The Day We Went to War (3 page)

1 January, W
ORTHING

‘Everyone’s wondering what can happen next!’ (Miss Joan Colebrook Strange, aged thirty-four, a trained physiotherapist living with her widowed mother in Langton Road, Worthing. Joan Strange was a committed Christian who undertook a great deal of voluntary work amongst German and Austrian Jewish refugees.)

2 January, W
ORTHING

‘The Archbishop of Canterbury broadcast last night a New Year’s Sermon telling all “to hope for the best and prepare for the worst” – not very encouraging!’ (Joan Strange)

5 January, O
BERSALZBERG

On his way back from Monte Carlo, Polish foreign minister Colonel Jozef Beck pays a courtesy call on Hitler at the ‘Berghof’. Hitler surprises the Pole by calling for Danzig’s return to Germany. Under the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Danzig has had the status of a ‘Free City’ with a League of Nations commissioner. The population is overwhelmingly German and the Nazis have control of the ruling Danzig Senate. Hitler tells Beck that Germany will guarantee Poland’s frontiers if a ‘final settlement’ can be reached on Danzig, and other outstanding issues between the two countries. ‘Danzig,’ the Fuehrer reminds the Pole, ‘was German, would always remain German, and sooner or later would return to Germany.’ Beck, who has a reputation for deviousness, is evasive. He tells Hitler that Polish public opinion would be against any change in Danzig’s status.

7 January, L
ONDON

Picture Post
, Britain’s largest-circulation illustrated weekly, features comedian Leslie Henson’s humorous ‘Outlook for 1939’. Henson warns readers: ‘But to carry a rifle may at any time become compulsory, particularly in civilized countries.’

11 January, R
OME

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his foreign secretary Lord Halifax visit Rome in an attempt to further the cause of peace. Chamberlain believes that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is a moderating influence on Hitler. But nothing is accomplished by the visit. Mussolini tells his son-in-law and foreign minister Count
Galeazzo Ciano: ‘These men are not made of the same stuff as Francis Drake and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men and they will lose their empire.’

Ciano telephones his German opposite number Joachim von Ribbentrop and tells him that the visit has been a ‘huge farce’.

11 January, W
ORTHING

‘Mr Chamberlain and Lord Halifax have arrived in Rome this afternoon. Accorded a great welcome. Should we welcome Mussolini in a like manner, I wonder?’ (Joan Strange)

15 January, B
RITAIN

The Irish Republican Army starts a bombing campaign on mainland Britain. Targets in London, Manchester and Birmingham are attacked. The IRA demands the withdrawal of all British forces and officialdom from Ireland. The Nazi-orchestrated press in Germany reports the news with more than a touch of
Schadenfreude:

Five bombs went off, dreadful, my dear!
Old England nearly choked with fear.

When the overfed Englishman at his breakfast table heard this news
he dropped his beefsteak from his fork in horror.

23 January, Berlin

Anti-Nazi Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, leaks misinformation that the Nazis are about to invade the Netherlands. They will seize Dutch airfields in order to use them to deliver a knockout blow on Britain. The leak is taken seriously in Whitehall. It is decided that ‘an attack by Germany on Holland would be a first step to attack on us and must be regarded as a direct challenge’.

Hitler receives Polish foreign minister Colonel Jozef Beck at the Berghof, Obersalzberg, 5 January 1939. Beck told an English visitor, ‘Hitler has power and charm and flair, but he is not a Colonel Beck.’

The British ministerial visit to Rome, January 1939.
From left to right:
Count Galeazzo Ciano; Lord Halifax; Neville Chamberlain and Benito Mussolini. As Chamberlain departed, British residents in Rome sang ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. ‘What is this little song?’ Mussolini asked.

24 January, W
ORTHING

‘In Spain, the Government’s defence of Barcelona is giving in rapidly. Barcelona is bound to fall very soon. Hitler and Mussolini are reported to be preparing their manifesto on their colonial demands for January 30th. Can war possibly be avoided?’ (Joan Strange)

26 January, B
ARCELONA

General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces enter Barcelona. They encounter only sporadic resistance from the city’s Republican defenders. Spain’s civil war, which began in July 1936, and has cost over half a million lives, is now approaching its end.

26 January, W
ARSAW

Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop pays an official visit to the Polish capital. He again brings up Hitler’s proposals regarding Danzig and the Polish Corridor, the territory that separates East Prussia from Germany proper. Beck once again rebuffs the German offer. The vain and pompous von Ribbentrop returns empty-handed to Berlin. He has misled Hitler over the Poles’ willingness to negotiate the future of Danzig and the Corridor.

26 January, P
ARIS

French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, regarded in Paris and London as an out-and-out appeaser, makes a speech reaffirming France’s commitments in eastern Europe. Few believe that the Foreign Minister is being sincere. Bonnet is suspected of having told von Ribbentrop of France’s disinterest in the region, when the Nazi visited Paris six weeks ago.

26 January, T
EDDINGTON

‘Barcelona fell to Franco at noon. Heigho!! I wish it could have offered the resistance Madrid has done.’ (Mrs Helena Pare Lydia
Mott, aged sixty-six; a woman of independent means living in Teddington, Middlesex)

28 January, B
IRMINGHAM

In a speech at Birmingham, Chamberlain defends the Munich Agreement: ‘For myself looking back, I see nothing to regret nor any reason to suppose that another course would have been preferable.’

30 January, B
ERLIN

Adolf Hitler addresses the Reichstag on the sixth anniversary of his coming to power. He warns the deputies: ‘If international Jewish finance inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a new world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race.’ The Fuehrer’s words are greeted with stormy applause.

30 January, T
EDDINGTON

‘Hitler’s speech at seven. We had dinner early and he was in full blast when we had finished. Seemed to have a good reception – but his speech was much faster and much more clip style and varied very much in tone – high and biting . . . coughed at intervals. He went on bawling until 9.25pm then Goering. All sang “Deutschland, D- ueber alles in der Welt”, “Horst Wessel”. Heil! Heil! Heil! Damn!’ (Helen Mott)

30 January, W
ORTHING

‘While all Germany was listening to Hitler’s broadcast on the sixth anniversary of the Third Reich, Worthing held a most interesting meeting in connection with the Jews. A Mr Davidson from Woburn House, London, gave a talk on the work of the refugee problem and a committee was formed to coordinate efforts being made here in Worthing. I got on!’ (Joan Strange)

February

3 February, L
ONDON

The BBC broadcasts a radio programme entitled
Children in Flight
. It consists of interviews made at the Dovercourt camp for German Jewish refugee children. They have come to Britain under the Kindertransport scheme, following the excesses of
Kristallnacht
last November. The Nazi Party newspaper, the
Voelkischer Beobachter
, attacks the broadcast. It accuses the BBC of ‘making political capital out of pity and at the same time agitating indirectly against Germany’. The paper says the interviews with the children were ‘cleverly selected to appeal to sentimentality’.

3 February, W
ORTHING

‘In all the evening for once! Listened to excellent broadcast “Children in Flight”, a series of sound recordings of the German child refugees taken about Xmas time. The little Laufen boy, Peter, five and a half, was one of the little children at Dovercourt. His father told me that Peter asked him if it were true that when he came to England he would be allowed to go into a garden again. In Austria and Germany Jews are not allowed in public gardens. Their sufferings have been indescribable.’ (Joan Strange)

6 February, L
ONDON

In a House of Commons speech, Chamberlain reaffirms that: ‘Any threat to the vital interests of France, from whatever quarter it comes, must evoke the immediate co-operation of this country.’

9 February, L
ONDON

The Home Office, responsible for air-raid precautions, announces plans to provide shelters to thousands of homes in areas thought vulnerable to air attack. Families with an income of less than £250 a year will receive their shelters free. Other households may buy
them for £6.14s.0d (£6.70). The shelters are already being called ‘Andersons’ after Lord Privy Seal Sir John Anderson, the dour and rather pompous but ultra-efficient minister with responsibility for civilian defence. They are steel-built, tunnel-shaped shelters measuring 6 ft 6 in by 4 ft 4 in. They are made in sections and need only two people to put them up. It is reckoned that a million and a half ‘Andersons’ will be given out by the end of August. Last September at the height of the Sudeten Crisis, over thirty-eight million gas masks, costing 2s.6d (13p) each, were distributed to the civilian population.

10 February, V
ATICAN

Pope Pius XI dies. Although a Concordat was signed with Hitler back in July 1933, Pius XI has often spoken out against the Nazi regime and its persecution of the Roman Catholic Church. In May last year he deliberately and ostentatiously left Rome for Castel Gandolfo during Hitler’s state visit.

10 February, W
ORTHING

‘A remarkable character, and devoted to the cause of peace.’ (Joan Strange on the Pope’s death)

14 February, W
ILHELMSHAVEN

Germany’s latest battleship, the 35,000-ton
Bismarck
, is launched. In his political testament
Mein Kampf
, Hitler wrote that it was a mistake on the part of the Kaiser’s Germany to antagonise Britain by building a fleet to rival the Royal Navy. But it now looks as if he too is intending to challenge Britain’s naval superiority.

15 February, T
EDDINGTON

‘£580,000,000 to be spent on defence for the year. What an abominable wicked thing due to one paltry Austrian paranoiac.’ (Helena Mott)

25 February, L
ONDON

The first Anderson shelters are delivered in Tiber and Carlsbad Streets, Islington. Mrs Treadwell of Tiber Street tells the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘I hope we shall never have to use it. Still if trouble does come, I’ll feel safer there than in the house. In any case, we can always use it as a summer house!’

26 February, W
ORTHING

‘And today we hear the British Government proposes to recognise Franco – blow!’ (Joan Strange)

28 February, L
ONDON
and P
ARIS

The British and French governments formally recognise General Franco’s regime as the legitimate government of Spain. In the House of Commons, there is an Opposition vote of censure about the recognition. Amid angry scenes, in which there are shouts of ‘
Heil
Chamberlain’, it is defeated by 344 votes to 137. In Paris, head of government Edouard Daladier persuades eighty-two-year-old Marshal Philippe Petain, the Hero of Verdun, to become France’s first ambassador to Franco.

March

2 March, V
ATICAN

Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, is elected pope and takes the title Pius XII. He was Papal Nuncio in Bavaria at the time of the Soviet republic there twenty years ago, and the experience has left him with a fear and loathing of communism. Many Vatican experts believe that this might make him turn a blind eye to the worst excesses of the Nazi regime.