Extracted, with permission, from "I Remember...My Life In Bwlchgwyn (1939-1943)" by Gwenda Lewis. © G Lewis 2005.
"In late 1940 we realised that German planes which were bombing Merseyside were passing overhead, having crossed Southern Ireland, which was neutral, and cutting across North Wales. We soon learned to distinguish the pulsing throb of the enemy engines, which was quickly followed by the wailing of air-raid sirens and by the distant weaving of searchlight beams as they combed the night sky.
There came a night when an enemy plane heading north-east, and chased by British fighter planes, jettisoned some of its bombs over our area. This was a new and worrying turn of events and Mr Richards, the Headmaster, asked Miss Roberts to organise some older pupils to fix anti-splinter muslin on the classroom windows of the school. Then bricklayers were called in to build high walls to protect the two school entrances from blast. This would hopefully minimise damage during night raids but also offer some protection for the children should we be bombed during school hours. Of course nothing could protect us from a possible direct hit. But thankfully daytime raids never happened.
During one night raid some incendiary bombs fell on the flat-topped Minera Mountain behind Bwlchgwyn. The dry heather and bracken burned fiercely in the darkness and quickly spread, revealing electricity pylons on the mountain. The German pilots must have reported hitting an important installation because they returned for about nine consecutive nights to bomb it again and again with high explosives. The smell of the smoke could be detected thirty miles away.
Now this was rather close to home and I remember waking up one night to the sound of these enormous explosions, like the worst thunderstorm you ever heard. The force of the explosions made the house shake and the windows rattle.
One late evening in October my mother, David and I were in the living room listening to the wireless and did not hear the enemy plane overhead, neither did we hear a warning siren. We heard nothing until the bombs began to fall. The next morning we awoke to find the village peppered with bomb craters and I immediately [28th October 1940] wrote to my father describing the frightening experience and our response to it.
This particular raid was reported in the local paper, without naming the village as that information might help the enemy.
BOMBS DROPPED ON NORTH WALES VILLAGE
NO CASUALTIES OR DAMAGE
An enemy raider passed over a village in North Wales on Sunday night. High explosive bombs were dropped in fields in and near the village. About 15 craters were to be seen next day. Three were in soft ground in a field below a vicarage, another was within a few feet of a highway and others were near farms and houses. Apart from a few broken windows, no damage was done and there were no casualties. Cattle who were out in one of the fields where three of the craters are, were all unhurt.
One bit of excitement I seem to remember was when a German Heinkel bomber came down on the slopes of the Penllyn Mountain. Hearing the rumours of this crash the village boys, including my brother David, were very anxious to visit the site but the police kept them away until the bodies of the crew were located and removed. Then the lads scrambled over the wreckage and came home triumphantly carrying chunks of twisted metal and other souvenirs to add to their collections of bits of shrapnel scavenged from bomb craters. What was left of the plane was put on display in Wrexham town centre as an encouragement to the people that the enemy was not getting it all his own way.
Highly prized were pieces of perspex from the cockpit window. Uncle Stan managed to get one and fashioned a bangle each for Margaret and me, cleverly carving a design on its surface with his penknife.
More sad in a way was when a British Hudson plane with a Canadian crew crashed in the wooded valley of Nant y Ffrith. The local policeman was otherwise occupied in the 'Four Crosses' pub beyond the village so George Edwards, who ran a local bus service, having spotted the flames of the burning aircraft, hastened to the scene where he found one crew member critically injured but still alive. Seeking to save time he carried the man to his car and set off for the hospital in Wrexham. Sadly the man died on the way. One might think that George would be thanked for trying to save the crewman's life. Not a bit of it. When the policeman got back from the pub he gave George a stiff reprimand for interfering instead of going back to the village to find him so he could alert the relevant authorities.
Now some have said that those two incidents were simultaneous and linked, that in the total darkness the German and British planes had experienced a slight collision, perhaps a wing-tip encounter, which explained them spinning off in different directions before crashing. Unfortunately my memory of all this is patchy after so many years and people I have talked to have differing versions of what actually happened. Strangely, there seems to be no official record of the incident, even a book 'Luftwaffe over Clwyd' published after the war makes no mention of any plane crashes at all. All this suggests that it was highly classified information and suppressed as far as the public was concerned. One child was told by her father she must forget it as it never really happened! So I guess we shall never know the truth about it. Nevertheless a cemetery nor far away has been found to be the final resting place of both Canadian and German crews.
Why did we, in Bwlchgwyn and the surrounding area, take such a pounding from the German Airforce? They may have been hoping to put the Monsanto chemical factory near Ruabon out of action, or to disable the radar station and searchlights on the moors near Llandegla. Perhaps it was simply a mistake, or it has since ben suggested that British electronic experts were experimenting with a means of interfering with the aircrafts' navigation instruments and the German pilots were deceived into thinking they were somewhere else altogether. We shall never know.
Eventually, probably some time in late 1941, the bombers stopped coming. The night skies over Bwlchgwyn were once again silent. No longer were we straining to distinguish the throb of the German plane engines from the steady drone of the British fighter planes, when we used to say, with relief in our voices, 'It's all right, it's one of ours!' "
© Gwenda Lewis 2005. Please contact me if you require permission from Gwenda to reproduce her text.
