Sir,

In your report (August 7 regarding St. Catherine’s Island) you mentioned the site of the anti-aircraft gun that defended Tenby during World War II. The gun was a Naval piece which was sited to be used against any invading force landing on the South Beach. It was considered that this was a possible landing site for glider borne assault troops. I remember a couple of aircraft landing on the sands pre-war.

To deter this, the Belgian troops who had come over with the BEF from Dunkirk and were stationed in Tenby at the time were tasked setting vertical iron posts at regular intervals along the beach. We, as kids, pestered them “Avez vous des souvenirs?” receiving uniform buttons and sometimes their names and addresses. This was the period immediately after Dunkirk when seaborne and aerial invasion was expected at any time.

To defend against this, the additional defences around Tenby were three pillboxes, one below the Esplanade, one at the beginning of the Burrows and the third opposite the branch road leading to Kiln Park. There was barbed wire stretching the length of the South Beach and between this and the Golf Course was a minefield about 20 yards wide. Incidentally, there was a youth, a few years older than I, and severely handicapped, who used to augment his pocket money by crawling under the barbed wire and searching in the minefield for lost golf balls. Unfortunately, one day he was killed having set off two land mines.

There were never any anti-aircraft guns around Tenby at that time. All such defences were concentrated around the South Coast and Kent Estuary. It was thought that the German aircraft, Heinkel III, Junkes 88 and Dornier 17, twin engine bombers, could not reach this area from Germany. No-one had envisaged the catastrophic collapse of France in the summer of 1940. There was a battery of 3.7 inch anti-aircraft guns at what we called Skrinkle, now SAA Manorbier, which regularly fired at towed targets or wireless controlled Queen Bee aeroplanes as part of their training.

Alun Morgan,

Nyth Aderyn,

North Cliff,

Tenby.