The Day We Went to War (2 page)

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

I
NTRODUCTION

‘. . . 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, commemorated 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’.

The following year, at the cinema, millions saw a celluloid depiction of the horrors of a new world war in Alexander Korda’s
Things to Come
. The scenes of a devastating air raid on London, with high-explosive bombs and gas raining down on the practically defenceless city, shocked British picturegoers. So too did the newsreels of the bombing of Spanish and Chinese cities. Exaggerated accounts of the strength of Hitler’s air force by, among others, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, did nothing to allay their fears. Nor did statements by politicians. In December 1938, Sir John Simon, Chamberlain’s Chancellor of Exchequer told an audience, ‘The Germans had it in their power to let loose 3,000 tons of bombs in a single day . . . in the first week or two of war the Germans might do an amount of damage in London and other great cities which would amount in money to £500,000,000.’

A month later, on 28 January 1939, Chamberlain himself warned, ‘If we should ever be involved in war we may well find that if we are not all in the firing line, we may all be in the line of fire.’

But despite all the official doom and gloom, and the darkening international situation, life for most Britons in 1939 went on much as before. The worst of the Great Depression was over, but of Britain’s population of 47,762,000, over 1,270,000 were still registered as unemployed. The average weekly wage for a man in 1939 was £3.9s.0d (£3.45), while that of a woman’s was a mere £1.12s.6d (£1.63). The average hours they worked to earn those wages were 46.5 and 43.5 respectively.

In 1939, Greater London, with a population of 8,650,000, was still the world’s largest city, with Tokyo it nearest rival. The capital had a Jewish population of 210,000, and 313,900 foreigners, mainly French, Italians, Germans, Swiss and Americans, lived and worked in London. The capital’s total working population was 2,749,000. Many lived in London’s suburbs, where the price of a semi-detached
house ranged from £400 to £600 (a similar house in the provinces fetched £100 less). Flats, such as ones in Hackney with deep balconies, advertised in early 1939, could be rented from as little as 10s (50p) per week, with larger ones at £1.1s.0d (£1.05).

To furnish them, there were bedroom suites from Fred Lawrence’s of Westbourne Grove costing as little as £22.1s (£22.05), and half that in the sales. In the wardrobe there might be found, from Swan and Edgar’s, a lady’s sports jacket at £2.12s.6d (£2.63), trousers at £1.7s.6d (£1.38) and a matching shirt at 10s.9d (54p). The man of the house could buy a suit from Montague Burton, the Fifty Shilling Tailors, for £2.10s (£2.50). A three-piece drawing-room suite could be got for the same amount, while a dining-room set of table, four chairs, and sideboard cost £12.12s.0d (£12.60). For the dining room, an 84-piece canteen of cutlery could be bought for as little as £7.7s.0d (£7.35). Labour-saving devices were still coming into their own by 1939. Although few middle-class homes boasted a fridge, many now had a Hoover or Goblin vacuum cleaner which could be got from Southern Electrical Products of Kingston, Surrey, at £4.0s.0d (£4.00) and £2.9s.6d (£2.48) respectively, or weekly instalments of 3s.6d (18p) on the ‘never-never’. In 1939, only 1,200,000 British homes had a telephone, and most people still relied on the Royal Mail for sending messages. A letter cost a penny-halfpenny (1p), while a telegram was sixpence (3p) for the first nine words and then a penny for each additional word.

In the bathroom, one could find a bar of Palmolive soap at three-pence (1p) or a tablet of Wright’s Coal Tar soap costing sixpence (3p), the same price as a tube of Pepsodent or Kolynos toothpaste. In the medicine cupboard, to guard against coughs and colds, the household might have a large bottle of Galloway’s Cough Syrup, ‘equally effective for young and old’ at 2s.6d (13p). There might also be DDD Prescription which had ‘golden drops with miraculous powers to clear the skin of spots’ at only 1s.3d (6p) a bottle. Most
men still had wet shaves, but a Remington Electric Close Shaver could be bought for £3.7s.6d (£3.38). To keep his hair in place, the man of the house could buy Brylcreem at 1s.9d (9p) a jar. His wife or daughter’s lipsticks cost from sixpence (3p) to 2s.6d (13p). A lot of British homes still did not have an inside, or separate, lavatory. But in those that did, one would probably find ‘Bronco: the perforated toilet paper for economy, health, comfort and neatness’, a 700-sheet roll for 1s (5p).

Downstairs in the lounge, or drawing room, the family’s radio, or wireless set, took pride of place; 9,009,700 wireless licences at ten shillings (50p) were sold in 1939. A Bush all-wave radio set with ten push buttons, recommended by Britain’s first disc jockey, Christopher Stone, cost £12.12s.0d (£12.60) cash, ‘or on popular payments’. Also in the room might be the family’s HMV portable wind-up gramophone, which retailed at £6. Records of some of the early hits of 1939, like ‘And the Angels Sing’ and ‘If I Didn’t Care’, cost two shillings (10p). The room’s cocktail cabinet would undoubtedly be stocked with whisky at 12s.6d (63p) a bottle, and a bottle of gin at just slightly less. A litre (1.76 pints) of Martini Dry cost 5s.6d (28p), the sweeter version a shilling (5p) less. A bottle of Gilbey’s ready-made ‘Odds On’ wine cocktail retailed at 2s.6d (13p).

For those Britons who preferred to drink away from home, there was always the public house or pub. Bolton in Lancashire had no less than 304 pubs in 1939. In any of them one could buy a pint of mild for 5d (2p), India Pale Ale for 7d (3p) a pint and strong ale for 11d (5p). Whisky, rum and gin cost 6d (3p) a measure, while a Single Malt might cost as much as 10d (4p). A glass of port, sherry or Empire Wine was sold at threepence (1p) a time. In 1939, Britons sank 895 million gallons of beer and 10,098,000 proof gallons of spirits. The same year, they drank 887 million gallons of milk. Less healthily, they also smoked a lot too. A packet of twenty Player’s Navy Medium Cut cost just under a shilling (5p) in 1939, while other brands like Woodbine, Piccadilly and De Reszke
Minors cost even less. To light them, a Ronson lighter could be got for £1.1s.0d ( £1.05). Pipe tobacco cost a shilling (5p) an ounce, and five Manikin cigars were 11d (5p) a packet.

For those Britons with a sweet tooth, an extra large tin of Quality Street cost 4s.6d (23p), while a packet of Maltesers sold at twopence (1p), and Black Magic chocolates at 2s.10d (14p) a pound box. And if one over-indulged oneself there was always Beechams Pills and Powders at 1s.3d (6p) a packet, and Kelloggs All Bran, ‘a food that brings normal “regularity” to constipation victims’, retailing at 7½d (3p).

1939 saw the passing of the Holidays with Pay Act. Three million more Britons now received, for the first time, a fortnight’s holiday with pay. Most people still went to British seaside resorts for their annual holidays. The majority went there by train or charabanc, but quite a number of Britain’s 1,900,000 private-car owners packed up the family Morris Eight (£128) or the swisher Sunbeam Talbot (£285) and made for the coast. For those who wanted a more energetic holiday than sitting in a deckchair on the beach at Margate or Skegness, there were the Norfolk Broads, where the hire of an eight-berth cruiser for two weeks cost £18.

For those even more adventurous and with 15s (75p) for a passport, there were plenty of holidays advertised in Britain’s ally, France. A room at the Hotel Opal near the Madeleine in Paris cost as little as 6s (30p) a night, while one with a bath at the smart resort of Deauville cost £1, and for an extra 12s (60p) one could get full board. To get away, if only physically, from Europe’s troubles in 1939, a luxury cruise of fifty-six days to South America, the West Indies and Florida was being advertised at just 5s (25p) short of £100. For those Britons curious to see Nazi Germany at first hand, the London branch of the German Travel Bureau advertised an all-inclusive nine-day tour of the Reich for £6.16s.0d (£6.80). Ominously, as tension mounted that summer, the tour was advertised as being ‘specially escorted’.

C
HAPTER
1

Countdown to War

January–August 1939

January

1 January, L
ONDON

Gordon Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, broadcasts a New Year’s Day message from Lambeth Palace. The archbishop tells listeners: ‘In the dawn of a new year it is still a confused and troubled world that we see. Terrible wars are being waged in Spain and China. In Europe restless national ambitions are increasing the widespread sense of insecurity. No wonder it seems as if the whole world were going mad.’