The Day the War Ended Read online

  Published by John Blake Publishing,

  an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

  80-81 Wimple Street

  London

  W1G 9RE

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  First published in paperback in 2020

  Paperback ISBN: 9781789463392

  Ebook ISBN: 9781789463507

  Audiobook ISBN: 9781789463484

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  © Text copyright Jacky Hyams 2020

  The right of Jacky Hyams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright-holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

  John Blake Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

  www.bonnierbooks.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Introduction The Day the War Ended

  Chapter 1 The Beginning of the End

  Chapter 2 It’s Over . . . Isn’t It?

  Chapter 3 Living Through the War

  Chapter 4 Love & Romance

  Chapter 5 The Return

  Chapter 6 Life After 1945

  Chapter 7 Aftermath

  Sources and Bibliography

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Before 1971 the pound was divided into 20 shillings (s). One shilling was made up of 12 pennies (d). A pound was made up of 240 pennies. A guinea was worth 21 shillings or 1 pound and 1 shilling (£1 1s 0d).

  I have given prices and sums of money in the original pre-decimal currency, which was replaced in February 1971.

  In order to calculate today’s value of any original price quoted, the National Archives has a very useful website with a currency converter: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter

  As a general rule of thumb, £1 in 1945 was worth about £43 in today’s currency.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE DAY WAR ENDED

  He was a stranger. He lived permanently on the mantelpiece. Like millions of other kids’ dads, in the summer of 1945 when World War II ended, my father was an absent presence in our home until the day of his return from far-off India in the summer of 1946.

  ‘That’s your daddy,’ children all over the country would be told, families pointing to the man in uniform, proudly staring into the camera, maybe a written scrawl on the back of the black-and-white photo carefully forwarded home with a long-awaited letter.

  Perhaps, I would reflect many decades later, the reason I had been unable to bond with my dad following the separation of those early toddler years lay buried in the conflict of my subsequent unhappy relationship with him. Who could ever know for sure if the long wartime absence of fathers through World War II permanently affected their children’s subsequent relationship with them? And what of the children who never met the man in the photo because he had been killed? How would they fare beyond the family’s loss?

  Each family in Britain has a different story to tell about this war that had made such a huge impact on their lives. Many stories were far more dramatic or damaging than mine. Like so much about the after-effects of World War II, the emotional impact of families being torn apart or evacuated elsewhere or losing loved ones could not be explored fully until decades later.

  These stories were amongst the many issues surrounding the advent of the war’s end. In looking closely at the period in Britain’s history when World War II ended, firstly on VE Day (Victory in Europe), when the war between the Allied and Axis powers and Hitler’s Germany formally ended on 8 May 1945, to be followed later that summer by VJ Day (Victory over Japan), with Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies on 15 August 1945, after the news that atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (6 August), those two dates in the summer of 1945 seem the most significant guides to the era. ( Just over a year later came an official Allied Victory Parade in London on 6 June 1946, a huge military event marking the cessation of hostilities.)

  But in marking how the official ending of World War II was experienced for those millions at home – nine-tenths of the population of Great Britain had remained civilians –when the five and a half long years of war formally ceased, was it even possible to highlight a specific or fixed point in time when wartime finally, irrevocably, ended in Britain? Or had too much changed with day-to-day lives to bring forth any easy answer?

  One can, of course, acknowledge the dates in the calendar as victory and leave it at that, paying due homage to those who perished. According to the Royal British Legion, World War II killed 382,700 members of the British Armed Forces and 67,100 civilians. As tragic as each death impacts on every home, this figure seems relatively low when balanced against World War II’s impact on the tens of millions who perished from other countries around the world. Such histories, of course, did not emerge immediately. They would be gradually revealed to the world in the months and years that followed that iconic official VE Day. The complexities of war ending in Britain were very far from simple: a small country with a vast empire sprawled across the globe, an island separated from the rest of Europe by water, unconquered by an evil force, yet torn apart both economically and in bricks and rubble, all this in addition to the long-lasting emotional strife of those at home living right through the war with their the stories of hardship, family separation, injury and, in some cases, devastation.

  Then there is the ironic case of Britain’s leadership through the tough times until the final ending. You’d expect such an individual to emerge as a feted colossus hailed by the people when the hostilities stopped. Not quite.

  Even now Winston Churchill remains a legendary icon (if controversial to some). Back in 1945, he had been viewed as a political giant, a tubby man of privilege with a cigar and a V-sign who had steered the nation through the most fearsome days and nights with memorable rhetoric.

  ‘You do your worst and we will do our best,’ he wrote in July 1941 following one of many visits to bomb-damaged cities like Plymouth where the sight of the streets, ragged from destruction, brought tears to his eyes.

  Yet Winston Churchill and his Conservative Party were soundly rejected by the British people when nearly 25 million war-weary voters turned up at the ballot box in the July 1945 election that tumultuous summer to vote in favour of the Labour Party. It was headed by the man who had been Churchill’s deputy prime minister from 1942 onwards, Clement Attlee.

  That sudden dismissal of Churchill, unexpected as it was at the time, revealed the depth of the struggle endured by the millions who had lived through wartime.

  They’d come through, got on with it stoically – somehow. Yet many hungered for change, aware that the years ahead for the victorious country meant facing up to huge problems. Millions had urgent need of housing thanks to the overall requirement to rebuild the damaged country. On the economic scale, the country was broken, in huge debt to its major ally, the United States. Even many of Britain’s Armed Forces, fearful of the years of disillusion and unemployment that had followed the First World War, voted for a new Labour gover
nment – and the impact of serious political change. Normal party politics had been suspended from May 1940 to May 1945 in the interest of national unity when the three main political parties had formed a wartime coalition.

  Now it was the turn of a new kind of leadership.

  Women’s wartime battle had been, for most, on the ground, though there had been valiant and courageous effort from the comparatively small numbers of women in the Forces, the 1 million-plus female factory workers as well as the huge army of female volunteers on the ground.

  Most of those wives and mothers, exhausted and weary, saw a glimmer of hope for the future in a new socialist-led Labour offer of social security for all, family allowances, educational reform and a brand new National Health Service.

  For even as victory had been claimed, there was a growing, uneasy sense that peace, in the future, would not resemble anything that anyone might have once hoped for or imagined. No chance whatsoever of turning the clock back to any semblance of previously held stability. Too much had been lost.

  Yet the British sense of humour, never far from the surface, was poised to sum up any underlying cynicism of the days ahead. ‘Well, there’s nothing to look forward to now. There was always the all-clear before,’ quipped BBC Radio comedian Robb Wilton in his sketch ‘The Day Peace Broke Out’. (Wilton, 1881–1957), was one of BBC Radio’s most popular comedians in World War II thanks to his series of sketches and monologues loved by millions of listeners.)

  Peace proved itself as a somewhat complicated arrival. Many could still recall the untruthful (or fake news) ‘peace in our time’ story the newspapers promised the country back in 1938 after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s return from his disastrous encounter with Hitler in Munich. A year later, the ‘peace’ had morphed into war. Real war.

  GERMANY CAPITULATED! crowed the Daily Telegraph news-paper on 8 May 1945. Here, at long last, came the real event, finally arriving after all the excitement at home of June 1944’s D-Day Normandy landings in Europe, followed by the nail-biting momentum of the long months that followed as the Allied incursion into Europe fought German military determination – and drove it towards victory.

  But how could it be peace as we’d understand it now? The ink was barely dry on the surrender treaties signed and the armaments only just laid down. Relief for the moment was the only order of the day. Yet the word ‘peace’ glossed over the reality of that crowing headline. The Allied victory had not always been a certainty.

  On 27 March 1945, the last German V-2 rocket had landed in England in Orpington, Kent, killing one person and injuring thirty. Earlier that same day, another lethal V-2 rocket had exploded in London’s East End, killing 134 residents of Hughes Mansions, Vallance Road.

  In the months before those last V-2s, many thousands had died and families shed bitter tears as a result of the German ‘last-ditch’ attempt to destroy Allied cities.

  Yet just weeks after those last rockets, people of all ages were dancing, cheering, revelling in the streets everywhere. Could Britain swiftly pick up the pieces of life after five and a half years of determined and repeated battering from the enemy? Over time, yes. But it was never going to be a swift return to normality.

  The end story itself was a slow, gradual finale for those at home. ‘Half lighting’, as it was officially described, came to millions of blacked-out homes in Britain as far back as September 1944. Other than for those living on the coast, ‘windows, other than skylights, need be curtained only sufficiently to prevent objects inside the building from being distinguishable from outside’.

  Direct lights were still forbidden and, if the warning siren sounded, ‘half lighting’ or ‘dim out’ became black-out again if the air-raid siren sounded. Regulations were slightly relaxed on car and cycle lamps and better street lighting was allowed, provided it could be turned off during raids. By December 1944, lighting on buses and trains was close to normal again, and churches with stained-glass windows could have their pre-war lights on. By 30 December, car owners were told they could light up their number plates again.

  It was not until 20 April 1945 that Herbert Morrison, the then home secretary, announced in the House of Commons (to loud cheering) the total abolition of the blackout from dusk on Monday 24 April, except for an area five miles inland from the coast. This last restriction was finally lifted on 10 May.

  Yet the delight of taking down the blackout curtaining or dismantling the damp and disliked Anderson shelter sunk into the garden proved to be minor enthusiasms after all that had gone before. Often, households were frequently shabby behind the blackout curtains, with faded casement curtains and lace curtains rotting.

  Tearing down the curtains could be a dirty process. One Devon woman found only dust and dead insects accumulated behind the shutters for six years. Thrift, not surprisingly, had taken over the country as a national obsession. One Midlands woman reported afterwards: ‘We did not go mad and burn the materials; they came in useful for years.’

  Children too had an unexpected reaction to the dramatic turning on of light. Many young children, never allowed out after dark for their entire lifetime, wept in fear when taken out to see the lights.

  One child, taken out by her mother to see the hitherto unseen moon responded: ‘What’s that lamp doing in the sky?’

  Two weeks after the formal abolition of the blackout, a new order came through: floodlighting and decorative lighting on seaside piers and bandstands was banned to save fuel. Austerity had only removed its hat very briefly. It would remain a byword for the country for several years to come.

  Consider what the country looked like in that momentous summer of 1945.

  Three quarters of a million houses had been destroyed or severely damaged. Public services, disrupted all the time by war, continued to be hugely disrupted for some time. Life expectancy had increased (from just fifty years in early 1900 to around age sixty-five). But access to medical services was, mostly, far from free – millions were too impoverished to pay for them.

  Efforts to improve lives had been made pre-war: the late 1930s had seen a healthy slum clearance programme until war halted it. As a consequence there remained many appalling Victorian slums in the big cities and over-crowded, inadequate and now ruined housing across the country. Seven million homes lacked a supply of hot water. Six million homes relied on an outside toilet.

  The year 1945, so momentous in its historical status, was a very different kind of ‘victory’. Technically, the war had been won by Britain and its Allies. But the reality of retrieving even some part of the ease and comfort of peacetime emerged as a lengthy process.

  It was long acknowledged by the authorities that the British public would deserve a new start when war ended. In December 1942, the Beveridge Report was published, drawn up by economist Sir William Beveridge. The report proposed a comprehensive post-war system of social security for Britain. Essentially this lay the foundation of the welfare state, attacking the evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.

  At the time, the report caused a sensation. A popular version sold over 600,000 copies.

  Then, as war began to draw to a close in 1944, more government directives set forth two major developments: a White Paper committed the government to the pursuit of full employment, followed by a new 1944 Education Act, creating free, non-fee-paying grammar schools and free, compulsory secondary education to age fifteen, providing chances of a social mobility, via university, that had never existed. (Until that time the standard school-leaving age was fourteen.)

  Furthermore, that year’s new Town and Country Planning Act gave far-reaching powers to local authorities to acquire bomb-damaged areas for reconstruction and redevelopment.

  But in those few weeks prior to the official ending, the beginnings of a huge and dramatic scenario engulfed the world.

  On 12 April 1945, as Franklin D Roosevelt, president of the United States – and a great wartime ally of Britain and then prime minister Winston Churchill – died, membe
rs of Germany’s Hitler Youth distributed cyanide capsules to the audience seated at Berlin’s Philharmonic, as they watched the final concert of the Nazi era. The curtain was finally coming down for Hitler and the Nazi regime.

  Three days later Allied soldiers encountered appalling scenes of horror as they liberated the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Millions had been murdered systematically in other concentration camps, and many sent to die in gas chambers.

  At the end of April, holed up in his Berlin bunker with his new wife, Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler used a gun and a cyanide capsule to end it all.

  That same April, the UK’s Labour Party issued its end of war manifesto which included an urgent housing programme, the creation of a new National Health Service and the nationalisation of many key industries. Events in that month had been moving incredibly swiftly – but the politicians believed that the building blocks were now in place to steer the country towards the new start everyone deserved.

  If the real changes to everyday lives were to limp along slowly, it is important to consider Britain just as it was in the year of 1945.

  There were trains, trams, buses, tubes and a few taxis on the road in the cities. In the country, bikes were the most frequent mode of transport. Car ownership, pre-war, had been for the well off. Compared to what lay ahead it was very low. Walking some distance wasn’t a weekend hobby, it was frequently a daily necessity.

  On the streets many people wore hats – the men politely doffing them to the women and carefully walking on the outside of the pavement.

  Culturally, books, films and plays were at the mercy of the censor. And foreigners, any kind, were not yet welcome. (‘No Irish, no blacks, no dogs’ was a sign frequently seen by those searching for somewhere to live in post-war British cities; you could even read the mantra, or something similar, in the classified ads of newspapers.)