AS THE Queen commemorates brave war heroes from Bomber Command, one Swanscombe pensioner has spoken publicly for the very first time about a deadly Second World War air raid.

Doreen Stapley, 83, told News Shopper about her terrible ordeal, describing how her father died before her family’s very eyes after a piece of shrapnel shot straight through his heart.

On February 5, 1944, Waterdales in Northfleet was rife with German shells and bombs.

Mrs Stapley, who was 14 at the time, had been at a friend’s wedding in Swanscombe when sirens warned of an impending air raid.

She immediately left the bridal party and arrived home to see an ambulance outside her house in Waterdales, Northfleet.

The great-grandmother-of-two said: “It was so sudden. It was terrible.

“My father, Harry Manning, had gone out for a drink at a nearby pub, The Fleet.

“It was a really bad raid.

“Usually he finished his drink but this time he ran straight home down the street.”

When he arrived at the family’s home, he knocked on the front door and Mrs Stapley’s mother answered.

But before he got inside, a piece of shrapnel hit him, piercing his heart.

Mrs Stapley, who worked at the Co-op in The Hill, Dartford, as a teenager, said: “He staggered inside and died almost immediately in his armchair.

“There must have been quite a lot of blood because afterwards, my two-year-old brother Harry would rub his chest and say ‘Daddy blood’.”

Mr Manning was 40 years old when he died.

He worked at Kent Kraft, a mill which makes paper in Northfleet.

Mrs Stapley’s younger sister, 74-year-old Jean,who was five at the time, was in the house when her father died.

She said: “He walked into the front room.

“We were still all sat round the table as we hadn’t had time to get to the air raid shelter.

“My mum said ‘Are you alright?’ and he said he was fine.

“He sat down in his armchair but died suddenly.

“I’m not even sure he knew he’d been hit.”

A few days later, disaster struck Waterdales again.

Mrs Stapley said: “A German aeroplane flew really low through Waterdales and started machine gunning everyone in the street.

“My sister-in-law’s brother was hit in the hip and another boy was sat on the pavement with his head in his hands, dead.”


GRAVESEND historian Christoph Bull said: “The Luftwaffe could have been trying to bomb the factories in Northfleet.

“There was a cement factory, paper and engineering.

“If the planes had been bombing in London, they could have had leftover bombs and would drop them in nearby towns such as Northfleet.”


LAST month, the Queen unveiled a £6m plaque to the 55,573 airmen of Bomber Command who died during the Second World War.

A Lancaster bomber dropped thousands of poppies in a flypast.

Criticism of large-scale area bombing by the RAF near the end of the Second World War had stalled plans for a memorial for years.