EVEN for a child with a vivid imagination the sight must have been unfathomable - a mesmerising, mechanical cloud approaching London's East End. Naive instincts informed eight-year-old David Caswell that the aircraft in this droning swarm were British. A child's reasoning suggested that the less-capable Nazi aggressor could never put on such a brazen show of force. As he squinted into the autumn blue he could see traces of smaller aeroplanes - potentially fighters - darting in and out of the main formation as the aerial armada dulled the light in an awe-inspiring, man-made solar eclipse. "This was actually the first time we'd seen the Luftwaffe up close, massed as if the skies were its own airfield," Caswell (pictured right) says as he recalls the attack of that 1940 September day. "And then they started dropping bombs. "You could feel the blast waves from explosions and the anti-aircraft guns were firing - the noise was terrible," he adds. "My mum and I headed to the shelter, which just about fitted in the garden of our house at Pragel Street, Plaistow.
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