Timeline 102762 Main 17 Armadas: The War in the South Atlantic – Part 1 by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-26T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

Camino de Xavier Lombardi, Puerto Argentino, Isla Soledad

Elena Bonham-Garcia and her daughter, Lucia, had been clearing away the dishes in the kitchen when the distant air raid sirens began to crank up. Within seconds more sirens came to life; and soon an unearthly, ululating banshee wail was washing across the dark waters of the harbour, reverberating back off the low craggy hills of Cresta Inalámbrica – in former days, ‘Wireless Ridge’ - and the mountains to the west.

Mother and daughter snatched up their coats, pushed their feet into their trusty Wellington boots, and hurried out onto Camino de Xavier Lombardi where other women and children and several men in uniform were already walking, with studiously unhurried urgency towards the nearest bomb shelter.

Having watched the shelters being hastily constructed in the last few weeks, Elena had dreaded the first time she and Lucia had to use one of the bunkers de emergencia numero dos – Emergency Bunker (Type Two) – in earnest. The air raid shelters had been bulldozed into the peat and rock, each one an eyesore in between the neat, tidy rows of alternatively red and green-roofed houses all over Puerto Argentino. Inside, they had been sealed against groundwater seepage by thin roughly concreted walls, and over-topped by curved corrugated iron sheets supported by wooden props, and then covered with several feet of earth. Inside there was barely six feet of headroom, hard wooden benches to sit on and just a single hurricane lamp. The Type Two bunker could theoretically accommodate about twenty people in cold, miserable gloom and after about an hour condensation began to drip from the already rusting ceiling. About half the shelters leaked, mostly brown-black water from the surrounding peaty soil, waterlogged at present because of recent heavy rainfall, needing to be regularly pumped out.

Elena, Lucia and the others found themselves queuing at the entrance and then shuffling through three or four inches of frigid water as they entered the dark, claustrophobic bunker nearest the residence. There were complaints around them.

Elena took charge.

“Everybody must find a place to sit. We must make sure that the children can get their feet out of the water as soon as possible.” Nearby the sirens still wailed.

‘The shelters are the best we can do for the moment,’ Hugo had apologised to her.

There was a shortage of building materials – a thing that could have been easily resolved by knocking down several uncompleted commercial premises in the town, and requisitioning the construction equipment shut down and mothballed in the first week of September but the Governor had been unwilling to risk ‘offending investors’ - so the MLFG had had to make good the civilian administration’s neglect of its civil defence responsibilities.

‘I know they are squalid and no protection for a direct hit,’ Hugo had gone on, ‘but people inside them during an air raid or an artillery bombardment will be twenty times as safe as they would be in their houses or practically anywhere above ground.’

Apparently, during the Second

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.