Air Raid Deterrents

Heroes Remember

Air Raid Deterrents

Transcript

They put their black-ups out, you know the blackouts, black out your windows as soon as it got dusk. Then of course the air raid sirens would go. They wouldn’t go on ‘all clear’ until the morning, you know. They’d go at night when it got dark and then they’d, pretty well all night they’d be coming some time during the night, you know, you’d hear them. They had a different sound to their aircraft too. They had that, I don’t know how if I can explain it. It was kind of [imitates sound]. It was a different sound than it seemed to be than our aircraft. You know, I can’t say I wasn’t afraid but, you know, you just got used of it, you know. I don’t know, the people in England, they just seemed to take it for granted, you know. That there’s going to be an air raid tonight as soon as it gets dark and you know, they just took it for granted, it seems to me anyway, you know. Of course they had, you know, anti-aircraft fire. They had, England was covered with balloons, too. They had those big balloons, you know, on cable, you know, like to stop the low lying aircraft. You know, they had these big balloons. They were all over England. That’s all you’d see.

Description

Mr. Bruce describes blackouts, in England, to deter air raids. He also describes the use of cable secured balloons used to entangle low-flying German aircraft.

Robert Bruce

Robert Bruce was born on February 11, 1922 at Sturgeon Valley, Saskatchewan. He was the second youngest of eight children. After they were forced to sell their farm when his mother was widowed, the community built Mr. Bruce’s family a new house across from the local school. He left school at fourteen, didn’t qualify academically for the air force, and eventually joined the army, where he served as a truck driver. Mr. Bruce served in post D-Day Europe from France to Germany. After the war, he returned to Canada and worked on the railroad.

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