The Day We Went to War (19 page)

10.30pm, B
OLTON

A Mass Observation diarist encounters a drunk leaving a pub at closing time. ‘Heil Hitler,’ the drunk says, ‘Och, dinna listen to me – I dinna mean it.’

10.30pm (11.30pm), G
ERMAN
-P
OLISH
B
ORDER

Wilhelm Prueller and his company receive tea and are issued with fifteen cigarettes each. They suffered their first fatality at 5pm this afternoon. Prueller now beds down for the night.

10.45pm, H
OUSE OF
C
OMMONS

Sir John Anderson returns from Downing Street. He tells Hore-Belisha and the others that the ultimatum will now be given tomorrow morning at 8am to expire at midday. The war minister thinks the interval too long. Another message now arrives from Number 10. The Cabinet is to meet at 11pm.

10.45pm, 10 D
OWNING
S
TREET

Chamberlain receives French ambassador Charles Corbin. The Prime Minister does not beat about the bush. He tells the French diplomat, ‘Public opinion unanimously considers the Italian offer a trap, intended to favour the advance of the German armies in Poland by immobilizing the Allied forces. Britain is definitely united now, but the country is beginning to be seriously disturbed by the delays due to the vacillating attitude of the French Government. We cannot wait any longer. If necessary, we shall act alone.’

11.00pm, P
LACE DE LA
C
ONCORDE
, P
ARIS

Hubert Earle of the US Embassy is walking home to his apartment in the pitch dark. The blackout is so complete with ‘not a suspicion of the moon’, that Hubert walks right into a fountain and is soaked to the skin.

11.00pm, C
ABINET
R
OOM
, 10 D
OWNING
S
TREET

Ministers begin to assemble, some in white tie and tails, others in dinner jackets or ordinary suits. To Minister of Agriculture Reginald Dorman-Smith, Chamberlain is like ‘a stag at bay’, with his ministers angrily demanding action and ‘if necessary to destroy him’. But things calm down rapidly as Chamberlain acknowledges his colleagues’ strength of feeling. Hore-Belisha puts forward his view that the ultimatum should be given in three hours’ time at 2am to expire at 6am, ‘The less time involved the better.’ Chamberlain tells his colleagues of the trouble both he and Lord Halifax have had with the French over delivering a joint ultimatum. And it is now reluctantly acknowledged that the two allies will hand in separate ultimatums tomorrow morning.

11.00pm, T
AKELEY

The Charlton family discuss the latest radio news of the crisis. Moyra has never felt so angry or worked up before. She believes that ‘Mr Greenwood, in a concise and excellent speech, voiced some of the points which express surely, not only Opposition views, but the views of anyone with any foresight in England. War is ghastly, but what of the future if we let this go? What security, what peace would there be? Damn it all, we still have the guts to face it, even if Mr Chamberlain has not.’ The Charltons decide that there must be some definite reason for the apparent change in the Government’s policy. Moyra records ‘two fascinating suggestions: (a) that Hitler has shot himself. (b) That there is a revolt in Germany.’ She goes to bed, ‘very worried . . . I hope to Heaven we know soon one way or the other.’

11.00pm, B
OLTON

In the street, a loud voice is heard shouting, ‘T’ war cancelled for twenty-four hours.’

11.30pm, W
EST
N
ORWOOD

Nellie Carver, a supervisor at the Central Telegraph Office in the City, has had a busy day. Writing up her diary tonight she reflects on how the telegraph service always seems to thrive in crises. ‘Well, I’ve seen a few myself. Coal strikes, General Strike, two Kings’ deaths & funerals, a war, an Abdication & now another war! In each of these we appeared to be the centre of the whirlpool, but this beyond everything yet seen.’ Nellie is unable to sleep because of a violent thunderstorm breaking over the capital. It seems to ‘put the lid on a ghastly situation’. She tries to imagine what the future might hold but her imagination fails and she just writes in her diary, ‘Germany has been given until 11am tomorrow (an ominous hour in our History), but we know what her answer will be – they will not withdraw now.’

11.55pm, B
ROADCASTING
H
OUSE

Chief BBC Announcer Stuart Hibberd is exhausted. He has been on duty all day, although there has been virtually no news. About to leave, Hibberd reflects that today has been ‘A glorious summer day. Why is it,’ he asks himself, ‘that at this, the most lovely time of the year, men should start thinking about killing their own kind?’

12.00 midnight, P
UTNEY

‘As I write there is raging outside a terrific storm, almost continuous lightning and thunder. Nature is providing the finishing touches to these poignant, horrible days. The waiting, listening to news bulletins every hour, the instructions for complete blackout at night, general mobilisation yesterday – khaki-clad boys everywhere – the speeded up evacuation of three million children and invalids from the cities, all these have come to us – a supposed civilised people! Warsaw has been bombed, German tanks and aeroplanes have been shot down and war is once more striding across our world.

‘This storm makes one feel that perhaps God is wishful of reminding us that our little wars are as nothing compared with his awful power, but it is too late now, we are too deeply immersed in it. The blackness in the streets is so strange, one feels one must be quiet and secret all the time and walk upon one’s toes. What a state to come to – darkness and fear – a vast organised army of people wondering if all the fighting, first aid, ARP and other services for which they have trained, rather amusedly in most cases, for the past months, will be used in the worst manner they have conceived . . . Here’s the storm again tearing its way across the sky above us – I wish it would stop and we could have some sleep, as we should be able to do, without fear of raids for tonight at any rate!’ (Vivienne Hall)

C
HAPTER
4

Sunday,
3 September 1939

Introduction: resumé of 2 September

For twenty-four hours Poland had been under attack. But there was still no positive news of Britain and France coming to her aid. Huddersfield housewife Marjorie Gothard wrote in her diary, ‘the people of Britain wake up to hear that no reply to the British ultimatum has come from Hitler’. People were perplexed at the lack of action on Britain’s part. There was a genuine concern that the Government was still trying to appease Hitler and wriggle out of its obligations to Poland. A Mass Observation diarist, a woman of twenty-four, ‘woke up feeling flattened and weak. News in evening bewildering. What is the reason for delaying the decision? Afraid of letting down Poland.’ In Bolton, a woman told Mass Observation, ‘No one would stand another Munich.’ In her diary, Helena Mott, a persistent critic of Chamberlain and appeasement, wrote with increasing frustration: ‘WHY HAVE WE NOT STARTED?!!’

In France too, there was uneasy feeling that the Poles were going to be abandoned, just as the Czechs had been the year before.
Despite Daladier’s brave words in the Chamber, there were many deputies who believed that ‘Bolshevism is our first enemy. Let us not forget it,’ and that the Nazis posed no threat to France. After all, said one deputy, ‘Hitler declared that he will not claim Alsace Lorraine!’ The ordinary people displayed more resolution, but nothing like the enthusiasm that had been seen in 1914. Captain Daniel Barlone noted of his men that, if ordered, ‘Of course they will go, and return home to peace and quietness after handing Hitler a good drubbing. The men’s great hope is that Hitler will be assassinated.’ In Paris, reservists were still arriving at the Gare de l’Est and other stations. Writer Jean Malaquais, a naturalised Polish Jew, described the scene: ‘You know how stations are on general mobilisation days: sniffles, tears, promises that a stray bullet can break.’

On the morning of 2 September, Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnhof was full of small children, wearing blue tags, ready to be evacuated to the countryside. William Shirer noted that in general Berliners ‘seemed to be a little more cheery’ as no Polish bombers had got through to the capital, which had ‘a fairly normal aspect today’. Berliners appeared to have quickly ‘settled down to a dazed war routine’. All German papers reported the initial successes in Poland, and the High Command confirmed that the advance was going according to schedule. ‘The people were cheered. They did not expect that England and France would enter the conflict,’ one of Shirer’s colleagues reported. At the British and French embassies, the diplomats’ bags were packed ready for departure, but their American colleague William Russell still ‘wondered fearfully if they would break their word again’.

As the British and French continued to vacillate, Poland was not only bearing the full brunt of Germany’s military machine but also the consequences of Nazi racial propaganda. Corporal Willi Krey wrote in his war diary: ‘The houses in these Polish villages are crammed with filth . . . the folk who stand outside and gape at us appear to be totally uncivilised: they all look dirty and bedraggled,
the women as well as the men. These so-called representatives of civilisation seem to me to be competing as to who can be the dirtiest.’

Later the same day, 2 September, his unit came under fire from a house. They stormed it and found, as Krey wrote, ‘Two Poles lay in their blood, one dead, the other wounded in the arm and stomach . . . Our German doctors refused to treat the wounded Pole. We placed him on pile of straw . . . and left him to rot. He took seven hours to die.’

12.00 midnight, H
ARWICH
–L
IVERPOOL
S
TREET BOAT TRAIN

Virginia Cowles and her friend Jane are only just back from the Continent. Before boarding the train they ask a docker whether war has been declared. ‘Not yet,’ comes the reply, ‘But I hope it won’t be long now. This waiting around is making us all nervous.’ The two young Americans now hear the sound of far-away explosions. They lean out the train window and see ‘the sky lighting up with sharp spasmodic flashes – obviously bursts from anti-aircraft fire,’ thinks Virginia. She and Jane are still hanging out of the window when they reach the outskirts of London. Suddenly, they feel torrential rain coming down. And only now does it dawn on them that the ‘explosions’ they heard, and ‘anti-aircraft fire’ they saw, were just a thunderstorm.

12.00 midnight, H
AMPSTEAD
, L
ONDON

A violent and frightening thunderstorm breaks over the capital. Verily Anderson, a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry [FANY], is shivering in her bed. But she manages to ask her friends jokingly, ‘Perhaps it could be Hitler’s secret weapon?’

12.00 midnight, S
AVAGE
C
LUB
, L
ONDON

Britain’s leading theatre critic James Agate watches the storm from the Club’s steps. ‘One moment there is complete darkness: the next a sheet of vivid green showing Westminster cut out in cardboard
like the scenery in a toy theatre.’ The lightning flashes last so long that Agate can count the surrounding buildings.

12.00 midnight, 10 D
OWNING
S
TREET

Alec Douglas-Home, Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, and Tory MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon are standing on the steps of Number 10 when the heavens open and rain deluges down. To both men simultaneously comes the thought that this is the gods weeping for the folly of man.

12.00 midnight, S
COTT’S
R
ESTAURANT
, P
ICCADILLY

Daily Express
Editor Arthur Christiansen has been to see Arsenal play this afternoon. Now, coming out of the restaurant, he sees the lightning bringing daylight to the blacked-out streets. The thunder, Christiansen thinks, sounds like ‘the noise of a million guns, as though God Himself were rumbling in rage at human folly’.

12.00 midnight, W
ATCHET
, S
OMERSET

Regular soldier Second Lieutenant Peter Parton of the Royal Artillery is now back in camp. He’s just been to the local cinema to see a late showing of
Wuthering Heights
, starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. The film was only halfway through when a notice was flashed on the screen: ‘
ALL OFFICERS AND SOLDIERS RETURN TO YOUR BARRACKS IMMEDATELY
.’ Silently, the cinema rapidly emptied. Parton has spent most of the last few weeks training men of the Territorial Army’s anti-aircraft regiments. His own unit has now been brought up to full strength and they are all awaiting the inevitable. The cinema notice seems to indicate that things are coming to a head. Parton knows that his unit will be among the first to go out to France, ‘when the balloon goes up’.

12.00am (1.00am), W
ARSAW
C
ENTRAL
S
TATION

The first hospital trains arrived about an hour ago in the Polish
capital. One eyewitness sees ‘the wounded men, looking very long and flat, [they] lay on stretchers roughly covered with blankets. Horribly wounded. The first fruits of the Great Mechanised War.’ Civilian volunteers and boy scouts have come to the station to help out the overstretched Polish Army medical personnel and Red Cross. They go up and down the platforms, offering the wounded men cigarettes, snacks and hot soup. The men on the stretchers have heard no real news for the past two days. They ask the helpers what is happening in the outside world. Their most urgent enquiry is to find out if Britain and France are honouring their pledges. They all want to know if fighting has started on the Western Front.

12.00am (1.00am), F
OREIGN
M
INISTER’S RESIDENCE
, W
ARSAW

As the hospital trains are being unloaded, France’s ambassador Leon Noël is having an awkward conversation with Foreign Minister Jozef Beck and his wife Jadwiga. Poland has now been under attack since Friday morning, and still France has made no move to assist its ally. Noël tries to allay Beck’s suspicion that France is attempting to wriggle out of her obligations. But the ambassador himself is torn by conflicting emotions. On one hand, he hopes that France will stand by Poland and come to her aid. On the other, he remembers that in the last war France lost over 1,300,000 men and that she cannot bear to stand such a catastrophic loss again this time. Noël knows too that even at this late hour Georges Bonnet, his foreign minister, is attempting to find a way of France getting out of honouring her word.