Occasional Magazine N.S. Vol.1 No.1 (January 1980)
Some Recollections of Milford in War time by Dr. Croft Watts. The author came to Milford early in 1940 and recalls local incidents from the Second World War. He was an air raid warden and supervised fire watching originally but then Lymington Borough Council appointed him Medical Officer of Health and Head of the Casualty Service. In Milford beach huts were dismantled and removed, replaced by pill boxes, gun emplacements and tank traps and with sea defences carried out into the sea. Troops of all sorts arrived and guns and tanks were hidden under the trees in Kivernell, De La Warr, Victoria, Cornwallis and Whitby Roads. Large stores of petrol were hidden in the gorse on the cliff and an air raid shelter was sited at the village green. The drone of enemy planes over Milford became familiar from their using the Needles as their landmark. The first bombing of New Milton was observed as pillars of smoke in that direction: Milford Hospital received some of the injured. In other incidents an aerial battle finished with little figures descending by parachute and a low-flying plane was followed by machine-gunning from the Keyhaven direction. A German plane crashed at Blackbush, a bomb made a crater in Lymore Lane and two sea mines were dropped in the village. In time, bombing got less and the troops began sealing the tanks in Victoria Road. One day the sea filled with more ships of different types than the author had ever seen, but the whole vast fleet then disappeared overnight. D-Day had arrived.
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