Hollywood And Nuremberg

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Hello, and welcome to a new series of Family Stories, the podcast written by you, our listeners.

This week's family stories span from dubious rabbit pies to the harrowing task of editing the first concentration camp footage, plus some hair-raising blitz escapades along the way.

This week, we're starting with a story from David Alexander.

David writes, This family story concerns my paternal grandfather, Bob.

During World War II, he was in a reserved occupation, working for the Chivers Food Company as a production engineer.

He helped to design, build and maintain the factories producing canned food that went to the forces overseas, and developed special curved cans that could fit in the sides of a submarine hole so that they could use every inch of space.

Sometimes Bob had to drive around between the different factories, working on improvements to the production lines.

One day he was en route to a factory when he saw a roadside cafe advertising rabbit pie on the menu.

Being very partial to rabbit pie, he stopped for lunch, ordering a portion in eager anticipation of a change to the normal wartime diet.

The pie duly arrived with mash and veg, and he set to eat it with enthusiasm.

After a mouthful or two, he decided that it didn't taste much like rabbit pie, nor did the meat have quite the right texture.

He questioned the waitress to make sure they'd given him the meal.

She said yes, it was right, but they had to eke out the rabbit with some other meat in order to make it go further.

After many minutes of questioning, she admitted that they'd used horse meat, but assured Bob it was a 50-50 mix.

Bob picked apart the rest of his pie and could only find one piece of rabbit meat.

The majority was horse meat.

He complained again saying that his pie was not a 50-50 mix.

At this point, the cafe owner got involved and explained that the 50-50 mix actually meant one rabbit and one horse.

But rabbit pie sounded more appealing on the menu.

From that day until the end of rationing, Bob had a much more careful careful approach to ordering meals when he travelled.

There is a funny twist to this story.

My other grandfather was also in a reserved occupation and owned an arable farm near Saffron Walden in Essex.

Real, unadulterated rabbit pie was a regular item on their menu, freshly caught in the fields.

And that story was from David Alexander.

Our next story is from Henry Faulkner.

My grandparents, Charles and Kate Jones, married just before the war, in the small village of Alton in North Herefordshire.

Grandad worked on the family farm and Gran was in service in a large estate house.

The war started and Grandad and his brothers and sisters continued to work the farm.

Although it's now all grass, the furrows where they plowed can still be seen today.

Evacuated children were sent south from Liverpool to the village, but at that time my grandparents were not eligible to host children.

Despite this, my gran would wait on the platform and take in any children who didn't have a family to go to until the admin was sorted.

They took in dozens of children, some for a night, some for a week or two.

The children would always ask, in a scouse accent, where's the chippy, missus?

and be amazed at the sight of real eggs rather than powdered, and fresh milk.

One time two sisters were sent to the estate house where my gran worked, but they were terribly sad living in a grand house of luxury.

My gran noticed this and asked what was wrong.

They said they preferred to come and live with my grandparents in their small cottage instead.

Somehow the rules were changed and my gran and granddad were allowed to take the girls in.

The girls said it was one of the happiest days of their lives.

During the war a farm became available for my grandparents to move to, a couple of miles up the road.

Grandad brought the horse and cart down from the farm, loaded all of their possessions and the girls on top of it, and they moved moved into the farm.

My mother was born after the war, and I grew up with an extended family of aunties from Liverpool who would visit their other parents, Charles and Kate, on Coppice Farm.

They always said it was their second home.

That story was from Henry Faulkner.

The next story is from Steve Wallace.

Steve writes, Here's my story about my granddad Tom.

My grandfather on my mother's side, Thomas Matthew Mick Johnson, served as a signalman in the Royal Corps of Signals, and he was often tasked with being the driver for his commanding officer.

During the war, he was involved in a number of encounters with the enemy across both France and Germany.

However, there are two pieces of information that have stuck with me since his passing a number of years ago.

He was one of the soldiers who helped liberate Belson and was one of the first through the gates.

Due to his role as a driver, he was given the gruesome task of bulldozing the bodies of the deceased emaciated prisoners into lime pits.

Due to this horrendous duty, he lost his sense of smell and for the rest of his life, for some unknown reason, could only ever smell fresh bananas.

He was also a bit of a cheeky chap.

and often borrowed jeeps from his American allies, which he would then sell back to a different group of American soldiers as they moved through Europe.

During his travels across France, he ended up staying with a French family for a while.

At one of their family meals, he was served with a plate of pork and vegetables.

Dessert was a bowl of stewed apples.

The face of the French lady who served him his dinner was a picture as he took a big spoon of the apple and slopped it onto the pork.

How uncouth was a phrase she used.

Maybe he wasn't the most culturally aware.

At the end of the war, he was demobbed in Roalpindi in India and came home to his wife, my grandmother, including his eldest daughter Simone, my mother, who he had named after a French nurse who had treated him after he was injured during a skirmish in northern France.

I'm so proud of him and all he did for his country, and I regret not getting the chance to speak to him in detail about his time during the war.

Thanks for the podcast.

It's fantastic and has opened my eyes and ears to so much I didn't know about the war.

And that story was from Steve Wallace.

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The next story is from Andrew Broxom.

My dad was born and brought up in Hull.

His father during the war had a reserved occupation working in the Blackburn aircraft factory at Brough and also carried out the role of volunteer policeman.

My dad was sent away during the war to live with an auntie in Lincoln as it was considered safer.

But some weekends he would travel home to stay with his parents.

He was home on Saturday the 17th of March 1945 and on this evening his father took him to the Savoy Cinema on Holderness Road in Hull.

They sat at the back of the stall so they could make a quick exit, which proved to be a very good decision.

The film finished and they left quickly.

The cinema staff would put on the lights to assist patrons leaving in the blackout.

My dad and granddad had made it about 300 yards down the road on their way home when a lone German aircraft came down the road firing its machine guns.

The lights had attracted its attention.

My granddad threw my dog over a hedge into the front garden of a large old house and quickly followed him over.

My dad said the noise was deafening and as the aircraft flew off he could hear the screams of the dying and injured.

Twelve people were killed and 22 were injured that night.

This was the last raid on Hull and these are the last civilian casualties in Britain in World War II caused by a piloted enemy aircraft.

The cinema is long gone and a convenience store now stands there.

A plaque was placed on the shop wall to remember the victims.

A small coincidence of that evening, my dad learned years later that the window under which they were sheltering from the attack was the window to the room where his wife and my mum happened to have been born in 1939.

That story was from Andrew Broxon.

Our next story is from Dennis Anderson.

My father, Technical Corporal Carl Richard Anderson, didn't bring home a Luger pistol, an Iron Cross, or a Fritz helmet.

Those were popular war souvenirs among frontline soldiers.

But my father brought home something else.

Stories.

He shared them at my bedtime, vivid, adventurous tales of London during the V-bomb blitz of 1944.

In his telling, dashing off a rooftop to a bomb shelter as the V-1 buzz bombs putted overhead became a kind of thrilling race with his buddies, almost fun.

More than 60 years later, as a clinical therapist working with veterans, I recognised what he couldn't name at the time.

He was likely, in his own way, processing trauma, possibly from a close call during the V-Blitz, and almost certainly from other things he witnessed.

Before the war, he was a newlywed in his 30s, working at Columbia Pictures in Frank Capra's studio.

Then he was drafted into the Army Signal Corps, where he served as a photo editor and was assigned to the unit that processed nearly all combat footage and still photography from the European theatre.

It wasn't until late in my parents' lives that we spoke more openly about what my father had done during the war.

One day, my mother quietly mentioned that he had worked on film evidence used at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

She said he never really got over what he saw in the editing room.

I had nearly forgotten that conversation until, 20 years after his death, I opened a storage box.

Inside were his military papers and photos I'd never seen before.

There was a copy of the Stars and Stripes newspaper announcing Germany quits on VE Day and a photograph of my father in Class A uniform holding that very edition.

I also found his cartoons, drawings I had no idea existed.

My father was a unit cartoonist for the 3908th Signal Detachment.

Most of the men in his unit were like him, Hollywood studio technicians, older, married, drafted for their talent.

The cartoons he drew reflected the typical humour of GI life,

except one.

The last cartoon in the stack showed a door marked, Atrocity Room.

There was a skull and crossbones on the sign, a scream from inside, and blood oozing out from under the door.

That room, I now understand, was where concentration camp film was edited.

Some of that footage came from Dachau, some from Mittelwerk, and Camp Dora, where more slave labours died making the V1 and V2 vengeance weapons than those bombs ever killed in the Blitz.

That cartoon tells a story my father never did.

I wish he had.

But I'm also grateful for what he endured and for the work he did to help bring justice to the enablers of the Holocaust.

This next story is from Gareth Powell.

I'd love to share with you and your listeners some of my dad's childhood memories of the Second World War.

He was three and a half when war broke out, living in a tall terraced house in Woolwich, East London, right across from the barracks.

With his father away serving in the Royal Navy, my grandmother was left to care for him, his two sisters, and her elderly mother.

In those early months, she decided to move the family to Devon to stay with relatives, hoping it would be safer.

They ended up in a bungalow in Paynton, perched on a hill with stunning views over Tor Bay from Torquay to Brixham Harbour.

Though the beaches were barricaded with barbed wire, my dad remembered Devon as a childhood paradise, Freedom, countryside, and endless exploring, far from the bomb-threatened streets of East London.

But even there, the war left its mark.

One night they watched from their windows as the burning halves of an oil tanker drifted apart across the bay after an explosion.

Another time a German fighter flew low over their house while he and his sister played in the garden.

Oblivious to danger, they stood waving at the pilot until my grandmother gave them a fierce scolding.

His most vivid school memory was a pageant, where at age four he appeared on stage in gun boots that didn't fit, carrying a spade and saying, let's dig, dig, dig.

Eventually, a letter from a neighbour warned that looters were targeting the many empty houses in London, including theirs.

My grandmother, ever defiant, declared that if their house was going to be looted, they'd be there with it.

So they returned, just in time for the blitz.

Their neighbourhood near Woolwich Station in the barracks was heavily targeted.

Even while they'd been away, the Anderson shelter next next door took a direct hit, killing the neighbour's adult daughter.

An anti-aircraft gun was sometimes stationed just behind their house, but the constant pom-pom of its fire brought my dad more anxiety than comfort.

At first, they all slept in the sitting room, his mum and Gran in a bed and the children underneath.

He remembered lying against the wall, feeling the house shake from nearby bombs, wondering if he'd wake up in the street below.

Later, they were issued a Morrison shelter, where his mum and gran slept above and the children below.

It filled the kitchen, but gave them some peace of mind.

Still, moonlit nights were feared, as they were easier targets for bombers.

Not all raids happened at night.

One morning, running late for school, my dad hoped to stay home, but my grandmother wasn't having it.

After repeated dawdling, she lost patience, grabbed a broom, still in her slippers, and chased him out into the street.

He zigzagged between plane trees to escape, eventually outrunning her.

Unwilling to face trouble at school or at home, he spent the day hiding in a nearby bombed-out house.

Little did he know that a daylight air raid was to come.

He still remembers the fear as the siren sounded, then the growing drone of the enemy aircraft overhead, and finally the inevitable screams and crashes of the falling bombs.

He could not have been more than six years old, and was totally alone.

After the raid, he saw schoolchildren walking home and joined his younger sister Brenda, swearing her to secrecy.

But when they got home the first thing she said was, David's had no lunch.

The truth came out quite swiftly, and he was sent to bed without dinner.

But years later, he realised it wasn't skipping school that had upset his mother, but the sheer panic of imagining him injured or killed, and no one knowing where he was.

As the war progressed, bombing raids gave way to flying bombs, mostly during the day.

My dad still remembers the sound they made and how there was nothing to fear as long as the engines continued to growl, but that shelter was needed immediately if they cut out.

On one such occasion, they had been sent indoors to the Morrison while my grandmother watched the bomb fly over.

However, the engine suddenly cut out just overhead, and she rushed inside.

As she was closing the door behind her, the explosion blew it right back open, knocking her across the room.

Soot came down all the chimneys, covering the carpets, and the windows at the front of the house were smashed with their frames dislodged.

Fortunately, my grandmother suffered no more than a few bruises.

The bomb had landed on the garrison church, which was about 100 yards away on the other side of the barracks, but the trees and the barrack buildings between them and the church saved their house from more extensive damage, and most likely saved my grandmother's life too.

Remarkably, no one was killed.

One of my dad's earliest memories was sheltering in an underground station during an air raid, just before leaving for Devon.

When peace finally came, he was nine years old.

He had only ever known wartime.

He didn't remember shop windows lit at night, or street lamps glowing.

Every window had been blacked out, any stray light met with a shouted, Put that bloody light out from the local air raid warden.

So seeing something as simple as shops and streets lit up at night, and busy with shoppers was a truly wonderful thing to him.

Although life remained hard after the war, he always said they learned to value what they had, and to expect little.

What mattered most was family, friends, and neighbours.

A lesson, I think, worth remembering.

That story was from Gareth Powell.

That's all for this episode.

If you've got a family story you'd like to be considered for the show, please email it to wehaveways at goalhanger.com.

Please label the email family stories so we don't miss it.

Thank you so much for listening.

See you next time.

Cheerio.