The Day We Went to War Read online

  4.45am (5.45am), BOLESLAWIEC, GERMAN-POLISH BORDER

  Men of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s own bodyguard troops serving with the army’s XIII Corps, have just arrived in the village and are pulling Poles and Jews from their homes. They shoot dead the father of Franciszek Lizon at his workbench. An SS trooper also shoots elderly Antoni Czubowicz in the back at point-blank range.

  7.00am (8.00am), CIECHANOW, NEAR EAST-PRUSSIAN BORDER

  German ’planes again bomb the town; twenty-one civilians are killed and thirty-six wounded, including nine women and four children.

  9.00am, LIVERPOOL

  Popular author Cecil Roberts is leaving for London after receiving a summons from the War Office last night. The weather over Liverpool is grey and overcast as Roberts starts his journey. He is soon held up by ‘a pathetic procession of schoolchildren led by their teachers’. They are all tagged and are carrying drinking mugs, gas masks and hand baggage. Roberts was a war correspondent on the Western Front in the last war. Today, he reflects on seeing the evacuees: ‘So this was modern war in the progressive age, children were in it as much as the men in trenches. There was no “front” any more.’

  9.00am (10.00am), STETTINER STATION, BERLIN

  US embassy clerk William Russell is seeing off a Canadian friend. In an effort to cheer up his friend, Russell says, ‘Maybe it will blow over. Maybe you’ll be back in a few days.’ But the Canadian replies, ‘I wouldn’t come back. If we don’t keep our word this time I would be ashamed to be seen here.’

  9.00am, MELTON, SUFFOLK

  Author and psychologist Anthony Weymouth and his family are just finishing breakfast. They listen to the news, but find it puzzling, ‘Germany is invading Poland and in spite of our guarantee we seem to be doing nothing.’ Nonetheless, the threat of war hangs over the Weymouths’ holiday home. Anthony believes, ‘Nothing but a miracle or the breaking of our word can prevent us being at war in a few hours, at most.’ But the tension lifts, if only momentarily, when his daughter Yvonne asks, ‘Of course, Hitler would be much better if he were married, wouldn’t he, Pop?’

  9.30am, TOLLESHUNT D’ARCY, ESSEX

  Popular crime writer Margery Allingham is just setting about assembling ‘about three hundredweight of depressing books’. She is going to make a wall of them halfway across the breakfast-room windows to offset the effects of bomb blast. Her friend and neighbour Christine is furious with her. She tells Margery, ‘If you go on like that, you’ll make it happen.’

  10.00am (11.00am), BRITISH EMBASSY, WARSAW

  Patrick Maitland has come to the Embassy to see if there is any news. He finds the place cluttered with packing cases. Papers and files are being burnt. It is obvious that preparations for evacuation are already taking place. ‘Peter’ Norton, the highly efficient and practical wife of the Embassy’s Counsellor, has managed to scrounge a lorry from the Polish Army for the move. Meanwhile, in the Chancery, the Times correspondent comes across a typist still typing out menu cards for a dinner that ambassador Sir Howard Kennard is due to give next week.

  10.30am, PIERS COURT, STINCHCOMBE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE

  Novelist Evelyn Waugh is awaiting the arrival of the evacuees expected yesterday. As a precaution, he has removed all the valuable objects from the rooms that he is going to let them have. Except for an hour and a half’s delay on the telephone to London, Waugh thinks everything else seems normal today. He fills in his time waiting for the evacuees by writing to offer his services for the war effort.

  11.00am, HUDDERSFIELD, YORKSHIRE

  Master Butcher George Gothard and his wife Marjorie are converting their garage into an air-raid shelter. With the help of neighbours, they dig holes in the garden to fill protective sacks with dirt. Marjorie acknowledges, ‘It is very hard work, but everybody is willing to help and [her sons] Guy who is six and George Junior nearly five are quite enjoying themselves and think it is great fun.’ Despite everyone’s efforts, Marjorie knows, ‘We shall have to work many days before there are enough sacks filled, and we are having very warm weather, which makes it harder still.’

  11.00am, PIERS COURT, STINCHCOMBE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE

  Evelyn Waugh is told that due to an administrative error, no evacuees are coming to him today. And yet, he reflects, last night on the radio it was announced that ‘the evacuation was working like clockwork’.

  12.00pm (1.00pm), HOTEL EUROPEJSKI, WARSAW

  US ambassador Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr and his family are having lunch in the hotel’s courtyard restaurant. German ’planes are over the city, but the ambassador notes that his fellow guests evince nothing more than ‘calm interest’. And the waiters, ‘aside from an occasional glance upwards to note the progress of the aerial action’, continue to serve as if an air raid is an everyday occurrence.

  12.00pm (1.00pm), MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA, BERLIN

  An official statement is released to the press and foreign correspondents. It reiterates that Germany is confining her bombing in Poland to purely military targets.

  12.00pm (1.00pm), WARSAW

  Patrick Maitland and other correspondents leave the capital to see how the city’s suburbs have fared in the bombing. In one village, a blazing cottage stands alone. A peasant woman sits outside it. She is cradling a dead child. The woman just stares apathetically at the flames. She has given up trying to put them out with pails of water. Her husband is dead, machine-gunned on his land. Her son is also dead.

  1.00pm (2.00pm), GERMAN-POLISH BORDER

  Austrian soldier Wilhelm Prueller hurriedly jots down in his diary: ‘14.00: we’ve climbed a big hill. Hours it took. In front of us the guns boom, also light machine gun-fire. For the past two hours they’ve been under fire from our artillery and trench mortars, but they wouldn’t give in. We’re lying ready in a wood. Banging of rifle shots. We learn there are five civilians behind our back shooting at us. I go with two others, and in five minutes these five civilians have had it.’

  1.00pm, BOLTON

  A women tells an observer from Mass Observation, ‘My nerves have completely gone; we’ve been waiting for a whole year, not knowing if there’ll be a war or not. I want a knock at Hitler.’

  1.30pm (2.30pm), GERMAN-POLISH BORDER

  During a brief lull in the fighting, Wilhelm Prueller catches up with his war diary, ‘14.30: the first Polish reconnaissance aircraft. He shot a few rounds at us and disappeared. Our flak saw him, shot at him, and I hope, got him. The Poles seem to be well entrenched, but our artillery clears the way for us. Over hills and valleys, through burning villages we continue to attack. We take some civilians with us, and they have to carry our heavy things.’

  2.00pm (3.00pm), RYBNIK, SILESIA

  Polish soldiers of 12th Infantry Regiment surrender to the Germans. They are thrown to the ground by their captors and tanks are driven over them.

  2.45pm, PARIS

  New Zealander Geoffrey Cox, Daily Express correspondent in the French capital, is rushing to get to hear Premier Daladier’s speech. He has been held up queuing for a gas mask from a stock that the British Embassy has made available for Britons in Paris. The chief of the volunteers distributing the masks is a bank clerk. Cox recalls that his manner has always verged on the obsequious. But, ‘now, dressed in the alas none too brief authority which war confers’, he has great pleasure in ordering about the correspondent and the others waiting for their masks.

  2.00pm (3.00pm), TIVOLI GARDENS, COPENHAGEN

  Impatient at Britain’s delay in honouring her pledge to Poland, Ewan Butler, The Times correspondent in Berlin until the day before yesterday, comes up with a novel idea. He decides to launch his own propaganda raid on Germany. With a colleague, he buys several dozen balloons and then composes ‘offensive messages to the Fuehrer’. These they attach to the balloons and launch them. There is a brisk breeze blowing and the two men see their missives bowling southwards towards the Reich.

  2.30pm (3.30pm), FOREIGN MINISTRY, ROME

  Count Ciano puts th
rough a call to Lord Halifax in London. The Count tells the Foreign Secretary that he believes Hitler might yet agree to a five-power conference on the understanding of an immediate armistice being signed. Halifax tells his Italian opposite number, who has just also telephoned Georges Bonnet with the same news, that Britain cannot contemplate a conference with German troops on Polish soil. They must withdraw before any negotiations can take place.

  3.00pm, CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES, PARIS

  Premier Edouard Daladier mounts the tribune. He first reads a message from President Lebrun, and then addresses the deputies and senators. He tells them that ‘if measures of reconciliation are renewed, we are still ready to join them’. ‘But,’ Daladier continues, ‘time presses. France and Britain will not stand by and witness the destruction of a friendly people . . .’ The premier says that France must fulfil her obligations, because if she does not, then she would be ‘despised, isolated and discredited, without allies and without support’. He warns them, ‘At the cost of our honour we should purchase only a precarious, revocable peace and, tomorrow, when we had to fight, having lost the esteem of our Allies and of other nations, we should be nothing but an abject people, doomed to defeat and servitude.’ Daladier finishes his speech by telling the parliamentarians, ‘Our duty is to finish with aggression and violence. By peaceful means, if we still can, and we will keep on trying to that end. By using our force, if all moral decency and reason have disappeared from the aggressors.’

  The premier is given a standing ovation as he leaves the tribune. There is a brief recess and then the Finance Committee approve the Government request for seventy billion francs of war credits to help finance France’s military effort. Both houses then vote on the war credits. In the Senate, former premier Pierre Laval tries to speak. He demands that the Government work with Italy to keep the peace. He is shouted down. In the Chamber, Deputy Gaston Bergery calls for a secret session to debate on France going to war. He too is shouted down. Both houses vote on the war credits. They pass unanimously. Daladier considers this as good as a declaration of war, and decides it will not be necessary to seek an actual vote on going to war. But outside the Chamber, Verdun veteran and newspaper editor Emil Bure tells Geoffrey Cox, ‘They are talking to the Italians, and hope to get a conference tomorrow. We will yet see a sell-out.’

  3.00pm, ST JAMES’S PARK, LONDON

  Florence Speed notes that there is still no concrete news on what Britain and France intend to do. In the park, Florence finds it much quieter than usual. It dawns on her that, because of the evacuation, there are no children playing there.

  3.00pm, ‘VILLA VOLPONE’, SOUTH HAMPSTEAD

  Critic James Agate brings his journal up to date: ‘3pm: Nothing yet. I hear that we are waiting for the evacuation of the children to be completed. No excitement. No flag-waving. Only, last night in the pubs, all the old war songs except “Tipperary”.’ Thinking back to the last war and the Treaty of Versailles, Agate wonders today, ‘what the shades of Clemenceau and Foch are thinking’.

  3.00pm, TEDDINGTON

  ‘Dull, then bright but terribly oppressive, then dull and cloudy again but pleasantly breezy. 3pm: No news. So far we have heard nothing. That fool Hitler says that the present hostilities are not to be considered a state of War. It is merely to “rectify the Eastern Frontier”. He has given his word (!!) to Roosevelt not to bomb civilian towns & has already bombed refugee train. Lord Halifax has had no reply from Hitler. It may be that Italy is trying for peace. Greenwood spoke well and for action. The only man worth his salt. Chamberlain shuffling as usual. Strange noise in studio – sounded like booing or anger while his speech was being read out.’ (Helena Mott)

  3.00pm (4.00pm), WARSAW

  Patrick Maitland returns to the city. He finds that there is still no news of Britain and France honouring their pledges to Poland. He senses that the Poles are beginning to be badly shaken at the lack of any positive action by London and Paris. And his American colleague Ed Beattie is constantly being asked, ‘are England and France going to sell us out too?’

  4.00pm, WORTHING

  ‘Worthing, being a safe zone, has had over 10,000 evacuees billeted on the inhabitants from London. On Saturday afternoon Schofield and I helped billet some Bermondsey blind people. We both felt how terrible it was that so much money, time and trouble was taken to help these poor, old, ill, blind people, while we send healthy, young, virile people to be killed.’ (Joan Strange)

  4.00pm (5.00pm), POLAND

  ‘We couldn’t think of sleep last night, we felt too insecure. Death might lurk anywhere. We drove all the men out of their hovels at the point of the bayonet. To call them dwellings would be going too far. I was lucky enough to get the job of searching all the inhabitants for arms. At the end of the job I shuddered at my own fingers. After the search we shut all the men in a large barn and posted a strong guard. We found no weapons. The Pole is a cowardly fanatic. This sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it is none the less true.

  ‘The Pole’ homes are almost all filthy and utterly neglected. Open a door to search for weapons and you meet a solid wall of stench. One’s gas mask comes in useful when searching these houses. This afternoon the attack continued . . . in a nearby place twenty soldiers were murdered by the inhabitants. The order was given to set fire to all the villages. We are not putting up with any more nonsense from the Poles.’ (Corporal Wilhelm Krey, 13th Artillery Observation Battery, German Army)

  4.15pm, ELYSÉE PALACE, PARIS

  Jean Zay, Daladier’s thirty-five-year-old education minister, announces his intention of resigning his cabinet post to rejoin his regiment. His colleague, the pugnacious Minister of Finance, Paul Reynaud, is dead set against the Italian proposal for a five-power conference. It was first mooted two days ago, and Count Ciano’s ’phone call to Bonnet an hour or so ago has breathed new life into it. Reynaud, in forthright language, tells the Council of Ministers, ‘If we go crawling to Rome on our knees, we’ll be docile sheep offering our necks to the butcher’s knife. For one of two things might happen: either we’ll be defeated without a war, or much worse, we shall have lost our honour without winning the peace. If there is still time left, the only way to avoid a slap on the face is to put up our fists instead of turning the cheek.’

  4.15pm, 10 DOWNING STREET

  Chamberlain and his ministers meet. They are told of the proposal from Mussolini for a five-power conference to try and settle the current crisis. But the British attitude is that there must be a withdrawal of German forces from Polish soil before any such conference can take place. This they are all agreed upon. The ministers also discuss a French proposal to postpone sending an ultimatum to the Germans for another forty-eight hours. The British chiefs of staff are firmly against such a delay. So too is Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha, who thinks any delay ‘might result in breaking the unity of the country’ as ‘public opinion was against yielding an inch’. He also thinks that Italy is acting in collusion with Germany and that various troop movements lend support to this view. Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald agrees with the War Minister. Lord Halifax, however, still thinks the time limit should be extended to midnight on 3/4 September, ‘if this would facilitate consideration of a conference’. But he is in a minority of one. The Cabinet decide that the ultimatum should expire at midnight tonight.

  4.30pm, LIVERPOOL

  The SS Athenia slips anchor and begins the hour-long run down the Mersey on the first stage of her 2,625-mile voyage to Canada. She is now carrying 1,102 passengers; 469 Canadians, 311 Americans, some 150 European refugees and the rest British and Irish citizens. Among the Europeans are thirty-four Germans, including a handful of Jews, escaping from persecution to seek a new life in North America. The Athenia is carrying a cargo of 880 tons, including 472 tons of bricks. There are also fifty pairs of curling stones and a batch of text-books for Toronto schoolchildren.

  4.30pm, OLYMPIA EXHIBITION HALL, KENSINGTON

  Anti-Nazi German Jewis
h refugee Eugen Spier has just been arrested at his flat by two plain-clothes Scotland Yard officers and brought here by car. No charge has been made against him and no judicial warrant for his arrest has been issued. The police officers, who arrived at Spier’s flat just as he was writing to the Home Office to offer his services to the British Government, tell him that his arrest is ‘required under Royal Prerogative’. He is mystified as to why he has been arrested.

  5.00pm, BOLTON

  A local dance-band leader tells an observer from Mass Observation, ‘I’ve been calm all week, but yesterday I listened to the news bulletin and I got a bad dose of the jitters. I read somewhere that they’re going to move London to Canada, and I can well believe it.’

  5.00pm, NATIONAL GALLERY, TRAFALGAR SQUARE

  The last of the Gallery’s paintings have just left, evacuated to Aberystwyth. In view of the expected devastating air raid on London, Director Sir Kenneth Clark suggests to his remaining staff that it might be appropriate to go to St Paul’s. Two taxis are flagged down and the small party make their way to the Cathedral. On arrival, they are greeted by a posse of vergers shouting, ‘All out! All out!’ Sir Kenneth tries to remonstrate with them. As war is almost upon us, he tells the vergers, many people will want to visit the Cathedral for prayer and solemn meditation. In a few hours St Paul’s itself may be destroyed by bombs. His words cut no ice. The vergers carry on shouting, ‘All out! All out!’ And it dawns on Sir Kenneth that they are not acting out panic. It is simply the Cathedral’s official closing time. ‘It would have been,’ Clark believes, ‘different in the Middle Ages.’

  5.00pm, ARSENAL FOOTBALL STADIUM, HIGHBURY

  Daily Express Editor Arthur Christiansen, finding nothing to do at the office, has come to see Arsenal play Sunderland. Arsenal thrash Sunderland five goals to two, with Ted Drake scoring four of their goals.

  5.00pm, TAKELEY

  Moyra Charlton and her mother are at the village hall. All afternoon they have been busy buttering bread, slicing cake, and generally getting ready for the evacuees’ arrival. There has been no shortage of helpers and ‘people are willing and generous to the extreme’. But the Charltons keep getting conflicting reports as to when the evacuees will be arriving. Moyra and Mrs Charlton decide to have tea themselves. Just as they do, a rumour goes round that no children will be coming today. But at that very moment, two buses roll into the village with sixty-five children on board. They are fed and then allotted to homes in the village. Moyra is told that another 206 will be coming tomorrow. If they do come, she thinks, ‘we will have our work cut out’.