The Day We Went to War Read online

  The Day We Went to War

  Terry Charman

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9780753537787

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Published in 2010 by Virgin Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

  A Random House Group Company

  First published in the UK by Virgin Books in 2009 with the title Outbreak 1939

  Unless otherwise stated photographs and text © The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum

  2009

  Foreword © Melvyn Bragg

  The poster ‘Take Your Gas Mask Everywhere’ is reproduced with kind permission of RoSPA

  (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents)

  The television programme Outbreak is an ITV Studios Production for ITV,

  History Channel and France 3 in association with the Imperial War Museum

  and ECPAD © ITV Studios Ltd 2009

  Extract on pages 142–143 © Daily Express

  Terry Charman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is substantially a work of non-fiction. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in some minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

  Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher would be glad to hear from them and make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council [FSC], the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace-approved FSC-certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

  Typeset in Sabon by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire Printed and bound by CPI Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon CR0 4TD

  ISBN 9780753519653

  To buy books by your favourite authors and register for offers visit www.rbooks.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Foreword by Melvyn Bragg

  Introduction

  1 Countdown to War

  2 Friday, 1 September 1939

  3 Saturday, 2 September 1939

  4 Sunday, 3 September 1939

  5 The Fall of Poland

  6 The War in the Air

  7 The War on Land

  8 The War at Sea

  9 The Empire at War

  10 The Beer Hall Bomb

  11 The Venlo Incident

  12 The War on the Home Front

  13 Wartime Entertainment

  14 Lord Haw Haw

  15 The Winter War

  16 Christmas and the End of the Year

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  List of Unpublished Sources

  Index

  To James Taylor

  The Day We Went to War

  TERRY CHARMAN is the Senior Historian at the Imperial War Museum, where he has worked since 1974. He is a frequent lecturer on the First and Second World Wars and has contributed to magazines and journals on a range of subjects. He has also worked as a consultant for a wide range of publications and has appeared on and been associated with numerous documentaries, television and radio programmes and films, including Foyle’s War and Schindler’s List. He is the author of The German Home Front 1939–1945.

  By the Same Author

  The German Home Front 1939–1945

  ‘Unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.’ Neville Chamberlain, 3 September 1939.

  FOREWORD

  I just missed the start of the Second World War. On Sunday, 3 September 1939 I was not quite ready for landing. That happened on 6 October. Nevertheless the war was the landscape and currency of my childhood – its background noise, its daily prayers, the atmosphere of life both at that time and in some ways forever since.

  Windows were blacked out nightly to give the German bombers no chink of light and even we children staggered rather drunkenly around the twisting alleys of the small town with weak pencil torches nervously flashed on and off but always pointed downwards. Rationing ruled the kitchen. Stories of war were our daily bread and games of war our childhood antidote. The wireless was the altar and news bulletins the daily service. It was a time when children conceived violent hatreds of nations and peoples they knew nothing of, when no propaganda was too black and yet the greatest tragedy of all was – to take my own experience – not even whispered in the streets. We did not know the depth of evil out there.

  There were outings now and then, mainly to the seaside, to Silloth ten miles away, and the churches filled in social gaps with gaslit youth clubs. There would be dances in the blacked-out basement of a Congregational church where women, often in coats against the cold, danced with women or taught their children the steps of old ballroom dances.

  And there were treats. Children whose fathers were in the war got a present now and then from sympathetic families doing their bit and felt very special because of it.

  I lived in north Cumbria in the north-west of England, a borderland near Hadrian’s Wall, a place both ruined and ripened in wars over the centuries – Romans, Vikings, Normans and in the Middle Ages 300 years of reiving border warfare with the Scots.

  Then came the imperial wars with local regiments called up in heavy numbers to plant and to defend the flag. My grandfather and five of his brothers went through the First World War. My father and three of his brothers were in the Second.

  Where I lived was involved in battles in the air not because it was on the aerial frontline but because it was so far from it. Fractured aeroplanes hedge-hopped from the south-east of England to a place thought to be out of range and out of sight of the German bombers. They were ‘turned around’ and sent back south into battle.

  There were soldiers marching even in this small market town, Wigton, population 5,000. There were morale-boosting marches when the music played and little boys ran alongside in the gutters. There were soldiers and sailors and airmen on leave with the occasional story of combat and horror but those were tight-lipped days. And there were the casualties to men from the town and, early on, the growth of fear as the defeats could not be concealed and towards the end the birth of an even greater bottomless fear as the atom bomb entered into history.

  And so when I realised that
the seventieth anniversary of World War Two was all but on us, there were hundreds of iron filings which rushed to that magnet of the war in my past. You only rarely have a complete idea immediately. This was one of them.

  I wanted to make a television programme about the day the Second World War broke out, the very day. To track through that day, to show what happened here in my own country and also in France, Germany, Poland, Australia, America, the Commonwealth and elsewhere. The proposition was accepted by ITV for an hour-long documentary.

  You always want more and it would have been good to have two or three programmes which included a long and complex lead up to the war but others in print and in exhibitions will I’m sure do that. Outbreak stuck to the day.

  There is something very satisfactory in the shape of a day. By concentrating on that we could embrace and contrast great acts of state with private mundane actions from members of the general public. There would be the grand drama unfolding but also, I hoped, the sense and evidence, the humour and personal fears in ordinary lives.

  Above all I wanted the story to be told by those involved in the day either through archive (which was rich) or through finding people who could remember 3 September 1939.

  That led the research team to some remarkable discoveries, not only in this country but in Germany, France, Poland, Australia and the West Indies.

  We could go from a woman holding up a dress in which she had been christened on that Sunday, 3 September to a woman who had been on the SS Athenia sunk on the same day. We could go from the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire to words and recollections of Winston Churchill, from the memories of Richard Attenborough and children sent away from London to the countryside as evacuees to words from the Prime Minister of the day and from King George VI.

  The team employed several telling strategies. For instance, descendants of the main players would read the words written about the time – Lady Soames quoted her father Winston Churchill. There was Neville Chamberlain’s grandson. They played back the speech of King George to those who had listened to it at the time including George Cole, Betty Driver, Vera Lynn, Tony Benn and Nicholas Parsons, and their reactions were telling.

  When the Imperial War Museum indicated interest, I was delighted. It was like being awarded a degree. The Museum had already drawn up its own plans to commemorate the seventieth anniversary with an exhibition and an accompanying book by its Senior Historian Terry Charman. With his immense knowledge of the period and his eye for detail, we were fortunate indeed to have Terry’s services as historical consultant on the programme. In his thirty-five years at the Museum, he has assisted many eminent historians, including Asa Briggs, Sir Martin Gilbert and Professor Richard Holmes with their books. Now he has had the opportunity to write his own.

  There cannot be many books that bring together both the vituperative diary entries of Dr Goebbels and the risqué jokes of Max Miller. Drawing on the immense and almost unrivalled collections at the Imperial War Museum, the book has skilfully woven together the stories of not only the Great and the Good, but also of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. We meet the vain and alcoholic Colonel Beck, Poland’s foreign minister, who nonchalantly accepts Britain’s guarantee to his doomed country between two flicks of his cigarette ash, and at the same time physiotherapist Joan Strange of Worthing, who perceives only too clearly the evil nature of the Nazi regime through her work for Jewish refugees.

  Our programme dealt with just the one day, 3 September 1939, but the book goes on to cover the last months of 1939, and the first of what became known at the time as the ‘Phoney War’. But while the RAF confined itself to dropping propaganda leaflets, Outbreak shows that there was no Phoney War at sea. Nor was it phoney in Poland, where right from the start the Nazis unleashed a campaign of racial terror that eventually led to the deaths of over six million Poles, Jewish and non-Jewish. Nor in Finland, a victim of aggression, not on Hitler’s part this time, but from his new ‘ally’ Stalin. We learn how on 25 December 1939, while the British enjoyed a near-normal Christmas, the citizens of Helsinki spent most of it in air-raid shelters. We encounter both the sinister ‘Lord Haw Haw’, William Joyce, for whom the British people had such a morbid fascination during the war’s first months, and ‘Our Gracie’ – Gracie Fields – still not recovered from a serious illness, but determined to entertain the ‘boys’ out in France.

  The first day of the Second World War can without exaggeration be called one on which the world was changed. To have that day put on film and in an exhibition and in a book could not be more fitting. All of them give a salute to what the Allies undertook on Sunday, 3 September 1939.

  In The Day We Went to War, Terry Charman has produced a book that chron-icles, in Evelyn Waugh’s words, ‘that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance’. As Churchill himself used to say, you will read it with ‘pleasure and profit’.

  Melvyn Bragg

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘. . . a far-away country . . .’

  – Neville Chamberlain, 27 September 1938

  For the people of Britain, for her friends and for her enemies too, two-thirds of 1939 was spent in uneasy peace, one-third in a state of declared, but seemingly ‘phoney’, war. But for many, the years from 1933 had been a kind of ‘phoney peace’, full of ‘wars and rumours of wars’.

  1938, especially, had been a year of ever-increasingly serious crises. In February, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden resigned over dis agreements with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the dictators. On Eden’s departure, one-third of Britons, when polled, said they expected there would be a war. Eden’s resignation was soon followed by Hitler’s ‘bloodless’ invasion and annexation of his Austrian homeland on 13 March 1938. Then, in May, came the first crisis over Czechoslovakia. Throughout the summer and autumn, Czechoslovakia and Hitler’s demands for the German-speaking region of that country, the Sudetenland, dominated newspaper headlines in Britain. The Sudeten Crisis cul minated on 29 September 1938 in the signing of the Munich Agreement. At Munich, in the words of a contemporary survey of the year:

  The British and French Governments assented, in the hope of preventing war, to the mutilation of a free and democratic land, which Hitler’s propaganda had covered with foul abuse. They handed over to Nazi Germany the Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia, with all that country’s chief fortifications, under threat that unless they did so Hitler would let loose a world war. He promised that this would be his last territorial claim in Europe.

  Many believed, or professed to believe, him. Chamberlain flew back from Munich promising ‘peace for our time’, and the country’s most popular columnist, Godfrey Winn, gushed in the Sunday Express, ‘Praise be to God and to Mr Chamberlain. I find no sacrilege, no bathos, in coupling those names.’

  In Britain there was an immense feeling of relief that war had been averted, but many entertained feelings of guilt too. Leslie Weatherhead, Britain’s leading religious writer and broadcaster, spoke for many when he wrote, ‘Do you feel a little uneasy, as though you had made friends with a burglar on condition that if he took nothing from you or your immediate friends, you would say nothing about what he took from somebody else? I feel like that.’

  A Cambridge undergraduate put it more succinctly: ‘I know we’ve let them down like hell, but then we’re always swine, aren’t we?’

  In France, which, unlike Britain, had formal treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia, there was a similar feeling of euphoria that peace had been saved. Chamberlain’s French opposite number, Edouard Daladier, had half expected to be lynched when he arrived back at Le Bourget airport from Munich. Instead, he was greeted by delirious crowds. But in France too there were those, like former premier Leon Blum, who confessed to a feeling of ‘cowardly relief and shame’. Diplomat Alexis Leger, who had accompanied Daladier to Munich, put it more crudely: ‘Oh yes, a relief! Like crapping in your pants.’

  Six weeks after Munich, Britain and France, the victors of 1918, com
memorated the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Armistice. Over 740,000 men from the British Isles had died in the Great War, and almost double that number of Frenchmen. Memories of ‘The War To End War’ were still vivid and all too painful for some. One ex-soldier said to a younger colleague: ‘The average fellow who was in the thick of it wants to forget all about it.’ But another, exasperated by the threat to peace posed by Hitler, told his workmates, ‘We ought to have gone right into Germany and wiped them all out.’ In Britain, forty million poppies were sold, and 80 per cent of people polled by the new Mass Observation public-opinion organisation observed the two minutes’ silence. But Mass Observation also noted:

  The general attitude towards the Great War has changed. A new generation has grown up. Since 1918 the League of Nations has come into existence and then practically faded out again. The Versailles Treaty has been made and broken. The Great War is less in people’s minds than the possibility of the next war.

  That possibility was reinforced for many people in the New Year when the Government distributed twenty million National Service booklets. The booklet detailed the various organisations that Britons might volunteer to join in order ‘to make us ready for war’. Foremost among them was Air Raid Precautions, for it was ‘the shadow of the bomber’ that dominated official and public thinking when it came to the prospect of a new war. In the 1914–18 war, Britain had been subjected to German air attacks by both airships and aeroplanes; 1,414 Britons had been killed and 3,416 seriously injured in these raids. These were small enough figures when compared to the enormous casualty figures on the Western Front. But it was the psychological effects of the raids that really mattered. They demonstrated that not only was Britain no longer an island, but that civilians, as well as the fighting forces, were now in the firing line. In 1935, Chamberlain’s predecessor Stanley Baldwin had spoken of ‘the tacit assumption on the part of all nations that the civil community will no longer be immune from the horrors of warfare as they have been since the barbarous ages until modern times’.