Near Reigate, the Heavy Rescue Service found three greyhounds inside Paul Lewis’s Anderson bomb shelter, which he had constructed to be virtually air-tight. The dogs were alive and hungry. The bodies of Lewis and a fourth greyhound were ten feet from the shelter’s entrance. He had attempted to save one too many of the animals.
Alfred Sedgwick remembers his survival with remorse. He and eight other pipefitters and machinists heard screams from outside their Reigate Waterworks machine shop. He recalled, “One look, and we knew what was what, the poison cloud coming at us with the wind.”
Sedgwick and the others ran to the back room where the gas masks had been stored for three years. “In 1939, there were more masks in Surrey than people. But they had been shuffled around over the years. And the eight of us found only two of them, stacked in their buff-colored boxes. Only two.”
Sedgwick and the others drew lots, using lengths of wire. “Reggie Merrill and I drew long ones. Six of our friends did not. Dreadfully frightened, they ran from the shop, trying to keep in front of the cloud. Their bodies were found a stone’s throw from the waterworks. I’ve never forgiven myself for not finding a better way. I feel as if I sent them to their deaths.”
I asked Sedgwick what that better solution would have been.
He shook his head. “Something. Anything. I’m alive, and they’re dead. It doesn’t seem right.”
Maude Bruce was a nurse in Reigate. “We had just placed the last of the wounded and ill from our small hospital on lorries. One moment our town was full of retreating American soldiers. The next moment they had disappeared.”
Enemy armor and infantry skirted the town on their march north. She saw them at the edge of her village, glimpses of panzers and camouflaged trucks barely visible in their own dust. Firing came from everywhere.
“It was too late for me to escape to London,” she told me during an interview, “and the fighting seemed to be north anyway, so I walked the other direction, toward the Mole.”
She walked along the River Mole, a winding, seemingly aimless creek. Along the banks she was hidden from most of the German units above. A few Wehrmacht troops might have spotted her, she thinks, but battle-pressed infantry do not have time for wandering civilians.
“There might have been twenty of us along the river bank, trying to stay out of harm’s way. I was trying so hard to make myself small, to disappear, that I didn’t see the clouds of gas so many survivors remember.”
Maude Bruce suddenly felt her throat restrict, as if a hand had been clamped around it. “My first thought, actually, was that a German had snuck up behind me and grabbed my throat. Then my lungs seemed to fill with fire, and I thought I’d been shot. I thought, this is what being shot must feel like.”
She collapsed into the mud of the river bank. “As providence would have it, my face fell into a bushel of moss. I was never unconscious, I don’t think. I turned my head once, and my nose filled with a sweet hay odor, and I knew it was poison. I pushed my face further into the moss.”
The river moss acted as a filter. Maude Bruce survived. When she rose thirty minutes later, the banks of the River Mole were dappled with bodies.
The English way with happy euphemisms at times fails them. The hospital for the criminally insane at Royal Tunbridge Wells was named Royal Tunbridge Wells Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Interred there were four King George VIs, two Napoleons, at least one Mary, Queen of Scots, and ninety others.
I spoke with Dr. Robert Longstreet, superintendent of the hospital. “My assistants and I tried, we really did. We had more than enough gas masks, but not enough strength. As soon as we would get a mask on a patient, he would yank it right off. Many just could not understand the danger. We lost forty-five patients, many dying with their masks in their hands.”
At another hospital, this one near Guildford, Edwin Perkins felt fortunate for his injuries. Perkins had been badly burned a day before. He had been placed under an oxygen tent. The toxic gas seeped through the hospital windows.
He remembered, “An orderly convulsed, coughing and clawing at his neck. One of the doctors rushed into the ward, and he fell, too. And I saw other patients writhe and cough and then be still. But I was immune to it, and it took me a moment to understand. I was under the oxygen tent. It saved my life once, and it saved me again.”
Graham Gilmore was spared when he sealed himself inside his grocery’s meat locker. “After about ninety minutes, my choice was clear. I had to risk stepping outside or freeze to death.” Out he went, and the gas had dissipated.
Roger Crighton was director of the Wheelerstreet Cemetery and Mausoleum, near Godalming. When a shell landed near his west garden, a green cloud raced toward him in the wind. He locked himself inside the mausoleum. “The lichhouse saved me.”
Clara Roe of Albury, three miles southeast of Guildford, rolled up the windows of her automobile and closed the vent. She told me after the war, “I saw a wisp of lime green air come through the vent, so I took off my blouse and jammed it in there.”
I remarked that this was quick thinking.
She blushed. “I wasn’t through removing my clothes. When a puff of it came through the floorboards, I removed my skirt and lay it over the boards, and sat on it. Then I took my stockings off and pushed them along the bottom of the passenger door to stop another wisp. I sat there as naked as I ever care to be for twenty minutes until the cloud cleared. I felt quite the doxy.”
Wayne Sandon crawled through a manhole into a sewer in Royal Tunbridge Wells. “After gagging for half an hour, I thought to myself, no German gas can be as bad as this sewer, so I climbed out. The poison was gone.”
Lord Walford hurriedly descended into the wine cellar of his country home five miles north of the Duke of Norfolk’s castle at Arundel. “I felt entirely safe, even snug, in that dark, warm cavern, with my wine collection. Then, after five minutes, I decided my faithful servants deserved to join me. I emerged to find them madly running around coughing in this distracting manner, and I had to fairly tug them into the cellar. Five of us were down there for two hours. It was exceedingly close, and we had little to talk about. Now that I think about it, I should have offered them something to drink.”
General Clay’s toxic clouds burst forth along a north-south line roughly corresponding to the western borders of Surrey and Sussex. More poison clouds erupted along the northern German front, in a sweeping east-west arc twenty miles south of the Thames. The freshening wind both aided and hindered the gas, moving it along but also diluting it.
It might have been worse. English civilians hid in basements, under blankets and laundry, in closets and pantries, under rugs, in bomb shelters, anywhere that seemed proof against the deadly wind. Some of these spontaneous shelters worked, and many civilians had gas masks.
The gas dipped down here but not there, puddled in one home but missed the neighbor’s house, streamed along one village lane but ignored another.
Most civilians had already moved inland. Only essential workers and the brave, ignorant, or foolish had remained.
Despite all this, the carnage was appalling. Latest estimates for noncombatant deaths due to the chemicals are approaching 22,000. The number of wounded is much higher, and may never be accurately determined.
At 5:30 that afternoon, General Clay said grimly, “Not one goddamn further inch of English soil is going to fall to the enemy, Jack. Mark my words.”