Defenders of the Skies - Plymouth's WWII Anti-Aircraft Defences

"The sound of the ack-ack boomed around the estuary at the waves of Luftwaffe bombers droning overhead, their payloads smashing down on Plymouth creating great explosions & fire throughout the City. The defenders of the skies were slogging away to try keep the enemy at bay with the Heavy Anti-Aircraft Batteries at Maker Heights pounding the night sky. What will come of the great City of Plymouth?"

A vivid account from a Plymothian who was only 12 at the time, witnessing the sheer ferocity of German attacks & the barrage of defences that surrounded the City, seemingly having little effect on the bombardment that rained down. Over coming months we will look further into the ways that Plymouth was defended from aerial attack focusing on the HAA Batteries that surrounded Plymouth, barrage balloon sites & light anti-aircraft guns that were sited around the streets, manned by US Troops. We will research deeper into each sites history to build a better account of what happened & who manned these important installations.

Maker Heights Heavy Anti-Aircraft Battery as it is today

Rusting mountings for 3.7 inch guns

Many sites have been lost to development since the war, although some will still offer archaeological remains just beneath the surface such as the site on farmland near Penlee Nature Reserve. The concrete trackway still remains but all above ground structures were levelled with the return to farmland. A total of ten Heavy Anti-Aircraft Batteries were sited around Plymouth, including Maker Heights, Bere Alston, Carkeel, Plympton & Down Thomas. Over 6 years, we have documented each site carefully to record what now remains before any further loss to development that may happen in the future. Now we want to build on those photographs with unit histories, losses & accounts from the crews who manned them. Sites like this need to be remembered if only for the brave souls that manned the guns. We need your help to raise funds for plaques to be sited at each of the ten locations remembering the crews & will be setting up a fundraising effort in due course.

Relic uncovered from demolished Nissen Huts at an AA Battery site

Arc type emplacements now provide a modern use for farmers

Ammunition lockers inside a HAA Battery emplacement

Barrage Balloon sites were in abundance in & around Plymouth, proving a necessity to help prevent low flying bombers, with locations including Mount Wise, Devonport Park & The Blockhouse, Stoke. The best preserved moorings are to be found at Staddon Heights close to the massive firing range wall but just recently, a hugely important find sheds new light & history of another location that is still under investigation by the team. Add to this another contribution from a reader as to another location in Saltash & it makes for some great results over the 6 years we have been documenting.

Barrage Balloons were sited at The Blockhouse in Stoke 

Balloon mooring points - the best preserved lie atop Staddon Heights

Marking a site at Mount Wise

Here are a couple of old photographs of barrage balloons from back in the day - the first thought to be from Plymouth Sound & the other a fine capture of a 1940's dance on The Hoe, both pictures courtesy of Cyberheritage.

Source: Cyberheritage

Source: Cyberheritage

Do you have any family members who were stationed at sites like these? If so we would love to hear from you & with your help build a history of each unit that served. Any photographs from around the time would be fantastic too although cameras were few & far between back then.

Next time on Defenders of the Skies - Maker HAA Battery.

Faces of Plymouth Blitz

Over the past four years we have met with many locals who experienced the Plymouth Blitz, & this year we are looking to speak with more to gather stories & photos from the time. Our research will be collated as part of the Faces of Plymouth Blitz project we have running throughout the year & we urge you to get in touch with us if you would like to share your memories for future generations to learn more about their past.

One of our readers, Lucy, recently got in touch with some fantastic memories from her mum, Mary, whom we have since spoken with to gather detailed information of her experiences in WWII & shed more light on the deep air raid shelter at Hexton Tunnel.

Here is a short excerpt of the full account that Lucy kindly mailed us;

Mary Outhwaite (nee Hine) was born in January 1938, and lived on Hooe Road, the main road into Hooe, until she was an adult.  She remembers the Hexton Hill tunnel and the Breakwater fort.

When the air raid alarm started, my mother would pick me up take me to the bottom of the garden, over the fence, through the fields and down the steep path that leads to the tunnel.  At times the tunnel would be full of people, sometimes squeezed in like sardines – my mother said that one night it was so airless in there, a match wouldn’t stay lit - some of the people would have made makeshift beds.  Mother and I would often sit on some type of wooden bench until the all clear sounded, and we would go home.  There was no door at the entrance of the tunnel, and some people would stand and watch the planes and bombing.  My father wasn’t with us as he was in the home guard and stationed at the top of Murder Hill (Hooe Hill), where there is still a sentry box near the top on the left, where the ground starts to level out.  He was stationed on the guns there, I suppose firing at incoming enemy aircraft. 

My father used to rent a piece of land which overlooked the tunnel, and I used to play there.  When I was about nine or ten (after the war), I would visit the tunnel with friends and walk right through, although there was a slight kink in it and you couldn’t see daylight from one end to the other.  One day we could see a suitcase in the entrance to the tunnel, we didn’t approach, but went home briefly, probably ten minutes at the most.  When we came back, our picnic had been ransacked – oddly, the cheese pasties had gone but the rock buns remained; the suitcase had gone.  The tunnel is on the edge of Hooe Lake, local people were convinced that Lord Haw Haw, the famous propagandist, lived close by on a house boat, and was seen sitting in the bar of the Royal Oak which is also on the edge of the lake.  This may have been after the war although he was tried at Nuremburg and subsequently hanged. 

My grandmother, Mary Hine, realised that this steep track to the tunnel was not an easy one to follow in the dark, so she painted marker stones white to aid vision by night. I last went into the tunnel about ten years ago, from the lake side, it seemed so much smaller!  It was about five foot wide, and a couple of feet drop on either side of the main path.  It was being used for storage, and it didn’t go back very far.

A collapse in the tunnel today denies access to the other entrance that Mary's family used

There we have it, just one amazing story that we intend to build on & all thanks to one of our readers getting in touch to share their family history. If you would like to feature your family as part of the series, please get in touch via info@hiddenplymouth.co.uk

Keep following for future updates & amazing memories from the children of Plymouth Blitz. Here is a video from Steve Johnson showing an ITV documentary from 2001.