Centenary searches

September the 15th is a special day for me. This year, it was my father’s 100th birthday. Though perhaps I should say the centenary of his birth since, sadly, he didn’t make it past 61. 

I keep thinking about the gaps in my knowledge of his past. You know how it is, while people are alive there’s always plenty of time to ask the necessary questions, and then they aren’t anymore, and you haven’t.

My father in uniform:
as a Belgian boy scout in 1936

I know that in May 1940, the family was living in the Belgian capital, Brussels, where he’d spent his childhood. By then, there had been eight months of ‘phony war’, during which France and Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany, but fighting had been local and limited. Then on the 10th of that month, a Friday, Germany changed up a gear, giving the allies a taste of the real thing, no phony fakery.

Its troops moved over the borders of Belgium and Holland. That was a smart trap, into which France and Britain promptly fell. They moved forces to confront that move, and missed Nazi preparations for the real thrust further south, aimed at France itself. The French commanders refused even to believe their airmen when they reported huge traffic jams of German tanks and other vehicles ready to come straight at them.

Still, from the point of view of my father’s family it didn’t make much difference that the northerly attack was a diversion. When German tanks bore down on their home in Brussels, it must have felt just as serious as if it was the main offensive.

My father was the youngest of five siblings. He was still eighteen when the Germans came knocking. I don’t know whether he was still at school, but I do know he and his mother were alone in the Brussels house. I suppose the two brothers and two sisters had already left home to pursue their own interests. As for my paternal grandfather, he’d chosen to travel to England for what must be right up there with the least fortunately timed golfing weekends ever.

Military traffic meant there was no way for civilians like him to get back to Belgium.

Brussels fell to the German forces just a week after the start of their assault. That was 17 May, the Friday following the initial invasion. My father and his mother were on the run by then. They caught the last train out of Brussels. He reckoned that made them lucky, as the previous one was attacked by a German fighter that inflicted a lot of casualties.

He used to talk of an attaché in the British Embassy in Brussels who’d always amused people by announcing he was a spy. My father saw him again, on the dockside at Calais, in uniform with the green band of Military Intelligence around his cap. So, it turned out, his claims hadn’t been a joke at all.

In a conversation about all these events, my mother assured me that he hadn’t travelled to England from Calais but from Bordeaux. That makes sense. We’re now into late May 1940, and with the Germans rapidly moving across France, the French army collapsing and the British in full retreat, I imagine that the route was still reserved for military traffic. My father could no more travel to England that way than his father could travel back in the opposite direction. 

My father and his mother escaped across France to the southwest. In Bordeaux, they were met by British ships that took them home. I can entirely understand my father’s relief after days on the run for their lives, at seeing the Royal Navy warships lined up when they arrived in Portsmouth. At last, he had the feeling that Britain wasn’t entirely without resources to defend itself.

The French government surrendered in June 1940, ending the Battle of France. As Churchill pointed out, that only meant that the Battle of Britain was about to begin. Germany would certainly count on air superiority, one of the major elements of its victory in France, so my father decided to join the Royal Air Force.

Technically that meant joining the Voluntary Reserve of the Air Force. He wasn’t planning on following a military career. By enlisting in the ‘RAFVR’ he was joining up for the period of the war, with the aim of being discharged once it was over. 

It seems that, despite the urgency of the times, it could take months for a volunteer to be called in. That meant that my father, having found a flat in London’s Earl’s Court, had a front row seat to the Battle of Britain as it was fought out over the capital. That was raging as he turned 19 on 15 September 1940.

Making the capital the battleground hadn’t, originally, been the Germans’ plan. They started off bombing airfields in southeast England, to prevent British planes attacking a German force crossing the Channel. Had they stuck to the plan, things might have gone very hard for the British, since airfields were being put out of action more quickly than they could be repaired. 

Unfortunately for Germany, and just as unfortunately for the civilian population of London (and Berlin as it happens), but fortunately for Britain’s prospects, a unit of German planes bombed the outskirts of London by mistake. Churchill decided to hit back, launching a bombing attack on Berlin. Hitler, in his fury, switched the German campaign against the British capital. And my father got a ringside seat to the battle that followed.

He told me about watching a British fighter chasing a lone German bomber across the city. The pursuit ended with a terrible crash and a column of smoke, and he said to himself, “I don’t think that’s the bomber”. Next day, near Victoria Station, he saw the wreckage of the fighter spread across the front of an apartment block.

On another occasion, he had a fine view of what he believed was the same German bomber return on three days in succession to bomb Battersea Power Station, on the south bank of the Thames. Each time the bombs fell closer and closer to the power station, causing huge damage to the civilian housing in their path, but without ever quite reaching the target itself.

This nineteen-year-old watched the London Blitz play out while the RAF took its time calling him up. According to the War Office’s records, he was formally recruited into the RAF some time “after November 1940”. At least six months had passed since he and his mother had fled Brussels, but now it was time to get serious and into the war himself, as a participant, not a spectator.

My father, enlisted some time after November 1940

A subject I’ll come back to in a while. Because I’m beginning to get a picture of how things went, though it remains a bit fragmentary. If only I’d asked more questions while I still had the time…

My father in uniform again
With his parents during World War 2