and often are hugely popular. In my view, the absence of a popular war helped to explain the militancy of young people when they opposed the unpopular war in Vietnam and struggled for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s. I was teaching in a university at the time and was intrigued by the fact that students dressed in military-style clothing and spoke of their protests in military jargon: a march here, an offensive there, the campaign for this or that. They were seeking a substitute for war. I understood how they felt because for me the Second World War came as an adventure, a chance to escape from the routine of normal living.
My brother was eighteen when the war began and he soon volunteered for the Royal Navy. He was trained as a coder — encoding and decoding radio messages — and volunteered to be part of a small crew taking a ship to New Zealand, a long and uncomfortable voyage. He returned to Britain in 1943 and was commissioned and trained as a meteorologist, a handy skill for a sailing enthusiast who later took up ocean racing. When invasion threatened in 1940, my father joined the Home Guard, and I was thrilled when he brought home a rifle. It was still greasy from storage, and was called a Ross rifle. I discovered much later that Ross rifles had been manufactured in Canada to equip troops serving in the Boer War, and also the Royal North West Mounted Police. Despite various improvements, however, the rifles were never satisfactory and were eventually abandoned during the First World War when the Canadian army adopted the British Lee-Enfield. But so desperate was the need for rifles in 1940, after the British army left much of its equipment on the beaches of Dunkirk, that the old Ross rifles were dug out of storage and issued to the Home Guard.
Stranger things happened in those days. Some of the brighter sparks in the Exeter Home Guard mounted a machine gun on a tiny Austin 7 car as our answer to the German Panzers. Minefields were laid across the Warren golf links to hold up German invasion forces, but there were paths through the mines so that golfers could continue to play. Tank traps were installed on the beaches at Exmouth, which made it difficult to land dinghies, but they were used mainly as racks for bathers’ clothes and towels. Coastal defence guns were dug into the red sandstone cliffs to command the approaches to the Warren beaches, but as the nearest point in France was Cherbourg, about a hundred miles across the Channel, I can’t imagine, in retrospect, why anyone thought it remotely possible that the Germans would attempt such a dangerous and difficult crossing.
The war was going badly at the end of 1941 when we heard on the radio that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. “We’ve won the war,” said my father, with unusual prescience — and with undue optimism because it was not until several days later that Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. That bears repeating when so many people, including most Americans, are under the impression that they entered the war in Europe to support Britain in the defence of liberty and democracy. They entered in fact because Hitler and Mussolini declared war on them in support of Japan. Of course, the United States had been aiding Britain and edging toward war with Germany, but one can only speculate about what might have happened had Germany and Italy not forced the issue. Obviously, there would have been a powerful argument in the United States for concentrating its strength against Japan and leaving Europe to its own war. But my father proved to be right, and within a year or so American troops began arriving in and around Exeter.
My image of America, like those of millions of other around the world, had been shaped by Hollywood movies, but the American soldiers tended to confirm our good impressions. They were on average bigger than our own soldiers, better uniformed, better educated, and with better manners. They were instructed in how to treat British civilians, and their military police were quick to remove anyone who seemed to be causing trouble. So while there were incidents, mainly over women, most Britons tended to see Americans as saviours whose presence guaranteed victory over Germany. That may be why, many years later, I could not sympathize with the anti-Americanism of many Canadian nationalists who saw, indeed, still see, the United States not as an ally but as a threat.
I became a “Firewatcher” while still at school. The job was to watch for incendiary bombs and, if possible, put them out before they started a major fire, with a bucket of sand or a stirrup pump — that is, a pump with one leg in a bucket of water to suck, and one leg outside on which the pumper stood to stabilize the operation. Stirrup pumps were distributed by the thousand, and if they sound like an poor way to tackle a bomb, the girl who later became my wife actually made it work: she and an aunt rushed our in their nightdresses when an incendiary fell in the garden and put it out. Even more remarkably, an incendiary fell through the roof of the house next door and was promptly kicked downstairs by an old lady and extinguished. Nothing as exciting as that happened to me.
With a friend, I spent an occasional night firewatching at our school. We played chess and the headmaster came down in his dressing gown and trounced us both. At home, when air raid sirens sounded I put on my steel helmet and, with my father, turned out to patrol the crescent in which we lived. But not as promptly one night as I might have done, because I had got too accustomed to sirens when German bombers passed over, going to or from Devonport, a major naval base about forty miles away, or Bristol, an industrial centre seventy miles away. Sometimes the planes dumped their bombs on us when they couldn’t find their real target, or perhaps were being chased by night fighters. There were in fact nineteen raids on Exeter between August 1940 and May 1942, most of them minor affairs.
I was in bed on the third floor of our house — on a hill about a mile from the city centre — on the night of May 3-4, 1942 and did not pay much attention when the sirens went and I heard bombs exploding a couple of miles away. But then I saw the night sky turn red and realized there was a major fire in the city. In fact, great stretches of the High Street were ablaze, including Tudor era buildings which burned all too easily. My father and I donned our steel helmets and went outside, while my sister, our housekeeper, Alice, and the dog, and a new kitten, promptly named Blitz, took shelter in a sort of store room between the sitting and dining rooms. When, a little later, I tried to check on them, I had a struggle to open the front door; blast had lifted the linoleum throughout the house, jamming the doors. I don’t know what caused the blast. No bombs fell very close to us, but nearby, on the county cricket ground, anti-aircraft guns were blasting away. Or perhaps the great fire in the centre caused a powerful wind as it sucked in oxygen.
We learned after the war that 40 Junkers 88 bombers flew up the River Exe to find the little city of about 80,000 people, and dropped 10,000 incendiaries and some 160 explosive bombs to spread the blaze. About 160 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. One bomb fell through the roof of the cathedral and exploded, but they built medieval churches to last and, with a huge tarpaulin over the roof, the place survived until it could be repaired when peace came. The new library and a million books burned, much to my dismay: I was a great reader, even then, and it had been my custom to stop at the library on the way home from school to replenish the supply of books — G. A. Henty’s stirring stories about boys adventuring in the Empire, and, always favourites, yarns about boys who ran away to sea. I remember the indignation of a librarian when I borrowed a short book, read it over tea, and tried to return it the same evening: Not allowed!
We didn’t know at the time why the Germans had picked on Exeter, a city of little or no obvious military or industrial importance. There were rumors but censorship was tight; I had just begun work as an apprentice reporter and spent the next few days phoning our reports through to London for censoring. We were allowed to announce that there had been a raid on a place in the southwest, and to describe the damage in general terms, but not to name the city because, it was ruled, that would show the Germans, who might have been lost, where they had dropped their bombs. Actually, as we found out after the war, the Germans not only knew they had blitzed Exeter, but also why, and were boasting about it. The raid was in fact a reprisal for an attack by the Royal Air Force in March on the historic German city of Lubeck, on the Baltic. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of bomber command and known popularly as Bomber Harris, had come to the sobering conclusion that night bombing of specific German targets was so inaccurate as to have little value, and he decided to try the tactic of attacking whole German cities, setting them ablaze where possible. Lubeck was chosen as an experimental target because it could be approached over water where there were no A-A guns, and because
