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John Powell, who served in the Home Guard in World War Two, was part of a crew manning an anti-aircraft rocket battery in London.
Here he recalls the night of an air raid.
John writes for Bonzer! maazine. Please do visit www.bonzer.org.au
...But then I was outside, running in the chill night to Projector No.13 of Charlie Troop, as fast as I could, so that I would be No.1 and Tom would have the onerous chore of loading the rockets as No.2.
I pulled on the earphones.
"Fuse 67!" I yelled to Tom and heard him repeat it
We set the fuses on the rocket nose-caps and Tom loaded them onto the ramps.
"Bearing, one eight five." I pushed the projector round to the mark.
"Height, seven four!" I yelled to Tom. He repeated it as I saw him raise the ramp with the rockets on it.
"Stand By!" crackled the earphones
"Stand By!" I shouted to Tom
Then, sure enough it came again.
"Stand down." And almost immediately, "unload."
For a few seconds I waited; thoughts flashed through my mind: fires . . . the Blitz . . . restrictions . . . shortages . . . fear . . . bombs . . . broken windows again. In complete frustration with everything, I said, "Dammit," and slammed down the firing handle
There was a blinding flash, a cloud of smoke and an almighty, mind-shattering and ground-shaking roar as our two rockets took off.
The other 79 projectors were all pointing in different directions returning to the standard bearing of 359 degrees, and the ramps all at different angles winding down to 45 degrees to unload.
Thinking that they had misunderstood the order or, maybe, knowing they had not, but filled with similar feelings of frustration or enthusiasm, first a few, then gradually all the rest, started firing off as well.
The deafening salvo lasted for about a minute.
The rockets went all over the place, in all directions and at different angles. Two of them shot over the Marble Arch, missing the Cumberland Hotel by a whisker, but taking off five of its chimney pots as they hurtled skywards.
A terrified sentry flung himself to the ground as two rockets roared over the camp gates and, miraculously missing trees, headed down to the Serpentine Lake. Plainly visible in the bright moonlight, they skimmed along the surface, bounced twice, then, like torpedoes, went under in a turbulent cloud of spray and foam, to disappear without trace except for a sudden surge of gurgling bubbles coming to the surface.
Four more streaked over Park Lane, racing each other to the heavens and straddling the Dorchester Hotel, two on either side as they went.
Two others went straight up and, as though with the intention of bestowing empirical confirmation of Newton's Law of Gravity, came straight down again, crashing through trees to finish in Green Park.
There they stood; embedded nose first, almost side by side, proudly erect, like two ancient phallic symbols
Identified by the battery markings on the battered fins, they were returned to us by a truck of the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Squad, with a sarcastic note that they were far too busy defusing unexploded bombs and mines without having to clean up 'the droppings' from Dad's Army
They politely requested that, in future, we remember to set the fuses so that our little firecrackers went off 'pop' in the air, without danger to anybody . . . and probably, by the looks of it, that would include bombers of the Luftwaffe.
The other rockets took off to all points of the compass with a nerve-shattering roar that seemed endless; most leaving an avalanche of broken branches and twigs cascading down.
Dad's Army had fired! The hoodoo had been broken. A stunned silence fell over the London scene for a few moments, a silence broken only by spasmodic outbursts of rather violent flatulence from the old soldiers.
Complaints flooded in very promptly from the Hotel Managements, the Police, the Air Raid Wardens, and numerous anonymous abusive callers. A Fleet Street night editor even phoned to ask if it were true that Hyde Park had been blown up by Dad's Army, while fire watchers reported a rocket in a vertical position, flying horizontally, leaving a trail of sparks across the dome of the Albert Hall and wobbling along like a pregnant duck.
Our Commanding Officer acted very responsibly over the whole military action, and informed the Bomb Disposal Squad of the pregnant-duck rocket, about to land at any moment somewhere in the Greater London area, which all the Dads agreed, was very helpful. At the same time he informed them of the two rockets somewhere at the bottom of the Serpentine Lake, in case they wanted to retrieve them.
Bomb Disposal were very rude. They said that, including the free home delivery of the two unfused rockets, three incidents from Dad's Army in as many minutes were more than they could stand in one night and that we were giving them as much trouble as the bloody Luftwaffe.
They then suggested that we could retrieve the damned things from the Serpentine Lake ourselves, and that their advice on the best way to start was for all Dad's Army ' to go jump in the lake' and look for them.
We never found out whether we shot anything down that night—apart from the five chimney pots on the Cumberland Hotel, but we reckoned we must have.
After all, it was surely no coincidence, that, suddenly, there was not another air raid on London for another, unprecedented, four nights.
The authorities were puzzled, but to all the Dads it was obvious that the few nerve-shattered Luftwaffe pilots who survived our Dad's Army onslaught, had staggered back to base with terrifying reports of a horrifying, deadly, new, secret weapon, a hellish weapon from which there was no escape because it fired in all directions at once.
© John Powell
