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1. 10. Moo corner – showing resilience in the face of the enemy. It’s the 90th anniversary of Bomber Command just now and it’s quite something to see a man who remembers it first-hand, talking about it only yesterday..

   101-year-old veteran among those remembering Bomber Command 90th anniversary | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DECqvBSt48

   One of the things that Bomber Command did was to make the Germans withdraw significant Luftwaffe and air defence forces away from the coast of France to protect their own towns and cities from RAF bombing. Both of my parents lived in towns on the south coast (Poole and Torquay) during the war and Mum in particular remembered the different sounds our bombers made when they were going out to when they were coming back. My Dad, he remembered the strafing by German fighters over his beloved Torbay, the locals called them “hate raids”..

   ‘Strafing caught everyone unawares. Seemingly, any German fighter with nothing better to do, or with bullets or cannon shells remaining from a skirmish elsewhere, were attracted to Tor Bay by a kind of magnetic lodestone, as though unable to return to base unless inconveniencing some person or building along the way.’

   They didn’t all get away with it though as Dad recalled he was making a wet fish delivery on his bike near Torre Abbey Sands and saw a Focke-Wulf 190 go down on the beach. This was May 1943 and it was one of several aircraft that strafed the Palace Hotel in Babbacombe – the hotel was being used as a convalescent home for injured RAF aircrew. War is a nasty business.

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