Inferno - Max Hastings [64]
Among the heroes of the campaign were the men who learned by trial and error to deal with unexploded bombs, of which there were soon a plethora in Britain’s cities. One of the more remarkable was Jack Howard, the Earl of Suffolk. Early in the war, this maverick boffin, thirty-four in 1940, secured himself a roving commission in the Scientific Directorate of the Ministry of Supply. In that role, one of his more notable feats was to evacuate from Bordeaux, after the French surrender, £3 million in industrial diamonds retrieved from Amsterdam, a group of France’s most brilliant scientists, and the country’s entire stock of Norwegian heavy water, indispensable to making an atomic bomb. In the autumn of 1940, this self-consciously eccentric figure chose to appoint himself to Bomb Disposal.
Suffolk formed his own squad, which included his pretty secretary Beryl Morden, and outfitted a van from his own resources. Thereafter, dressed in a Stetson hat and flying boots or occasionally a pilot’s helmet, and invariably affecting a nine-inch cigarette holder, he addressed himself to defusing bombs, and especially to exploring German delayed-action devices, which were fitted with increasingly sophisticated antitampering devices. His courage and imagination were undisputed, but some UXB men deplored his casual indiscipline. On 12 May 1941, at London’s “bomb graveyard” in Erith Marshes, the earl was addressing a ticking Type 17 delay fuse when the bomb exploded, taking with it “Wild Jack” Howard and thirteen other personnel rashly clustered around, including the beautiful Beryl Morden. His death was lamented, but it was widely held that his insouciance had caused the gratuitous loss of his companions. UXB work penalised amateurs.
A different sort of embarrassment was caused by another UXB man, Bob Davies, a prewar drifter from Cornwall. He had acquired some technical experience during travels around the world, which he parleyed into an emergency commission in the Royal Engineers. Early one morning in September 1940, Davies commanded a squad sent to address a one-ton bomb which had buried itself deep in the road in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral during a raid in the night. The engineers quickly found themselves in difficulties when overcome by gas from a fractured main, which caused them to be briefly hospitalised. Resuming work, they dug all night, until a spark ignited gas from another main, burning three men.
The press got hold of the story—and the threat to the cathedral. The Daily Mail used the opportunity to applaud the courage of the UXB squads: “These most gallant—and most matter of fact—men of the RE are many a time running a race with death.” Deeper and deeper Davies’s men dug, until almost eighty hours after it fell, they reached the bomb, twenty-eight feet into the London clay. A heavy cable was attached, with which a lorry sought to extract the huge menace. This snapped. Only when two lorries took the strain on a second cable did the bomb slowly rise to the surface. It was lashed to a cradle and driven through the streets of London to Hackney Marshes, where it was detonated. The explosion blew a crater a hundred feet wide.
A flood of publicity followed about Davies and his team, who became famous. A headline asserted: “A Story That Must Win a Man a VC.” Davies and the sapper who found the bomb and saved St. Paul’s were indeed awarded the newly created George Cross, for civil acts of heroism. Only in May 1942 did an unhappy sequel take place: Davies was court-martialled on almost thirty charges involving large-scale and systematic theft throughout his time in charge of his UXB squad; he had also exploited his role to extract cash payments from some of those whose premises he saved from bombs, compounded by later passing dud cheques. More embarrassments