George Reed’s experience during the Norwich fire raid was more immediate. He was a member of Norwich’s Auxiliary Fire Service, and when the warning siren sounded, he was filling sand bags from a mound of dirt a lorry had left earlier in the day. He descended to the ARP building basement carrying his shovel.
He waited patiently for the all-clear, picking at a callus on his hand, glancing at the air raid warden sitting across the room, envious of his uniform. The sirens forced the people of Norwich into the cellars several times a week, and it always came to nothing.
Reed had once been in London during a fire-bomb raid. He stood quickly when he recognized the fluid sound of an incendiary hitting the stones of the street. A man and a shovel could usually put out the fire caused by one of these cylinders. He ran up the stairs toward the street.
A fire was burning fiercely in the center of the road. The blackened canister was off to one side. Reed dug his shovel into the dirt and ran to the fire. A dozen shovels’ worth might extinguish it. Just as he tossed the dirt, another canister ripped through the ceiling of the nearby chemist’s shop. Fire flashed through the first floor, billowing out the windows.
Reed changed direction, thinking the street fire would burn itself out in several moments. He carried the shovel toward the chemist’s. A third canister landed near a fruit vendor’s cart half a block away, setting it on fire. Another hit the roof of the ARP post. In quick succession, small bombs landed in a weedy lot at the end of the block, on the roofs of the solicitor’s office and a pensioner’s hotel, and in the flatbed of a truck parked across from the ARP post. Then a cylinder splashed onto the cobblestones four feet from Reed.
Fire crawled up his pants. “Believe it or not, we AFS volunteers had been trained for just this situation,” he recalled. “I dropped to the street and rolled around, suffocating the fire, then kicked my pants off as fast as I could.”
He suffered severe burns on his right leg, and the purple scar was still vivid when I spoke with him after the war. He rose unsteadily to find that fires were growing rapidly all along the street. Forgetting his leg, he ran to the post’s basement door and yelled a warning to the ARP warden. Then George Reed joined a growing stream of people abandoning their town.
Incendiaries rained down on Portersfield and Whitehall roads and crossed Earlham Road, and at least two dozen found Heigham Hall, setting all parts of the old mansion ablaze. The next run of planes came in closer to the center of town, and the clusters landed on Victoria Station, the Norwich Hospital, and city hall. The Lutyens War Memorial and the Guildhall, dating from 1407, were caught by the bombs, as were hundreds of common-walled homes. The skyline in Norwich was quickly topped by fire. Only Norwich Cathedral, with the second tallest spire in all of England, rose above the flames.
Victoria Haselhurst had been raised in Ipswich, forty miles south, so she felt shamefully unconnected to the roaring fires. But, after all, her parents were safely south. The loss was not hers, not really.
She would learn later that the loss was indeed hers. Ipswich, the chief town of Suffolk, was receiving the same rough treatment from the German bombers. The canisters fell across it, too, in a swath to the west of the town center.
In both Norwich and Ipswich, the westerly winds worked for the Luftwaffe, prodding the flames across narrow streets and onto more and more buildings. Victoria’s parents fled the approaching firestorm, but her home, in her father’s family for two hundred years, was consumed. As Victoria watched the Norwich fire, she did not know that the Ipswich fire had reduced her and her family’s possessions to the clothes on their backs.
Eighty percent of the buildings in both towns were destroyed. Fires burned for a week. Because the canisters produced no concussion, casualties were surprisingly light, 1,554 for both Norwich and Ipswich. Most people ran ahead of the flames. To appalled English citizens, the destruction of those lovely towns seemed senseless.
The Defense Committee understood the Germans’ tactic, however, which was to flood the area with refugees fleeing the conflagrations. Homeless, frightened, confused people choked the roads of Norfolk and Suffolk. The task of reinforcing British troops along the coastlines of those counties had suddenly become much more difficult.
Victoria Haselhurst watched the bombers recede. With Norwich engulfed in fire, she began walking south along Blue Bell Road, skirting the town. She heard the steady singing of the all-clear behind her.
Forty miles was a long way to walk, but she hoped to inveigle a ride, her usual method of traveling home. Hitchhiking was virtually unknown in England before the war, but it had become common. She paused for a last look at the town. A band of orange flame rose above it, and higher yet was a vast plume of black smoke. Due to the melee of S-Day, she would not see her parents again for two months.
7
“If I ever write a report about you, I’m going to put this in it,” General Clay grumbled as he levered himself out of the jeep and walked toward a cottage that had a thatched roof, a narrow wood door with a rough iron bolt, and small, leaded windows. “The Hun might be hours away, and I’m more lost in the goddamn Sussex countryside than the Wehrmacht divisions ever will be, thanks to you.”
The general routinely accused me of causing all the snafus in his war effort, everything from coffee that was cold to delays in merchant marine convoys, sometimes charging that a particular blunder had “set out the red carpet for Hitler.” I had nothing to do with any of them, and he never failed to grin. He did so then, as he pushed aside a gate and walked toward the cottage at the side of the lane.
After meeting with the prime minister, we had flown toward an airfield eight miles north of Brighton. Our destination was II Corps’ headquarters at Adisham, between Deal on the channel coast and Canterbury, but from the air we discovered that Luftwaffe bombs had just pockmarked the dirt runway. Engineers with dump trucks and a grader were filling in the holes as we flew over.
Captain Norman searched for a few moments before finding an oat field long enough to land on and with furrows running lengthwise. He touched the Cub down gently. Our British driver was back at Adisham, so the general and I commandeered a jeep from the 127th Field Artillery Regiment and began toward corps headquarters. I drove, the general gave directions, and five minutes later we were lost.
Before he could knock on the door, a boy wearing a striped shirt and shoes two sizes too large appeared from behind a corner of the cottage. He frowned at the general and stepped back in retreat.
“Hold on there, son,” Clay ordered. “Can you tell me where Adisham is? It can’t be far from here.”
The boy was about seven. He squinted up at the general. “I could, but I daren’t.”
“You daren’t?”
The boy scratched his head. “Mummy and the reverend say not to tell strangers where they are.” His hand remained in his mass of unruly brown hair, apparently forgotten. “You could be a German.”
“Look, kid—” Clay checked himself. He knelt down and continued sweetly, “Lookee here, lad, I’m wearing the uniform of a general in the United States Army. Do I look like a German to you?”
“It could be a ’sguise,” he said.