BOMB VICTIMS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24613, 22 May 1941, Page 8

BOMB VICTIMS

HAIRBREADTH ESCAPES FROM RAIDERS BRITISH SHIP’S SAFE ARRIVAL • Air Mail) SYDNEY, May 17. A party ol more than 300 men, women and children,*some of whom were bombed out of homes in Birmingham. Coventry, Leeds and London, has arrived in Sydney. Australians who have been living in England were among the arrivals, most of whom have worked as A.R.P. wardens, women bus inspectors and fire spotters. They told of hairbreadth escapes in recent Nazi air raids. Mr A. N. Tizard, an aircraft engineer, brought with him an unexploded incendiary bomb. It was dropped from a Nazi machine as it fiew over his sister’s home in Surrey. Mr Tizard dismantled the bomb, which was dated 1936. It will be used for National Emergency Service demonstrations in Sydney. Mrs A. Mountain, of Leeds, and Mrs C. Robertson, from Halifax, were on a boat train on the way to the ship which brought them to Australia, when a fire raid'started “Fire bombs were raining down like jumping crackers.” Mrs Mountain said. “The roof of our carriage and the running hoard caught alight. Two railwaymen returning from work snuffed out the fire bombs with a large coffee mug. They put out the fires with their overcoats. Then came high explosive bombs, which rocked the train and smashed every window. The train crawled all the way to the embarkation port because the attack had weakened the permanent way." Mr George Ivon, a retired official of the Birmingham Municipal Council, said that hundreds of factory workers were killed in one raid on his town. He said that gas from broken mains had permeated shelters, asphyxiating whole families.

“ For five weeks, water, gas and electricity were cut off,” he said. “We had to walk more than a mile to a railway siding and queue up for hours to get a bucket of water. A kinema received a direct hit as I was going home one night. Four hundred people were killed. A land mine in one street flattened a dozen houses.” His wife said: “ Many ot us have been through hell. My husband and I lived in a cellar for five months The suffering of the people is indescribable, but they are determined to carry on."