At The Eleventh Hour Of The Eleventh Day Of The Eleventh Month

The BBC website has many stories of current Rayleigh residents’ wartime experiences.

For example:

It was the late evening of Tuesday 13th June 1944 just one week after the Normandy landings of D.Day. An alert had sounded, and we could hear the distant rumble of anti-aircraft gunfire. We decided at once to take refuge in the Anderson shelter in the back garden. Hardly had the last wailing note of the siren died away when we heard the sound of a low flying aircraft. The noise from the aircraft grew louder. It was a strange sound unlike the familiar throbbing of A Heinkel or Dornier but more like a cross between an un-silenced motor cycle engine at full throttle and a pneumatic drill.
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So powerful were the sound waves that the oil lamp in the shelter vibrated on its metal stand. The aircraft passed overhead and went on for a little way then the engine stopped abruptly. There was silence for a few seconds and then a heavy explosion. It was as if the aircraft had crashed. Almost immediately after another aircraft was heard, the same thing occurred again, the engine cut out and after 10 seconds there was a further explosion.
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At first we thought maybe our anti aircraft gunners had suddenly developed marksmen?s skills and that the aircraft were being shot down, but the incidents were repeated all night long. It was quite frightening; the noise from the engines was over powering. The next day we heard on the news that we were under attack from pilotless planes. The V-1 flying bomb had arrived….

It’s also worth reading the account here of Esther, a 15-year-old from Rayleigh who in 2008 visited the battlefields of World War One .

At each site the leaders tried to make you see that behind each name there is a story and that person had a life and a family. That is why we looked at the personal stories of random people from the First World War. It made me think deeper about the war and its effect back home. It was also interesting that the French commemorate the wars much more than we do.

Never forget.