![]() ![]() “After we had walked already, they found a lot of bombs in that area that would go off the minute you made any movement. “We got there all right, but when we tried to come home the same way, they wouldn’t let us go through there,” Slutzky said. To visit her father in the hospital, after the bombs stopped falling, Slutzky and her mother had to trudge through wartorn town. You couldn’t see them, so anybody who walked near them could feel the movement of pavement and it would blow up,” Slutzky said. Slutzky’s father, who fought for England in both the First and Second World Wars, was among those injured by the blasts. Slutzky later found a job at a factory doing the same job back in Grimsby, she said, spending several months making Spitfire fuel pumps.Ībout a year later, in 1943, German forces dropped thousands of bombs in the Grimsby area, killing hundreds. “I stayed there (in Leicester) while I did the training,” Slutzky said. It was, according to Britannica, the most highly manufactured British aircraft throughout the war. Those planes are renowned for helping secure the country’s victory in the yearlong Battle of Britain. Slutzky left her hometown for Leicester to report for duty at a factory that manufactured fuel pumps for the country’s Supermarine Spitfire fighter planes. “I got a letter from the government to report to this place,” Slutzky said. She turned 18 in 1942 and shortly after, was drafted into factory work to support England’s war effort. Bouts of illness, including a case of rheumatic fever that rendered her bed-ridden for six months and left her with a lifelong heart murmur, also hindered her. Slutzky’s dreams of attending college, among many other aspects of her life, were derailed. “I remember many times we would count the planes leaving and we’d count them upon (return and say), ‘Oh good, they’re all there.’ And then some nights, they were not - there’d be one missing or two missing.” “We were a little town that was surrounded by fields, it was a lot of space,” Slutzky said. The town’s airport was also requisitioned by the Air Ministry in 1940 and expanded to house a bomber squadron. Ex-fishermen from Grimsby worked alongside the Royal Naval Reserve, using tools from their previous fishing operations, to remove bombs off the coast of the North Sea. Its Royal Dock became the country’s largest base for minesweepers. “It’s really something to remember.”Īs a port town on the North Sea, Grimsby played a crucial role in the UK navy’s operations throughout the war. “And all I (could) hear was (one of my sisters) saying, ‘Don’t leave me.’ She was worried that we would run down to the air raid shelter and leave her up there in the bedroom,” Slutzky added. “If we saw anything up in the sky, we’d run down to the bomb shelter. “(My two sisters) and I shared a bedroom and we’d run to the window,” she said about hearing the sirens. Slutzky recalled the sirens that signaled danger – that bombs were about to fall. Soon enough, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, began pummeling the UK. She was just 15 when Nazi Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland in September 1939 - driving the United Kingdom and France to declare war on the country and its dictator. It hauled nearly 15,000 soldiers to aid Allied Forces in Europe until WWII’s end in 1945. People often forget that while the Queen Mary is now a tourist attraction – and a somewhat rundown one at that, having spent years needing millions of dollars in repairs – the ship had a bellicose chapter. She did so just after its stint as a troop-carrying war vessel dubbed the Grey Ghost - but before people called the ship historic or legendary. Slutzky even sailed aboard the Queen Mary. She lives in peaceful retirement, surrounded by family photos and bygone trinkets.Īt 98, her life’s denouement is average, prosaic even.īut her story - her journey to Seal Beach, to a quiet existence - was anything but.īorn in 1924 in the English port town of Grimsby, Lincolnshire, Slutzky battled a six-month bout of rheumatic fever as a teenager, sacrificed a college education to work on Spitfire planes during the Second World War, married an American soldier, and eventually journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean to America, building a new life in Chicago – and, eventually, California. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |