ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the sense-memories of people who lived through the Second World War in Britain as children, focusing on sound-memories of air warfare. Of all the dimensions of the Second World War the war in the air had the widest-ranging direct impact on the population, but for most children it was experienced from the relative safety of an air raid shelter or refuge as a soundscape of sirens, aircraft, bombs and missiles. By exploring memory narratives of wartime childhood collected more than half a century after the conflict ended, the chapter aims to characterize the soundscape of air warfare both as it was experienced and as it was and is remembered. The definitive component of the soundscape of air warfare is undoubtedly explosions, whether of falling bombs or rising anti-aircraft artillery. The Germans then began a further blitzkrieg with thousands of unmanned flying-bombs – the Doodlebugs or V1s, followed later by the devastating V2 rockets.
