EXCITING DAYS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 90, Issue 56, 8 March 1946, Page 7

EXCITING DAYS

DESTROYING MINES WELLINGTON MAN’S WORK (Special Australian Correspondent.) Recd. 6 p.m. Sydney, March 5. The latest recruit to the aimy of seekers for accommodation in Sydney is the man who saved Fleet Street in April, 1941. He is Lieutenant-Com-mander Dudley Reid, George Medal and Bar, of Wellington, who, with hi, English wife and son Graham, aged two, desires to resume business in Sydney as soon as his discharge from the Royal Australian Navy is completed. The Fleet Street job was just one of 25 successful encounters with German accoustic mines in Britain. One of Germany's earliest secret weapons, the accoustic mine, was employed on lard targets with devastating effect during the blitzes of 1940 and 1941. To coinbat it, teams of naval experts were pressed into service. While Commander Reid served with the R.M.S. (rendering mines safe) flying squads, his wife, as an officer in the meehnaised transport corps, drove stretcher parties to "incidents’’ and returned with the dead and injured. FLEET STREET MINE The Fleet Street mine was one of many left unexploded after the blitz of April, 1941. With Lieutenant "Red' 1 Kesack, Terrigal, New South Wales, Commander Reid arrived just too late for the job which saved Charing Cross station and won the George Cross. They were starting out to deal with a mine near St. Paul’s Cathedral, but were re-directed to a "higher priority job" in Fleet Street. A cylindrical bomb, measuring Bft. Bin., lay across the street below Lord Beaverbrook’s “Daily Express" office "like an overturned pill box. Commander Reid was alone in the street, which was cordoned off for the only time in the blitz period, but a great crowd watched from a distance. The bomb's fuse was on the underside; listening with one ear to the mine for the warning whir of the machinery, he turned it over. After hours of work with the delicate skill of a safebreaker, the mine was de-fused. One could never be sure of the mechanism of mine fuses. A jar or Impact often deranged them so that the slightest touch meant instant explosion. Lieutenant Kesack was killed in this way. Others heard the whir in time to run 50yds. and escape with broken eardrums and blast injuries. When the Germans raided Clyde, Commander Reid was one of the team which was rushed from London in a special train. His team of one New Zealander and two Australians defused six mines the first afternoon and nine the next day. He won the George Medal in the winter of 1941 when a mine hit the Cardiff mortuary, bursting water mains and flooding the streets. The mine was buried deeply and the casing was broken. Reid broke two sets of tools before completing the job. He still has the sign from the mortuary door, which reads: "If you have any bodies, please lake them to the cemetery.” A BUSY CHRISTMAS

Commander Reid’s first English Christmas, 1940, was a busy one. He de-fused one mine in the morning, and in the afternoon set fire to a building which a broken mine had sprayed with hexonite. Firemen stood by until the hexonite had burnt away and then put the lire out. That evening he blew up a mine which, a receding tide had exposed on the Mersey foreshore. Racing back to London, his car was impaled on a girder blown into the roadway by a bomb-burst. In October, 1941, as crews were trained to handle the bombings, which were then sporadic, Commando;- Reid joined tile anti-sub-marine escort forces which were convoying in the North Atlantic and later in the Mediterranean. By 1944 he was in command of the corvette Spiraea. Afier serving nearly six years altogether as a member of the Royal Australian Navy Volunteer Reserve, he returned to Sydney a month ago.