Jack Wing

Commended AFS Fireman

By Jeremy Wing

On 18 September 1940, John Lewis in Oxford Street was hit by incendiary bombs, flammenbomben, causing devastating fires, which eventually all but destroyed the entire building. Auxiliary Fireman Jack Wing (my father), was on duty that day and he and his colleagues were amongst the first fire-fighters to reach the scene. I remember my dad describing “immense walls of flame that reached far into the sky and strangely very hot winds, so strong that if I wasn’t clinging onto a part of the building they would almost certainly have blown me off my feet”. That day, three of his colleagues tragically were killed from the effects of blast from falling high explosive bombs. My dad himself suffered from the effects of that blast but was determined to continue his fire fighting.

In recognition of this he was commended and received a letter from the Ministry of Home Security, Whitehall and a hand-signed letter from Winston Churchill PM, First Lord of the Treasury, on 27 and 28 March 1941. Jack continued fire-fighting to the end of the war, having survived collapsing buildings and immense fires in the Docklands. Although very reluctant to talk about his experience during the war, he did once describe being in the Docklands attending a blaze and hearing a loud and extremely strange noise. He had the presence of mind to haul himself onto a first floor window ledge in time to see an army of rats as wide as the road being pursued by a river of burning molten sugar! A sugar and molasses warehouse had been hit by the Luftwaffe’s flammenbomben.

For details of the raid on John Lewis's, Oxford Street on 18 September 1940, see Bomb Incidents page