Professor David Steigerwald
Last fall when the OSU marching band performed for the NFL in London, a good friend of the WWII Program, Steve Habash, had dinner with an alumni and his wife who live there. Steve has a knack for making good things happen for us, and he is not one to miss a chance. In this case, the Buckeyes he met were Tim and Jenny Ringo. Tim is a 1994 graduate of the Fisher School, who has made a career in Human Resources and Human Capital Management for such companies as Anderson Consulting, Accenture, and IBM. Jenny, a native of greater London, also worked for Anderson, and the two met while on a joint project in Prague. Jenny’s father, Michael Handscomb, was a teenager during WWII. And this was the chance that Steve sensed: Would Mr. Handscomb have any interest in meeting with the Buckeye WWII students and regale them with stories about growing up in the midst of war?
Regale us he did. With all the style and vigor of a practiced lecturer, Michael told us of buzz bombs and doodlebugs, black-out nights and strict rationing. His family lived just east of London in a small community, Bexleyheath, that metropolitan London long ago collected into its expansive maw. He was the eldest of two boys, his father a scientific tool-maker and his mother a university graduate and a school teacher who continued to work even after marriage—both then rarities for women.
When the war began, Michael’s father thought it was best to decamp—literally—to a relative’s property on the coast near Portsmouth. It seemed well out of the way of potential violence. There, Michael and his brother, Colin, lived like Boy Scouts, tramping around the property, playing war, building forts out of the remnants of an old brickyard, and learning how to catch and skin rabbits, a skill that unexpectedly came in handy once rationing clamped down.
This was 1939, the year of the “phony war,” when Britain was technically at war with Germany but the Nazis had not yet made their drive west. Like a great many people across Western Europe, Michael’s parents were lulled into complacency and decided to take the family back home.
So, in the first few days of September 1940, the Handscombs returned to Bexleyheath.
And the Blitz began.
Having secured air bases in France and the Netherlands, the Germans began their systematic air attacks and took aim at London. Nighttime bombings intensified during the second and third weeks of September, before the Royal Air Force prevailed. In the meantime, large sections of the London metro area were pummeled, thousands died, and much of the population found some small measure of safety in the city’s bomb shelters, often improvised in subway tunnels.
While no place was safe—Buckingham Palace itself was hit twice—the East End suffered most. The main targets were the factory and wharf neighborhoods along the Thames. East of the city, Bexleyheath lay directly on the flight path both in and out of London. If a German pilot hadn’t released his load going in, he had to drop it going back out. Bexleyheath was as good as anyplace to leave it.
So 11-year-old Michael got his first taste of war. His father served as a community air-raid warden. Every night after dark, he walked the neighborhood to make sure the blackout rules were being honored. The family spent night after night in their Anderson shelter, a prefab metal unit installed in family gardens. As Michael explained it, these acts of civic activism and family pluck gained inspiration from Winston Churchill’s crucial leadership.
An Anderson Shelter: Easily installed at home, the shelters were supposed to be covered with 18 inches of dirt for extra protection. They could never defend against a direct hit. But they did provide protection against shrapnel, flying debris, and other deadly residue of bombings. Above all, they provided confidence, a sense of control, and an antidote against despair. And they reinforced the nuclear family, since a household with an Anderson didn’t need to mingle in the depths of Tube stations with so many other people.
Though the bombings diminished, one could never take safety for granted. The black-outs remained. Rationing grew to extremes. To students accustomed to summoning up pizzas from their phones, hearing that basics like cheese and butter were limited to a few ounces a week was pretty shocking. Michael explained that though meat was rationed, a friendly butcher might be expected to slide a bit extra round the corner with regularity. And if he caught a rabbit, well, it fell into skilled hands.
Michael’s most dramatic stories weren’t of the Blitz so much as of the VI and V2 attacks of 1944. Even more than during the Blitz, Bexleyheath was in the line of fire. These terrifying weapons were notoriously inaccurate—indeed their most unnerving quality was that no one could be sure where they would land, least of all the Germans. The V1 was aimed at London, more or less, but it fell wherever it ran out of fuel, and the Handscombs’ neighborhood too often was just that place. You could always hear them coming, Michael explained as he imitated the peculiar buzzing noise of the incoming “doodlebug.”
Whenever the siren sounded, Michael’s father snapped to duty. If need be and the worst happened, Michael was pressed into service to clear damage and even extract victims. “It was the first time I’d ever seen a dead body,” he told the students.
Mr. Michael Handscomb and the 2016 World War II students, London.
Yet life went on, its routines woven oddly, yet necessarily, around the presence of disaster. Once, he and his brother were playing in the countryside when a rocket barreled to earth so close that the explosion knocked Colin out of the tree he was climbing. What was the boys’ first reaction? They ran to see what the crater looked like and to help themselves to any souvenirs. Their second reaction: Don’t tell mother.
As he catalogued the anguish and resolution of the British people, Michael ended with a most thoughtful postscript. Shortly after the war, he won a contest with a junior United Nations group and was invited to travel to Prague by no less a figure than Jan Masaryk, the famous Czech patriot. This was 1947, and Europe had hardly begun to recover from the war’s massive destruction. Stopping briefly in Cologne and Nuremburg, he saw the complete devastation that Allied bombing had brought to Germany. Though what he saw hardly lessened his pride in England’s wartime efforts, he took it as a sobering lesson that no one really wins wars and that, in the event, misery is humanity’s common possession.
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Not only was Michael’s visit with us a terrific lesson in personal history. It reminded me of how important our Ohio State connections are and what a broad reach this institution has. We can count friends worldwide, friends who can bring a wealth of experience and a breadth of perspective to our students. And in turn, we expect this group of Ohio State students to take inspiration from the contacts we present to them and to imagine living to the model of the global citizen.