The Day We Went to War (55 page)

Wenzel, with his immediate superior Lieutenant-Colonel of Police Max Daume present, presided over the mockery of a trial and sentenced 114 of the men to death. Antoni Bartoszek, the proprietor, had already been hung above the door of his tavern. The rest of the men were taken off to be machine-gunned to death on a piece of open ground. One of them managed to get away unhurt, while another seven, although wounded, were also able to escape. One of those executed, forty-year-old Warsaw bank official Daniel Gering, was of German descent. Three times he was given the chance to save himself, but each time told his captors, ‘I am Pole.’ This only served to infuriate the Nazis more, and before he was killed, Gering was treated with particular brutality. ‘They beat him to pulp,’ recalled one eyewitness, Janina Przedlacka, who lost both
her husband and a son: ‘I was left by myself, aching and desolate, stricken in a way that no human words can express.’

As the year drew to a close, the Allies issued their casualty figures. Three British soldiers and 1,135 French had been killed in action. In the air, the British had suffered 438 fatalities, and forty-two French airmen had died. At sea, the Royal Navy had lost 2,070 men, while French losses amounted to 256 men. A total of 2,511 British servicemen had been killed since 3 September, while French losses totalled 1,433. But heavy as these losses were, they bore no comparison to those of 1914. Then, between August and December 1914, the first BEF had lost 17,164 dead, 19,918 prisoner and 55,689 wounded. And in 1914, over a million Frenchmen had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Nor were casualty figures anything like the death toll from the earthquake that struck Anatolia in neutral Turkey. Elsie Warren recorded in her diary on 29 December, ‘a report from Turkey says that an earthquake took place yesterday. There are over 30,000 dead.’ In a few minutes whole towns were wiped out and vast areas of the region devastated. Cold, fire and famine added to the death toll and the suffering.

In London as the New Year approached, and despite the blackout, many were anxious to have as a good time as possible. CBS radio correspondent Ed Murrow told his listeners in America: ‘There are more dance bands playing in the West End now than in the months before peace went underground. Any establishments where we could eat in those old days now engaged small orchestras. Customers want to dance. Places like the Embassy Club, Quaglino’s, the Paradise and the Café de Paris are jammed every night. People come early and stay late . . . practically no-one wears formal evening dress. That’s a change from pre-war days.’

On New Year’s Eve itself, at the Savoy Hotel there were no less than three cabarets that night and, at midnight, trumpeters of the Life Guards to sound in the New Year. Similar jollifications were to be found at the Berkeley. For those on more modest incomes,
the Strand and Regent Palace Hotels and Lyons Corner Houses still offered ‘gala entertainment’, with celebratory ‘Zebra’ cocktails at 2s.6d (13p) a time.

Because of the blackout and the Control of Noises (Defence) Order which forbade the sounding of sirens, factory hooters, whistles, or noisy rattles, the New Year was ushered in on a relatively quiet note. In London’s Piccadilly Circus, there was a chorus of ironic cheers as somebody in the crowd illegally shone their torch on a clock face at midnight. In the booking hall of the Circus’s Underground Station, a crowd of youngsters wearing paper hats welcomed in 1940 with the singing of ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’.

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill saw the New Year in at a party given by cabinet colleague President of the Board of Trade Oliver Stanley and his wife Maureen. Their house at 58 Romney Street, Westminster, was filled to overflowing and an accordion-player went the rounds playing all the latest popular tunes. Churchill joined in with gusto the singing of a particular favourite of his ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’. American foreign correspondent Virginia Cowles was a fellow guest: ‘when the clock struck twelve a solemnity fell over the group. Mr Churchill took Freda Casa Maury and me either side of him; we all joined hands in a circle and sang Auld Lang Syne’.

Virginia, who was about to leave London to cover the war in Finland, sensed that uppermost in everybody’s mind was what 1940 would bring. None more so than the First Lord of the Admiralty, for ‘when Mr Churchill sang out the old year, he seemed deeply moved, as though he had a premonition that a few months later he would be asked to guide the British Empire through the most critical days it had ever faced’.

E
PILOGUE

What happened to the people in this book?

James Agate
remained a prolific writer and critic until his death in 1947. Among his theatrical discoveries was the talented young Donald Sinden.

Ruth Andreas-Friederich
, operating a resistance group in Berlin, survived the Nazi regime and after the war went to live in Munich, where she married. She committed suicide in September 1977, aged seventy-six, and was honoured as Righteous Amongst Nations by Yad Vashem.

Edward Beattie
, of the American news agency United Press, covered the war in Europe before being taken prisoner by the Germans in September 1944. He was released by the Red Army in April 1945. He wrote of his experiences in two books,
Passport to War
and
Diary of a Kriegie
.

Jozef Beck
, after Poland’s defeat, was interned in Roumania. He wrote an account of his foreign policy entitled
Final Report
and died, still an internee, in June 1944.

Anthony Wedgwood Benn
served in the Royal Air Force during the latter part of the Second World War. He became a Member of Parliament in November 1950 at the age of twenty-five. He succeeded his father as Viscount Stansgate but renounced his title in 1963. Benn held a number of ministerial posts in the governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He retired as an MP in 2001.

Anthony Drexel Biddle Jr
became United States Ambassador to the Polish Government in Exile in 1939 in France, and later to all the governments in exile in London from 1941. He resigned his diplomatic post to join the United States Army. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy made him ambassador to Spain but he died shortly and suddenly after the appointment was made.

Georges Bonnet
was moved from the Foreign Ministry to become Minister of Justice a fortnight after war was declared. Along with Daladier, he lost office in March 1940 and spent the rest of his long life writing justifications for his policy in 1938/1939. He died in June 1973.

Nellie Carver
worked at the Central Telegraph Office for the rest of the war, and on her retirement edited a news bulletin for former members of the CTO. She died in 1970 and her diaries came to the Imperial War Museum in 1989.

Neville Chamberlain
remained Prime Minister until 10 May 1940. He became Lord President of the Council in Churchill’s first cabinet and was a loyal supporter of the new premier. Diagnosed with bowel cancer, Chamberlain retired from office on 3 October 1940 and died on 9 November at his country home near Reading.

Moyra Charlton
served with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry and then the Auxiliary Territorial Service before joining the WRNS in
December 1942. She later married and lived on the Isle of Skye. She deposited transcripts of her diaries with the Imperial War Museum in 1988 and died at the age of eighty-two in November 2000.

Maurice Chevalier
remained in France after the 1940 defeat and was unfairly accused of collaboration with the Germans. After a short spell in the doldrums his career picked up again. Following his appearance in the 1958 film
Gigi
he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award. He died in January 1972.

Count Galeazzo Ciano
remained Italian foreign minister until February 1943 when he became ambassador to the Vatican. He voted against his father-in-law, Mussolini, in the Fascist Grand Council meeting which led to the
Duce’s
overthrow in July 1943. Tried at Verona for ‘treason’, under pressure from the Nazis he was executed there on 11 January 1944, bravely facing the firing squad.

Kenneth Clark
, in addition to his duties at the National Gallery, headed the Films Division of the Ministry of Information. He also encouraged official war art through the War Artists Advisory Committee. Many of the works of art produced as a result are now at the Imperial War Museum. Clark’s most famous post-war achievement was the television series
Civilisation
. He died in 1983 aged eighty.

Alfred Duff Cooper
, unlike Churchill and Eden, was not offered office in September 1939. He became Minister of Information in May 1940, but was not a success. Sent to the Far East in Autumn 1941, he was unfairly associated with the debacle of the fall of Singapore the following year. In 1944 he was made ambassador to France, a post in which he excelled. Dogged by ill health, he died on 1 January 1954.

Robert Coulondre
was repatriated back to France and performed a number of diplomatic tasks during the ‘Phoney War’. Unemployed
during the Vichy regime, his last official role was as a representative on negotiations dealing with reparations in 1945. He published his memoirs, entitled
From Stalin to Hitler
, in 1950 and died in March 1959.

Noël Coward
was tireless in entertaining servicemen and-women throughout the rest of the war. Denied a job in the Secret Service, he went on to produce one of the war’s finest films,
In Which We Serve
, based on the early war career of his friend, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Coward was knighted in 1970 and died in March 1973.

Virginia Cowles
reported on the fighting in Finland and on a number of other fronts, as well as in Britain. In 1945 she married Aidan Crawley. She authored a number of bestselling historical biographies, including
The Kaiser
in 1963. Twenty years later she was killed in a car crash in France, aged seventy-three.

Geoffrey Cox
,
Daily Express
correspondent in Paris, had a distinguished post-war career which included editorship of Independent Television News from 1956 to 1968, during which time he founded
News at Ten
. He died in April 2008.

Edouard Daladier
fell from power in March 1940. He was imprisoned by both the Vichy regime and by the Nazis. Returning to France after the war, he continued to play a part in politics but never again held ministerial office. He died in October 1970.

Hugh Dalton
served in Churchill’s wartime coalition as Minister of Economic Warfare and President of the Board of Trade. When Labour came to power in July 1945, Dalton expected to be made foreign secretary, but instead Prime Minister Attlee made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Forced to resign over a Budget leak, Dalton remained a grandee of the Labour Party until his death in 1962.

Sefton Delmer
escaped from Poland and covered the war in France before becoming the outstanding head of British black propaganda to Germany from 1941 to 1945. He resumed his newspaper career after the war and wrote two volumes of memoirs,
Trail Sinister
and
Black Boomerang
. He died in September 1979.

Alec Douglas-Home
was very ill during the Second World War, which prevented him from taking an active role. He lost his seat in the 1945 election but was elected again in 1950. He was a member of the Churchill, Eden and Macmillan administrations and was foreign secretary between 1950 and 1963 when he became Prime Minister. He lost the 1964 election to Harold Wilson but regained office as foreign secretary in June 1970 in the Heath government. He returned to the House of Lords in 1975 and died in October 1995.

Tom Driberg
continued writing the ‘William Hickey’ column in the
Daily Express
, but in 1942 was elected as an independent to Parliament in a sensational by-election at Maldon in Essex. He joined the Labour Party, eventually becoming its chairman. Ennobled in 1975 as Lord Bradwell, he died the following year. A memoir of his rackety private life,
Ruling Passions
, was published posthumously.

Anthony Eden
became war minister in May 1940 and foreign secretary again in December. In that post he helped to curb some of Churchill’s wilder ideas and was very much the Prime Minister’s heir apparent. Eventually succeeding Churchill in 1955, Eden’s own administration will be for ever associated with the Suez Crisis of 1956. Due to a breakdown in health, Eden resigned in January 1957 and died almost exactly twenty years later in January 1977.

Georg Elser
remained in Nazi concentration camps until almost the end of the war. The Nazis hoped to use him in a show trial to prove that the British Secret Service had been responsible for his attempt to kill Hitler. In the event, the trial did not take place and
Elser was murdered in Dachau concentration camp on 9 April 1945. Elser is now regarded as a hero of the German resistance and in 2003 appeared on a commemorative stamp.

General Maurice Gamelin
was dismissed on 18 May 1940 by Daladier’s successor Paul Reynaud. Like Daladier he was imprisoned by Vichy and the Germans, but survived the war to write a three-volume defence of his career entitled
Servir.

Dr Josef Goebbels
, overshadowed during the early years of German military successes, came into his own as the war went against Germany. Preaching a radical approach to fighting a ‘total war’, Goebbels was the only one of the Nazi leaders to visit and encourage Germans in their bombed towns and cities. His propaganda was partly responsible for keeping the Germans fighting after all hope of victory had disappeared. After poisoning their six children, Goebbels and his wife Magda committed suicide on 1 May 1945.

Hermann Goering
was lauded and promoted for the Luftwaffe’s early successes. He had, however, fallen into virtual disgrace by 1943 because of defeat in the Battle of Britain, failure to supply to Stalingrad and the inability to defend the Reich against the Anglo-American strategic bombing offensive. Dismissed by Hitler at the war’s end, Goering put up a spirited defence at the Nuremberg Trial. Sentenced to death, he cheated the hangman by committing suicide the night before his execution.