Eastbourne in World War Two

The “safe town” that wasn’t

In January 1939, with war looming, Eastbourne was officially declared a “safety zone” and told to prepare for thousands of evacuees. The town’s own MP, Charles Taylor, was reported to have reassured residents that the Germans would surely never bother carrying bombs all the way to Eastbourne. When war was declared that September, a blackout came down and some 17,000 children and hospital patients arrived from London, believing they had been sent somewhere out of harm’s way.

On the front line

The fall of France in 1940 changed everything. Suddenly the Sussex coast was not a refuge but the most likely landing ground for a German invasion. Hitler’s invasion plan, Operation Sea Lion, earmarked the beaches either side of the town — Pevensey Bay to the east and Cuckmere Haven to the west — for landings, with Eastbourne, the large town in the middle, marked to be “softened up” first. The logic of evacuation was reversed. In the summer of 1940, around 3,000 local children were sent away in their turn, to Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, and the town’s population collapsed from a peacetime figure of tens of thousands to well under 20,000, leaving Eastbourne a half-empty garrison town.

The first bombs

The war first came close on 20 March 1940, when the merchant ship SS Barnhill was bombed and set ablaze in the Channel off Beachy Head, its burning hull visible from the shore. The first air raid on the town itself came on 7 July 1940, when a German bomber dropped its load across Whitley Road, killing two people and wrecking several houses. Through that summer, as the Battle of Britain raged in the skies overhead, German aircraft being chased by RAF fighters would often simply jettison their bombs over Eastbourne as they fled back across the Channel.

Hit-and-run: terror from the air

What made Eastbourne’s war so punishing was its exposed position. German pilots could cross the Channel from their bases in occupied France, strike in seconds and be gone before the RAF could respond — and for much of the war there was no air-raid warning local to the town at all, the nearest siren being over 40 miles away in Dover. Lone raiders bombed almost at will, and on occasion flew so low they machine-gunned the streets. Locally, the only early warning was the sounding of gongs at police lodges, until the so-called “Cuckoo” siren was finally installed in 1942.

The worst period came between May 1942 and June 1943, when fast Focke-Wulf fighter-bombers carried out a relentless campaign of hit-and-run raids on the town.

The town’s darkest days

Two raids in particular scarred the town’s memory. On 18 December 1942, bombs struck Terminus Road and hit Marks & Spencer, which was full of Christmas shoppers; eighteen people were killed. Then, on 3 April 1943 — the worst single day of the war for Eastbourne — fighter-bombers struck the town centre and an air-raid shelter in Spencer Road took a direct hit, killing more than thirty people who had gone there for safety. Streets of Victorian and Edwardian buildings were reduced to rubble, and barely a corner of the town was left untouched.

A garrison town and the road to D-Day

Through it all, Eastbourne played its part in the war effort. More than a thousand local men had volunteered for the Home Guard within days of its formation, and the emptied town became home to thousands of troops. Among the most remarkable were the men of No. 3 (Jewish) Troop of No. 10 Commando — German-speaking Austrian and German Jewish refugees who trained in Eastbourne before going on to dangerous front-line work. The beaches were mined and the seafront fortified against invasion, and as the tide of war turned, the town and the surrounding county became one vast staging area for the build-up to D-Day. The danger never fully lifted: as late as 4 July 1944, a V1 flying bomb was brought down behind Astaire Avenue, flattening houses.

Counting the cost

By the time VE Day arrived on 8 May 1945, Eastbourne had endured 112 bombing raids. Official figures record that 174 civilians were killed and more than 900 injured, with around 475 homes completely destroyed and thousands more damaged — a toll that earned the town its grim official title as the most raided in the South East. The years after the war brought a huge programme of rebuilding, and much of the modern town centre rose from bombed ground. Today, quiet memorials and the occasional gap in a Victorian terrace are reminders of what the town went through. For the wider story of how Eastbourne came to be, see our complete history of Eastbourne; and above the town, on the cliffs at Beachy Head, a memorial honours the airmen of RAF Bomber Command.

Eastbourne in WW2: FAQs