TRANSCRIPT

I'm Kathleen Gruen. When I joined the navy I was Kathleen Baker, and I joined in 1942 at HMCS GRIFFON. Commander Just, that was our boss, he asked if I'd like to go overseas. And of course I said "sure I would". We came by train, down across the Scotch border, and as we were going down through England we could hear these bombs being dropped and guns shooting at them. And so they warned us, because some of the girls smoked, to make sure there was not one little flicker of light from anywhere. You couldn't even light a match or anything because they could see that from the air. So, we got down to Liverpool and that's when this huge air raid was taking place. We had to sit in our train there and just keep everything quiet, not have any windows open or anything, but we'd peek out and see what was going on. I got blood blisters on my ear-drums from the bombs. When the blood blisters would break, it was like a bomb in my head, it was awful. And then be Buzz Bombs started coming over. They were huge, like a big air plane flying. And you'd hear them coming, or the sirens would go off to warn you that they were coming. Being as I was the Petty Officer in charge I had to make sure all the ratings were out and everyone was down in the shelter. You could see them, they were like a huge air plane without wings. And they would come over, and you would hear them "zzzz" and away they would go, they call them Buzz Bombs. They would go, and they would keep on going and then they would explode somewhere. Then they made them so that they came and then they would go so far and they would turn and come back. They got people by surprise and they were killed because they did not know it was coming back. That went on for a long time and then finally they discontinued them. It was very scary. Everyone had to go down in the shelters. And this one day we got bombed, it was not our building but it was a building really close to us. All these people were sitting in a bus, and they were all dead, because when the bomb exploded the air was all sucked right out of them. It killed them. They weren't hurt, they weren't hit or anything, but they died from it. It landed right near our building, and it brought it home to you.