Lancaster bomber

[Yellowperil]

Back in the latter part of last century one of my mates dad's used to tell me stories of his formative years, he was born around 1910 and was a motorcyclist in his twenties, so his first bikes consisted of flat tankers, some without beaded tyres even.
The man was a self taught engineer, builder and farmer, a bloody genius who dragged himself up from real poverty and built everything he owned.
Ernie knew his way around any engine and even in his mid eighties would still have a trick of two to teach, like sticking a screwdriver into a spark plug cap to see if there was any juice there, that used to frighten me on account of his pacemaker.

He was in a reserved occupation during the war and I remember him telling me about the bombers all taking off from the local airbases (or aerodromes as he called them) and forming up. One thing I never really thought about was the sheer noise, we are lucky to see one bomber usually, a few years ago we had two for a summer. He was talking about multiples of bombers, apparently all the windows used to vibrate for ages and the sound would just fill the area, as more and more planes kept appearing as others went away.
I wish he was still here, he would tell the story much better than my ramblings.
He died a few years ago, nobody was sure if he was 99 or 100.

[mercrocker]

It is an inevitable shame that folk like that are simply not around any more. One of my wife's friends is 100 and served in the RAF Regiment, ending up in Burma. He still won't talk about it and the overwhelming emotion he does show is that of guilt for having returned and lived such a long and happy life. Lovely fella, too....

[NorfolkNWeigh]

That guilt of having survived when your comrades in arms didn’t was brought home to me when visiting the USS Arizona wreck/grave in Pearl Harbour. 900 of the 1200 victims are entombed in the wreck still. I must admit I choked up when the young Naval Officer giving the guided tour said that over the years a lot of survivors have had their ashes taken down by Navy divers and placed in the ship to be with the friends they left up to 70 years ago.

[Warren t claim]

I live in a part of the country that suffered heavy Kraut bombing in the war due to us being a port and having a shipyard in the area.

The evidence is still visible in our local geography. A row of lock up garages in a terraced street where once houses stood. A few 1960s houses in a street that look out of place.

[Hooli]

Liverpool was the Western Approaches HQ as well I believe.

[mercrocker]

Southampton and Portsmouth are very similar to Liverpool, London and Bristol in WW2 heritage. I am not so familiar with Portsmouth as I only started hanging about down there in the late Seventies but I know loads of sites in Southampton that still bear visible reminders of the Blitz. My Grandfather was an ARP Fire Warden and St John Ambulance driver in his spare time (he was Reserved Occupation) with Gran as his travelling Nurse and he often pointed out things around town which are still there. Sadly, most of the post-war rebuilding has now itself been demolished and successively replaced with modern shit but there are still things to see - including a wall whereupon American soldiers awaiting D Day embarkation are alledged to have scratched their names in the bricks. More than one local cynic has pointed out the wall also represents where the pox clinic used to be and that the queues of G.I.s were actually waiting there.....

One piece of architectural history now vanished is the Sun Hotel at the docks end of High Street. This was a mid-Victorian establishment destroyed in a Luftwaffe raid but rebuilt as a one-storey shed-like boozer. They saw fit to destroy even this in 1994 and replace it with another anodyne Millenial horror. Across from the Sun used to be a vacant plot where the neighbouring building was demolished after bombing and this was an Esso garage and car sales lot for many years - I remember the sheepskin telling a whiney-looking couple to (very loudly) Fuck Off after they carped about a car they hadn't even bought yet (a Farina, I think) as we passed by. It was the first time I had heard an adult swear like that in front of my Mum and I was equally embarrassed and amused....

[Warren t claim]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2people ... 3148.shtml

An air raid shelter took a direct hit. Half of the road is still there but a police station was built on the crater back in 1974.