West Wales at War: Forgotten Defences and Wartime Stories

‘Outside the kitchens and music the laughing, the loving, the midnight talking, the resting, the sleeping in all the blind houses outside the searchlighted night is at war with another darkness and men who were late at harvest stand cold and calm and armed on hilltops under the punishing rush of planes.’

e tend to think of Dylan Thomas as the archetypal poet, inward-looking and ensconced in his writer’s garret – concerned only with his muse, or perhaps nagged by the feeling that before long, the latch on the pub door would be released, the beer and conversation flowing in due course. Yet the words above (similar in tone, perhaps, to a passage from Thomas’s ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood) were written for a Ministry of Information film, produced at the height of the Second World War, and entitled, Our Country. Proof indeed that British war propaganda was of Nestled in the heart of West Wales, just a stone’s throw from Carmarthen, AB Campers and Vehicle Conversions is your go-to destination for transforming ordinary vehicles into extraordinary travel companions. Whether you’re a weekend wanderer or a full-time road warrior, our bespoke camper conversions are designed to fuel your adventures.

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Wales under wartime threat

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superior quality: nothing of the iron fist of state control to be found elsewhere in Europe, but instead, a sense of the ordinary people, enduring rationing and the black-out; standing in their gardens or on a hillside, watchful and thoughtful as aeroplanes rumbled in the sky, navigating their way through the night-clouds to war. The Second World War did, of course, come to Wales: Cardiff and the docklands of South Wales went through the flames of the Blitz, and like Londoners, the people there coped as best they could, both during the bombing and in the forlorn aftermath. (After the bombing of Swansea, Thomas lamented: “Our Swansea is dead.”) Yet the island of Great Britain was never invaded by a modern military power, despite Germany formulating its Operation Sea-Lion, for the invasion of England – a storming of the Southern beaches, followed by Panzer tanks in the Home Counties, and then, ‘lightning war’ that would have propelled the At Bronwydd in Carmarthenshire, a sign depicting the history of the village offers an artist’s impression of the Home Guard on patrol during war-time.

German armies to the River Severn, to the beacons and beyond. Today, as we walk, cycle or drive through West and mid-Wales, we scarcely give a thought to the history of 1939-45 – and our eye might only briefly be caught by the almost-hidden concrete structure, obscured by weeds and ivy, over there in the field, just beyond the road… The traveller might even come to a halt, close to some beauty At Henllan, on a rock-face just above a stone cottage, stands another of the lost sentinels of civil defence.

spot or other, and find – and how convenient – a large stone (or is it concrete?) embedded in the ground by the picnic area – just the thing to boil up the kettle on. The chances are that our visitor, without knowing it, is seeing and sitting by remnants of the defensive structures that were built across Wales in the early years of the war, when the threat of invasion was on everyone’s mind. Now just ruins in the landscape – more modern versions, perhaps, of the Druidic stones or castle walls for which Wales is famous, or even a smaller-scale Celtic copy of France’s Maginot Line – the decaying World War Two ‘pillboxes’ and tank-traps take us to a nightmare film-scene of an almost-beaten British army in a ravaged landscape. Together with what was left of the volunteer Home Guard, the retreating regiments would have fought a rearguard action against the Wehrmacht on British soil. Pillboxes – so named because of their resemblance to what the family doctor in those days might have given you – were mass-produced and situated all over the country, from Kent to Carmarthen, yet only a fraction of the approximately 30,000 constructed now remain. Like the Home Guard itself, they had as much of a psychological importance, as practical relevance: a sense that civilians, everyday people, were protected; the very homeland itself, fortified. And although placed by railway lines, bridges, roads, to show that such places were guarded, the pillboxes contained slits and openings from which firepower would be deployed if (to quote a phrase from the war) “the balloon went up”. Here, at the door of the concrete pillboxes, the last battle of Britain, the battle of Wales, would be fought.

A wider perspective

At the quiet village of Cynwyl Elfed, not far from Carmarthen, just a stone’s throw from the busy post office, there is the small hump of a bridge that crosses a brook. A house stands by the bridge yet look closely at the building – at the peculiar slits cut into the wall, facing in the direction of the Carmarthen road. Here, in 1940, or ’41, or whenever the German invasion might have come, snipers would be positioned; firing on the A484, holding up as best they could, the slow, grinding but inevitable advance of the enemy. A line of such places was drawn across the map of Wales. Just by the bridge at Henllan, by the quiet flow of the River Teifi, on a rock-face just above a stone cottage – stark and of the machine-age – stands another of the lost sentinels of civil defence; Henllan’s pillbox, giving the defenders a clean sweep of the valley.

And if you explore a little further, just behind the ‘Welcome to Carmarthenshire’ road-sign, where the tractors, electric cars and caravanners pass by, another of the little concrete forts is revealed. Might the bridge, in some alternative reality, have been the scene of a great battle? Near Bronwydd Arms, by the In West Wales, pillboxes guarded railway lines, bridges and roads in case ‘the balloon went up”.

cricket pitch and community centre, a sign in the car park outlines for visitors the history of the village. Woven into this modern version of a Bayeux Tapestry is a striking image, an artist’s impression of the local Home Guard on patrol by the main road. In our busy lives, it might be worth us pausing for a time at such spots, recalling the men and women who stood ‘armed and ready’ in those far-off days, waiting for the invasion-call that – thankfully – never came. As Dylan Thomas put it: ‘Morning is breaking over Wales at war. Not the long and far-away wild war of the mountain Welshman and the English kings, but the terrible near war of England and Wales and her brothers and sisters all over the earth…’