Thread: The War Years
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Old 19th June 2018, 19:37
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John Rogers United States John Rogers is offline
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Location: St.louis,Missouri USA.
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The War Years

I was born in a small town in south Wales called Glyn-Neath, on the 8th of December 1931. The winter was very cold, food was scarce and there was no work for my father who worked as a coal miner.
In 1932 my family moved to a town in England called Shirehampton near the seaport of Avonmouth. We had no home of our own so we moved in with my Grandmother (Williams) , the home was a large stone and brick building with a large front garden. It still looked good in 1995 when I last saw it. We lived at this home for a year. My aunt Maryann and uncle Llewellyn lived in Avonmouth three miles away, they had two children, Peggy the oldest, and Ira a little older than me. My Dad soon found work on the docks at Avonmouth as a Fireman on the Dock Locomotives
Now that my father was working, we started looking for a home of our own. You could not buy homes back in those days; you rented from the local or city government and when your name came up on the list you moved into a home. We finally made the list in 1934 -we were were offered a place to live. We moved into the lower part of the village of Shirehampton, called the Bank, as it was named because the homes were situated on a high bank over looking the main street. They were row cottages, very old, built wall to wall, coal fireplaces, and no water (you got your water from a tap in the middle of the yard). We had a living room downstairs, a kitchen, and two bedrooms upstairs. The only good thing to say about that place was that it was close to my father’s work place that was only a two-mile walk every day. Oh yes, I forgot to say the toilets were also in a building outside in the courtyard ,a six hole wooden seats deluxe model, for a bath we would have to boil the kettle a few times to pour into the galvanized tub.
. We lived at this place until 1938.
In the summer of 1938 we got lucky! The Rogers name came up again on the waiting list for a house and this time we hit the Big Time a three bedroom, living room, large kitchen, electric lights, running cold water, a real bathtub in which we heated the water in gas boiler and pumped it through a pipe to the bathroom. We had a large back garden that we grew just about everything. Dad was a
hell of a gardener. The house was only about five years old and it was freshly painted when we moved in. I can still smell the paint even to this day, as it was the cheap type that rubbed off on your clothes when you bumped into a wall. It was a mixture of powder and water, but it was quite a step up from what I was accustomed to. Our home in Shirehampton, was the place I grew up and what I remember most about my childhood.
The village of Shirehampton has quite a long history dating back to the Roman days. Old Roman forts and camps are scattered all about the place. Avonmouth, which was located two miles away, Bristol was the port seven miles up the river Avon,Avonmouth was where the ships all waited to go up the river Avon to the port of Bristol with the tide. We were taught the history of the village while in school. Of course, back then none of that history meant anything to me, but now when one thinks back it was a nice place to grow up and play in those places.
One thing nice about living at Shirehampton was that it was close to my first school. It was about seventy-five yards from my house and it was not a long walk to and from school. I can remember going to school, as a matter of fact; I have class picture of my first class with my classmates. I have remained in touch with some of them, not as often as I would have liked, but every few years we make contact.
I remember one time I was leaving for school and as I stepped out of the front door my Dad picked up the morning paper and the headlines read ENGLAND GOES TO WAR WITH GERMANY! I can still remember that day as if it were yesterday. I can remember the bomb shelters they built under the school and the small one they built in our back yard. I had to stay and sleep in that shelter many times in the cold of winter, looking out and seeing the firebombs hitting our house, catching it on fire, and the firemen putting out the fire. The front bedroom was completely burnt and smelled like hell for a long time. It is funny how certain smells can trigger your memory. The smell was the same as the white phosphorus (WP) Willie Peter as we called it in Vietnam.
Well, 1940 came and Dad goes off to war in the Army. The German planes were still bombing us day and night. We only lived two miles from the docks, which are full of ships and sometimes the German pilots, would miss the targets and the bombs would fall all around us. Sometimes they would just dump their load so they could get the hell out of there, as the ack ack gunners were very good. We lived very close to a lot of prime targets -- the docks, oil storage tanks, the aircraft factory and an Army camp all within a five-mile radius of our home.
While the war was going on the government changed the daylight summer time to two hours so it was daylight at 10 o’clock at night. All of the kids stayed outside and played because it remained daylight. Wintertime was the worst, as we had to put on extra warm clothes and move into the bomb shelters and stay the night.
It was bad at night. We would watch the German planes be caught in the beams of the Army searchlight units and the anti aircraft guns blow the hell out of them! Of course what goes up, must come down and did it come down! The shrapnel did lots of damage to the rooftops. The next morning, we children would go around picking it up for souvenirs for show and tell. However, the police cracked down on us and started confiscating our loot. Some of us were picking up exploded anti aircraft shells. Kids will be kids and we had no fear of anything. One day my buddy and I were watching a dog fight between a Spitfire and a German plane that had come over to take pictures (not of me). They wanted intelligence pictures of the ships in the dock and the harbor. The spitfire shot the German plane down. The Germans bailed out safely, but the local women got to them before the authorities did and beat the hell out of them with broomsticks and rakes. But guess who was first at the scene of the crashed German plane looking for goodies? My buddy and me. We got some really good stuff from the plane, but the police took it all away from us, kicked us in the ass, slapped our ears and ran us off. They said they wanted the equipment for intelligence purposes. Now that I am older and wiser, I believe them. I did not then, of course, because I was only eleven years old.
In the summer of 1941 through 1942, the German bombing became worse, so they decided to ship all the children to places in the country to keep them out of harm’s way. The evacuees, as they were called, were placed with families that had farms and were located far away from any targets. I knew of kids that were treated like dogs or slaves and they ran away. I also know of kids that loved it -- they got plenty to eat, loved the families that took them in, and kept going back to see them after the war. My Dad decided that I needed a firm hand on me to keep me out of trouble and keep me out of danger from the bombing, so they shipped me off to Brecon, Wales, the home of my Grandparents, Dad’s Mother and Father.
I Lived in Brecon for a year with my Grandparents. It was only sixty miles away from my home, but it was out of the way and at the base of the Brecon Beacons There were a lot of trout streams, and I hunted small game. But most of all, there were no air raids. Life was kind of quite in Brecon. I did not know any other boys my age and at school I was the outsider, so I went up into the mountains to fish and hunt rabbits with my Grandfather, sometimes I would go off by myself. I would stay out late, sometimes for hours past my curfew. That was when Grandma would whip my butt with the riding crop she kept along side of her chair and she would make that thing sing. She was very good to me but was very strict.
About ten miles from our home in Brecon was a special training camp for soldiers. I would take beer up to the troops and earn a few extra pennies. I would have to sneak it to them on the QT because they were in special training. I found out later that they were commandos. Today that same camp is operating, but as a Special Air Service, or as we know it be, the Special Forces, one of the most elite military organizations in the world.
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