Friday 7th August 1942 was to be a day like none other in the long history of Bodmin. Just after lunchtime two Focke-Wulf 190s flew low and fast over the town releasing their deadly 500kg bombs in one of the Luftwaffe’s notorious tip & run raids. The first bomb hit the Primrose Dairy in Mill Street while the second struck the gasworks in Berrycombe Road creating a scenario that could have caused death and mayhem on a catastrophic scale. That only nine people lost their lives is due to a remarkable set of ‘co-incidences’ which prevented the day the war came to Bodmin from being much worse.

Historian Phil Hadley using wartime records, both local and national, wartime photographs and countless eyewitness testimonies gathered over many years of researching the incident, has pieced together the events of the day and set them in the context of the tip & run raids being carried out on Cornwall at that time. He tells the tragic story of the Sargent family killed during a family celebration and details the death of teenage message boy Jimmy Tippett. He narrates the rescue of those buried alive beneath tons of rubble and the accounts of those who were machine-gunned. He argues that this was no opportunistic raid but part of a carefully planned and targeted campaign of terror against the British public in response to the RAF’s bombing of Germany.

This short eBook provides a compelling account that will be of interest to the local resident, to the families and descendants of those involved, to those wanting to know a little more of the place where they reside as well as to the reader who has an interest in wartime or Cornish history.