ESSEX: Airfield's wartime day of disaster recalled

By pdent-jones

JUST out of school, Ken Fletcher walked into an Essex recruiting office and reinvented his age.

He was determined to fight for Britain and it was the only way in that summer of 1940 that a 15-year-old boy could get into uniform.

Within an hour he was signed up for the Essex Regiment and, just 10 weeks later, while defending an Essex air base from German bombers, he was seriously injured, his back broken in five places.

Around him were the bodies of 10 of his young colleagues, teenagers just like him.

Ken, his upper body locked in a plaster cast for six months, recovered and would later see service in the RAF on Bomber Command raids.

Now, as the country he served prepares for another Remembrance Day, Ken recalls the trauma, the waste of life and sacrifice of the young men who, by today's standards, would still have been at school.

Romford-born Ken spoke to the Gazette of the impact of war on the country's young people and their parents.

He was talking from Canada, which has been home to him, his wife and three children for the past half-century.

He said that today's youngsters, preparing to face the uncertainties of their own world, should hear at first hand what decisions their peers of two generations ago were prepared to make.

Ken's original ambition to enlist in the RAF was dashed at the recruiting centre when he realised they needed to see his birth certificate. The Army was less demanding, so he joined them instead.

That's how on June 12, 1940, he came to report for duty at the reception centre in Upminster.

Armed with knowledge from three days of lectures and a pair of new heavy army boots, Ken and his fellow recruits were sent to RAF North Weald.

They had no transport, just boot power and the words of a young officer ringing in their ears that the 20-mile march would be good experience. They spent the next three days away from duty with blisters.

Their duty at North Weald in that summer as the Battle of Britain gathered pace was airfield defence.

It meant long hours, often throughout rain-sodden nights, patrolling sandbagged walls hiding the all-important Hurricane fighters.

Guard duty for Ken included June 27, the day when he manned the main gate as King George VI and Prime Minister Winston Churchill entered the base.

Ken's recollection of that dramatic day is as vivid today as that summer afternoon on August 24 when the North Weald speaker system blurted out: "Bandits approaching from Chelmsford." It was the first alert that a German air attack was headed for them.

It was a testing time for the air base's new young Hurricane Squadron Leader King, in the post for just three days. He was killed six short days later.

Ken said: "Our drill was to go to the chest-high slit trenches ready to repel paratroop invaders. Others went to the underground shelter. As I took up my post, I stared at the blue sky, almost mesmerised by the sight of the first of 50 Dornier bombers, protected by up to 100 Messerschmidt fighters, hurtling towards us to unleash their bombs on the air base.

"That picture is as vivid in my mind's eye today as it was in 1940.

"The shelter where my friends had gone for safety received a direct hit – 10 were killed.

"Around me the walls of the trench shook like a jelly. Concrete was flying everywhere. A large chunk hit me in the back and I was completely winded.

"In those unreal moments afterwards, with my back feeling strangely numb, I walked along a hedgerow to hide the concrete missile and keep it as a souvenir.

"In the sick bay, I found others bleeding, with broken bones and burns.

"Hours later, at St Margaret's Hospital, Epping, an X-ray revealed the five spine fractures. The full body plaster cast remained from that day for the next six months and meant regular visits to St Margaret's."

A year later, Ken's Army career was over. His parents, Tom and Lilian Fletcher, produced the birth certificate showing his real year of birth as 1925, not 1922.

Torn between pride at their son's commitment and anguish over his plight following the raid, the couple had gone along with the age deception at Ken's request.

Ken's parents would go through more anxieties later in the war. The reason they had produced the birth certificate was not merely to end their son's Army career, but to pave the way for him to volunteer for his first ambition, to join the RAF.

For Tom and Lilian, the entire episode had been traumatic. Back on that terrifying August day, they had driven from Billericay, the town where only five years earlier Ken had entered Laindon Road Junior School following the family's move from Romford.

They travelled along the bomb-cratered Ongar to Epping road past broken and twisted gas and water mains to arrive at the hospital as a new air raid alert had sent all the rest of the patients to the hospital shelter. But there was no sign of Ken. A search revealed him to be still in the ward, pushed gently under a bed which would have given the immobilised young soldier protection in the event of further bomb damage.

For the survivors at North Weald air base, it was back to business and amid the raids, time to welcome the world's journalists, including Pulitzer Prize winner Ray Sprigle, from Pittsburgh, who wrote of death and devastation caused by the raid and the young men in the front line of the Battle of Britain.

Ken's recollections of his days at the Epping hospital were overshadowed by memories of the night a young fighter pilot was brought in with terrible burns after his aircraft crashed.

"He moaned and talked odd words from time to time," said Ken. "Then, in the second night, he cried out and was gone. Had he lived, could he have carried for all times a legacy of that dreadful night?

"The 10 men who were killed in the direct hit on the shelter were all aged 17 to 19. I reflect on those men with whom I lived in that hangar in the corner of the airfield."

He believes that if there is a positive side to the story it is the memory of the brief comradeship they enjoyed. Some of the young soldiers had been street kids from the East End, "a great bunch of fellas we called the Hackney Gurkhas," said Ken.

"In some strange way, I could see that, with a uniform, meals and a roof over their heads, not to mention the two shillings a day in pay, they had come to some sense of purpose, of belonging and of comradeship. They made very good soldiers and solid friends. How can our youth of today find the same sense of purpose without going to war?"

The irony is that Ken had not known just who had died in that ghastly raid. It was not until 10 years ago, on a Memory Lane visit to North Weald, that he walked into the graveyard there and discovered the truth. Names etched on his memory were there engraved on a long line of stones all bearing the same date of death, and the tears welled up as Ken repeated the names written there. They had all been youngsters, some of them with a wicked sense of humour, who Ken had thought would go on to enjoy a full life.

Back in 1941, Ken briefly saw a return to duty in the Essex Regiment. He spent three months at Warley Barracks before going on to drive an armoured car around Southend Airport.

But it was an airport far from Essex that would become home for the young serviceman drafted into Bomber Command. From Foggia in Italy, Flt Sgt Kenneth Fletcher, the rear gunner in a Wellington bomber flying with 70 Squadron, completed 40 operations over southern Europe. They bombed key oil installations from Germany to the occupied Balkans.

Ken, a "tail end Charlie" in the lonely and most vulnerable of all bomber crews, proved to be one of the lucky ones. Only 46 out of every 100 men in those crews survived.

Ken, by now commissioned as a flight lieutenant, finished his service career as welfare staff officer in the Aden Command. He was still only 21. A lifetime of experience had been packed into the six years since the schoolboy with an assumed age walked into service life.