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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
At the outbreak of war in 1939, ordinary people were quickly forced to adapt to the realities of a nation under dire threat. But it soon became known as the Phoney War, a time when official incompetence reigned supreme. Theatres and cinemas were closed and football matches cancelled, only for the government to realise belatedly that morale was plunging as a result. Thousands of women and children were evacuated to the countryside, only for many to flood back to the cities, preferring the dangers to separation from their families. Censorship of news was heavy-handed and bred widespread resentment. In fact, the period from September 1939 to May 1940 was a time of intense political and military activity - the blitzkrieg on Poland, the start of the U-boat menace, the disastrous Norwegian campaign, the political manoeuvrings that brought Churchill to power. Barry Turner skilfully weaves these events into a compelling home front narrative which evokes the fears and dangers but also the humour and the absurdities of everyday life in the dark days of 1939-1940.
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WAITINGFOR WAR
BRITAIN 1939–1940
BARRY TURNER
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Plate section
A butcher painting a meat registration notice on the window of his shop.
Soldiers helping with the harvest where farmhands have been called up.
David Low, the Evening Standard’s political cartoonist.
A British wartime poster appearing in the streets of London.
Neville Chamberlain inspects a field gun in northern France.
The sandbagged structure used to protect the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus.
Signposts removed from their positions in Kent, to confound the enemy.
ARP workers digging trenches for air-raid shelters in St James’s Park, London.
An Austin Therm balloon car with a bag full of coal gas.
A farmer has his herd of cows painted with white stripes during the blackout.
A poster recruiting women into the war effort.
A female member of the Auxiliary Fire Service.
A poster providing guidance on good practice during an air raid.
A heap of scrap iron collected from householders to help in the salvage scheme.
A propaganda poster encouraging mothers to leave their children in the countryside.
Villagers saying goodbye to the evacuee children they adopted for the war.
INTRODUCTION
The stand-off between Britain and Germany from September 1939 to May 1940 has entered the history books as the ‘Phoney War’. But this is not to say that it was without drama. The story of this critical period in the nation’s history is of political infighting, missed opportunities and of military and civil incompetence on a monumental scale. Defeatism was deeply ingrained in a people dreading, above all, a return to the carnage of the Great War.
Revisionist interpretations of events have attempted to excuse Neville Chamberlain and his foreign secretary Lord Halifax for doing no more than bowing to the dictate of public opinion. The voters wanted peace and the government tried its best to give it to them. But this is to ignore the prime function of a political leader which is to lead.
Portrayed as a victim of circumstances or as a misguided idealist, Chamberlain can be forgiven many things but not for his failure to recognise Hitler’s ruthless villainy. While Chamberlain fondly imagined that he was shaping events, in fact he allowed the events, with Hitler as their driving force, to shape him.
The hindsight justification for the Phoney War, that it gave Britain time to build up its strength for the struggle ahead, is hard if not impossible to sustain. Britain was in better military shape by May 1940 but so too was Germany. The big difference was that while Britain put its energy into building up its defence, Germany focused on attack. In September 1938 the RAF had five squadrons of Hurricanes and one of Spitfires. A year later it had 26 squadrons equipped with one or the other. But these were light monoplane fighter aircraft built for defence. The strength of Bomber Command actually fell in the same period. The RAF had barely a single aircraft that could reach Germany with even a modest bomb load.
Moreover, by holding back when Germany was occupied with crushing Czechoslovakia and Poland, the Anglo-French Allies sacrificed the support of Eastern Europe with its highly committed fighting forces at a time when Germany had only thirteen divisions on the western front. No amount of rearmament could make up for the lost opportunity of stopping Hitler when he was at his most vulnerable.
With Britain adrift with a government that had neither the will nor the appetite for conducting a war, policy was dictated by the false hope that economic pressure would bring Germany to its senses or, failing that, an internal upheaval would lead to Hitler’s downfall.
A catalogue of errors that almost cost Britain the war started with the failure of military and diplomatic intelligence to penetrate the Nazi regime or to understand that Hitler and the other dictators, Mussolini and Franco, held in contempt the conventions of international diplomacy.
On the home front, an ambitious programme of civil defence was dictated by the entirely erroneous assumption that Germany had the capacity and the immediate aim to bomb London and other cities to near total destruction. Public morale suffered an unnecessary mass evacuation and an over-officious administration, along with ham-fisted efforts to mould public opinion to suit the prejudices of the political elite. Arrogance and ignorance combined to undermine morale.
Seen from this distance, the commanding features of everyday life in 1939 – the blackout, gas-masks, air-raid shelters, evacuees, rationing and the profusion of often contradictory rules and regulations – seem bizarre almost to the point of farce. But they were real enough to those who had to live the experience. So too was the action at sea and in the air where combat brought occasional triumphs to balance against the more frequent tragedies of a misguided and poorly implemented strategy. A compensating factor was the ability of the country to laugh at the absurdities of life under the shadow of the swastika.
But there can be no escaping the conclusion that the Chamberlain government took the country to the brink of defeat. As Churchill remarked to his personal bodyguard, Inspector Walter Thompson: ‘I hope it is not too late. I am very much afraid it is.’
It was a close-run thing.
CHAPTER 1
We Are At War
The ultimatum to Germany was delivered on the morning of September 3rd, 1939. Shortly before 9.00am, in the role of reluctant messenger, Sir Nevile Henderson, British ambassador in Berlin, arrived at the German Foreign Office. He was expecting to meet Hitler’s foreign minister but Joachim von Ribbentrop was disinclined to receive him. Instead, he sent Paul Schmidt, interpreter for the Nazi top brass in their dealings with foreign dignitaries, as his understudy.
Schmidt almost did not make it. After several days of round-the-clock duties and September 3rd being a Sunday, he overslept.
I had to take a taxi to the Foreign Office. I could just see Henderson entering the building as I drove across Wilhelmsplatz. I used a side entrance and stood in Ribbentrop’s office ready to receive Henderson punctually at 9 a.m. Henderson was announced as the hour struck. He came in looking very serious, shook hands but declined my invitation to be seated, remaining standing solemnly in the middle of the room.1
An arch-appeaser who saw his world dissolving, Henderson found it hard to get out his words. But he felt bound to read aloud the document in his hand. It was short and to the point.
‘More than twenty-four hours have elapsed since an immediate reply was requested to the warning of 1 September [that Britain would take action when German forces were withdrawn from Polish territory], and since then the attacks on Poland have intensified. If His Majesty’s Government has not received satisfactory assurances of the cessation of all aggressive action against Poland and the withdrawal of German troops from that country by eleven o’clock British Summer Time, from that time a state of war will exist between Great Britain and Germany.’
The deadline was set for just two hours ahead. Schmidt made his way to the Reich Chancellery.
Hitler was seated at his desk, Ribbentrop to his right near the window … I stopped at some distance from the desk and then slowly translated the British ultimatum. When I finished there was complete silence.
Hitler sat immobile, gazing before him … He sat completely still and unmoving.
After an interval that seemed an age, he turned to Ribbentrop, who had remained standing by the window. ‘What now?’ he asked. …
Ribbentrop answered: ‘I assume that the French will hand in a similar ultimatum within the hour.’2
As Schmidt was leaving, Hermann Goering, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and economics supremo, was heard to mutter, ‘If we lose this war, then God have mercy on us’.
In London, with no expectation of Hitler backing down, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was standing by in 10 Downing Street, preparing himself for a nationwide broadcast. BBC engineers were putting the finishing touches to a makeshift studio when Big Ben struck eleven o’clock.
Chamberlain was set to follow the morning service broadcast from Croydon parish church, where the congregation sang ‘Oh, For a Faith Which Will Not Shrink’ and ‘God is Working His Purpose Out’. Later in the day, with exquisite sensitivity, the BBC followed up with a talk by Dom Bernard Clements, vicar of All Saints, Margaret Street, on the theme of ‘What happens when I die’.
At 11.10, with no news from Berlin, the prime minister gave orders for the armed forces to be put on a war footing. With telephone confirmation from the British embassy in Berlin that the ultimatum had indeed failed to elicit a response, Chamberlain took his place before the microphone.
Meanwhile, on the steps of the Royal Exchange there gathered a group of incongruously dressed officials, two in cocked hats, short gold-fringed capes and long coats with brass buttons down to the floor, one in a morning suit with a tall top hat with a gold band around it, and two City policemen wearing tin helmets and carrying gas-masks slung on khaki-web shoulder straps; a crowd of City maintenance workers watched a gowned official in a short barrister’s wig read the official proclamation of war.3
At 11.15 Chamberlain spoke. His thin, metallic voice was not suited to a rallying call. In contrast to Hitler’s lengthy tub-thumping epistles, he gave himself just a few minutes to summarise a catalogue of failure. Every effort had been made to achieve a ‘peaceful and honourable settlement between Germany and Poland, but Hitler would not have it. He had evidently made up his mind to attack Poland whatever happened.’ Chamberlain made no effort to hide his remorse.
‘You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that my long struggle to win peace has failed … Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more, or anything different I could have done that would have been more successful.’
In those few words, Chamberlain revealed his inadequacy in a time of crisis. Unable to accept, or even understand, any judgement but his own, he was a victim of myopia and arrogance. But there it was. There could be no going back. For the second time in little more than a quarter of a century, Britain was at war with Germany.
Chamberlain ended his broadcast to the nation on what, for him, was a high note.
‘It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that right will prevail.’
After a short pause, a BBC announcer took over the microphone: ‘And now, an announcement about food.’
This was followed by a long silence broken only by the shuffling of paper and a low whisper. Then the national anthem was played. Mid-way came the wail of air-raid sirens. Chamberlain was standing back from the microphone chatting with staff and colleagues. They fell silent. So this was it. The anticipated Luftwaffe onslaught was about to begin. As the prime minister and his entourage made their way to the cellar, the national anthem was still playing on the radio. Anticipating hours of nervous waiting, Mrs Chamberlain took along a selection of books.
In the event, it was a false alarm triggered by who knows what? A French aircraft carrying the French assistant military attaché back to Paris was one possibility; another was an RAF plane on a reconnaissance trip over Heligoland in the North Sea. In some quarters, English tourists in a hurry to get back from France were blamed. Later, the Air Ministry made its excuses.
An aircraft was observed approaching the South Coast of England. As its identity could not be readily determined, an air raid warning was given. It was shortly afterwards identified as a friendly aircraft and the All Clear was given.
As war minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha blamed an over-sensitive radar station, one of twenty recently installed with a range, imperfect as it turned out, of between 50 and 120 miles.
Radar had given us a backhander and warned us of two of our own civil machines that were flying over the Channel.4
A few minutes earlier, Berlin had responded formally to the British ultimatum with a refusal ‘to receive, accept, let alone to fulfil [the demands] made upon the German government’. The tame justification for action against Poland, including the supposed ‘ill treatment’ of Germans within the Polish borders, was familiar stuff. The following evening German diplomats, consuls and other officials left, under police escort, for Berlin via Gravesend and Rotterdam. As foreign secretary, Lord Halifax pledged to find a new home for the embassy dog. All defences were on the alert for an imminent attack from German bombers.
On September 3rd [writes L.S. Bailey], I was a Warrant Officer pilot with No. 1 Meteorological Flight, stationed at Mildenhall, Suffolk. Immediately following the speech by Neville Chamberlain, I was summoned to Headquarters No. 3 Group, Bomber Command, then located on the same station. The area officer commanding handed me three top secret packages, and I was given instructions to deliver these personally, with all possible speed, by air to the R.A.F. Station Commanders at Wyton, Grantham and Linton on Ouse.
I flew a Gauntlet aircraft to carry out this mission, and thanks to the prior briefing by 3 Group, the Station Commander of each Station met the aircraft on arrival and signed for their package without my having to leave the cockpit. Within 1 hr. 10 mins. all the packages, the first operational instructions for Bomber Stations, had been delivered.
Another flight, mission unknown, ended catastrophically. Doris MacDonald lived nearby in west London.
After lunch we took the dog for a walk from here to Hendon where we had heard there had been some trouble. For the first time we carried our gas-masks. On arriving near St Mary’s Church, we found a number of houses had been extensively damaged – not by a bomb as it might have appeared – but by a falling British aircraft. I do not know if the pilot was killed; no doubt he had hoped to land on the adjacent airfield. He was probably the first casualty of the war.
The fallibility of the new defence technology was corroborated by the experience of those in the front line of plane spotting. A.P. Perry was part of a Territorial Army coastal battery.
Suddenly the Spotter yelled ‘Plane!’ and pointed to the sky over London. Three little dots were sliding out from behind a cloud.
We jumped to our posts and swung the long telescopic tube onto the target. ‘On!’ shouted No. 2 as he got them in his wide-view finder. I turned the fine-adjustment wheel of my narrow-angle range lens to catch the planes in its view. It was up to me to feed the correct height into the Predictor. If I failed to pick up the fleeting target or made a bad ‘cut’, so that the wrong height was set, all our efforts would be in vain.
Slowly the dots came into the middle of my viewer. ‘On Target!’, I shouted as I twisted the knob which would bring the upper and lower images of the leading plane together. The planes were light bombers. But the Brasshats had never provided us with any system of aircraft recognition training. We had to pick up what we could, mostly from the newspapers. So we could not be sure whether the dots were friend or foe. We waited for them to fire the Colours of the Day for recognition. Nothing happened except that the planes disappeared behind a cloud.
Half a minute later we heard ‘Boom! Boom!’ from the next gunsite on the defence perimeter and saw little puffs of white smoke around the dots, now far out of our range. We had muffed our first chance of action! But we had the last laugh. The ‘enemy’ were our own Bristol Blenheims.
WHOEVER ITWAS who ordered the alarm on September 3rd could be forgiven for being over-cautious. For years the received wisdom among military pundits was of enemy bombers delivering death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. Winston Churchill, huddled in his shelter, was not alone in imagining ‘ruin and carnage and vast explosions shaking the ground; […] buildings clattering down in dirt and rubble, […] fire-brigades and ambulances scurrying through the smoke beneath the drone of hostile aeroplanes’.
Another confident prediction soon to prove unfounded was of panic in the streets. For the most part, calm and good humour prevailed. All traffic came to a halt while police and steel-helmeted wardens acted as guides to the nearest public shelter. Their job was made easier by the Sunday closing of most shops and businesses. Even so, for those caught up in the open or at home preparing lunch, the sense of impending disaster was intense. Valerie Ranzetta, a mother of three who lived on the south coast, was called to her garden gate.
I was alarmed by the extraordinary sight of my next-door-neighbour’s husband running down the road, arms waving, umbrella flailing the air, mouth wide open, shouting something, which, as he drew nearer, proved to be, ‘I’ve got to go – now!’ He belonged to the Territorial Army, and had been ordered to report for immediate duty. That morning, his wife and children had gone to Suffolk, for their annual holiday, there to await Father. They would have to wait a long time, I remember thinking. Well, he panicked, I panicked. He needed a flask of coffee, sandwiches, night-clothes, a change of linen, and as most of his best things were in his wife’s two suitcases, this wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Somehow, between us, we managed it, and the taxi carried him off, waving from the window, face pale with tense bewilderment, like most of us at that time. Just then, my husband came hurrying down the street, astonished by the sight of Harry leaning from the cab, and shouting at the top of his lungs! When my husband reached me, all he could say was: ‘He’s in full uniform!’ and I knew what he meant. It brought the war home to us.
In Aldershot, ‘the home of the British Army’, Tom Childerhouse was expected to collect his two younger sisters from their holiday in Norfolk. He had decided on an overnight drive. ‘Leaving home soon after work at 6.30 p.m. on September 2nd, I anticipated being back by dawn in time for the next day’s work.’
Getting to Norfolk was no problem. Getting back was another matter.
We arrived in that rather deserted stretch of the A11 between Newmarket and Thetford at around midnight on the 3rd. … Suddenly a red light was seen swinging back and forth and a party of R.A.F. personnel stood firm, blocking my way. I was questioned, ‘Where had I come from, where was I going’, but most important of all, why had I been driving with full headlights? I was told pilots from the nearby aerodromes had reported my illuminated car. … I was told to drive the rest of my journey, over unfamiliar roads, without headlights. … In the end, I fixed one of those celluloid fog-light covers to one headlight and removed the bulb of the other. I completed the journey both ways in almost total darkness, arriving home at dawn as expected.
Mrs Calver, of Petts Wood, lived near a railway cutting that held morning mist. Responding to violent banging on her door, she found an old lady in hysterics saying the Germans were coming, she could see the gas along the railway line. It took some explaining to prove to her that she was threatened by nothing worse than shifting fog.
Mrs Cottrell’s husband was an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden. When the first siren went, he decided that his training must be put into full operation at once. The kitchen was to be the refuge. His elderly mother and her friend were hurried in. All blankets were taken off the beds. Some were nailed to tops of doors and windows in case of gas attacks. The oven cloth was stuffed up the boiler chimney and sticky tape stuck over cracks in the windows and back door. The sink was filled with water in case of fire. Her mother sat in the kitchen with a canary on one knee, a bottle of whisky on the other. The ‘All Clear’ sounded. The only ill-effects came the next day when the family was nearly choked by smoke when the boiler was lit. They had forgotten the cloth stuffed up the chimney.
A correspondent’s landlady, having attended ARP classes, set up a shelter in her basement. But where was the wet blanket to protect against a gas attack?
As soon as the warning went, I raced up to my room, snatched a blanket from my bed, tumbled it into the bath and waited a few anxious moments whilst it became soaking wet. Then galloping down the stairs two at a time, trailing water all the way, the landlady and I fitted it over the door, getting our clothes almost as wet as the blanket doing so. Our discomfort was quickly relieved by the All Clear. As we went up to tidy ourselves we were met by a cascade of water splashing down the stairs. I had forgotten to turn off the bath taps.
Maurice Brandon, on holiday in Brighton, was walking on the front when the first sirens sounded. A woman fainted. He laid her out on a bench, thinking as he did so, ‘I must take a course in First Aid’.
While Neville Chamberlain was on air, 23-year-old Kate Quennell, who lived with her mother in Coventry, had domestic work on hand.
I was busy nailing up black-out material over the frosted glass above the front door, and the window by the side of the door. I wondered how long it would be before I would be able to take the material down again.
For the third time, WAR had interfered with my life. My father had succumbed to the influenza epidemic following the Great War; my twin sister had died as a result of bronchitis contracted during an air raid in the Great War, when we were living at Upper Tooting in London.
I never took the black-out material down; during the blitz on Coventry on 14th November, 1940, a bomb fell in the corner of the back garden and the blast sucked out the back of the house. The front door was blown in against the foot of the staircase behind which my mother and I were sheltering.
EMERGING FROM THE Downing Street shelter, Chamberlain made his way to the House of Commons where the benches were packed with members waiting to be uplifted with a call to arms. Instead, they were treated to an effusion of self-pity.
This is a sad day for all of us, but to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.
It was left to Churchill to strike a suitably belligerent note. Agreeing with the prime minister that it was indeed a ‘solemn hour’, he went on to praise the ‘strength and energy’ of national unity in the face of tyranny.
Outside, the storms of war may blow and the lands may be lashed with the fury of its gales, but in our own hearts this Sunday morning there is peace. Our hands may be active, but our consciences are at rest.
It was no longer simply a question of fighting to save Poland.
We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war for domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.5
The contrast with the dejected Chamberlain could not have been greater. As a leader in the making, Churchill had made his pitch. Nearly eight months were to pass before he was able to take up the challenge.
For many people, the immediate problem was getting accustomed to new patterns of daily life. Frank Turner was a journalist with the Press Association. On September 3rd he was expecting to be in the PA building in Fleet Street by 4.00pm to start his shift as night editor. But the call came for him to be in earlier to sub-edit the speeches from Parliament before they were sent by teleprinter to the daily and Sunday papers and to the foreign news agencies.
Living out in south London, Turner was one of the first to come up against the complexities of travel in wartime.
Living half a mile from Penge East railway station, I went to the nearby main road hoping for a bus. The only transport in sight was a motorcyclist with a sidecar. I cadged a lift to the station and caught a train to Victoria, but as usual had to change at Herne Hill for a train to Blackfriars.
Herne Hill platforms were almost deserted and very quiet during the few minutes’ wait, but suddenly the Sunday morning air was split by the wailing sound of air raid sirens … as the sirens died away we few passengers heard a man somewhere on the station say loudly, ‘Well, I’m buggered!’
I reached Blackfriars only to find myself locked in behind the collapsible gates of the District station with many other passengers. An Air Raid Warden yielded to my entreaties and let me out. ‘At your own risk,’ said he.
Through deserted New Bridge Street and Fleet Street I made my way only to find frustration at the doors of the Press Association building. They were locked! Knowing the building, I found a back door open and was met by a procession of people of all departments trudging from the air raid shelter in the basement up to the fourth, fifth and sixth floors to resume the jobs they had left. The ‘All Clear’ siren had been sounded.
We slogged away all the rest of that afternoon and then at 4 p.m. I took over my real job as night editor. I remember the mass of official Proclamations, including Conscription and regulations, also 13 or 14 Bills to be rushed through Parliament the next day.
About 1 a.m. I said ‘I’m going home; we’ve broken the back of it for tonight’ and caught the 1.15 a.m. train from Blackfriars. About 2 a.m., as I was sitting on my bed taking off my socks, the air raid siren sounded again, with the ‘All Clear’ ten minutes or so later.
WHILE THE WAITING for something – anything – to happen continued into the first week of the war, Britain looked to her friends in the wider world. A French ultimatum was presented in Berlin, not as Ribbentrop had predicted, an hour after that from Britain but at 12 noon. The delay was explained by the dithering on the part of foreign minister Georges Bonnet who held out to the last moment for a negotiated settlement of the Polish question.
The countries of the British empire and Commonwealth declared war in the next few days, though the commitment was hedged. A body of isolationist opinion in Canada (‘We live in a fireproof house, far from inflammable materials’)6 was led by prime minister Mackenzie King. The decision was taken out of his hands by parliament voting to back the mother country. Canada declared war on September 10th.
Isolationism was also evident in Australia where painful memories from the Great War of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign cast doubts on a successful outcome of the latest conflict. However, along with New Zealand, where there was unqualified backing for Britain, war with Germany was declared on the day the British ultimatum ran out.
The trickiest alliance was with South Africa where, trading on the anti-British sentiment among the Boer population, prime minister James Hertzog favoured neutrality. The interventionist argument was put by his deputy, the soldier and statesman Jan Smuts, who was able to win a majority of the cabinet to his side. Subsequently, a two-day debate in the House of Assembly ended with the defeat of Hertzog’s motion of neutrality. A new government led by Smuts declared war on Germany on September 6th.
The British colonies had no choice but to take their orders from London, though in remote parts of the empire it took some time for the news to get through. Employed by United Africa, a trading company dealing in hides and skins, gum and ground nuts, G.E. Higham was stationed at Geidam in north-east Nigeria, some 100 miles from Lake Chad.
My nearest neighbours were five days travel away, walking or by horse or camel, in Maiduguri or in N’Guru (to the east and west). There was no other means of communication. In those days, for better or for worse, we did not fraternise with the local Africans though we were on the best of terms. Like all others in similar circumstances I had become a little ‘eccentric’ being so long on my own.
My one means of contact with the world outside Geidam was a Philips battery radio set on which I got wonderful reception. For months I listened to the war developing with the speeches of Hitler, Mussolini and the others coming over perfectly.
But on September 3rd, just as Mr Chamberlain said ‘We shall be fighting evil things’ the batteries ran out. I could only guess that we were at war, but to make sure I sent off two runners – one to N’Guru and one to Maiduguri to make sure. I promised each man extra pay if he could get there and back in seven days – no mean feat.
They did it in six with the news that we were, most certainly, at war.
Though Italy was not to declare war on the Allies until June 1940, Mr Higham reckoned that the nearest likely enemy airbase was in Italian-held Libya, more than a thousand miles away. Nonetheless, he felt it wise to take precautions, particularly when a plane passed overhead.
I could only just see it glinting in the sun but it convinced me that Mussolini or Hitler was after my blood. So, believe it or not, I had an air raid shelter dug for myself and my boys – 8ft × 8ft × 8ft with places to keep food and drink, particularly the latter.
Looking back on this, I have often wondered just how ‘eccentric’ I had become. Geidam was just about as far away from anywhere that one could get in those parts. It wasn’t far from French territory and the desert – in fact during the dry season one might just as well have been in the desert. But I had become convinced that I was a very important person.
Finally, the local Paramount Chief, the Kaigama, a wonderful old man came and asked me what we should do about the prospect of air raids. I told him that the only thing he could do to get warning was to send out his tribesmen in three lines – about 15 miles to the north west, north east and dead north – and when they saw or heard the Italian planes coming to bomb us they were to start beating their drums in the style of the bush telegraph and when we heard them we would all dive for cover and grab our rifles – such as they were.
BRITAIN WAS BACK on air alert on September 6th when the sirens disrupted the early morning. Ursula Bloom, in north London, was in bed reading when she heard the alarm.
I shot up and grabbed the gas-mask. I dashed into my clothes, had a last furtive look through the mullioned window beyond which absolutely nothing was happening, then went downstairs.
The residents [of her boarding house] had collected in the lounge, the idea being with the reminder of the 1914–18 hostilities that if one stood with one’s back to the main wall of the house nothing could possibly happen to the person – I suppose it is very satisfactory to be so sure. Nothing happened to any of us.
One gets a little tired of standing with one’s back to the main wall so I sat down and did some of my knitting. The milkman, making the most of an exciting occasion, came round and said that Romford had been raided, and that Chatham was already in ruins! All sorts of things were going on on the east coast, and I, who had lived there in the previous war, thought this quite likely. An hour later when the all clear sounded, I felt pretty silly as I took my gas-mask back upstairs and then started a belated breakfast away from the main wall of the house.7
Better prepared was Hilde Hoile who lived in Burgess Hill, West Sussex, in the days before it was urbanised: ‘Whenever the siren sounded we got under our beds which we had brought down to the dining room.’ Hilde took comfort from the wall built by the council to protect the glass doors against blast but reflected later that the wall itself was hardly strong enough to withstand more than a gentle push.
As recorded by her friend, an elderly resident of Bedford demanded protection for herself and a neighbour that went beyond the official guidelines.
She asked for an oilskin cape for mustard gas protection, and a tin hat, for herself and her neighbour, also an old lady over seventy.
They were determined to survive at all costs, and their applications not being successful, the indomitable pair decided on their own outfit, so they purchased cyclist’s oilskin capes. When the sirens sounded they donned their gas-masks, capes and with saucepans on their grey heads solemnly marched down to their Anderson shelters.
It was an image, said their friend, worthy of Bruce Bairnsfather, creator of the ‘Old Bill’ cartoons from the Great War.
As bizarre but more tragically came a lesson to those in the civilian front line not to exaggerate their duties. After climbing a drainpipe in an attempt to put out a light in an upstairs room, police constable George Southworth was killed falling from a third floor in Harley Street. He had been unable to get a reply when he knocked on the door.
Of war news there was little that was encouraging. Poland fought nobly and hopelessly. Eager to get their unfair share of the country, Soviet forces invaded from the east on September 17th. Warsaw surrendered eleven days later after suffering bombing and fire storms, intensifying fears in London and Paris that they would be next. But there were compensations, as Marian Rees noted in her diary.
Now the weather is so glorious – the morning haze, the hot mellow September sun, the heavy dew, the yellow sunflowers and the myriad blackberries in the garden, the peaceful river that I walk alongside on my way to work. Perhaps it is as well to live in these things, and not to live in the future. Only the sky is filled with barrage balloons, but even these are beautiful in the twilight, and in the field at the bottom of the garden there is a company of Territorials, with a camp, a gun and a searchlight. Even they seem to be peacefully enjoying themselves, digging in the sun, getting browner and browner skinned, smoking and talking.
A junior diplomat at Canada House on Trafalgar Square, Charles Ritchie set down his impressions of a city with a delayed sentence of blitzkrieg.
While the general London scene is the same, there are oddities of detail – brown paper pasted over fan-lights and walled-in windows on the ground floors of the buildings, the sand-bags around hospitals and museums, the coffin-like enclosures around the statues in the central court of the Foreign Office. And there are odd tableaux too – glimpses of people in shirt-sleeves digging air-raid shelters in their back gardens, or offices debouching typewriters and desks for removal to country premises. Then there is the outcropping of uniforms, raw-looking young soldiers in very new uniforms unload themselves from Army trucks and stand about awkwardly in front of public buildings. Women in uniform looking dowdy as old photographs of the last war, full-bosomed, big-bottomed matrons who carry their uniforms with a swagger, and young girls copying their brothers – a spectacle to make their lovers quail.8
There was still time to think and to wonder, how did it come to this?
Notes
1. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s Interpreter, 2016 edition; p. 158.
2. Ibid; p. 159.
3. Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came, 1989; p. 602.
4. R.J. Minney, The Private Papers of Hore-Belisha, 1960; p. 394.
5. Hansard, September 3rd, 1939.
6. Professor H.N. Fieldhouse, Toronto University, speaking in London, June 1938.
7. Ursula Bloom, War Isn’t Wonderful, 1961.
8. Charles Ritchie, The Siren Years: Undiplomatic Diaries, 1937–45, 1974, p. 42.
CHAPTER 2
Butter Before Guns
For more than a decade after the Great War with its terrible cost in lives lost and damaged, the hope was of a peaceful settlement of differences between nations bonded by a system of interlocking treaties. With the League of Nations to see fair play (a wretched illusion), there would be no further need to waste resources on military prowess. In Britain the budget for the armed forces was cut in almost every year up to 1932 while the armaments industry was allowed to wind down.
But the dread of another conflict was never far from the public imagination. Terrifying images were created by the power of the unknown with a consensus building up of a future war being fought, not on land or at sea, but in the air by machines of huge if yet untested destructive power. The bombs that fell from German airships and aircraft in 1917–18 were an intimation of what was possible. Asked to peer into the future, South African statesman Jan Smuts declared that there was ‘absolutely no limit’ to the use to which planes could be put.
As the high point of aerial warfare, Giulio Douhet, Italian career soldier and an early champion of Mussolini, promoted the idea of pre-emptive bombing to destroy civilian morale and bring a speedy end to conflict. In Il Dominio dell’Aria (Command of the Air), Douhet presented as fact that ‘Within a few minutes [of an attack] some twenty tons of high explosive, incendiary and gas bombs will rain down … As the hours pass and night advances, the fires will spread while the poison gas will paralyse all life.’ In Britain, the theme was taken up by J.F.C. (Boney) Fuller, another professional soldier and fascist sympathiser. In The Reformation of War, he described how ‘great cities, such as London, will be attacked from the air’:
Picture, if you will, what the result will be: London for several days will be one vast raving Bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium. What of the government at Westminster? It will be swept away by an avalanche of terror. Then will the enemy dictate his terms … Thus may a war be won in forty-eight hours and the losses of the winning side may actually be nil!
There was some evidence to support the soothsayers. The air raids on London towards the end of the Great War caused 4,820 deaths and injuries, a casualty rate of sixteen for every ton of bombs. In 1919, the newly formed Royal Air Force, the first of its kind, made short measure of an uprising in Somaliland led by the ‘Mad Mullah’. The RAF then saw action in Iraq, Aden, Sudan and on the North West Frontier of India. Up against lightly armed natives who had never before encountered sky machines with destructive power, this was fighting made easy for the imperial forces. But the science of war was not static. It was by no means fanciful that forthcoming advances in air technology would allow for a more damaging delivery of high explosives and, probably, of poison gas.
In 1922, in his role as chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Lord Balfour, recalling German raids of the Great War, predicted that in a reprise of a European conflict, a continental enemy could ‘drop on London a continuous torrent of high explosives at the rate of seventy-five tons a day for an indefinite period’.
A harder look at the evidence by a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, set up in 1924 under Sir John Anderson, soon to be the administrative and political driving force for civil defence, concluded that on the first day of war 200 tons of bombs would be dropped on London with a smaller tonnage thereafter, causing 50,000 casualties within the month.
FOR A WAR-WEARY Britain and France, doom-laden predictions strengthened the movement for peace at almost any price. Even the rise of fascism with its militaristic slant, first in Italy and then in Germany, did little to dent the widespread conviction that passive resistance or no resistance at all was the only antidote to aggression. The famous debate of 1933 at the Oxford University Union, the elite finishing school for the next generation of political leaders, when students voted 225 to 153 that ‘in no circumstances’ would they fight for King and Country, was enthusiastically endorsed on both sides of the Channel, with other universities urged to follow Oxford’s example.
The groundswell of anti-war sentiment in Britain found expression in the Peace Pledge Union led by Dick Sheppard, a former padre and crowd-pulling preacher who had been traumatised by what he had experienced on the Western Front. In 1934, having launched his Peace Ballot, over 100,000 sent postcards renouncing war and promising to ‘never again, directly or indirectly, support or sanction another’. Sheppard was only 57 when he died of a heart attack. Such was his popularity, not least as a broadcaster who made his listeners feel they were part of a friendly, informal conversation, his funeral had thousands lining the route of his cortege.
There were other big names attached to pacifism. Aldous Huxley was among those who rejected the ‘collective security’ promised by the League of Nations as a contradiction in terms. Peace could not be secured by threatening to punish an aggressor. The only way forward was unilateral disarmament with Britain setting an example for the world to follow. Labour leader George Lansbury was a Christian socialist pacifist. At a by-election speech at Fulham in 1933, he pledged to ‘close every recruiting station, disband the army and dismiss the air force’. A 32 per cent swing of votes gave this supposedly safe Tory seat to Labour with a majority of nearly five thousand. As Lansbury’s successor as Labour leader, Clement Attlee, though no pacifist, declared his party ‘unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament’.
In the fortnight leading up to the Oxford Union debate, a rather more significant historical landmark was observed in Germany, where Adolf Hitler was proclaimed chancellor. As the soon-to-be dictator began moving his people into senior positions, Neville Chamberlain, chancellor of the exchequer in the national but largely Conservative government led by Stanley Baldwin, had his mind elsewhere, as he disclosed in a letter to The Times:
Sir. It may be of interest to record that, in walking through St James’s Park today, I noticed a grey wagtail running about on the now temporarily dry bed of the lake, near the dam below the bridge, and occasionally picking small insects out of the cracks in the dam.
Probably the occurrence of this bird in the heart of London has been recorded before, but I have not myself previously noted it in the Park.
I am your obedient servant,
Neville Chamberlain
P.S. For the purpose of removing doubts, as we say in the House of Commons, I should perhaps add that I mean a grey wagtail and not a pied.1
Clearly, and despite vitriolic speeches and the evidence of a diseased mind contained in his memoir Mein Kampf, the government was not fazed by Hitler’s rise. Indeed, there was consolation to be found in a resurgent Germany. It was a common belief in Britain, if not in France, that Germany had been given a rough deal in the Versailles peace treaty that ended the Great War. In addition to losing one eighth of its territory, all its colonies had been redistributed among the victors. To shore up the defence of France, German troops were barred from territory west of the Rhine and from 50 kilometres to the east of the river. Though Allied occupation forces withdrew from the Rhineland in 1930, it remained a demilitarised buffer zone against a German attack on France.
As an added precaution, the German military, limited to 100,000 men, was forbidden tanks, heavy artillery, aircraft, gas, submarines and a general staff. Massive reparations, though subsequently modified, contributed to a giddy spirit of inflation and the collapse of the deutschmark.
Among those who argued that Germany deserved better were fascist sympathisers who found much to praise in the new Germany. While the world was struggling with failing economies and social disruption, here was a leader who, like Mussolini in Italy, got things done. Fascist methods were crude but who could deny the benefits? When Hitler came to power, well over a third of Germany’s working population was unemployed, and the national income was down by 40 per cent on the previous three years. Helped by a recovery in the world economy, he launched his version of America’s New Deal by pouring money into construction and, later, into rearmament. This in contrast to Britain and France where recession had been made worse by politicians adhering to the book-keeping school of economics with cutbacks in national expenditure in a vain effort to balance the accounts. German unemployment fell from 4 million in 1933 to 1.7 million in 1935 to close to zero by 1937.
The 1936 Olympic Games, held in Berlin, was a masterclass in public relations. Trailing a giant Olympic banner, the airship Hindenburg floated majestically over an athletics stadium designed to accommodate 100,000 spectators. The right-leaning politician and playboy, Chips Channon, heaped praise on his German hosts as the ‘masters of the art of party-giving’2 (propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels entertained 2,000 guests at his Sommerfest), while the more serious-minded Randolph Hughes found ‘health, character and order’, a contrast to Britain with its ‘louts and hooligans and wastrels’.3 ‘We plod behind’, declared Virginia Woolf. The German team came out top of the Olympic medal table with 33 gold, 26 silver and 30 bronze. Britain lagged far behind with just four gold, seven silver and three bronze.
The image of Germany as a fresh, disciplined and inventive nation was further endorsed at the 1937 Paris Exposition Universelle where the German-built 54-metre tower, topped by an eagle embraced by a swastika, dwarfed the British pavilion with its emphasis on traditional crafts and hobbies illustrated by a giant photograph of Chamberlain in wading boots wielding his fishing rod.
The Nazi regime made certain that the signs of progress were highly visible. Ambitious public works included over seven thousand kilometres of autobahns by 1936 (Britain had to wait until 1958 for its first stretch of motorway). Consumers, used only to shortages, rushed to buy the Volksempfaenger, a household radio made affordable for almost everyone. As the first of the Volkswagens rolled off the production line, the promise was held out for the debut of a ‘people’s car’. Factory workers, often subject to long hours in primitive conditions, were mollified by state-subsidised holidays.
Playing down the injustices and brutalities of Nazism, British right-wingers saw in Germany a reflection of their yearning for regeneration. Retired army officers were among Hitler’s most ardent supporters. Oswald Mosley made headlines with his Blackshirt demonstrations but his influence was superficial compared to the Anglo-German Group. Set up in 1933, it had among its members leading editors and journalists and other opinion leaders able to put pressure on the government to build good relations with Nazi Germany.
Foremost among those who cosied up to Hitler was the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, ‘a scion of one of Britain’s grandest and wealthiest aristocratic families’,4 a cousin of Winston Churchill, who by virtue of his gold-plated connection was secretary of state for air from 1931 to 1935. Courted by the Nazi elite with flattering attention to his opinions and with lavish entertainment including weekend shoots with Hermann Goering, Londonderry was seen in Berlin as a useful adjunct to a campaign to present Germany in a favourable light. Ill-equipped to be a politician, his arrogance and superior manner caused him to be sacked as air minister in 1935. Henceforth, he put his energy into promoting a peaceful understanding with Britain’s continental rival.
It was not just Londonderry who spoke up for fascism. Paeans of praise for Hitler littered the media in the 1930s. The Times, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail argued that Nazi rule was bringing great benefits to Germany and that Hitler was a force for good. Journalists who showed willing such as George Ward Price, foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail, were favoured with privileged access to Hitler’s inner circle. As owner of the Mail, Lord Rothermere was gushingly eager to please the dictators. A regular visitor to Germany since 1930, his first praise of Hitler appeared under the headline, ‘A Nation Reborn’. In 1930 he told Mail readers that any ‘minor misdeeds of individual Nazis will be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing on Germany’. Hitler was delighted to welcome Rothermere to Nazi functions and there were many exchanges of mutual goodwill.
Bookshops sold soft propaganda on behalf of the new Germany. In Germany Speaks, leading members of the regime wrote persuasively of their role in restoring Germany to its rightful place in the international community. Joachim von Ribbentrop, German ambassador in London and from 1938 Reich foreign minister, expounded his duty ‘to assist in every way possible any movement genuinely desirous of promoting understanding between two great nations’. As minister of justice, Dr Franz Guertner assured his readers that in his country ‘law and justice are at the root of every activity’.5
Incredibly, as it must now seem, the excesses of Nazi power – with political opponents falling under the state-wielded cosh – were excused or minimised by writers who held to the end justifying the means. These Germans had the travel writer Eric Taverner quoting his Hamburg friend, a ‘broad minded man of the world … with a deep appreciation of what we Englishmen mean by fair play’, on how international Jewry was intent on communist domination of Europe and how, in Germany, the ‘secret grip’ of the Jews had stifled medicine, law and the creative industries’, and the Jews were linked to the liberal press activity for ‘anonymous interests’. The spread of concentration camps was praised for clearing the ‘do-nothings’, ‘parasites’ and ‘foreign elements’ off the streets. Similarly, the well publicised sterilisation campaign against ‘recidivists and degenerates’ was justified as a contribution to the greater good.
To capture the young, Britain’s private schools were provided with free textbooks for first-stage German with conversation exercises that lauded Hitler and Nazi ideology. The writer Peter Vansittart was at Haileybury in the mid-1930s.
We had a German Club: sweet cakes, lieder and guitars, solemn Teutonic visitors glad of our parrot denunciations of Versailles. One of them announced that modern psychology was invented by Goering’s brother. A lively film, Marching through Germany with Hitler’s Armies, was shown in Big School. Processions, uniforms, cheap but stirring tunes, had narcotic powers which I have found easier to condemn than to expurgate …
One master, a Christian Union leader, encouraged us to spend summer holidays at a German Labour Camp, where, he guaranteed, most interesting things were occurring. These camps, apparently, had the happy results of completing the breakdown of snobbery and class-distinction. The disadvantages are equally clear. While fitting the individuals to take their place without question in a highly organised national life, the system gives them no time to think for themselves, and actually discourages any such desire … If the ideal is co-operation and peace, perhaps the price is justified; if it is not, the outcome can only be disaster in an unparalleled scale.6
REGISTERING THE PUBLIC mood (as home secretary Sir Samuel Hoare observed, ‘There is a strong pro-German feeling in this country’), the government looked upon Hitler not so much as a threat but as a strong leader with whom they could settle European relations. The first priority was to resolve German grievances. Hitler had his own way of doing this. Given that neither Britain nor France was prepared to deny him, he felt free to abandon the disarmament conference in Geneva and, in October 1933, to stalk out of the League of Nations. These moves were universally regretted but not roundly condemned. Was not Germany justified in its resentment at being treated as a second-rate power in thrall to its former enemies?
Hitler was not alone in reneging on international agreements and abusing diplomatic conventions. The myopia of the democracies in the 1930s extended to the Italian rape of Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia), the Japanese assault on Manchuria, and to the overthrow of the legitimate government in Spain. So it was that criticism was muted when, in blatant defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler reintroduced conscription in 1935 and announced the creation of an air force and a five-fold increase in the size of the German army to 600,000. In the first two years of Nazi rule, military expenditure as a proportion of national income jumped from 1 per cent to 10 per cent.
Noting the ambitious scale of German rearmament, the thinking in London held to a European pact guaranteeing mutual defence against an aggressor. An Anglo-French accord for ‘a general settlement freely negotiated between Germany and the other powers’ was taken forward, with foreign secretary Sir John Simon visiting Berlin for ‘a full exchange of views with Herr Hitler’. Apart from vague and soon to be broken German promises to limit military spending, the only development of any note was an agreement in principle for Germany’s naval strength to be allowed to increase to 35 per cent of Royal Navy tonnage. Simon took credit for the subsequent Anglo-German Naval Treaty, ‘the only agreement for arms limitation which has ever been secured out of all the welter of discussion’. In reality, it was an extraordinary climbdown by Britain. In quick order, Germany was given the go-ahead to build up its navy to 21 cruisers and 64 destroyers. Such was the sense of urgency – or panic – that no one thought to consult France or Italy, the other two European naval powers. Nor was any account taken of the views of Sweden and Denmark, where there was an understandable fear of German dominance in the Baltic.
On March 7th, 1936, German troops crossed into demilitarised Rhineland. If Britain and France wanted to stop Hitler in his tracks, this was the time. There was every legitimate reason to resist the weakening of the defence of France by allowing Germany to cross the Rhine. Instead, there was merely a shrugging of shoulders. After all, Hitler was simply ‘moving into his own back yard’.7 The Fuehrer put it more grandly when he addressed the Reichstag. ‘Germany has regained its honour, found belief again, overcome its greatest economic distress and finally, ushered in a new cultural ascent’, he claimed, adding: ‘We have no territorial claims to make in Europe.’ In the German elections that followed on March 29th, Hitler and the National Socialist party (the only party allowed to stand) secured 98.9 per cent of the vote.
Thus, by May 1937 when Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as prime minister, the scene was set for the finale in Europe’s power play with Hitler in the leading role. His gamble on reoccupying the Rhineland without incurring repercussions (he later called it the most nerve-wracking 48 hours of his life) strengthened his belief that he was walking with destiny. Unfolding events seemed to confirm his good opinion of himself. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was an opportunity to proclaim the German model of fascism as the European bulwark against Bolshevism; the news from Italy was of Mussolini’s desire to strengthen the Rome–Berlin Axis, while in France, the political gulf between left and right mitigated efforts to maintain the alliances built up to contain Germany. The new centre of power was in Berlin.
Chamberlain’s up-front involvement with appeasement started in late 1937 when Lord Halifax, in his grand-sounding but non-departmental role of Lord President of the Council, was in Berlin for the International Sporting Exhibition. Though himself a hunting and shooting enthusiast, it would not have occurred to Halifax to make the trip had not an official invitation arrived on his desk and had not Chamberlain seized on the chance for a senior colleague to meet the Nazi hierarchy. Informal conversation in convivial surroundings must surely help to clear away mutual suspicion. That, at least, was Chamberlain’s reckoning.
As foreign secretary, Anthony Eden was not so sure. His senior adviser, Robert Vansittart, was opposed to a visit that could be interpreted as kowtowing to an insalubrious dictatorship. But Eden, as a young (he was only 40) and ambitious politician was hardly in a position to defy the prime minister over what few would regard as a vital issue.
More controversially, Eden made no objection to the appointment of the egocentric, emotional and susceptible Nevile Henderson to be ambassador in Berlin. Pro-German and a faithful ally to Chamberlain, it was disturbing that Henderson felt ‘specially selected by Providence for the definite mission of … helping to preserve the peace of the world’. He made no promise of objective judgement.
