D-Day 80th anniversary special - by Robin Scott-Elliot

Bob Johns paused on the stairs and cocked his head to one side. He could hear his father’s snores. He smiled to himself and stepped carefully down into the hall of 129 Jervis Road, the small, terraced house in Portsmouth where he’d spent the first 14 years of his life.

Outside, he pulled the front door quietly shut behind him and sat on the steps to put his shoes on before plunging his hands into his pockets, turning up his jacket collar and hurrying off past the Royal Navy dockyards. Did he look back? If he did it would have been the last time Bob Johns ever saw home.

Bob Johns

Fast forward a couple of years, to the early hours of 6 June 1944 and Bob Johns was taking a deep breath before leaping into the night sky above Normandy, one of the first… I was going to say men to take part in D-day but Bob Johns was not a man, he was a boy. Bob Johns was 16, and he shouldn’t have been there.

His story is one of so many found within the history of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe 80 years ago, the day of days for so many young men and the end of days for plenty among them.

I have read and written plenty about D-day – including a podcast, Wars That Shaped The World – and been interested in it since I was a teenager and persuaded my parents to drive us from our home in Belgium so I could go and walk the ground, see Pegasus Bridge, Omaha beach, St Mere Eglise and all the other places that fill the history books.

Yet for all that I only came across the story of Bob Johns this week, stumbled over it while looking up something else. It’s why history fascinates me – there is always something new to learn, to discover to understand. History is always alive.

I can’t remember if we stopped in Ranville on that teenage trip or subsequent visits. Ranville, a small Norman village, occupies a footnote in history – it was the first village or town in France to be liberated. Among the men of the 6th Airborne Division who drove the Germans out at 2.30am was the boy Bob.

He's still there in Ranville, laid to rest forever in the war cemetery outside the village. On his white marble tombstone, the curved top matching all the other 2,417 graves, is carved the winged badge of the Parachute Regiment, the date of his death and his age, 16. It’s an age that places him exactly between my two daughters.

Bob's grave

There is an inscription on it, requested by his parents, Henry and Daisy… ‘He died as he lived, fearlessly.’

He was the second of Henry and Daisy’s five children to be killed in the war. His eldest brother, William, had been lost at sea in 1940 when his submarine was sunk in the Atlantic.

Perhaps that’s where the impulse came from for Bob to run off and join the army. When he turned up at the recruiting office, the sergeant must have had his suspicions, although Bob was tall and broad for his age – but nevertheless his age was only 14. The sergeant looked the other way and Bob was in.

By January 1944 he had sailed through the parachute training school. “He loved being a paratrooper,” his commanding officer, Jack Watson, was to recall after the war. “He was a very big chap and very capable. He was always ready to help people and really was fearless.”

He jumped into Normandy not long after the clock had hurried past midnight on 6 June to signal the beginning of D-day. Bob and his company were to spend 11 days on the frontline around Ranville and after a brief break were back in action in the bloody battle for Normandy. Some veterans have described this as the time of their lives, and from what we know of Bob this does sound like the time of his young life.

Back home, that was not how his parents saw it. When he’d disappeared, they searched with mounting desperation for their son. Not a single friend knew where he’d gone, or if they did they didn’t let on. The local recruitment office said they’d not seen him (he must have joined up away from Portsmouth). Henry and Daisy filled an ‘Under-age enlistment’ form and waited for the army to send him home to his mum and dad. Except this was not a priority within the armed forces – there was a war on.

At last, the Military Police picked up his trail. He was tracked down to his unit, the 13th (South Lancs) battalion of the Parachute regiment. Two MPs were dispatched across the Channel to find Bob – he was two young to fight. He should not be in Normandy.

On 23 July 1944, Bob was two days from turning 17. He’d no idea the net was closing in on him. He had a war to fight, a war he’d been fighting for six weeks. His platoon was dug in at the Le Mesnil crossroads. At 10am firing broke out. This is how his battalion’s war diary recorded what happened.

“At 1140hrs an OR [other rank] of the Anti-Rank Platoon was shot dead by a sniper from the area 146725. In retaliation we attacked [the sniper’s position] with mortars and PIATs at 1400hrs.”

That was it – the OR was Bob Johns, shot dead by a German sniper. Coincidentally, I read of the death of my great uncle Ronnie in the First World War in the same way; a brief sentence in a war diary that ends with him being shot by a sniper.

A few days later the two MPs arrived in Normandy with orders to take Bob Johns home to his mum and dad. They were too late. Instead of their son Harry and Daisy received a telegram… their boy Bob was dead for king and country, aged 16.

Robin Scott-Elliot has been a sports journalist for 25 years with the BBC, ITV, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the ‘i’, covering every sport you can think of and a few you probably can’t. He threw that all away to move home to Scotland and chase his dream of writing books instead of football reports. Once there his daughters persuaded him to write a story for them and that is how his career as a children's author began. Finding Treasure Island is his latest book and is published by Cranachan.

The Windermere Children: The story of 300 child Holocaust survivors who came to the Lake District

In 1945 the people of Lakeland welcomed three hundred child Holocaust Survivors into their community.

Lake Windermere

(photo Susan Brownrigg)

A special exhibition at Windermere Library From Auschwitz to Ambleside highlights what life was like for these children. I visited to find out more.

Windermere Library, home to the
Auschwitz to Ambleside exhibition 

(photo Susan Brownrigg)

In 1942 the Nazis began what they called ‘the Final Solution’ - a plan to exterminate all Jewish people across Europe. Roma gypsies, gay and disabled people, as well as black and mixed-race people were also persecuted and killed. 

It's estimated that eleven million people died in the Holocaust including six million Jewish people

By the end of World War II, approximately 90 per cent of Europe’s Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.

In June 1945, Leonard Montefiore, of the Central British Fund (now World Jewish Relief), persuaded the British Government to give permission for a thousand Jewish orphans aged from eight to sixteen to be brought to the UK for recuperation, and ultimate re-emigration overseas. 

Leonard Montefiore also set up the
 Kindertransport (children’s transport)
 which provided refuge for
 10,000 children before the war.

Just 732 actually came to Britain. They became known as The Boys, though they included 204 girls. 

Of these, 300 children who had survived the Theresienstadt Ghetto in the Czech Republic were brought to Windermere. The youngest were just three years old. 

Many of the children no longer knew how old they were and could not remember their date of birth, and lots were older than sixteen.

The Lake District Holocaust Project which curated the exhibition explains: “The Jewish children who came to the Lake District had been liberated in May 1945. Many had been used as slave labour in many camps across Nazi Occupied Europe for a number of years. The list of names of the camps they had experienced is an A-Z of horror. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Majdanek, Warsaw ghetto, Lodz ghetto…..they each had a different story to tell of a different journey. Their discovery in Theresienstadt does not begin to cover their story.”

The children were to spend a period of recuperation in the Lakes before setting out on new lives.  

The children were flown from Prague to Crosby on Eden airfield near Carlisle. 

The Immigration Officer said: “The behaviour of the children was exceptionally good.”

From there the children were taken in a convoy of buses and army trucks to Calgarth - a wartime housing estate built to accommodate workers from the Short Sunderland Flying Boats factory on the shores of Windermere. 

The single workers no longer needed the rooms at the now lost estate, near Troutbeck Bridge - and there was the perfect number available for each child to have their own private room.

A plan of the Calgarth Estate from Cumbria Archives
which is on display in the library

(photo Susan Brownrigg)

Arriving in the Lake District was described by the children as like being in “Paradise”.  

The Lake District Holocaust Project website explains: “The estate had its own shops, canteen, entertainment hall and many other facilities. They were each given their own small room, a bed and clean linen. For many it was their first encounter with privacy and cleanliness in five years.”

One quote on display is from Ben Helfgott, who was 15 when he came to Calgarth. “I'll never forget the smell of the fresh linen I slept on that first night ... I can't remember ever having a better night sleep ... It was only a hut, but to me it was a palace.”

The children who came to Windermere

were given a copy of Pears' Cyclopaedia

The children became known as the Windermere Boys - although the group included 35 girls.

Most young survivors were male and the Nazis considered girls less useful for slave labour.

When they arrived they could not speak English, so they were given language lessons.

The children were offered opportunities for sport, education, outdoor recreation and healthcare. 

Over a period of six months, they were gradually moved to other homes in places throughout the UK, and they had left Calgarth Estate by early 1946.

Around 30-40 children moved to Manchester, others to Liverpool, Gateshead and London. Some left Britain, to America, Canada and Israel.

Outside the library there is a memorial garden to the Windermere Children with colourful artwork and planting that tells the journey of the children through the language of flowers.

The interpretation explains: “Many of the children spoke of their love of the luscious green of the Lake District and described it as an explosion of colour after the horrors of the camps.”

Plants chosen include heather (protection) daffodils (new beginnings) and snowdrops (hope.)

From Auschwitz to Ambleside exhibition, Windermere Library

(photo Susan Brownrigg)

The children's story is also retold in the BBC film The Windermere Children and the accompanying documentary The Windermere Children: in their own words.

After the War from Auschwitz to Ambleside by Tom Palmer

The book After the War : From Auschwitz to Ambleside by Tom Palmer tells the story of the Windermere Boys in a dyslexia friendly accessible format. It is published by Barrington Stoke. The Centre for Holocaust education offers lesson plans for schools studying the book.

The '45 Aid Society was set up in 1963 by some of the 732 children who came to Britain in 1945. Their children continue the society's work. 

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) encourages remembrance in a world scarred by genocide. They promote and support Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) – the international day on 27 January to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, and the millions of people killed under Nazi Persecution and in genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. 27 January marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.

Useful links:

https://www.hmd.org.uk/take-part-in-holocaust-memorial-day/schools/primary-schools/

https://holocausteducation.org.uk/lessons/open-access/lesson-materials-to-support-after-the-war-a/

https://www.worldjewishrelief.org/about-us/the-boys

https://45aid.org/

“Any Old Iron” Guest post by Elizabeth Wein

The garden of my house in Perth, Scotland, lost its iron rail fence in World War II – not to an enemy bomb, but to patriotism. All over the United Kingdom, iron railings got chopped down in parks and gardens to support the war effort. Here's a link to a newsreel from 1940 showing men collecting railings in a London park!

https://www.britishpathe.com/video/park-railings-for-munitions

The idea was that the iron would be melted down and used to make ammunition and armour for tanks and ships, although nobody’s really sure if that happened – there’s a rumour that London’s iron railings were all dumped in the Thames, and I’ve been told that Perth’s ended up in landfill on St. Magdalene’s Hill.

Iron rail fences on our road early in the 20^th century

Parliament’s Hansard report for 13 July 1943 tells us that somebody wanted to know what was being done with all that collected iron. Lord Hemingford commented, “It has been felt that an injustice has been done to a very large number of usually uncomplaining and patriotic people. This question of the requisitioning of railings and gates is rather like eczema; it is not very serious, but it is most confoundedly irritating, and causes a vast amount of bad temper.”

(source: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1943/jul/13/requisitioned-railings)

For years, whenever I looked at the stumps of those railings in my garden wall, I thought of them as my house’s wartime scars. What I didn’t realize was that World War II took away something far more tragic from my house than its decorative iron railings. It took away the boy who’d come of age in that house and who’d still lived there when he went to war as a young man, the only child of the couple who lived in that house for forty years. He left my house to go to war and he never came back.

He was a navigator in the Royal Air Force. He was part of a team of “pathfinders,” a dangerous job in which an advance aircraft would have to find and mark an attack site for a bomber squadron, dropping flares in the dark that would light up the enemy target.  On 7 Dec. 1940, he and five other crew members took off from RAF Stradishall in Suffolk in their “Wimpey” – a twin-engined Vickers Wellington bomber. They flew through atrocious weather in the dark to Germany, along with two other pathfinder aircraft, to mark the target for a bombing raid in Dusseldorf. They vanished later that night somewhere over the North Sea – “Aircraft failed to return,” is what the official reports said.

A Wellington crew

(source: https://www.lancs.live/news/lancashire-news/lancaster-bomber-brave-daredevils-who-24064051)

Let me tell you about Chick. (His real name was Charles.) He was a mild-looking young man with dimple in his chin – his RAF portrait is in black and white, but I think he must have been like Kate, his mother, short and lightly built, with brown hair, those amused eyes blue. Robert, Chick’s adoptive father, ran a fishmonger’s shop in Perth, where Chick helped out, but in 1939, with war looming, he joined the Royal Air Force as a reservist.

The road in front of our house in 1934 and 2022

Late in August 1939, just before Germany invaded Poland, one of Chick’s mates who was also a reservist got his calling-up papers. The friend and a few others turned up at Chick’s house – MY house! – at eleven o’clock that night, and they all decided they’d have one last night on the town before they were called into action. Chick drove them from Perth to Dundee where, arriving after midnight, they had a couple of drinks and checked out a couple of all-night coffee stands before heading back to Perth at about three o’clock in the morning.

That’s when Chick ignored a stop sign, was spotted by a waiting policeman, and got pulled over for driving under the influence of alcohol – which apparently he didn’t have a very good head for!

He was fined £10 and given a six month driving ban. He was contrite and honest about what had happened, and solicitor who defended him pointed out that it was Chick’s “first time in trouble”! (Source: Dundee Evening Telegraph, 25 Aug. 1939, page 6).

See my source note there – I got this story from an old newspaper. It’s available online in the British Newspaper Archive. Actually, everything I know about Chick – the details of the colour of his mother’s hair and eyes, the kind of plane he flew, the date of his disappearance, even his nickname – I dug up by accident simply because I just wanted to know more about my own old house.

And in the wider sense, isn’t that the real reason we dig up history – because we want to know more about our own house, our own city, our own people, our own world? To learn from them, to connect to them in their strengths and to correct their weaknesses?

I tell this as a coherent story, as if I knew these people, Chick and his family and friends. But what I know about them I found through scraps, fragments, puzzle pieces that I’ve fit together: RAF war graves memorials, stories and police reports and personal columns in local newspapers, internet queries on ancestry chat boards, wartime bulletins, photographs, voting records, passenger lists for ships and airplanes.

(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_Wellington#/media/File:See_How_Your_Salvage_Helps_a_Bomber_Art.IWMPST14695.jpg)

Look at that – the scrap metal from his own fence railings may have become part of the Wellington bomber that Chick died in.

All my stories begin this way – finding connections between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between daily life and drama, between the past and the present. I hope this gives you some inspiration for finding your own fascinating connections!

Elizabeth Wein is a recreational pilot and the owner of about a thousand maps; flight inspires her young adult novels and non-fiction. Her best-known book, Code Name Verity, was short-listed for the Carnegie award and became a number one New York Times bestseller in 2020. She has published three short novels with Barrington Stoke, including Firebird, which won the Historical Association's Young Quills Award for Historical Fiction in 2019. Look for her latest flight-inspired historical thriller, Stateless, published by Bloomsbury in March 2023.

Visit Elizabeth's website at https://www.elizabethwein.com/

Twitter: @ewein2412

Instagram: ewein2412

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

The link to my info on the Barrington Stoke site: 

Elizabeth's Barrington Stoke books

Elizabeth Wein: Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)