Accounts of Events at Shingle Street

Photographs . The Battle of Britain and Operation Sealion . Map

An Eye-Witness Account- By Ronald Ashford, born 1922

In 1940, I was a volunteer in the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), later to be renamed the Home Guard and I was one of thirty men serving under First World War veteran; Sir basil Eddis.

After drilling without weapons for some three months, we were each issued with 303 rifles and four clips of 303 ammunition- each clip holding five rounds.

Not long after we were issued with these rifles, and before we had been properly instructed intheir use- a red alert was declared along the East Suffolk coast and we found ourselves dug in behind a long brick wall facing the Aldeburgh marshes. I am uncertain as to the exact date but I remember it was a Saturday night late in August, 1940. 

We had knocked out firing slits at intervals of a few feet.

It was a clear dark evening- about 9.00pm when the heavens appeared to open up south of Orford Lighthouse- in the Shingle Street area.

We heard a tremendous amount of gunfire and explosions. The night sky was lit up with a red glow. Sporadic gunfire went on for several hours.

 

We received word that a German landing had taken place. This was later confirmed by eye-witness accounts of a shoreline littered with burned bodies.

It appeared that this landing had been expected and that we had been laying in wait. The sea bed had been laid with piping from the shore at intervals with flammable liquid. I am uncertain about the exact number of German E-boats and the number of men that the regiment had laying in wait but without doubt, the target would have been the newly completed RADAR station at Bawdsey Manor- vital to our defence at the time.

 

A friend of mine- Bob Burns, once related a similar version of events which he learned from men he was posted with in 1944. Some time later in 1945, a Belgian who had come over and joined our forces overheard Bob relating this story and told him that he had been living in the Belgian port area at the time in question. He said that he had witnessed survivors landing at the port- some badly burned and bringing many bodies with them.

 

It is my belief that Churchill had declared that these events must never be made public. We had just been defeated in France and had suffered great losses. It would have been very bad for morale.

 

(Photo of Ronald Ashford, 1942)

What Happened?

This article documents the history immediately following the British allied defeat at Dunkirk in 1940- a time when British morale was at an all-time low. The known facts have been supplemented using the evidence gathered and summarised on this website.

 

Adolf Hitler had been set on the idea of the quiet conquest of Britain for some time; a country as rich in history as his own and with its own empire. Agents had been deployed in the years leading up to the outbreak of war to covertly gather as much intelligence as was possible.

Before the outbreak of war in 1939, Germany had also been secretly conducting surveillance along the East Coast of Britain. In 1938, the German airship; Graf Zeppelin was sighted off the coast of Aldeburgh in Suffolk on a tour of the British Isles.

 

After the outbreak of the war, British intelligence received word of a planned invasion of Britain codenamed "Operation Sealion."

By all accounts, Operation Sealion was planned down to the last detail but relied upon the success of the German Luftwaffe to clear a path for their stealth force of commandeered craft through the English Channel.

History records that the failure the Luftwaffe to implement their plan led to the operation being stood down by early October, 1940.

In reality, a second operation had been planned (codename unknown). This operation aimed to complete the German military's plans for an invasion by attacking a different part of the English coastline, the relatively quiet and poorly fortified Suffolk coast.

This secret invasion had been planned and brought to the fore in light of the British defeat at Dunkirk earlier that year.

We had lost guns, artillery, tanks and ships and other transport in our retreat on the French coast. Much of our army had been forced to surrender and by July that year, Britain was licking it's wounds, unprepared for an outright invasion. 

The intention was make best use of the opportunity which our defeat presented. By planning an invasion at a time when British morale was at an all-time low and when our forces were depleted, Germany stood their best chance yet at a strike across the Channel.

 

The six mile stretch of coastline between the mouth of the River Ore to the Harwich Habour was a prime target owing to it's close proximity to the RADAR installation at Bawsey Manor.

If successful, the invasion force would have been able to hold for reinforcements and consolidate before advancing on to Martlesham Aerodrome.

There are several testimonies to the build up of German forces in French and Belgian ports in the weeks leading up to the invasion attempt, some reports making reference to German troops dressed in captured British army uniforms, no doubt with the intention to confuse an un-expectant enemy.

By the night of the invasion however, news of the unusual troop build up in the French and Belgian ports had not gone unnoticed by British intelligence. Our response was to covertly add fortifications to selected parts of the East Anglian coast. Possibly due to the short notice with which we had to act, the defence chosen consisted of laying a series of pipelines in the sea, just past the low tide line.

When the time came, these pipelines would be pumped full of a flammable liquid (most probably petrol) and the sea would be set ablaze whilst our army divisions fought to prevent the enemy landing.

 

In order to carry-out these defences and to secure their secrecy as well as the safety of the local population, an order was given to evacuate the residents of villages along this stretch of the coast. The evacuation of  Shingle Street in late summer 1940  is well documented although the available information stops short of the true explanation as to why Shingle Street had to be evacuated, the report is available for inspection at the Public Records Office.

 

There are several theories regarding how the sea defences were laid off the coast at Shingle Street, but there is evidence to suggest that the army laid concrete roads over the pebble banks of the shoreline in order to carry the lorries needed. Remnants of the road structure still exist today.

 

One Saturday late in August 1940, the flotilla of small vessels commandeered by the German army set out across the North Sea. 

Although small in size, the flotilla was picked up by RADAR operating from air bases in Suffolk and Essex, not least by the newly completed RADAR at Bawdsey manor which had the ability to see far past the visible horizon to the boats as they left the French and Belgian coasts.

 

A pre-emptive air strike was launched and the RAF engaged the flotilla whilst still some hours from the English coast. The air strike is thought to have decimated the German forces quite considerably. Resolved to continue however, the remainder of the flotilla made for land, reaching a stretch of desolate coastline off Shingle Street.

Using RADAR and aerial surveillance, the flotilla's course and time of arrival had been anticipated and an unknown number of allied troops were laying in wait.

At the critical moment, the sea defences were activated and the sea "set on fire." Many of the boats nearest to the shore were caught in the blaze and also set alight, resulting in many German casualties. In the aftermath of the attack, there were unconfirmed reports of many burned bodies littering the shoreline from Shingle Street to the port of Harwich (further to the South)- some "wearing British uniforms."

 

During the attack, a regiment of the Local Defence Volunteers stationed at Aldeburgh (to the North) had been placed in a state of red alert and watched as in the distance, the sky lit up to the sound of gunfire and explosions. A witness who was serving in the LDV at the time estimates that the gunfire lasted for several hours.

During this time, a dance was being held in the Aldeburgh Jubilee Hall. There are reports that midway through the evening, the dance was cut short as off-duty servicemen were called to duty. Within an hour though, these servicemen had been stood-down; the cause for alarm had been averted.

Several witnesses also report the arrival of many injured and badly burned survivors in the occupied French and Belgian ports. The survivors were moved by rail to nearby hospitals which had been commandeered for this purpose.

Many of the bodies of German soldiers killed at Shingle Street were washed up on the shoreline from Shingle Street south as far as Felixstowe. Bodies continued to be washed up for many months, even years afterwards. Local inhabitants who came across bodies were sworn to secrecy not to reveal what they had seen.

Winston Churchill insisted that an invasion attempt had never taken place because at the time, the cabinet was in revolt over a peace agreement proposed by the German High Command and led by Lord Halifax the then Foreign Minister. This treaty was intended to neutralise our continued participation in the war, as a similar treaty had done in Russia. The German high command hoped that this tactic would allow them to continue to march unchallenged across Europe, by which time a German invasion of mainland Britain would have been inevitable.

The landing attempt which Winston Churchill had consistently denied was also dismissed by Adolf Hitler- and with good reason. Hitler's troops had felt invincible early on in the war- his army was victorious and any mention of the failed attempt to land on the coast of Britain would have demoralised an army poised to invade Russia. The German archives have not revealed any mention of these events, the conclusion being that they were never recorded.
Speculation and controversy still exist as to the events stated, but I am positive that in time they will be proven. 

Our freedom from domination really was hanging by a thread.

 

Ronald Ashford