From The Great War to The Cold War
Members of the Kent Historic Defences Group have researched many aspects of the county’s military histories.
Hitler’s V weapons
In February 2019, Colin and Sean Welch and their ‘Research Resource’ team’s excavation at the site of a V2 explosion at Horton Kirby was filmed for National Geographic’s Buried Secrets of WWII; Hitler’s Killer Rocket television programme. A team from Osnabruck University applied ground- penetrating radar techniques.
The site of a V1 flying bomb explosion at Bromley Green was excavated in August 2019, 75 years to the day after the missile was shot down by Polish pilot Flight Sergeant Donocik of 315 Squadron. The ‘kill’ was shared with an unrecorded Hawker Tempest pilot, likely to have been Flight Sergeant Shaw of 56 Squadron.
This project was reported by an American journalist for the USA’s Smithsonian Museum magazine Air and Space and followed an excavation in 2018 of another V1 shot down by Flt. Sgt Donocik near Ham Street.
The Bromley Green excavation produced a full tailpipe that showed 0.5in and 20mm ammunition strikes from both aircraft, confirming the combat report made by Donocik at the time and giving clear evidence of the different angles of attack.
In July 2019, Research Resource was filmed at a V2 site at Marden for the BBC’s Digging for Britain WWII Special 2019. The excavation was broadcast live by Skype to Marden Primary School, whose pupils (including their cub reporters) created their study and cleaned some of the finds. Colin Welch gave a talk to the classes involved, and both Colin and Sean gave a major lecture to the local community.
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Fig 1: Conserved and sectioned burner cup from thte Horton Kirby V2
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Fig 2: Bromley Green V1 tailpipe showing the angles of ammunition strikes from a Hawker Tempest aircraft
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Fig 3: V2 crater at Marden, following the first scrape of the topsoil
A survey in September of the third and final V1 shot down by Flight Sergeant Donocik, at Hinxhill, produced a fragment of an incendiary bomb, one of 16 carried by some flying bombs and in this case adding new information to the historical record of the event.
Reports on these excavations will be submitted to Kent County Council’s Historic Environment Record Officer.
Last year also featured lectures and presentations to local history societies and communities.
A further V2 excavation and analysis are being planned for 2020. Permissions, agreements and school collaborations are being finalised. A team of digital surveyors will record the developing excavation and finds locations, for further remote analysis, post-excavation.
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Fig 4: Wartime glamour girl. Graffiti revealed in the air-raid shelter at Maidstone Grammar School for Girls Top, right
Fig 5: ‘KURG’ excavating the air-raid shelter at MGGS
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Fig 6: Interior passage, accessed during the excavations
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Fig 7: Entrance to a room that contained unplumbed toilets with curtain dividers Bottom
Fig 8: Roadblock on the A229 Forstal Road junction, Maidstone, being negotiated by one of the few cars on the road due to wartime petrol rationing
‘Research Resource’ contact details: twitter.com/craterlocators
Digging deep at girls’ school
Robert Hall, the Kent Underground Research Group’s representative on the KHDG, one of the KAS’s affiliated societies, reports that at
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Fig 10: Professionals on parade. Troops of the 53rd (Welsh) Division in Ashford Road (War & Peace Collection)
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Fig 11: Dad’s Army. The 28th (Southern Railway) Bn Home Guard at Maidstone West Station in 1940
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Fig 12: Type 28A pillbox for a 6-pounder anti-tank gun and light machine-gun, extant at Allington Lock
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Fig 13: ‘Loopholes’ alongside the School Lane
A few days later KURG carried out a more thorough measurement, graffiti and photographic survey of the structure. A report on the project sets out the main results of the survey and is accompanied by a photographic two-volume study.
Currently, documentary research is being undertaken into the D2 heavy anti-aircraft gun battery at Swingate, the subject of ongoing conservation work.
Contact details:
Robert Hall rhmafia@gmail.com KURG: http://www.kurg.org.uk/
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Fig 9: Roadblock on Maidstone Bridge, one of only two places where enemy invaders moving east to west could cross the River Medway. The other crossing was Allington Lock
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Fig 14: Anti-tank blocks on the A229 Loose Road.
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Fig 15: Tonbridge Fortress book
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Fig 16: Tonbridge Castle. In WW2, pillboxes were erected along the curtain wall, and the river was designated as an anti-tank ditch to confront an enemy invasion from the south
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Fig 17: Spigot mortar pit in Riverside Gardens, Tonbridge, Castle, positioned to defend the town’s Big Bridge (background) and waterfront. (Copyright The Francis Frith Collection)
Towns that prepared for Nazi invasion
On behalf of the KAS, the first in-depth studies into anti-invasion defences constructed in and around two of Kent’s most heavily fortified towns, when Hitler’s threatened Operation Sea Lion seemed both imminent and inevitable, were carried out by Clive Holden and Paul Tritton, for publication on the society’s website.
Clive Holden’s Fortress Maidstone is mostly derived from 1940 and 1941 regimental War Diaries. Clive spent many hours at The National Archives studying the diaries, photographing thousands of pages, poring over archive photos and interpreting the complex military abbreviations and interminable changes in command structures.
Other sources included Stopping Hitler, the memoirs of Captain G C Wynne of the Cabinet Office’s Historical Section, who in 1948 wrote the official account of Home Defence plans drawn up between 1939 and 1945.
Among the few relics of Maidstone’s anti-invasion defences that survive within the town are two ‘loopholes’ for rifles or light machine-guns beside the School Lane entrance to Mote Park (Fig 13, opposite page), an important Army training ground and staging camp; and (Fig 14, left) a group of anti-tank blocks beneath a footbridge on the A229 Loose Road.
Paul Tritton’s Tonbridge Fortress covers the town’s experiences in the early years of WW2, from accepting child evacuees in
September 1939 (in some cases, reluctantly) and warmly welcoming soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, to being transformed into a fortress town on the General Headquarters Line (aka ‘Ironside Line’) of pillboxes, tank-traps and roadblocks, the concept of General William Edmund Ironside, Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, a former pupil of Tonbridge School.
The school’s playing fields became part of the fortress’s outer perimeter of gun emplacements, anti-tank ditches, barbed wire entanglements and defended buildings that town’s northern suburbs.
Paul Tritton embarked on his research after a pillbox was uncovered during building work at Tonbridge School in 2017.
Subsequently, the structure (see KAS Newsletters 108 and 111) was conserved following advice offered on behalf of the KAS by Kent Historic Defences Group founder and past-chairman Victor Smith, who contributed a survey and architectural drawings to the book.
The book also features other recently-revealed pillboxes, ‘then and now’ photographs, aerial pictures of the town’s defences, asks: ‘Could Hitler have captured Tonbridge Fortress?’ – and recounts a war game at Sandhurst that sought to answer the question.
Download Tonbridge Fortress at: www.kentarchaeology.org. uk/publications/member- publications/tonbridge-fortress
Contact details: Paul Tritton paul.tritton@btinternet.com
Great War to Cold War
Kent has a long and illustrious military history dating back to the Roman occupation but the ‘Great War,’ the first great conflict of the 20th century, brought the horrors of warfare to a new generation. The county’s geographical position also made it a prime target for German air-raids and naval bombardments.
Clive Holden’s latest book, Kent at War, published in July by Amberley, chronicles life in the county in WW1. His next book, due to be published in Autumn 2020, is entitled Cold War Kent and will cover the period from 1947 to 1991 when once again Kent was a ‘front line county’.
Clive’s current projects include researching coastal and anti-aircraft battery sites near Dover with the National Trust & continuing to volunteer with the restoration of the Victorian Slough Fort, Allhallows.
Contact details: cliverholden@msn.com
Amberley Books www.amberley-books.com
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Fig 18: Site of the weapon pit today, showing Tonbridge School’s reinstated Boer War Memorial, dismantled when the weapon was installed to avoid obstructing its field of fire.
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Fig 19: Marking the line. Plaque erected on the ‘Ironside Line’ at Tonbridge School following the conservation of a pillbox revealed during building work
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Fig 20: Architectural drawings
©Victor Smith
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Fig 21: Pillbox revealed at 44 Stocks Green Road, Hildenborough, in 2018 after undergrowth was cleared during landscaping work. ©Susan Featherstone Bottom row, right
Fig 22: Front cover of Kent at War. Top image shows an Armistice parade at a US Army hospital in Dartford, whose commander ordered ‘everyone who can walk must get out and celebrate’.
