Tynedale at War 1939–1945

Barawling Australians, Polish pilots burning to avenge themselves on Germany for the invasion of their country, the German officer who drowned while trying to escape from a South Tyne PoW camp, and the pub landlady who watered down her gin in order, she claimed, to prevent naive Land Army girls getting drunk it was all part of life in Tynedale as the district went to war for the second time in twenty-five years.

Although well away from the battlegrounds of Europe, Tynedale did not escape the ravages of the Second World War. The rolling moorlands of the heart of Northumberland are still pitted with dozens of craters, where both Allied and Axis aircraft crashed in flames, and there were tragedies on the Home Front too.

At remote Coanwood, twenty-four men were left dead or seriously injured when a training exercise went badly wrong, and an exploding ammunition train at Hexham railway station left three men dead. Even before the conflict began, founder of the British Union of Fascists Sir Oswald Mosley and the hated Nazi propaganda broadcaster, William Joyce better known as Lord Haw Haw both came to the heart of Northumberland to preach the Fascist gospel in Hexham.

This book deals with the everyday impact of six years of war on the district, from the arrival of gravely wounded soldiers from Dunkirk at Hexham Emergency Hospital, through to dealing with thousands of often louse-ridden evacuees from industrial Tyneside, the heroics of local servicemen and the antics of the Home Guard.