There were also happier tales. Between the frets and the joy, a middle note may be heard in the recollection of one reluctant evacuee. She was met by an equally reluctant ‘grey-haired lady’, who welcomed her new charge with the remark: ‘Well, come in. I didn’t want you, but come in anyway.’ A large dog was the first to greet this child, its paws on her shoulders. ‘The people of Littlehampton are the kindest in the world,’ reported one relieved headmistress. Experiences varied according to area, cultural and social expectation, and human nature. Mothers who had waved off ten-year-olds were to find themselves, six years later, hugging teenagers. Sharp-eyed scrappers came back chastened, wild ones were tamed and soft ones hardened.
In September 1939, the government was and was not prepared. Officially, it had been firm in its commitment to peace, but, as is so often the case in British affairs, Whitehall proved more prescient than Westminster. Civil servants had been turning the cogs of war while Chamberlain hoped for peace. The devastating power of aerial bombardment was not underestimated, though it happily proved to be exaggerated. The penultimate roar of the Nazi dragon came in the shape of the V1, a pilotless plane better known in Britain as the ‘doodlebug’, whose rise led to a third wave of evacuees. Then came the V2, hitting the earth at more than 3,500 miles per hour. Milton may have named Pandaemonium, but Hitler created it.
30
The march of the ants
On 10 May 1940, the Germans carved their bloody trail into Belgium and towards Holland. The more factional among Labour MPs still found it hard to accept that Hitler was the true enemy; for Aneurin Bevan, hostility to Germany was a distraction contrived to divert the workers’ energies from the real business of destroying capitalism. Small wonder, perhaps, that Churchill was later to say of him that he would prove ‘as great a curse to his country in peace as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war’.
But a new government must be formed, and with Chamberlain gone and Churchill as prime minister and minister for defence, Labour could join it in good conscience. Meanwhile, the German forces continued to advance, crossing the French border and threatening Holland. The British and French failed to hold their positions and the British Expeditionary Force, outflanked and outgunned, retreated to the coast. The Germans reached Brussels, their fifth conquered capital, and captured Antwerp and Cambrai. ‘This,’ said Churchill, ‘is one of the most awe-striking periods in the long history of France and Britain.’
There was a ray of hope in May, when the experts of Bletchley Park disarmed the most formidable of Germany’s secret weapons. Under the guidance of the mathematician Alan Turing, a machine was devised which could crack the feared Luftwaffe’s Enigma code. Generated by a device adapted by the Germans from a Polish model, the code’s settings were changed every twenty-four hours. It was necessary to use the prophetic powers of Turing’s machine only in desperate need, and the authorities were forced to let many ships sink rather than reveal their ability to decipher the German code. It was perhaps the greatest breakthrough of the war, but tragically compromised by the realities.
On the evening of 26 May 1940, ‘Operation Dynamo’ was launched by the English to rescue the men of the Expeditionary Force stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk. Every available water vessel was commandeered in pursuit of this miracle, but official ineptitude and the exigencies of the moment ensured that some of the troops were left behind.
On the following day, the King of the Belgians abdicated; he had had enough, as had other continental rulers overtaken by Fascism. ‘We must possess the continent,’ Churchill declared, ‘to make our way with every stop through “disaster and grief”.’ One major disaster was the capture and occupation of Paris. Was there worse to follow? On 2 July, Hitler ordered his forces to make detailed plans for the invasion of Britain. The plan gives an early glimpse of the erratic and deluded mind later evinced by the Führer. Even Göring did not believe that the preconditions for invasion could be met.
But if the nation was not aware of the possibility of invasion, it was scarcely the fault of government. All the talk about turning pots and pans and kettles into Spitfires and Blenheims kept the home fires burning. In 1943, 110,000 tonnes of scrap metal were being collected weekly. Iron railings, many of them ripped up from stately homes, fed the furnaces. ‘The Great Saucepan Offensive’, during which the women of Britain were exhorted to ‘give us your aluminium’, proved alarmingly successful once Lady Reading gave it her support. Only minutes after a speech in which she had urged her sisters to act, she walked home to see women converging on the nearest depots, saucepans in hand.
Nor did the fever to give stop with armies of women. The famous Children’s Salvage Group were enjoined to gather whatever they could – and they responded, their nimble hands collecting when the national need demanded it. ‘There’ll always be a dustbin,’ they sang, to the tune of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. Tales of First World War veterans offering their artificial limbs abound, although they were courteously refused. By 1943, government statistics claimed that each of the country’s homes had provided about half a ton of salvage.
In the drive to save paper, even libraries were not spared. Private owners denuded themselves of all but those books that were of national importance. All paper had to be salvaged, and wrapping paper was prohibited. By 1945, the National Book Drive had brought in more than 100 million books. Rationing, meanwhile, was extended to all foodstuffs apart from bread, vegetables, offal, game and fish. The result was a great upsurge in general health, but also in flatulence. The spirits of the people were still robust. While the army fought, the civilians, amidst making, mending, rummaging and whistling, did their best to laugh both at circumstance and at the enemy. A spoof pub sign portrayed Hitler’s distinctive hairstyle and moustache, and underneath ‘The Bore’s Head’. Comedy, whether in the music halls, on the wireless, or in homes, rose to happy heights.
It was as well that it did. The Battle of Britain, as it was known, beginning in July 1940, was Hitler’s experiment on British preparedness; German High Command recognized that unless German force could dominate the island’s air defences, there could be no security for the Nazi project in Europe, let alone an invasion of Britain. More attacks followed: the docks of London were particular targets, together with those of Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol. Göring directed operations; he opposed the wanton bombing of civilians because he saw no strategic advantage to it. By the end of September 1940, 1,500 civilians had been killed, but by the beginning of November, the Germans no longer dived over London. Their pilots and their planes had reached the limit of their usefulness. But within the areas of Europe ‘under German influence’, terror and violence mounted ever higher. Thousands of infants, boys, girls, crippled men and women were flung on burning piles and shot in ditches before being obscenely violated.
But Hitler’s will was undeniable, and by 14 November 1940, the city of Coventry was in ruins. A photograph of the time shows a priest standing quiet beside the lines of bodies. By contrast, the city of Oxford was spared – Hitler had intended it to be the capital of an occupied Britain in the event of a successful invasion. In similar fashion, he decided not to destroy Paris.
Russia, however, as the ancestral leader of the ‘degenerate’ Slavic nations, was to receive less considerate treatment. The Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact had been signed the previous year, but Hitler had no intention of honouring it. The failures of the USSR in the Winter War against Finland, coupled with Stalin’s timely cull of his own officers, gave him his opportunity. Hitler had issued a decree that ‘The struggle against Russia was one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be carried out with merciless harshness.’ This was not a war, he said, that could be waged ‘in a knightly fashion’. The language of spite, violence and murder sprang to his lips as if from some secret recess of Hell. Hitler told his officials that his great invasion of Russia was to occur on 20 May.