Beneath The Coventry Blitz
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What is the introduction and purpose of the ‘Family Stories’ series?
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Hello and welcome to our series of Family Stories, the podcast written by you, the listener. Today we're bringing you a whole range of stories and accounts, from a sailor sunk off Lisbon, the reality behind Anzac Digger Life, and a forgotten letter from the Commentary Blitz. First up we have this story from Will, who writes, I want to tell you about two men whose stories I've spent the last few months piecing together. One is my grandfather, one is my wife's. They never met, served in completely different parts of the war, and neither family knew the full story of what either man had actually been through, until my father in law found a stack of log books in the loft. My wife's grandfather was Stanley Paul Smith, Stan, a spitfire and Mustang pilot who flew with forty three squadron across North Africa, Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, and Italy between nineteen forty two and nineteen forty four.
And then with 611 Squadron, from Arnhem through to the end of the war. Towards the end of his life, with his memory going, he said something out of nowhere that nobody in the family understood at the time. There was these poor buggers in the water. I never forgot that. That was it.
How does Will uncover the linked wartime experiences of his grandfather and his father‑in‑law?
He never explained it. When the log books came down from the loft, I went looking for what he meant, and found it, a log entry from the twenty seventh of March 1943, after a torpedo bomber intercept off the Algerian coast. I saw two aircraft floating and in flames, men in water waving. Convoy fired on us. Italian aircrew in the water. and then the Royal Navy opening fire on their own air cover. That was what he'd carried for sixty years. My grandfather was William Cummins, a merchant navy officer from Middlesbrough. He left the tape recorded memoir submitted to the BBC People's War Archive, completely verbatim, dead pan Northeast, and extraordinary. He survived the torpedoing of SS Thurso in june nineteen forty two by U five two.
In the chaos below decks, William grabbed an axe to free the lifeboat, but his hand landed right on top of his wallet, his watch, and his Rolls Razor. He took the axe. The watch sank off Lisbon and he was still bitter about it decades later. He used to say You know where there is a good watch? Off bloody Lisbon. The chief steward and chief engineer had broken into the bonded stores when the torpedo hit and drank as much whiskey as they could. By the time they looked up, the lifeboats had gone. William's response when they started screaming from the deck was to hell with them if they were so keen on spirit they could stop there. They launched the jolly boat. Clearly under the influence they forgot the plug.
It sank. Cargo was cork, and as the Thurzo went down it erupted to the surface everywhere. Fortunately, the men were rescued from the floating corpse. The corvette that picked William up, HMS Marigold, was sunk by an Italian torpedo six months later. The crew she rescued. Uh lift her. This is where the two stories connect. In November 1942, William joined SS Fox as second officer, ferrying war supplies along the Algerian coast as part of Operation Torch. Ammunition encased aviation petrol in containers called Flimsies. William noted, By goodness, they were flimsy. They would only just stand up to their own weight more or less. At the same time, Stan's logbook has him flying daily patrols with forty three squadron over the same stretch of coastline, including repeated entries of patrol bougie.
The forty three squadron operational records confirm fuel shortages at the Ford Airstrips during exactly this period. William was delivering the fuel stand squadron, couldn't fly without. At Bougi, a city in northern Algeria, the fox-loaded cased petrol that had already been transferred once from a bigger ship, degraded, leaking, soaking the hold with one hundred octane fumes.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the introduction and purpose of the ‘Family Stories’ series?
0:02–1:34
2
How does Will uncover the linked wartime experiences of his grandfather and his father‑in‑law?
1:34–9:26
3
What dramatic rescue and fuel‑explosion incident connects the two maritime stories?
9:26–17:57
4
How did Norn’s father survive a severe thigh injury in the Burma jungle?
17:57–26:50