The Day We Went to War (38 page)

‘England! This is your work!’ was the slogan on this anti-British poster that the Germans plastered throughout Warsaw. A contemporary account claimed that a nine-year-old boy, Stás Kempi
ski, tore down one of the posters at the corner of Trembacka and Krakowskie Przedmies
ie streets. He was shot on the spot by a German patrol.

In Warsaw, the Germans put up posters depicting a wounded Polish soldier blaming Chamberlain for the destruction of the capital with the caption ‘England, this is your work’. On 3 November 1939, two women, widow Eugenia Wlodarz and student Elzbieta Zahorska were sentenced to death and shot for tearing down copies of the posters. As she faced the firing squad, Elzbieta defiantly shouted out to them in German the first line of the Polish national anthem, ‘
Noch ist Polen nicht verloren
!’ (‘Poland Is Not Yet Lost!’)

C
HAPTER
6

The War in the Air

While Poland was being crushed, Britain and France failed to render their ally any real practical assistance. A Royal Air Force reconnaissance flight over the German fleet on 3 September 1939 was followed the next day by an attack on the ships by fifteen Blenheim and fourteen Wellington bombers. The raid was not a success. Five bombers from each force failed to find targets in the low-cloud conditions. The remaining Blenheims carried out low-level attacks on the pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer
and the cruiser
Emden
in Wilhelmshaven. At least three bombs landed on the
Admiral Scheer
, but they failed to explode. The
Emden
was damaged when a Blenheim crashed on it, one of the five lost in the raid. While little damage was done to the German warships that day, bombs were dropped on the neutral Danish town of Ejsberg, 110 miles north of the target area, killing two civilians.

No. 9 Squadron lost two Wellingtons during the raid. One of them was No. L 4275, shot down either by anti-aircraft fire or a German fighter over Brunsbuettel at the mouth of the Kiel Canal. In its crew were two young Aircraftsmen 2nd Class; twenty-year-old
Kenneth Day from Essex and twenty-two-year-old Londoner George Brocking. Day’s body was recovered from the sea ten days later, and he was buried with full military honours by the Germans in Cuxhaven cemetery. Brocking’s body was never found, and he is commemorated on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede. Both men were ground crew who had volunteered as air gunners. They were also pre-war, and now non-active, members of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. On 16 July, Mosley had held a large anti-war rally at Earls Court. Six weeks later, on the day Poland was invaded, Mosley issued a message to all members of the British Union. In it, Sir Oswald declared:

‘To our members my message is plain and clear. Our country is involved in war. Therefore I ask you to do nothing to injure our country or to help any other Power. Our members should do what the law requires of them, and if they are members of any of the Forces or Services of the Crown, they should obey their orders, and in every particular, obey the rules of their service.’

As they took off on their first and last operational flight over Germany, it is doubtful if Brocking and Day had had the opportunity of reading that part of their leader’s message. Nor Mosley’s reminder that ‘Nearly twenty-five years ago when I was barely eighteen years of age, I was flying over the German lines in the last war.’

After the Kiel Raid, RAF Bomber Command operations were mainly directed at dropping propaganda leaflets over Germany. Already on the first night of the war, nearly six million leaflets had been dropped over Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, Bremen and the Ruhr industrial belt. This ‘confetti war’ soon became the source of numerous jokes. One of the first to appear in print was featured in the Peterborough column of the
Daily Telegraph
:

The pilot of one of our ‘leaflet’ planes reported back to headquarters two hours before he was due. His astonished C.O. asked for an explanation.

‘Well, Sir,’ the young officer replied, ‘I flew over enemy territory as instructed and tipped out the parcels over the side.’

‘Do you mean you dropped them out still roped in bundles?’ said the C.O. in an anxious voice.

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Good God, man, you might have killed somebody!’

Another joke told of the ‘leaflet’ plane that arrived back many hours overdue. When asked why he had taken so long, the pilot told his C.O. that to ensure safe delivery, he had posted each leaflet through the letter box. While a ‘naval’ version went:

Lieutenant-Commander reports to the Captain on the bridge of a destroyer: ‘The ship’s engines have stopped, sir.’

Captain: ‘I know. There’s an enemy U-boat about.’

Lieutenant-Commander: ‘Are you going to depth-charge her, sir?’

Captain: ‘No, I’m sending down a diver with leaflets.’

But not everybody saw it as a joke. Churchill was characteristically contemptuous of such methods of waging war, later recalling, ‘We contented ourselves with dropping pamphlets to rouse the Germans to a higher morality.’ Noël Coward, working in Paris on a propaganda liaison job with the French, wrote a memorandum on the subject. In it he said that if it was the policy of His Majesty’s Government to bore the Germans to death he didn’t think we had enough time. ‘For this,’ Coward recalled, ‘I was reprimanded.’

Despite the official reason that the ‘leaflet’ raids were giving aircrew valuable training, many RAF officers and men were sceptical as to their usefulness. Quite a few shared the view of future Bomber Command chief Arthur Harris that the leaflets were only
going to augment Germany’s supplies of lavatory paper for the duration. But the height of official farce over the leaflets was reached when the ‘ace’ American foreign correspondent John Gunther asked at the Ministry of Information to see a copy of a leaflet. MP Harold Nicolson recorded the exchange in his diary on 14 September:

‘The request was refused. He asked why. The answer was, “We are not allowed to disclose information which might be of value to the enemy.” When Gunther pointed out that two [
sic
] million of these leaflets had been dropped over Germany, the man blinked and said, “Yes, something must be wrong there.”’

At Westminster, there were many who shared Churchill’s view that it was nothing short of a disgrace that while our Polish ally’s cities, towns and villages were being ruthlessly bombed and machine-gunned, all the RAF appeared to be doing was dropping leaflets. Air attacks in the west on German airfields and communications would at least relieve some pressure on the Poles. Conservative MP Edward Spears tackled the Secretary of State for Air Sir Kingsley Wood directly on the subject. There was a heated exchange between the two men. The air minister begged Spears on grounds of national security not to raise the subject in the House. Spears reluctantly agreed.

Fellow Conservative MP Leopold Amery also went to see Sir Kingsley to urge him to take more offensive action. Amery, one of the senior statesmen of the party, but who had been out of office since 1929, suggested to the air minister that the RAF attack the Black Forest with incendiary bombs. The vast wooded area was full of arms dumps and other war supplies, so it was a legitimate military target. Moreover, as it had been a very dry summer, the wood would burn very easily. But, Amery argued, it would have to be done quickly before the autumn rains came. Sir Kingsley, who unlike Spears and Amery had not served during the First World War, and whose previous portfolios had been Health and the Post Office, flatly turned down the suggestion, ‘with some asperity’.

Airmen loading propaganda leaflets to be dropped over Germany, into a Whitley bomber. Public reaction to the RAF’s leaflet raids was mixed. Comments ranged from the contemptuous ‘fighting with bloody pamphlets’ to the gentler ‘I’m glad they dropped them pamphlets instead of bombs.’

‘You can leave it to our great little air minister. He will lead the RAF on to winged victory.’ During a visit to the RAF units in France in October 1939, Sir Kingsley Wood, Secretary of State for Air, is photographed on a converted Paris bus.

‘Are you aware it is private property?’ he asked the combative Amery. ‘Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!’

‘It takes a lot to turn an appeaser into a belligerent,’ was Spears’s acidic verdict when told of the interview by Amery.

But the reports that Wood and his War Cabinet colleagues were getting were hardly reassuring. On 6 September they received news of what became known as ‘The Battle of Barking Creek’:

‘Air raid warning (red) was received at 0640 on 6th and later unconfirmed reports of twenty-eight hostile aircraft near Hornchurch. RDF (radar) and observer reports indicated a massed attack on London and the Thames Estuary. Fighters were sent to intercept. Hurricane fighters were engaged by our own guns. Spitfires then attacked Hurricanes. Two Hurricanes were shot down by Spitfires and one Spitfire crashed . . . British submarine ‘Seahorse’, returning from patrol, was attacked and damaged by an Anson aircraft . . .’