them notice of imminent invasions, air raids, material drops (including weapons) and intelligence about German troop movements The Germans, of course, hadn’t a clue what these messages were about.

Various squabbles did disrupt the SOE work from time to time between , for example, resister groups who had violently diametricly opposed political views or between the SOE, whose chief objective was to create chaos and the Special Intelligence Service (MI6) who preferred quiet conditions for intelligence gathering.

The make up of the circuits was often a strange mixture. Convicted criminals were often part of the circuit as were homosexuals who were, in the 1940s and later, deemed to be outside the law. There were forty one women agents of whom sixteen lost their lives.

Noor Inayat Khan. The first female SOE recruit. Arrested by the Gestapo and executed at Dachau in September 1944.

Training was long, tough and thorough. Recruits acquired many new skills and learned how to kill, to cause explosions on railways, in marshalling yards, on telephone lines, roads and bridges, Most of them had parachute training , knew how to jump on and off moving trains. They could handle a wide variety of weapons including the Welrod single shot pistol, the Fairbanks-Sykes fighting knife, small fighting knives, plastic explosive the and time pencil.

Some of the weapons carried, not necessarily day-to-day, by members of SOE circuits.

Throughout the conflict, scientists, engineers, gunsmiths and others carried out never-ending research and development to help all allied fighting men and women do their jobs more effectively. The results gave field agents a better chance of survival and, amongst the new ‘toys’ were many items classified as dirty tricks. Field agents carried a suicide pill.

Many agents were dropped into their destinations by parachute and large items of equipment were delivered in the same way. Others flew from RAF Tangmere in a small transport plane, the Lysander which had room for a pilot, a couple of agents and some small items of equipment such as radio crystals. Before they embarked on their perilous mission, they were given a final briefing by one of the legendary figures of SOE history Vera Atkins.

Vera Atkins was a Romanian Jew who made her way to safety and England and became a lynchpin of Section F. You can read the story of her life in Sarah Helm’s superb book ‘Vera Atkins. A Life in Secrets and the lost agents of SOE.’Amongst her many duties were to see agents off from RAF Tangmere, checking they weren’t carrying giveaways like packets of English cigarettes, London theatre tickets or UK railway passes.

Vera Atkins whose duties with the SOE didn’t end with the war and who spent months trying to uncover the fate of those agents who didn’t return from the field.

Many books have been written about the SOE including :

MRD Foot. The Special Operations Executive 1940-1946.

Paddy Ashdown. A Game of Spies

as well as those by Sarah Helm and Maurice Buckmaster mentioned above

A School Master’s War. The story of Harry Ree edited by his son Jonathan.

and films

Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) About Violette Szabo. Executed at Ravensbruck 5 February 1945

Odette (1950) About Odette Samson who survived.

The cover of my novel whose ‘thrilling climax’ (a reviewer’s words not mine!) takes place in Eastern France in the second half of 1944 with SOE agents Major Roger Martin and Lieutenant George Aaron.

See you next month

WRITING ORDINARY HEROES

My latest novel ORDINARY HEROES is the fourth novel I’ve written set before and during the Second World War. Each covered a different aspect of the conflict from pre-war appeasement (The Blue Pencil) to crime in the London blitz (Two Families at War) espionage and terrorism (The Summer of ‘39) to the war itself and its effects on some of those who lived through it and died during it (Ordinary Heroes). Although each was a work of fiction they were based on real events. My aim was to write interesting absorbing and exciting tales which readers would say to themselves at the conclusion I felt part of the story and it could have happened like that.’

I began my research in 2010 and, over the years have collected a wealth of information, some of which I have been able to use more than once with different characters telling of their experiences in similar locations. (For example the London blitz and the Isle of Man appear in both Two Families at War and Ordinary People and Reich Kristallnacht in The Blue Pencil and Two Families at War). Here’s where that wealth of information came from :

The British Newspaper Archive, previously at Colindale in North London and now part of the British Library at St Pancras

The Newspaper Reading Room at the British Library at St Pancras

Durham University Library where there is a complete digital set of copies of The Times as well as volumes on both British and German foreign policy documents before and during the war.

The British Film Institute Archive where newsreels and documentary films are kept.

The Imperial War Museum where I viewed the German Concentration Camps film and listened to audio recordings involving participants in the war.

The RAF Museum at Tangmere from where Special Operations Executive agents flew en route to occupied France.

Wanborough Manor near Guildford, early training base for SOE agents during the war.

The D Day Story at Southsea where there is a huge landing craft for transporting tanks and other large vehicles used on D Day but similar to those used in Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in 1943.

Locations in North London bombed during the war where I spoke to survivors.

Additionally, I read books, especially about the SOE wherein former agents told their frightening and thrilling stories.

Having visited Paris, Berlin and the Isle of Man earlier during my short writing career, I was keen to go to Sicily and Natweiler Concentration Camp in Eastern France but sadly the pandemic prevented this from happening. However, there is an excellent re-enactment of the Battle of Primosole Bridge on YouTube. The battle was key in dislodging the Germans from the east coast road as Allied troops pushed them towards the sea at Messina.

Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man, apart from the barbed wire, unchanged today.

That’s just a flavour of the amount of research I have done in preparing to write my books. And now for something completely different.

I enjoyed writing the three novels (plus the non-fiction title Liberating Belsen). They were published by Sacristy Press in Durham. I shall forever be indebted to them for getting me into print. Their main interest is in religious books and they decided that Ordinary Heroes didn’t fit their present profile. So I decided to go indie and invested a considerable amount of money into employing professionals to lick it into shape. Alan Barker, a friend of mine and a professional proof reader did the initial read through/correction and the Debbie Martin did the rest; editing, copy editing and final proof read. It took three drafts for Debbie to give me the go-ahead for publication. When I look at my first draft and then the manuscript that went into print, I am acutely embarrassed. The first draft could probably have been called ‘Fun and Games in the war.’ Debbie reminded me that the novel was about the war and the final result is a sometimes tragic, often exciting picture of how ordinary people became Ordinary Heroes when their backs were to the wall.

Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, at the time the largest sea invasion in history.

You can download a free copy of ORDINARY HEROES by clicking on this link https://dl.bookfunnel.com/7f9xvk3sjl

OPERATION HUSKY

The Invasion of Sicily. July 1943 – August 1944

A bit like General MacAthur who promised the Japanese that he would return when US forces were booted off the Philippines the year before, Allied troops made their return to European soil for the first time since Dunkirk when Sicily was invaded in the summer of 1943. Churchill described Italy and Sicily as the soft underbelly of Europe and felt it made sense to strike first there to distract the Germans who were then engaged in a life and death struggle with Soviet troops at Stalingrad and who were packing the defences of Northern France in anticipation of the Allied invasion which would open the ‘second front.’ Various intelligence plans were put into place to confuse the Germans, including the best known Operation Mincemeat. This was the subject of a recent film which was inferior to the 1956 movie The Man Who Never Was and extremely inferior to Ben Macintyre’s superb book Operation Mincemeat. Would you believe there’s even a musical comedy based on the event currently on the stage in London’s West End. ? I’m not sure if a military campaign in which nearly 15.000 were killed and several great cities suffered catastrophic damage is a suitable theme for a musical comedy. Perhaps it is soaked in cynicism like Oh What a lovely War.

Apart from giving the Allies a toehold in Europe, the most important aspect of the campaign was that it gave US, British and Canadian troops experience of landing on enemy soil under fierce fire. Much was learned which would be so valuable twelve months later on the beaches of Normandy. At the time Husky was the largest land invasion from the sea in history. On the Allied side 600 tanks, 14,000 vehicles, 1800 guns as well as fighter planes, fighter bombers, gliders as well as Navy ships, who carried out the pre invasion pounding on the Axis defenders. Anyone who wishes to look closely at the giant amphibious landing craft should visit the D Day Story on Southsea Sea Front in Hampshire.

The Americans attacked on the Western side of the island and the British and Canadians on the East. Unfortunately, the weather on D Day was atrocious and the troops in the vanguard made little headway. Luckily, the Italian defenders went AWOL, having decided it was too wet for war. On day 2 the real action began and the Durham Light Infantry soon cleared the beaches and began the march up the the east coast. The British and Canadian troops were the 8th Army commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, the victor of El Alamein. The American Supremo was General Dwight D Eisenhower who twelve months later would command the D Day landings in Normandy.

Corporal George Aaron, one of the Ordinary Heroes of my latest novel of that name, and was amazed to find that, most of the large towns on the East of Sicily had been reduced to rubble following Allied bombing attacks and the Italian citizens treated the Allies as rescuers from the Italian fascists rather than invaders.

Having worried for almost two years about how he would perform under fire, George had had no chance to test his resolve until the Battle of Primosole Bridge. The Germans had fetched in some crack troops from Southern France and needed to be shifted for the Allied advance to continue.

You can read what happens in Ordinary Heroes. In just under five weeks the Allies drove the Germans off Sicily onto the Italian mainland. The Italians surrendered and Mussolini was no longer Il Duce. The Italian campaign was far tougher that the action in Sicily. The best book that I’ve read about this campaign is Sicily ‘43 by James Holland, one of the UK’s foremost military historians.

Next month I shall be writing about the process I followed in putting together my novel Ordinary Heroes . Please join me then. In the meantime, if you wish to get in touch, you’ll find to do this on my website. Www.davidlowtherauthor.co.uk,

THE LONDON BLITZ September 1940 – May 1941

The London Blitz was not the first mass attack on civilians and other targets from the air nor was it the first such atrocity. The Japanese had bombed Manchuria in the early 1930s, the German Condor Legion had attached the Basque town of Guernica in 1937 and, two years later, the Luftwaffe rained death and destruction on Warsaw.

This pattern of murderous air attacks continued throughout the war and beyond. The RAF carried out three one thousand bomber raids on the German cities of Cologne, Essen and Bremen in 1943 and, a year later, reduced Hamburg to ashes. The Germans had already started the war in 1939 by attacking Warsaw and, three years after the Blitz had ended in May 1941, launched their V rockets on London. I’ll deal with the V weapons in a later post. Nor was London the only British city to suffer. Strategic targets such as Coventry, Liverpool and Glasgow were amongst the urban areas to suffer horribly. In London, the population was forced to seek safety on Tube platforms. The RAF and American air forces laid waste to numerous German cities in the latter stages of the war and the US air force reduced Tokyo to rubble before dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring the conflict to a close.

And it continues to this day : Russians on Ukraine, Israelis on Gaza, Hamas on Israel though new weapons like rockets and drones, as well as aircraft, are now used to continue the murder of innocents from the air.

George Aaron, one of the ordinary heroes of my novel of that name, was involved in the Blitz right from the first day. A bomb penetrated the basement of the Columbia Road Flower Market near to his East London home in Bethnal Green. He and his great friend Joe, both 17 at the time, were roped in by the Civil Defence people to assist with sorting out the chaos in the market , the basement of which was being used as an ad hoc shelter. Those sheltering should have been safe but, by sheer bad luck, a bomb dropped through the air conditioning shaft. Forty five people were killed and many others injured. George and Joe grew up very quickly that afternoon and were soon added to the list of reliable volunteers called on by the Civil Defence during the many emergencies that followed.

Later, the two young men, carrying out their duties after an attack on another East End location in Bateman’s Row, stumbled across one of the vilest of all of the crimes of the Blitz ; the ransacking of houses, and sometimes corpses, in destroyed homes soon after the bombers had gone. With this I was returning to a series of similar incidents from an earlier novel of mine Two Families at War.

The blitz ended in 1941when the Luftwaffe was withdrawn to support the massive German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. The bombers returned periodically but not until the terror of the pilotless aircraft in 1944 were Londoners subjected to further horrors.

Numerous books have been written about the Blitz and, amongst the very best of them is a long section in Juliet Gardiner’s superb book Wartime Britain 1939-1945. For anyone who wishes to know the extent of the damage on London, I can thoroughly recommend :

Bomb Damage Maps 1939-1945. This astonishingly detailed book was compiled by Lawrence Ward from the archives of London County Council and published by Thames and Hudson in 2015.

My now post, in February, will focus on Operation Husky in the summer of 1943 where our ‘ Ordinary Hero’ George Aaron’ played a significant part.

Please contact me either through my website http://www.davidlowtherauthor.co.uk or via email info@davidlowtherauthor.co.uk

INTERNMENT 1940

The Phoney War had come to an end when the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark in April 1940. The chief characters of my novel ORDINARY HEROES, Esther and George and George’s friend Joe, were shaken by this as they began to realise that conflict would soon break out in earnest and their pleasant evenings in the West End might soon be at an end. When the enemy armies over ran the Low Countries and and poured over the French border, British citizens began to chew their nails in fear. By the beginning of June, the Wehrmacht was in Calais, a little over twenty miles from the English coast. Invasion, for the first time since 1066, now seemed a distinct possibility.

Panic set in amongst the UK population. Rumours abounded that German sympathisers, or even agents planted before the war, were preparing to ease the path of the invading armies once they landed. A call went out, predominantly from the popular press, to intern all so-called enemy aliens. Pressure on the government mounted and soon the unrest spread to the House of Commons where Prime Minister Churchill’s opponents called for him to act. Having been in post for just a month, Churchill’s position in Parliament was not strong and he quickly responded by ordering the police to ‘collar the lot.’ This included Italians who’d lived here for generations, as that country had recently declared war on Great Britain.

Caught with their pants down, the Government hastily put together a plan. Two and a half thousand were shoe horned onto a one thousand berth liner and shipped to Australia in dreadful conditions. Another liner, the SS Arandora Star, set sail for Canada but was torpedoed in the Atlantic west of Ireland with the loss of more than eight hundred lives. Many of the internees (called enemy aliens in official language) stayed close to home. Esther and her family in ORDINARY HEROES, despite holding UK citizenship, were first taken to Butlin’s Holiday Camp at Clacton-Sea where conditions reasonable and later to an unfinished housing estate at Huyton near Liverpool where conditions were atrocious. Two elderly Jewish refugees committed suicide during their stay there. Elsewhere in England, all sorts of odd places were used as holding camps before more permanent arrangements could be made. Amongst these were Kempton Park Racecourse where some guests slept in horseboxes, Bertram Mills Circus winter base at Ascot and the Olympia Exhibition Centre in London.

Esther and her family eventually made their way by sea to the Isle of Man. There were several camps there housing German Prisoners of War and Italians but the vast majority were Jewish refugees either from Germany or from European countries overrun by the Nazis in the late 1930s ; Austria and Czechoslovakia. Just to demonstrate the stupidity of the scheme, one of the Italian ‘aliens’ had represented Great Britain in the swimming events at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. He spent the entire period of his internment walking about in his British tracksuit. Amongst the Germans detained were some families who had lived here since Edwardian times, held full UK citizenship and had probably been detained on the same island during the First World War about a quarter of a century earlier.

Once they had arrived on the island, they were redistributed to various camps. Esther’s father and her younger brother were ordered to march to Hutchinson Camp in Douglas.

Hutchinson Camp, Douglas, Isle of Man, virtually unchanged today apart from the absence of barbed wire.

Almost all of the accommodation on the island was in bed and breakfast accommodation since it had been a popular destination for holiday makers from both the UK and Eire in the years before the outbreak of war. And, of course, the Isle of Man TT motor cycle races attracted thousand of competitors and spectators each year (and still do).

Women, older female and younger children travelled south from Douglas by the famous IOM narrow gauge railway which remains today, as it was then, the longest narrow gauge steam line in Great Britain. Mothers with younger children alighted at Port St Mary, a fishing village with a beautiful harbour popular with sailors, holiday makers and fishermen.

Next and final stop was Port Erin, also a fishing port with a magnificent beach and a magnet for holiday makers.

Beautiful Port Erin in the south of the Isle of Man. My mother and father, brother and sister, enjoyed a holiday there in the months before the outbreak of the Second World War. (I hadn’t arrived by then!)

Collectively, Port St Mary and Port Erin were called Rushen Camp whose commandant was Dame Joanna Cruickshank who had founded the RAF Nursing Service in 1918.

The quality of the internees was incredibly high. Those who had been forbidden to work in Nazi Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, made their way to the UK in the1930s. Amongst these were doctors, surgeons, lawyers, school teachers, university professors, artists, musicians, accountants and a wide range of clever scientists. Many of those on the island received a better education than they would have had ‘back home.’ It has often been said that, when Britain most needed people of this experience and ability, they were locked up on the Isle of Man. It wasn’t too long before even the most of those calling for internment admitted their mistake and most Jewish refugees were back on the mainland by Christmas 1940.

My own very tenuous link with internment was through Charles Forte. He owned and and managed a number of milk bars in London and Scotland. When he was released in late 1940, he was recruited by the Ministry of Food to play his part in the war effort. After the war he founded the Trust House Forte Hotel and Restaurant Group and was later ennobled as Baron Forte. Two younger members of his family owned businesses on Barry Island, one of which was three doors from my father’s restaurant. I knew him well but it never crossed my mind that he had been interned during the war but he must have been. Born in 1926 he would have been 14 when internment started and liable to have been locked up. Missed opportunity for me.

Forte’s Ice Cream Parlour on Barry Island. My friends and I spent many happy hours in there drinking hot orange and eating ice-cream (his ice-creams were tastier than my father’s) and chatting with Andreas.

COMING NEXT MONTH : THE LONDON BLITZ