Secret Casualties of World War Two by Simon Webb

Author:Simon Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / Military / World War II
Publisher: Pen and Sword

In a book which he wrote, called Ack Ack, Pile gave specific examples of what he meant by the anti-aircraft batteries not getting ‘the best type of recruits’:

Many were quite unsuited for military duty, let alone the highly technical duties of AA. Out of 25 who arrived at a fairly representative battery, one had a withered arm, one was mentally deficient, one had a glass eye which fell out whenever he doubled to the guns, and two were in the advanced and more obvious stages of venereal disease.

When we consider the above circumstances in combination, the surprise is not that so many shells exploded at the wrong time, but rather that any actually went off near the aeroplanes that they were meant to destroy. These inadequate troops were expected to carry out the most intricate calculations relating to the height speed and bearing of approaching aircraft whilst under fire and usually in the dark. They then had to work out how long to set the fuzes for and set them correctly. Even if all this was accomplished successfully, there still remained a reported 50/50 chance that the fuze would in any case be defective and fail to operate as required.

We saw how a dozen people from a wedding party were inadvertently killed by faulty procedures at one AA battery, let us now look at another case of the same type, a little later in the war. The district of Lanishen, in the north of the Welsh city of Cardiff, is famous today for its tax offices, which are housed in the tallest building for miles around. In 1944 though, Lanishen was better known as the location of a 50-acre complex of factories, known as Cardiff Royal Ordnance Factories. These produced field guns for the British army. Because of its industry and importance to the war effort, the Luftwaffe bombed Cardiff pretty regularly between 1940 and 1943, killing a total of 387 people in the course of the Second World War. The last German bombing raid took place on18 May 1943.

The Cardiff Royal Ordnance Factories were naturally a target for German attacks, but they still stood, relatively unscathed, as the war entered its penultimate year in 1944. By the end of March that year, the dropping of bombs from aeroplanes flying over Britain had all but ceased and the stage was set for the arrival of the V weapons, the cruise missile known as the ‘doodlebug’ and the ballistic missile called the V 2. There was, however, some slight activity over South Wales by German bombers on the night of Monday, 27 March 1944. That night, many women were working at lathes and other power tools in the factory in Lanishen.

There had been an air-raid warning on the evening of 27 March, but because no bombs had been dropped on Cardiff for almost a year, the workers in the factory did not head for an air-raid shelter but simply stayed at their machines. Up on the high ground around Cardiff, a number of 3.

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