When the Second World War was declared on Sunday 3rd September 1939 I was nineteen years old and living in Liverpool with my parents and two sisters Thelma and Mavis. Thelma was fifteen and Mavis eight years old. I remember sitting around the wireless set with my family, listening to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announcing that Great Britain was at war with Germany. I wondered what on earth was going to happen to us all and how soon it would be before our happy home life would be affected. I was soon to find out!

A blackout was announced immediately, all the streetlights went out, no lights in shop windows were allowed and blackout curtains had to be put up in all houses and public buildings. Only dim blue lights were permitted on public transport. Woe-be-tide anyone who should show a light after dark! The Air Raid Wardens would soon rap on the door and tell you about it.

We soon learned to carry a torch as Liverpool was plunged into darkness each night. Barrage balloons appeared in the sky over the city and trenches were dug in the parks and recreation grounds. Street air raid shelters were erected and Anderson shelters were provided to householders with space in their gardens. The council workmen delivered ours in pieces. It was made of corrugated iron and my father put it up with some difficulty, at the bottom of our garden and covered the top with old carpets and soil. We fitted out the inside with boxes to sit on and an old mat over the entrance. It was very cold in there in the winter and pitch black but it saved our lives on many occasions when the air raids started in earnest in 1940.

The first few weeks of the war were fairly quite and we tried to carry on with our lives as usual but gradually things changed. We all had to register to prove that we were British citizens and given identity cards. People who were alien were interned. Ration books were issued. These gave everyone the same ration of foods in short supply such as butter, margarine, sugar, eggs, cheese, meat and tea. As the war progressed the food ration become smaller and smaller. Some things were hard to buy as the shopkeepers put them "under the counter" for their special friends. Items such as custard powder, sauce, coffee, jellies, and biscuits were rarely seen. Bananas and oranges disappeared for the duration of the war. Fresh fruit and vegetables were in very short supply in the cities as none were grown locally. We were told to "dig for victory". My father tried hard to grow vegetables but the Liverpool clay soil produced very meagre crops if any at all. We were forced to queue for vegetables at the greengrocers that opened for an hour or two each day and soon sold out.

Coupons were allocated to buy clothing, sweets and bread. The children at the local primary school were offered the option of evacuation to North Wales or Lancashire countryside. I will never forget the day they all went off with their little gas masks on string around their necks and their name pinned to the front of their coats. It was a very tearful departure with so many of them homesick and unhappy once parted from their families. My sister only stayed a short time and was so unhappy that she begged my parents to bring her back home. In the end they agreed. She had to suffer the trauma of the air raids but she would never consent to be evacuated again. After the children had been evacuated the place seemed very strange and lonely without the sounds of their voices playing in the street, coming, and going to school. Many of their fathers were "called up" for service in the armed forces whilst their mothers went to work in the factories making arms and war equipment.

In 1940 just after my 20th birthday I too was "called up" and had to leave my office job where I was perfectly happy to work in an aircraft factory. I was trained to test "automatic pilots" that had just been invented and were being built into all the new war planes being so hastily produced at that time. The work was exacting, tedious and very boring. I had to stay there until the war ended in 1945. I worked long hours, often from 7am to 7pm, especially in 1940 to 1941. I must admit that I sometimes fell asleep at my bench after I had been kept awake the previous night by the noise of the anti-aircraft guns firing at the enemy planes. They made more noise than the explosion of the bombs and made the air raid shelter shake about. It was all very frightening.

Although we had some daytime air raids, most took place at night. It was very difficult getting home from work, especially during an alert, as the tramcars stopped running whilst the driver and passengers took cover in the nearest shelter. Mostly I took the chance and walked the three miles home. With hindsight I should never have done so, as it was so easy to be hit with a piece of shrapnel and be killed. One night I fell over something in the middle of the pavement and grazed my leg. I couldn't see what it was in the dark but the next morning I went along the same pavement and in the daylight I saw that it was a machine used to slice bacon that had been blown out of the grocers shop by an exploding bomb. I remember that it stayed there several days until the council's men removed it.

One morning I missed my usual bus to work and I was fifteen minutes late clocking-in. I was stopped thirty minutes pay. Being up all night in an air raid was no excuse for being late! As the roads in and out of Liverpool from the suburbs were constantly being bombed the tram service was badly disrupted. Hugh craters in the roads and the entanglement of tramlines often meant no trams. So the factory were I worked used open-backed lorries to pick up people at certain places along the road. We would have to clamber up the tail end and sit on the floor all cramped together. Hardly an elegant way to get to work but we had to accept it and get on with it.

The air raids reached their peak in 1941 when in April and May the City of Liverpool docks, railways and suburbs were bombed night after night without let up. I will never forget it if I live to be one hundred. Street after street of little dockside terraced houses were flattened. Buildings just vanished in clouds of smoke. Familiar landmarks I'd known all my life just went forever. The centre of the city was almost completely destroyed in one week. Big department stores disappeared in a pile of rubble. Incendiary Bombs left others as blackened burnt out shells. Schools, railway stations, churches, shops and houses were all reduced to a heap of bricks. People were evacuated to the countryside and housed in army tents hastily erected in the fields. Some of the people lost everything; their homes and all their belongings. But most people just stayed put and hoped for the best.

Although I lived five miles from the docks I could see the huge fires burning as the warehouses and factories along the dock road were set light. The glare in the sky light up the city and the stench of the burning soap, sugar and cloth from the factories was dreadful. A black pall of smoke blotted out the sun and turned the day into night. In one week alone hundreds of people had been killed and thousands more injured. Hospitals were overflowing with the casualties and even they had been bombed causing death and injury to doctors, nurses and patients.

My father, who was a Liverpool City Policeman and nearing retirement age, was on duty when the raids were at their most ferocious. He had to stay at the main Police Station and sleep in the cellar whenever he could. At one time there was a complete breakdown of public transport in and out of the city because of burst water mains, huge craters in the road and falling debris from bombed buildings. He just couldn't get home and with no telephone in our house we didn't learn for several days what had happened to him. Then one day he came home rather grubby-looking from all the dust and grime, with his arm in a makeshift sling. He had dislocated his shoulder when a blast from a nearby bomb explosion had thrown him against a brick wall. He was lucky to get out of that devastated city alive.

Meanwhile, I spent long hours with my Mother and my two sisters in the Anderson Shelter while it seemed that the world was coming to an end. The ground shook beneath us as the bombs exploded one after another until I was sure that the shelter would collapse on top of us. The noise from the anti-aircraft guns that were only about one hundred yards away was ear splitting. We could hear the shrapnel hitting the top of the dustbin and the concrete yard. A stick of bombs fell hitting the house opposite. All the windows of our house and every other house in the road smashed. A bomb went in through the top of our neighbour's house and crashed down the gardens in our road were it exploded killing two people. A second fell on another house reducing it to a pile of bricks and killing four members of a young family. The third fell in the road making a huge crater, "big enough to put a horse and cart into" as my father said afterwards. The family of six who lived in the house across the road was sitting down to supper when they heard the bombs falling. They all ran into the street, something we were told never to do but it saved their lives. All the furniture and ceiling from the upstairs of their house fell onto the table were moments before they had all been sitting. Strangely, the house roof was still intact although there was a gaping hole right through the house. It took us some time before we could clean up all the dreadful mess. We had to have all the broken windows boarded up again. It had not been long since we had repaired them from the previous bomb damage. Then we had the blast from a landmine that fell onto an underground shelter. It killed nearly everyone in it, including some of my friends.

Our house was very badly damaged that time. When we eventually emerged from the shelter when it became day light, we could see that all the windows had been blown in again, the kitchen back door was blown off it's hinges and was halfway down the hallway. The front door was in the front garden and all the banisters up the stairs had been broken to bits. All the dishes in the kitchen were smashed, as were the mirrors, pictures and photographs in glass frames. The food in the kitchen larder was covered in grey dust and the beds were the same and sprinkled with plaster from the ceilings. The furniture downstairs was covered with soot from the chimneys and had shards of glass stuck in the upholstery. The whole house was one grey dusty mess. There were no lights to switch on that night and no curtains to draw across the windows as they were in shreds, so we all went back to the air raid shelter and tried to sleep there. Once again we had escaped physical injury and were thankful for that but it was something I'll never forget.

I remember seeing a tramcar on end in a huge bomb crater outside Lime Street Railway Station in the centre of Liverpool. The back end of the tram was pointing straight up towards the sky together with the tramlines. When shop fronts were blown out the shopkeepers would just board-up the windows and open up the next morning with the sign "Business as Usual" chalked up on the boards. Liverpool people never lost their sense of humour throughout the hard times. I once saw the words "Cauliflower's for sale- Hire Purchase Taken" chalked on a board outside a greengrocer's shop. That ticked me. They were in such short supply and so expensive that many people could not afford to buy them. Despite everything we still went to work, queued up for food and tried to carry on life as best we could as a family.

It wasn't all gloom and doom. Throughout the air raids we still when out dancing and to the cinema. If it became too dangerous we took shelter then resumed when the "all clear" siren sounded. We had picnics in the parks in the summer and trips to the seaside, over the River Mersey on the ferryboats. Some of the beaches were mined and had big notices to say that it was a prohibited area but some were quite safe to use.

Liverpool in wartime was the headquarters of the Naval Western Approaches Fleet and the base for numerous Royal Navy ships therefore the city was full of young sailors. The dance halls and pubs were their favourite haunts when shore leave provided a short respite from the dreadful time s they were having at sea. German U-boats were sinking so many ships all around our coast. In the Atlantic Ocean, where the convoys of merchant ships were trying to bring vital supplies of food and war materials to England, it was especially bad. Large Convoys only had two destroyers to protect them from the enemy and the slow moving cargo ships made easy targets. The U Boats were so successful at sinking our ships that by the spring of 1941 food was running so short we only had a few weeks supplies remaining. The food that did get through was stored in the dockside warehouses awaiting distribution but these were frequently bombed and all the food would be destroyed.

The U-boat aces where national heroes in Germany, much decorated, young and arrogant. They thought that it was just a manner of time before we would be beaten into submission. But then things changed dramatically in March 1941. H.M.S. Vanoc and H.M.S. Walker, two old WW2 destroyers, were escorting a large convoy of merchant ships from America bound for Liverpool when they located two U Boats very near to them in waters off Iceland and they went in for the kill. My husband, Fred Chilton, was a young sailor aboard H.M.S. Vanoc on the 17th March 1941 and this is his account of what happened.

"H.M.S. Vanoc and H.M.S. Walker were part of an escort group of naval ships that were escorting a large convoy of merchant ships from mid Atlantic to Liverpool. From 12th March onwards the convoy was attacked by a pack of German U-boat submarines. Many of the merchant ships had been torpedoed and sank with a heavy loss of life. The senior officer of the 5th Naval Escort Group was Donald McIntyre, captain of H.M.S. Walker. After consultation with Commander J.G.W.Deneys, captain of H.M.S. Vanoc, he decided to leave the convoy with the other escort ships and go to hunt the U- boats that had caused such havoc.

I remember on the night of 16th March, Jackie Oldfield, our leading telegraphist, coming into the wireless office and suggesting that we didn't change our clothes when we turned in. He thought that we should be ready for "action stations" as the Vanoc and Walker had steamed away from the convoy to search out the U-boats. The next thing that I remember, in the early hours of the morning of 17th March, was being called to action stations in the wireless office. Apparently, the Vanoc and Walker had ASDIC contacts with the U-boats that appeared to be in close proximity. The two destroyers circled in the water, taking it in turns to drop depth charges in the area were the submarines had been located. I was in the wireless office, which was on the deck underneath the bridge, so I could not see what was actually happening but I knew that our ship was dropping depth charges.

The next thing I remember was a terrible crashing noise and everyone in the wireless office was thrown about. We all thought that the Vanoc had been torpedoed as the ship toppled over at an alarming angle. However, the lights stayed on and after some time the ship gradually righted itself. Meanwhile, Petty Officer Walter Edney had already started to put the confidential papers into the weighted bag ready to thrown overboard if needs be. My instant reaction was to inflate my life belt that we always wore on the body when at action stations. After the ship had returned to an even keel I could hear a lot of noise and commotion coming from the upper deck and on the bridge so I went out of the wireless office to see what was happening. I could hear men in the sea shouting and calling for help. Or searchlights were scanning the water trying to see them in the blackness. Our crew flung nets over the side of the ship to try to help the German sailors in the sea to climb up the nets to safety. I realised by then that the Vanoc had rammed the U-boat. While the survivors were being picked up the Vanoc was stationary and it was very vulnerable from attack from other U-boats in the vicinity. The Walker circled around us to try to offer protection from attack. It was very difficult to pick up survivors and we only managed to save one officer and five ratings from the sea.

I learned later that the submarine that we had sunk was the U100, captained by the famous 29-year-old U-boat ace Joachim Schepke. The U-boat was about 1000 yards from the Vanoc after the depth charges were used and it was forced to surface when it was badly damaged. It was then located by the ships new radar system and the order was given to make full speed ahead and to ram. The Vanoc hit the submarine at full force in the middle by the conning tower. The men near the conning tower were flung into the sea. When the Vanoc rammed the U-boat the captain was standing near the tower and he was unable to get away before the Vanoc's bows crashed into his boat at right angles. He had both his legs severed and his body fell into the sea. The U-boat then sank with the rest of the crew still on board. The six survivors were made prisoners of war aboard Vanoc and they considered themselves lucky to be alive.

A short time later the Walker received another ASDIC contact with a second U-boat and Vanoc was ordered to join Walker to locate the submarine and to drop depth charges. Before long the depth charges found the target and badly damaged U99 surfaced. This time all but three of the crew were picked up and taken on board Walker. The U-boat sank and the German sailors were made prisoners of war. The captain of the second U-boat, was Otto Knetshmer, another U-boat ace, young and much decorated by Hitler for so much success in sinking merchant ships. In one memorable night, 17th March 1941, two of Germany's ace U-boat commanders were put out of action. One killed and the other taken prisoner for the duration of the war.

The Vanoc and Walker rejoined the convoy of the remaining merchant ships and smaller navel ships and reached Liverpool a few days later without further incident. As we drew up to Princes Landing Stage we were welcomed by a group of high ranking naval officers from Western Approaches Headquarters that was based in the Liver Buildings overlooking the River Mersey. The German sailors were taken ashore and sent off to prisoner of war camps. The five ratings on the Vanoc had slept and ate with us in our mess and were able to converse with one of our men who could speak a little German. They were treated well and were no trouble. When they left the ship we gave them a small package of chocolate each. As they left the ship and walked down the landing stage they turned and waved farewell to us on board. The one officer turned and made the nazi salute. They were all convinced that Germany would win the war in a matter of months but as we all know now they were very wrong. They would have spent many years in a prison camp before being allowed to return to Germany at the end of the war.

As the bows of the Vanoc were badly damaged when it rammed the U-boat we were all given four weeks leave when she was repaired in dock. After our leave we rejoined the ship in Liverpool and continued to do convoy duty in the North Atlantic for the rest of 1941."

Iris Chilton
26th January 1994

This account was sent to me by David Cilton, the son of Iris and Fred. David can be contacted at davidchilton@zoom.co.uk