Hershey Bars, Yanks and Sherman Tanks: Childhood memories of the days before D Day
During the 1970s, when I was a child, the Second World War hung about us like a fog. It was everywhere. Everyone over the age of 40, if they were here at the time, had memories of the Second World War. Anyone over the age of 50 was an adult during the war. The general population was a deep reservoir of memory of air raids, rationing, Churchill’s speeches and ominous telegrams.
And it ran deep into our popular culture. Don’t mention the war? You could not avoid it. Favourite sitcom? Dad’s Army. Best drama? Secret Army or Colditz. Settling down on a Saturday afternoon for a film on BBC2? There’s The Dam Busters, Bridge On the River Kwai, Battle of Britain, Cockleshell Heroes, Reach for the Sky, Guns of Navarone, Ice Cold in Alex, and of course no Christmas was complete without The Great Escape.
Our Action Men didn’t have skateboards; they had the uniforms of British Commandos, Nazi stormtroopers or the French resistance, with authentic weaponry and vehicles. We read comics like Commando, Victor, or Warlord, which started in 1974 at 5p, with heroes such as Union Jack Jackson and Lord Peter Flint overcoming crudely stereotyped German and Japanese foes. We played the boardgame ‘Escape from Colditz’, launched in 1973. We read Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed, published in 1975, and went to see the movie with Michael Caine the following year. In 1977, A Bridge Too Far drew us to the cinemas.
During the 1970s, perhaps more than any other post-war decade, the enduring myths of the Second World War were ingrained through television comedy, film, toys and novels. As the post-war certainties were challenged by punk, strikes, and Thatcher, many clung to the reassuring tales of Britain beating the Nazis. The narrative passed from the generation which had experienced it, to the one born in the 1950s and 1960s and beyond, and for good or ill became part of our shared culture, our folk-memory. Its legacy can be seen in both the stoic ‘dig for victory’ reactions to Covid-19, but also the shameful petty xenophobia marring the Brexit debates.
As the wartime generation fades away, and first-hand memory becomes rarer to find, it is all the more important to hear the voices of those who were there, on the oceans, in the air, in the deserts, or jungles, or the battlefields of Europe, or at home amidst rubble and rationing. In that spirit, I am publishing below a short memoir written by my father at the fortieth anniversary of the D Day Landings in 1984. Typing on an old blue Olivetti (how I loved that sound! how I miss it now) he recalls his childhood on Portland, Dorset during the war, as the greatest armada was assembled by the greatest generation, along the English coast, before setting out for Normandy. It captures some of the excitement and thrill of being a child in war, and some details which historians may find useful. It is only one person’s memory, but it deserves to be shared. Amidst the fog, small shards of light can illuminate the greater truths of great events.
Memories of Portland during the lead-up to D Day
Gordon Richards, writing in 1984.
I was born in Portland in January, 1932. My father was in the Royal Navy stationed at Portland Dockyard, and in 1936 we moved to Castletown, to Victoria House, which at that time and throughout the war consisted only partly of a Salvation Army hostel, the seaward half being shops on the ground floor, and three rented flats, with an adjoining bakery.
In the build-up to ‘Overlord’ Castletown underwent many changes. On the stone jetty whose pre-war function had been the export of Portland Stone several ‘seco’ or similar temporary Army huts had been used by the British Army from the early days of the war (I could strip a Vickers heavy machine-gun and re-assemble it when I was nine), and these, with additions, were occupied by U.S.N. personnel in 1943. A scaffolding and boardwalk jetty was built out from the centre of the stone pier the length of an L.S.T., and wedges were cut out to enable vehicles to drive into the holds of two of these simultaneously. Concrete blocks in the form of a Cadbury’s chocolate bar, approximately 2 x 1 ½ metres each, were placed on the sloping shingle beach just outside the dockyard gates to make a ‘hard’ or loading area for L.C.T.s. Our first contact with the U.S. Army was of a tented camp on what was the Royal Navy sports ground, now the helicopter base. Here many of us saw what we now call ‘Afro-Americans’ for the first time, in those days segregated into all-black units. The men were unfailingly polite and generous to us ‘kids’ and started a three-year ‘Americanisation’ influence.
Further afield, the CBs, more famous for their building exploits in the Pacific, but equally awesome to us with our first experience of huge bulldozers and grading machines, created at Ferrybridge what is now the public car park, but was built as the final marshalling area where convoys of tanks and other vehicles were combined into discrete loads for landing craft. They were preceded by an M.P. in a jeep or on a motorcycle, and since the beach road is narrow, presented a problem to other traffic. I vividly remember being caught up on my bicycle between two M4 Sherman tanks which had to stay in to the left because of an empty truck convoy travelling in the opposite direction. The exhaust flames of the one in front were on my front wheel, and the one behind was too close for comfort — the only consolation is that at that age I did not appreciate how little training the drivers had before setting off for Europe! As part of the harbour defences canisters could be lit to form a smokescreen to confuse air attacks. The main store was on the shore near Portland Castle. I can’t recall the exact date, but sometime in 1944 the whole lot went up. That final day I added ‘spontaneous combustion’ to my vocabulary, and from the firemen several other words not to be repeated here. Shortly before D-Day we heard hammering from the flat above (we lived on the second of three floors) and were intrigued to learn that the U.S.N. were building a platform on the wall facing the harbour to use as a visual signal station to control ship movements. We soon got used to the continual clatter of the signal lamp shutter and befriended the personnel. They appreciated having their laundry done,and came into our shelter to reassure us when we had a (by now only occasional) air raid. The noise from our own guns, with each L.S.T. having as many Bofors guns (eight I seem to remember) as were deployed for the whole area earlier in the war, was deafening. The amount of metal thrown up at an intruder was immense, and I recall the glee with which untrained sailors went and ‘had a go’ with an Oerlikon.
The final realisation that Portland was playing a key role in the impending invasion was the setting up of a restricted zone. The main road was blocked just west of the helicopter base officers mess (then the NAAFI) near the railway bridge. We were issued with permits, and the rule was ‘once in the area go home and stay there’. We children happily ignored this and wandered about among the ships and vehicles. I don’t have any record of the unit numbers or names of embarking troops, only the memory of two days of purely Free French convoys, during which several lampposts which had survived months of vehicular proximity were wiped out. The M4 tanks were fitted with hard rubber blocks to reduce road damage, since many had driven down from Liverpool, and by the time they reached Portland some had worked loose. I had a narrow escape when one flew off, and learned to stand on the inside of turning traffic.
To return to the ‘Americanisation’, which so profoundly affected children of my age who were so close to all this military activity. It has to be said that the first effect was a full stomach. Nobody in Castletown relied on the meagre rations between 1942 and 1945. The U.S. troops gave us meals at their messes, candy (our first peanut brittle, O’Henry and Hershey bars) tins of fruit, eggs, butter, the first taste of Coke, and in C and K rations instant coffee.
We learned to play baseball. There were two diamonds on the sports field, and often an LCT crew ashore for recreation could only muster half a dozen men. At first we kids were tolerated to make up the outfield, but as we improved we were given more responsibility — I specialised as a first baseman. I was given a glove to keep quite early on, and subsequently built up a stock of bats, balls and gloves.
My collecting went beyond stamps at this time. I had scrapbooks (alas, now lost) with carefully pasted cigar bands (an astonishing 100 +), chewing gum wrappers and razor-blade packets, and notebooks with vehicle types and adaptations to their equipment (aided by the magazine ‘Recognition’, supposedly restricted but readily available) and all the landing craft derivatives, such as LCT (R) with banks of rocket rails giving the close-range firepower of a battleship, LC (H) or Headquarters, LC (M) or Maintenance ship — the additional collecting urge was to have actually set foot on all these ships. Shortly after 6th June LCTs started to carry spent ammunition back from France for recycling, and I amassed a large collection of bullet and shell cases, from 9mm to 5.5in, of British, French, German and American origin. A life-long enthusiasm for jazz and swing had started with late-night listening to the American Forces Network before 1944, but at that time record-players were available at every U.S. ship or unit, and V-discs greatly expanded the ‘hot’ music available. I was too young to ‘jitterbug’ myself, but remember evenings at the Drill Hall, Eastin and at venues in Weymouth, watching the gyrations of local girls with the Yanks — maybe distance lends enchantment, but I remember them as much more skilful than the present-day ‘jive’ exponents.
At school (Weymouth Grammar) L.s.d. had practically ceased to exist as currency. Many of the pupils came from as far away as Abbotsbury, out of the area of direct U.S. influence, and candy and gum, and especially American comics (pre-eminently Batman and Superman) were good for all kinds of barter.
In retrospect I could not have enjoyed spending those childhood years anywhere more than in Portland in wartime. To us the whole thing was ‘no end of a lark’, but I did have a sobering experience in about September, 1944, when the first batch of German prisoners came into Castletown by LCT and were marched to the temporary POW camp on the rugby ground just above Victoria Square. Some had minor arm or body injuries. They were led by a colonel, who I was shocked to see was a woman about the same age as my mother. They all smelled of earth and delousing powder, and any jingoistic urge to jeer was dispelled by their harmless and dejected appearance. I followed them to the camp, and offered one cigarettes, but a U.S. private stopped me and said ‘they get plenty from us’. Subsequent shiploads of POWs, and wounded Americans were less disturbing, becoming merely an opportunity to see the large railway engines brought into Portland to haul the long trains which took them away, rather than the little 0–4–4 tankers which fronted the tw — coach train to Weymouth in which I traveled to school throughout the war.
Gordon Richards (1932–2004), writing in 1984.
