War memorials, graves and anniversaries keep public awareness of the second world war alive, but what about the intimate personal memories at risk of being lost in time? Rooted in our communities there exists a mosaic of lived experiences that capture the intersection between the tides of history and intimate recollections of those who were there. Even small villages such as Benenden in the borough of Tunbridge Wells bore witness to acts of breathtaking selflessness and courage.
3 August 1944 – a hero above Benenden
The son of a local farmer recalls:
“A plaque in Benenden church commemorates how the Free French pilot, Captain Jean Pierre Edmonde Maridor, lost both his life and his RAF Spitfire preventing a V1 flying bomb from hitting Benenden school, which was a military hospital at the time. Instead the flying bomb fell on the north side of Goddards Green Road, where it demolished the house there and killed the elderly couple in it.
“My mother and I were at home at that moment, though I, being not quite nine months old, have no memory of it. She told me years later that Little Barn, where we lived at the time, had a ceiling hatch leading to the roof space, but she had never been able to open it. The explosion caused a considerable earth tremor, which made the hatch leap open, dance briefly on its hinges, then slam back shut as immovably as before.”
Captain Maridor, who heroically sacrificed his life to avoid hitting the hospital, would have been one of those who managed to get to London to sign up with the free French under Charles de Gaulle. Those who qualified were then put under RAF command, with aircraft supplied under the lend-lease scheme financed by the USA.
The doodlebug and the danger from above
The V1, or ‘doodlebug’ as it was nicknamed, was an unpiloted aircraft. It took off up a ramp (somewhere in occupied Northern France or the Netherlands) and was powered by a ram-jet engine, whose fuel was measured as enough to reach London. When the fuel ran out, the V1 nose-dived. Pilots discovered the trick of flying alongside close enough to get their aircraft’s wingtip under the V1’s and tipping a little, destabilising the gyroscope and sending the flying bomb into a downward spin. Done over open country, the explosion caused less damage. It was this trick that Maridor was attempting, it is believed, but the V1 exploded.
The later V2 was the first ballistic missile, launched vertically on a curving trajectory with no additional power and impacting its target at about 3000 mph. The British authorities were at first mystified by this pilotless capability which is why an explosion caused by a V1 or V2 was dubbed a ‘Big Ben event’.
After the war, the V2 technology was adopted and adapted by French, British, American and Soviet military authorities for what became the nuclear deterrent and cruise missiles. This strategy of using remotely launched weapons continues to be developed, especially in the Ukraine war, where drones, the modern equivalent of the doodlebug, are taken down by ground forces. In the conduct of warfare, there is now little need to send a pilot in an airplane to shoot down the incoming threat, as with the brave Captain Maridor eighty years ago over rural Kent, but the stakes are still as high.
From war to peace: a village resumes life
Our witness has further memories of the far-reaching consequences of global conflict:
“After the end of the war much military equipment was shipped back from Europe and parked temporarily. I recall seeing a row of dirty brown (i.e., khaki) army tanks lined up in a field, in the village, I think, but cannot say whether it was our field.
“My father returned from the army and resumed farming at Bikkel farm.
“I would date to about 1946 the arrival of a party of German PoWs to help on the farm while awaiting their repatriation. They were generally a jolly bunch, and I recall being carried around on their shoulders. However, this episode soon ended, because one of them succeeded in convincing the authorities that their treatment breached their rights under the Geneva Convention – an ironic situation when compared to the outlook of their previous employer. However, after the rest had gone, one named Rolf, stayed on as a proper employee for many years.”
The shadow of the past – and the resolution
What our witness is alluding to here is that the Nazis used slave labour. It is estimated that 20 million people were forced to work by the Nazis, mostly in the arms industry or in farming. Some 13 million of these were in Germany, and 7 million in the German-occupied areas. It was no secret, as most Germans, whether in the military or in other enterprises needed for the Nazi war of conquest, would have come face-to-face with forced labourers.
In keeping with Nazi racial theories, there was a hierarchy among these: workers from Poland were of lower status than the French or Dutch. Workers from the Soviet Union were below them, and the lowest were in the concentration camps: Jews, and Roma. It is estimated that some 2.5 million people, largely prisoners of war or in concentration camps, did not survive this forced labour for the Nazis.
After the end of the war, there was once again mixing of British with Germans, especially as there were army camps and exercises in Germany for decades to come. Animosity began to dissolve in the collective effort Europe took rebuild and reshape itself into a community of nations formalised in the founding of the Council of Europe in 1949, which West Germany joined in 1951.
Echoes in Ukraine: why memory still matters
In the Europe of today, such accounts and recollections from ordinary citizens risk slipping forever from collective memory unless we make efforts to preserve them. They serve as a timely reminder that the horrors that once gripped the European continent are now being played out again in Ukraine – and take on a poignant significance in an increasingly unstable and uncertain geopolitical moment.
In the wake of a conflict that threatens to touch the lives of all Europeans in some way, it is vital to weave our small intimate lived memories into the fabric of collective memory. This can be achieved variably through local history projects, newspapers and news sites of record, oral history initiatives and the archiving of parish news.
Some parish magazines regularly feature the stories told by their more elderly inhabitants. I can recall, for instance, reading as a teenager in the 1950s in the local Benenden parish magazine the memoirs of someone still living whose career went from being a teenage ploughboy in the 1890s, to windmill mechanic, and then helicopter technician by world war two. The wartime memories quoted above were first produced in the Benenden magazine, a monthly online publication since Jan 2017.
The preservation of such village news is somewhat haphazard. Some villages seem to have passed all their old paper copies of parish magazines to the Kent archives. But many villages, including Benenden, are missing in a search for these. Some people evidently just tossed out boxes of old magazines when clearing out a house for next occupancy. Others, more sensitive to local history, perhaps aware of the efforts of the British Association for local history thought to takes the boxes along to the county archives in Maidstone.
Now that most of such publication is online, can we assume that there will be better preservation for future generations? People who in the future live in those same village locations will then benefit from the stories of those who came before them. More than just a memorial plaque on a church wall, as with the one dedicated to brave Captain Maridor, the fuller stories of those who experienced the event are worth passing on.
Editor’s Note: Parish newsletters and magazines are the most local level of independent publication (independent that is from the big commercial media firms that run our national media and local newspapers). We need to encourage more diversity and independence in our media. For further information visit the Public Interest News Foundation.
