Flying Bomb Memories

A Memory of Twickenham.

As a 14 year old living in these dangerous war year's, we were used to seeing dog-fights between the Spitfires and Luftwaffe so much so that we were rather blasé about taking cover when danger threatened. Came the flying bomb in 1944 and it was a different kettle of fish because they were unpredictable in their performance and though we realized that when the engine stopped we were to take cover or lay flat wherever we were, sometimes the engine didn't stop and the missile kept coming. It was designed thus - with a certain fuel load and a timing mechanism which enabled the elevators so that the bomb dived with motor running. It was only discovered that when the elevators were enabled and the bomb started to dive, the fuel in the basic jet motor was cut off and so stopped which gave citizens some early warning. We had a few of these bombs in Twickenham, one which devastated the Twickenham Swimming Baths, and it is this one that is the subject of this tale. The bomb landed in the early hours and us boys who were always on the look-out for souvenirs of shrapnel or bomb splinters decided to walk to town to see what damage was done. As we approached the baths from Church Street, just past where the newsagent called Trussler was situated was an extremely large piece of the flying bomb some 5 foot long and with a few German markings on. There was not a soul in sight so we thought "could we dare take this prize home safely?" There were five of us in the group and we picked up the remains and started walking back home getting just as far as St. Mary's Church when around the corner came a police car which stopped and asked us boys just where did we think we were going with that object? We had no answer for that and were told to leave it where it lay and "go home" We found out long after the war that the remains lay in the Twickenham Police Station yard and eventually went to scrap.
We had another encounter with one of these "vengeance weapons"a few weeks later whilst we were playing soccer on Moor Mead. We could hear the bomb approaching and carried on playing until the motor stopped, we looked up and this missile was heading down at a remarkable rate spinning as it did. It looked as though it was heading for us and instead of us laying flat, we started to run in the direction the bomb was coming until an ARP warden screamed at us to "get down, you little fools"!! which we did and were almost deafened when the bomb whistled over us and landed near Gillettes on the Great West Road, quite a way from us but nevertheless we felt the blast.

---

---