The Owen Gun War Crimes
The Owen Gun War Crimes Chapter Five Part One
It has been suggested that a good title for this book would be, ‘The Owen Gun War Crimes’, but as this is just one of the beginning chapters its too early to decide on a title. For sure War Crimes were committed and the innocent died, due to them. Still, it is for the reader to decide the guilt or innocence of the participants.
Blame?
This book is a history of the crimes that were committed against Australian soldiers who fought and died ill equipped defenceless due to the misdeeds of their older superior officers. To judge those people fairly we have to appreciate the state and time that the world was in and how war crimes were perceived during the 1940s
Action at Parit Sulong Jan 1942 by Murray Griffin, First large Massacre of Australian Wounded by Japanese Troops.
War has a roll on affect, like skittles or ten pin bowling, one person affected, in some way makes a decision which rolls on and affects millions of people. War changes people, some for the better and some for the worse. Depending on their position the affect can roll on to affect millions of people. In the Owen Gun history the decisions that certain people made impacted on the youthful generation of Australians that either went out to fight a war, or those that stayed at home to worry about them.
Sgt C.Parsons winning DCM, he and his Two Pounder Crew destroyed six Jap Tanks. Where were the Australian Tank? Where were the Australian Sub Machine Guns?
What was in the mind of Evelyn Owen in 1940 when he made the decision, to join the Australian Army? The Australian newspaper stories and Cinema Newsreels would have been describing the events occurring in Britain. Any intelligent person could relate those scenes to Australia knowing that it would be only a matter of time before it too would take its turn and come under attack.
With the advantage of looking back through history we can see that Evelyn Owen would have been far better employed designing firearms, for others to use rather than square bashing his way though recruit training, and preparing to go to war with his brothers in the same way his forefathers had gone to the First World War. At that time as he had no hope of seeing the fruition of his firearm inventions, he wanted to play his part in defending Australia in any way he could. His motivation would be to do anything he could to prevent the madness that was destroying the ‘Old World”, demolishing his world, and the world of all the people he cared about. Millions of other young men felt the same way, but a few had their own agenda’s, they had careers, promotion and power to consider. That’s okay as long as they do not send thousands of other young people to their deaths to enhance that career.
Evelyn Owen with one of his early proto-types with a drum magazine. Owen began manufacturing proto-types in 1931.
As we get older we realise that it is not ideas that rule the world but that the world rules a man’s ideas through or from the information that he is allowed to receive. Events and actions are infinitely more powerful motivating factors in influencing the formation of people ideas and opinions than a mere desire to follow a certain philosophy that they may have had all of their lives. Just with the near miss of a bomb can change a lifelong pacifists into a militant and in another person and place a militant into a pacifist. Sometimes the bomb does not have to be real, media is a powerful force in its negative and positive affects. Many times it is what they do not report that has the maximum roll on effect. The people who report these actions have a large responsibility and in many areas have to accept the blame for the dissemination of misinformation, or the reverse, removing the truth by failing to include the true picture to even the people closely affected by it. For example.
World War Two Bombing of British working class housing by Germany created the maximum amount of suffering to the people least able to deal with it. This in turn built fierce resistance which was repaid to Germany in kind and revenged at the War Trials.
In the World at War Evelyn Owen would have had no knowledge of the Bethal Green Tube Station tragedy as that was covered up for 65 years. It was a roll on affect not unlike skittles or ten pin bowling. 173 mainly women and children died in that disaster but it was caused not by a German bomb but by the new sound of a new type of rocket battery operated by the Royal Artillery, a new invention on an old idea.
Peter Patch will never forget, aged 16, being crushed into a ball and the last glimpse of his beloved 17-year-old sister, Iris.
Nor will he ever forget his father’s anguished words to his mother after finally tracking down Iris to a makeshift mortuary: “She’s gone, girl.” that’s all he could say.
Jimmy Haynes still sees the faces of the dead children he had to load on to the lorries: “I was only 16 and I wasn’t a big lad so they told me to carry out the little ones. I didn’t talk about it for years.”
Alf Austin, then 12, will always remember being pinned against a jagged concrete wall by a mass of dying people until a burly lady in uniform plucked him to safety. He will always remember, too, the only time he ever saw his father in tears.
Most people’s response will be: “The what?” The abiding impression is of the wartime East End, its incessant bombing, interspersed with sing-songs and visits from the late Queen Mother.
The Bethal Green Tube Disaster is all the more tragic because of the horrors the victims had already endured. And yet, it did not involve German bombs. It was not a heroic example of London’s “Blitz spirit”. It did not even involve a Tube train; there were none running.
In total, 173 people – mostly women and children – were asphyxiated in an accident so shocking that it was 63 years before the public was allowed to know most of the truth.
Even now, some of the details are uncertain.
The Roll on Affect. Taught Australia What They Could Expect.
The East End of London was a place of deprivation and gritty stoicism almost unimaginable in today’s cosseted society.
“Home” was a loose term. The “home” you had in 1939 was, very often, a pile of rubble by the end of 1940. And the “home” you had in the day was entirely different from the place where you went to sleep.
“I think we’d been bombed out four times by 1943,” says Alf Austin.
“I remember my mother coming out of the shelter after one bomb and the only thing standing was the kitchen dresser. All she could say was: ‘My China!’”
Peter Patch remembers a royal visit after his family lost their first home. “We were just hanging around and then the Queen Mum turned up,” says Peter. “She asked us lots of questions.”
Millions of city children were evacuated to the countryside, but other families chose to stay together and take their chances.
Basic Anderson shelters were built in every garden, but the London authorities discouraged sheltering in the Underground in case people refused to resurface, a hypothetical condition known as “deep shelter mentality”.
Public opinion – reinforced by thousands of deaths at ground level – soon overcame the patronising theories of the Whitehall mandarins, and the Tube quickly became a popular sanctuary.
In the East End, the newly built Bethal Green station could fit up to 5,000 people. The Central Line track was still being laid there and the tunnels had no trains, so it could be fully converted into its own subterranean town.
Alf Austin tells visitors “Down this side, they built a hall over the tracks and we had theatricals and the odd wedding party,” he shouts fondly above the din of a train.
The council built a hospital and even a library down here. Chemical loos and a canteen were installed and, eventually, the tunnels were lined with thousands of bunk beds. “We must have spent years sleeping down here,” he reflects.
A routine soon developed. At the first sign of an air raid, each family would send someone to the “Bundle Shop”, a left luggage depot where everyone stored their bedding. Today, it is Nico’s Cafe, where Alf Austin still likes to meet his chums for a bacon sandwich.
“One of you would pick up the bundle of bedding and then get down to the platform to grab a decent place, while Mum or Dad would round up the little ones and come on behind. Once everyone was safely down below, a lot of the dads would then go back up to get on with their work.”
The little backyard bomb shelters were no defence against direct hits.
Alf’s father drove his lorry through the Blitz. Peter’s father, who worked for the local power company, raced around bombsites disabling the gas and electricity supply. At 16, Jimmy Haynes was just old enough to be an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) messenger, running errands for the emergency services.
On the night of March 3, Alf and his family knew an air raid was on the way. “The radio went off the air at five to eight and that was always a sign. There’d been a raid on Berlin a few days before, so we knew we’d be getting Hitler’s revenge.”
Alf’s parents told him to run on ahead to the Tube with his Aunt Lil. Alf’s mother had just had a baby and would need a little longer to get there.
Peter was a 12-year-old schoolboy, too. His mother had sent him on ahead with his sister Iris, 17, and his cousin Barbara, seven.
Jimmy Haynes met another ARP messenger called Jack and they set off to report for duty at the fire station on Roman Road.
Hundreds of people were below ground when the air raid siren sounded at 8.17pm. The numbers quickly increased as pubs and cinemas emptied out.
There was only one entrance to the Tube, from the street – a flight of 19 rough steps leading down to a landing.
There, people turned right and walked down another seven steps to the ticket hall. From there, a set of escalators led to the platforms and safety 80ft below ground.
That first set of steps was lit by a single 25-watt bulb. An earlier rain shower had made them slippery and there was no central rail.
But most people knew the place well. For many, this had been a bedroom for years. People were used to forming an orderly queue, however terrifying the mayhem above.
What happened next, however, is a source of official debate.
Over the road from the entrance, a searchlight was in operation. Half a mile beyond that, in Victoria Park, an anti-aircraft unit was preparing to fire a new rocket weapon for the first time.
According to a subsequent official report, there were no enemy aircraft in the area. The records of the Royal Artillery’s 26th Searchlight Regiment, which Alf has obtained from the Public Records Office, state that “a small number of enemy aircraft” were nearby.
Either way, at 8.27pm, the Victoria Park battery let rip with its new rockets.
The noise nearly knocked Jimmy Haynes off his feet. On that top stairwell, it caused chaos. “It made a great ‘whoosh’. We’d never heard anything like it,” says Alf.
“People started shouting, ‘It’s a bomb!’ There was screaming and a great shove.”
According to the official report, a woman on the first landing tripped while carrying a baby and a bundle of bedding.
An elderly man then tripped over her. Before they could get up, others were falling over them.
The landing was soon a pile of bodies and it was a case of human skittles all the way back to street level.
Adults fell helplessly on children. There were screams, then groans, then whimpers and then nothing. Piled ten deep, people just ran out of breath.
Protective arms thrown around tiny bodies squeezed the life out of them.
Down in the bowels of the station, around 1,000 people were bedding down as usual. None of them had a clue what was unfolding above.
But up at street level, three buses had just screeched to a halt, disgorging yet more people wanting shelter. Some found themselves treading onto a floor of human bodies.
The official magistrate’s report, which would not be made public for years, describes it as follows: “The stairway was converted from a corridor to a charnel house in ten to 15 seconds.” Of the 173 dead, over 60 were children.
A few steps short of the landing, Alf Austin was carried forwards and then suddenly forced upwards by the crush.
“I was pushed against the wall with my head and chest sticking above everyone. I was terrified.
It was safe enough to play cards in the Underground Tube Station. if you had one handy?
“This big ARP lady, Mrs Bramley, I’ll never forget her, she just waded in, put her hands under my arms and pulled me out. Then she just told me to get down below and not say a word about what had happened. And I didn’t.”
Peter was further back up the stairs. As the crowd surged forward, he remembers crouching, while Iris and Barbara remained standing.
“I curled up in a ball. I could see Iris. I could touch her. But I couldn’t talk to her.”
He can’t remember how long he stayed in that position but, eventually, he was pulled out by a policeman.
“He brought me up and there were all these bodies laid out along the pavement but I didn’t know what was going on.
“He told me just to go over and take shelter under the railway arch and stay there. So I stayed there until the next morning when I went home.”
Only then did Peter’s father learn that Iris and Barbara would never be returning. His mother kept Iris’s coat until her dying day.
The same steps are still there, one of several entrances. With commuters and shoppers weaving around them, Peter and Alf show the exact steps where they were standing. It is all so tragically ordinary. There is nothing here to suggest a deathtrap.
Jimmy had been ordered to go to the station to help with “a terrible accident”. He found a swift but thorough clean-up operation under way.
“We were just told to lay out the bodies and then load them on to lorries,” he recalls.
“One or two near the bottom were still alive. But most of the faces, they were all purple and mauve.”
The Evidence of Disaster Was Washed Away, So Were Many Others.
There were very few injured people. People were either suffocated or they walked away relatively unscathed.
“I do not think I saw a single case of a fractured ribs, which is extraordinary,” the police surgeon told the coroner’s inquest.
Ivy Breen, then 25, was one of a handful with lasting physical injuries a partially paralysed face. What really troubled her for the rest of her life, though, were the sounds of that night and the memory of her tiny nephew, Barry, who died in her arms.
Alf Austin emerged from the Tube the next morning along with thousands of people who were still unaware of their lucky escape.
“They’d washed away all the evidence,” he recalls. The papers were not allowed to report the tragedy, they were not allowed to identify the station or print any details about rocket launches, let alone stories of panic.
The official account was simply that a woman had tripped with a baby and others had fallen on top of her. To this day, the questions persist.
Could We Blame The Germans Or The Britons For This, Who Apportions the Blame?
Why were people used to the terror of the Blitz suddenly spooked by friendly fire against an uncertain target? Why were there no police on duty at the top of the steps? Where were the railings? If the rockets were merely being tested, why do it over the East End?
A year later, the Bethal Green Corporation was successfully sued for negligence by Mrs Anne Baker, who lost her husband and 14-year-old daughter (she received £950 compensation for the loss of her husband and £250 for her daughter).
Similar awards were later paid out to all the bereaved families. The Mayor of Bethal Green and her husband fled the area, broken and vilified. Railings were installed and the steps were painted. But there was still no reference to the chaos induced by the rockets.
“It was wartime and they had to hush all that up,” says Alf.
The bomb-battered East End of the day was a close-knit community. “Everyone knew someone involved,” says Alf.
“I remember going back to school and there was only one of the Morgans left.”
A look at the Book of Remembrance shows why: George and Florence Morgan of 7, Cleary Place had perished along with three of their children.
Peter remembers the double tragedy of poor Maud Thomas. “I was at school with her son, Jamie. He died in the Tube and a week later her daughter was killed by a car in the Roman Road. That was all her children killed.”
Alf Austin feels for George Jones , husband of Lil and father of Vera, seven. “My dad had to identify them. He could only tell it was Vera by her little shoes. George was fighting in North Africa but they wouldn’t let him home. They told him he had nothing to go back to.”
Ivy Breen died a few years ago but her daughter, Sandra Smith, 60, says she never really got over it. Little Barry’s wooden Tommy gun is a treasured family heirloom.
“It’s so important that people know what happened, what they all went through,” says Sandra.
Yet It Was Unreported At The Time.
All this was not reported Evelyn Owen and his contemporaries would not know of this particular incident but the stories of grief and foreboding created urgency and a sense of purpose that it should not happen to their loved ones in Australia.
The most images and impressions that would have been given to Evelyn Owen would have been of the ‘Peoples War’, ‘Their Finest Hour’, the dogged resistance of the civilians in the blitz, putting up with the worst conditions imaginable. He would not have known that the British Anti Aircraft Guns actually killed more Londoners than German air crews as all that hot shrapnel had to come down somewhere. It was although, a great comfort to the masses of civilians that some resistance was being made no matter how poor the actual results.
Evelyn Owen like millions of other young men of his generation joined up as they desperately wanted to keep any fighting that had to be done away from their homeland.
In the Owen Gun betrayal people were changed by war, those changes like the skittles impacted on other people some of whom were needlessly killed due to a lack of firepower, in hundreds of defensive actions when they were under mass attacks. Some changes were positive and won though eventually saving thousands of other lives. They that strived to make other men hurry and make those important decision saved countless thousands that other wise would have been lost.
The World at War introduces a certain stiffening of peoples inner resolution, they realise that ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’, or ‘Loose Lips Lose Lives’ and that bad decisions lose even more of them in war, as the stakes are high, the cost is human life. The blame for those wrong decisions are cut with the firmness of a surgeons knife and forgiveness is forgotten.
One civilian forgets to black out a window, producing a twinkling light, a German Heinkel bomber 22,000 ft above is lost. He has missed his targets but sees the light realises he is over the city of London drops his bomb load and heads for home.
The author remembers that the Children were not much upset when the schools were bombed.
The Bomb drops on the residential area of Canning Town, Custom House East End of London, 80 are killed and 32 still missing, hundreds more are injured and add to the overfull hospitals. Six hundred of the homeless tired and shocked with nothing but the clothes they stand up in are taken to a disused school, as many children had been earlier evacuated to the country South Hallsville School which was called an ‘Evacuation Centre. In reality it was a temporary shelter from the elements certainly not a bomb shelter. They were kept there almost under lock an key. The ARP wardens would not let them leave, until they were found alternative accommodation billeted with relatives or with anyone who had spare room. There was no facilities, no beds, no proper toilets or baths, a mattress on the floor and nowhere comfortable to sit where they could quietly express the grief over their loved ones and the loss of their homes. They should have only been there less than 24 hours. Buses were supposed to arrive and take them to their next destination, to somewhere comfortable and safe, but the buses never came. At the Local City Council the Councillor responsible for signing the paper work for the utilization of the buses had lost the paperwork in the disarrayed piles of papers on his desk. He was very busy, he thought people did not appreciate how busy he was. He felt rather sorry for himself, and that might have been the reason he did not try that hard. On the third night the 13th of September 1940, the voluntary Auxiliary Air Force Leading Aircraftsman who was responsible to wind up Bevin the Barrage Balloon, (the people named each Barrage Balloon after a famous politician, as they considered them all full of wind, Blimps was another nick name) was having a bad night. He had not had slept in a bed since the night of the 9th of September and he was exhausted. The winch that let out the cable had a tangle on the winch drum it got stuck before Bevin was half way up. The Barrage Balloon had been moved to be up over the school to obstruct the German bombers, so they couldn’t risk tangling with the cables this made them fly over 4000 ft or around them. The Auxiliary LAC man whose team had dwindled to one man due to the weeks of continual bombing has instead of fixing the cable or reporting it to his ‘hard to find’ superior, just left it. Many people didn’t think they did any good anyway, as released bombs did not fall directly downwards they had a diagonal path. Some were even dropped by parachute and were called “Land Mines’ they were delayed action bombs. At around the same time that the Auxiliary LAC man was climbing into bed, above him another person was having a problem. A German pilot who had dropped his main stick of bombs over the London Docks had the last one stuck in the bomb bay doors. His chances of returning and landing in that condition was very slight, so he gained height climbing for a few minutes and then dived as steep as he dared when he got down to 4000 feet. He banked up pulling himself out of the dive, the inertia released the loose bomb. He never saw Bevin the Barrage Balloon, before he turned into the east and set a course for home, as it was still hundreds of feet below him. The Bomb as it had left at a very steep angle continued its course directly into the South Hallsville School killing four hundred civilian mainly women and children. The blame and finger pointing, between the Council and Balloon Command continued for weeks. The government blamed the Germans for bombing a civilian Evacuation Centre and made a propaganda 5 minute Newsreels for the cinema matinees.
Continued in Owen Gun War Crimes Chapter Five Part Two
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