Skegness Magazine

Coastal Town Bombed – but Casualties were Amazingly Few

Fourteen Bombs – Two Deaths

Daylight Attack

A coastal town in the east of England was bombed by a lone enemy raider in the late afternoon of a day during the weekend just past.

Some thirteen or fourteen small HE bombs were dropped on what is in every respect an open town, and two men were killed – a cafe proprietor named Mr Charles Herchberg, and a sailor who was on a visit.

The casualty list was small in view of the fact that a cinema, shops and cafes were amongst the buildings hit. One bomb penetrated a corner of the roof over the balcony. A few members of the audience suffered minor injuries and shock, but fortunately no-one was killed.

A member of the local authority was working in his upper floor office with a junior named Jack Brown when a bomb burst through the roof. The boy was slightly injured, but his chief was heavily struck by falling debris and shrapnel, and the nature of the injury to his ribs and other parts of the body necessitated his being detained in Hospital.

Fatal Glass Injury
Glass splinters caused the death of the cafe proprietor he being actually forty of fifty yards from the small calibre bomb which brought about his death.

The young sailor who was killed was having refreshment in a cafe which received the first of the bombs, he also being struck by a falling beam.

The enemy raider had been observed over the area some time before the attack, which was obviously deliberate. It was daylight at the time, and there was plenty of low cloud. Some business premises with glass roofs were lighted up, and it is the theory of some people that the lights were the magnet which induced the enemy to release his load of death-dealing missiles.

Came in From Land
The enemy aircraft was seen to make his attack from the land. The last few bombs dropped on the foreshore and he sped off seawards for his own country after fulfilling his mission.

18th January 1941

As explained on previous occasions, the local newspaper was in the habit of reporting Skegness as something like ‘an east coast resort’, so’s not to give too much information away to the enemy. The cinema described in the news article had to be the Tower Cinema’ – the only one with a balcony!

Mr Charles Herchberg is Commemorated in perpetuity by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Unfortunately, we found three different spellings of Mr Herchberg’s surname – ‘Hershbergh’ in the local newspaper, ‘Herchberg’ on the War Memorial at St Matthew’s Church, Skegness, and ‘Hershberg’ on the Commonwealth War Graves website. The entry of his marriage to Jennie Freedman in 1921, transcribed on the FreeBMD website concurs with the version on the cenotaph, which we would deem as the correct spelling.

This page forms part of our project…

Civilian War Dead Skegness