Young Bill Perks
The bombs began to fall on London in early September 1940. The Nazi blitzkrieg was designed not only to destroy property and people but also to crush the will to fight, to convince Britain to surrender to the German onslaught before the country was destroyed. Th e bombing was not unexpected; it was a matter of when it would begin. Anticipating the attacks on the capital, thousands of women and children were evacuated to the countryside, usually to the homes of relatives or sympathetic countrymen. Th at was the case with young William Perks Jr. (b. October 24, 1936), the oldest child of William and Kathleen (known as Molly), who accompanied his mother and two siblings to Pembrokeshire, Wales, in April 1940. Bill’s mother was lonely and unhappy in Wales, however, and the brood returned to London a few weeks later to become observers victims of the Battle of Britain, which raged in the skies above England from July through October 1940. Bill remembered gazing at the skies above London as waves of German bombers crossed from occupied France to England for their bombing runs and to be attacked by the British Royal Air Force fighter planes. It was an exciting and dangerous time. Many nights the family slept in their back garden air-raid shelter, as did thousands of other Britons. Extended families were thrown together for safety; commercial buildings and homes were destroyed by the seemingly ceaseless bombing raids. After October, the regular nightly raids ended, but bombing runs still continued through May 1941. At that point, it was clear to the Germans that there would be no British surrender and that the continued raids were futile. Nevertheless sporadic raids went on for years until the end of World War II in 1945. Much of Great Britain, particularly the important cities, was reduced to rubble. By the end of May 1941, over 43,000 civilians, half of them in London, had been killed by bombing, and more than a million houses had been destroyed or damaged in London alone. London had a population of about 9 million people at the start of the war.
