The Day War Broke Out Read online

  Three or four days later, I had a phone call from my girl. She was now working in Central London and wanted me to meet her in Southampton Row the following afternoon. I was able to make the afternoon because I was on the early shift on the counter.

  On our second date there was a surprise. She met me fully kitted out in the blue uniform of the Women’s Royal Air Force: hair in a bun, flat shoes, peaked cap, etc. Apparently, on Monday, 4 September, she had volunteered for the WRAF and was now stationed at Adastral House, the RAF HQ in Theobalds Road, Holborn.

  In such circumstances, my potentially great love affair was destined to fail. I could not keep in touch by phoning her although she was able to phone me at work. We exchanged a letter or two and then she was shortly posted out of London. As a result, we were never able to meet again. Our love withered on the wartime vine.

  As for me, I served in the Royal Signals in Algeria, Tunisia, Sicily and Italy and was demobbed in 1946. In February 1947, I married Evelyn, my childhood sweetheart, we had three children and fifty-one wonderful years until she died in 1998.

  THE TEN-YEAR-OLD

  Frank Mee was a ten-year-old, living in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, with his parents, Charles and Gladys, and sister, Sylvia.

  As a family, we went to the pictures twice a week. We watched the newsreels at each showing. So, as a lad I knew about the second Chinese–Japanese War [1937–45], with pictures of bombing and atrocities. We saw the news reports on the Spanish Civil War [1936–9]. Some local men went to fight in that and came back with stories – we knew what was coming.

  My parents had seen the first war, lost relatives, seen the wounded and crippled come back. In my mother’s case, she had to help two of my uncles, both badly wounded, then sent home when the hospitals could do no more. The women of the family had to dress horrendous wounds, I saw what shell splinters can do. Both uncles died: Oswald in 1921, Charles in 1933.

  My mother never forgot them.

  She had also started to lay down stores of tinned and dried food for what was to come. She also bought a lot of cloth from the market – she’d been through rationing before in the first war and knew what would be in short supply.

  We lived in an area of about ten miles square, but the whole family congregated at my grandmother’s house in Moses Street, North Ormesby. I’ve often wondered how we all came to be in one place together on that day to hear Mr Chamberlain’s speech. None of us had phones, ‘our’ phone was the big red [public phone] box next to the pond on the Green, and the bus service was a Sunday service, yet we were all there together. And it was only at the last minute we knew there would be an announcement: was it some animal instinct that drew us all into my grandmother’s house?

  It was crowded. We kids went to play in the yard while the adults, looking gloomy, were sitting, talking. To us kids it was just exciting – after all, we were brought up reading Biggles, Beau Geste, Tarzan in the comics. What was there to be afraid of? We always won! Just before eleven o’clock, we piled into the house for the broadcast. Then we heard the Prime Minister saying we were at war with Germany.

  Some of the women were crying; the men just sat there, silent. Then the air-raid siren went. I remember that moment to this day: total panic as us children were all grabbed and pushed into the large cupboard under the stairs, the very cupboard Grandma told us not to go in, because the bogeyman lived there. My sister and young cousins were all screaming in fear.

  I was trying to calm my sister when the cupboard door opened and soaking-wet, cold towels were draped over all our heads – and the door slammed shut again. That set everyone off. The noise was horrendous, we could hear the adults running up and down the passage and stairs, all shouting at once. It seemed to go on forever until the door opened, we were pulled out of the cupboard and we could hear the all-clear siren.

  By then my sister was hyperventilating, we were soaking wet from the towels and had no idea what had just happened. I asked my Uncle Raymond, why the wet towels? He said it was against the gas – the Germans had used gas in the First World War and were sure to use it again.

  I later found out that the newspapers in the run-up to war had run the story of Guernica in Spain, how the Basque town and hundreds of civilians were wiped out in 1937 by aerial bombing by the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. The newspaper story said the Germans would open the war with a massive air attack on this country so when the sirens went off, my family thought it was going to happen, just as the papers said.

  [With us] dried-off and dressed in dry clothes, Grandma and the women had, with the usual ‘stiff upper lip’, got the Sunday lunch cooked and served up. Granddad told us that they had been told the First War would be over by Christmas [1914] and went on for four years. Then one of the men said ‘Yes, but it did not end in 1918, they were fighting into the 1920s.’ ‘Where?’ I asked. They told me it was in the Baltic against Russia, and in Macedonia, Iraq, Iran [then Persia] and the North-West Frontier of India. My dad, who never usually said much, said he thought it would be a long war but he hoped it would be over before I was old enough to be in it.

  We made our way home and, that night, we heard King George give his speech on the radio. Mother had another cry. My sister Sylvia seemed OK by then, which was a relief as I’d thought she was going to pass out on me when we were in the cupboard. And so the day ended, one I never, ever forgot.

  THE EXCHANGE STUDENT

  Stella Broughton was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl living with her family near Havant, Hampshire. Her father Charles was vice-principal of Portsmouth College of Art. In the summer of 1939, Stella was on an exchange trip to Paris with a schoolgirl friend, Maud, also on an exchange: they were scheduled to remain in Paris until early September.

  During the first two weeks, we visited the Louvre Museum. Other visits were to the Tomb of Napoleon and Notre-Dame. My memory of the Sacré-Coeur is of a very long flight of steps leading up to the entrance. From there, the arrondissement of Montmartre appeared as an interesting collection of small, jumbled buildings nestling under the shadow of this famous church.

  During my visit, Maud and her French exchange invited us to tea. When we arrived, we were ushered into the best room, where the table was laid with cups and saucers, a jug of milk, a sugar bowl and a plate of biscuits. Two other French girls were introduced and we all sat down. It was obviously an occasion for the teapot was brought in and ceremoniously placed in the centre of the table. The tea, when served, looked very weak but this did not bother me. What did was the fact that it was COLD! Amongst embarrassed giggles, it transpired that the tea had been made with cold water.

  During my third week, there was a sense of urgency as troops began arriving by road and rail every day. The Tuileries Garden became a massive camp with tents everywhere.

  Listening to the early-morning overseas radio on Thursday, 14 August, we heard someone recommending all Americans leave Europe immediately. Turning to my host, Nicole, I said: ‘If it’s good enough for them, Maud and I should get back to England this weekend. It appears the outbreak of war is imminent.’

  By lunchtime, Maud and I agreed to leave as quickly as possible. Our tickets were checked and we were told to travel to Calais, where ferries were sailing to Dover continuously. Pooling our money, we went to the post office and sent a cablegram to my father, saying we were leaving Paris on the next midday train; would he meet us off the ferry at Dover on Saturday at about 4pm?

  When arriving at the Gare du Nord, I found Maud with her French exchange girl. Her parents were quite insistent that she was to travel with us so we were bundled onto the train, luckily securing seats, and arrived at Calais about 2pm. Following the crowds to the quays, we were shepherded four-abreast into a queue, which went to and fro in an ‘S’ formation.

  At first, we could not see the ferries or even the end of the queue for the hundreds of people with luggage. Moving slowly, snake-wise, we saw one ferry pulling away from the distant quay and within a matter of minutes, another one appeared
alongside and the queue started to move again. We saw at least five ferries pull in and depart fully loaded before we got within distance of seeing one of the gangways.

  ‘When we were within the last thirty people from the nearest gangway, off went the ferry to our left. On our right, another one was nearing the quay and yet another was steaming along, about six miles out. At last we got on board and eventually landed at Dover Harbour about 7pm.

  Maud and I were through customs quickly and we waited for her French friend, who had to go through the foreign side. As she did not appear after ten minutes, I left my case with Maud and went through to the other side. No other foreigner was there and I found this thirteen-year-old girl being questioned by three customs officials. I had to explain what had happened and reassure the immigration officer that she was on a school exchange visit. After giving them the name and address of Maud’s parents and accepting the fact that she might have to go back to France, I was allowed to bring her with me. Her suitcase had been taken on to London, it was several days before it arrived back at Havant.

  At Dover, Stella and the girls were eventually reunited with their parents, who’d been waiting since early afternoon to drive them back to Havant. But there wasn’t enough room for everyone in the car, so Maud and Stella opted to catch a train to Havant, then get a bus or walk the short distance home.

  At first, Mother was very apprehensive about us going all that way by ourselves, but I said if we could arrange to travel from Paris through all the hassle of troop movements in a foreign country, we could surely manage a train from Dover to Havant. Father gave me some money and we bought our tickets.

  At Havant, we were glad to see Father waiting to take us home. He’d been able to take Maud’s mother and the French girl to their house. What a day!

  The broadcast by the Prime Minister was expected on the following Sunday. Mother and I joined Father in the drawing room instead of going to church. At 11.15 he announced in a sombre tone that a state of war now existed between Germany and Britain. Father turned off the radio and there were a few moments of quiet thought until he turned to Mother and said: ‘We must plan for twenty-five years ahead. Examination results must be downgraded immediately otherwise there will be insufficient qualified teachers available for when the war is over.’

  Leaving them to discuss what needed to be done, I crept out of the room, feeling very apprehensive of what might happen and a little excited at the prospect of a very different life that might be opening up for me. My entry to the Portsmouth College of Art, where I was to spend a year, was but a few days away.

  Not long after Neville Chamberlain ended his broadcast to the nation came his formal announcement of his War Cabinet. Dominated mostly by Con-servative ministers who had previously served under Chamberlain’s National Government from 1937–9, one name stood out: Winston Churchill.

  For a long time, Churchill’s ignored warnings about Hitler had been a thorn in the side of the Prime Minister. But now he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, a role he had occupied in the First World War in 1914, though his part in the orchestration of the failed Dardanelles naval operation, and the disastrous military landings on Gallipoli the following year, led to huge losses and his subsequent resignation from government until 1917, when he was appointed Minister of Munitions, a post he held until 1919. Although he held various other ministerial posts until 1929, by the time war broke out he had been on the back benches for ten years.

  Through the 1930s as a backbench MP, Churchill’s repeated warnings in the Commons and the press about the dangers of Hitler and German rearmament had been largely ignored by the pro-appeasement government. Now, back in charge of the Royal Navy – at that time the largest and most powerful in the world – Churchill’s supporters took heart: the Board of Admiralty is reputed to have sent out a signal to the entire Fleet reading, ‘Winston is back’.

  Yet, as 3 September drew to a close, the first major wartime blow against the British did not come, as was commonly feared, from the air. It was seaborne. And its victims were innocent men, women and children travelling to safety from Glasgow to Montreal in an unarmed passenger ship crossing the Atlantic.

  The war was less than nine hours old when at, 7.30pm, the 13,500-ton passenger liner SS Athenia, carrying 1,103 civilian passengers and 315 crew, became the first British ship to be sunk by Germany in the Second World War, torpedoed by submarine U-30 just 250 miles north-west of the coast of Ireland. Ninety-eight passengers and nineteen crew lost their lives in the incident, which took place as the German U-boat was patrolling off the coast of Ireland. It had been at sea for several days, under orders to avoid contact or discovery.

  International conventions governing submarine warfare, drawn up between the wars, stated very clearly that ‘No merchant ship may be sunk without warning, and that in any case, no merchant ship is to be sunk until the safety of all passengers and crew is assured.’

  The U-30 commander, Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, had learned of the outbreak of war and had been warned to look out for armed merchant cruisers. On spotting the Athenia, he tracked the passenger ship for three hours before giving the order for three torpedoes to be fired.

  The first struck home and exploded, ripping open the bulkhead between the engine room and the boiler room. The second torpedo misfired, and the third missed, but the damage was done and the Athenia started to list and began to settle by the stern. There would later be reports that the U-30 had surfaced and raked the ship with gunfire.

  That first enemy torpedo had caused massive damage. In the rescue operation, one lifeboat capsized in heavy seas, causing ten deaths. Three passengers were crushed to death while attempting to transfer from lifeboats to the rescuing Royal Navy destroyers, other fatalities were due to passengers falling overboard from the Athenia and her lifeboats, or dying from injuries or exposure.

  Twenty-eight of the dead were US citizens, leading to German fears that America would be drawn into the war.

  The incident was widely reported as a war crime and the German naval authorities denied they had been involved in the sinking. At one stage it was claimed by the German propaganda machine that it had been Winston Churchill who had ordered a British submarine to sink the Athenia in order to provoke the US against Germany. The last thing Germany wanted was a repeat of history; it was the sinking of the British liner RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1917, in which 128 US citizens died, that had helped bring the then neutral United States into the First World War.

  The full truth of the Athenia tragedy did not emerge until war had ended. In January 1946, during the Allied trials for major war crimes at Nuremberg in Germany, a statement by Admiral Karl Doenitz (who signed Germany’s surrender in 1945) admitted that SS Athenia had indeed been torpedoed by U-30 and that every effort had been made to cover this up. Lemp claimed he had mistaken the Athenia for an armed merchant cruiser, and at the time of the sinking took the first steps to conceal the truth by omitting to make an entry in the ship’s log and swearing his crew to secrecy.

  The Donaldson Line SS Athenia, built in Glasgow in 1923, had left Liverpool en route for Canada on the morning of 3 September, its passengers eager to escape the imminent hostilities. Among the many children on board was seven-year-old Philip C. Gunyon, born in Japan of English and Canadian parents. He was travelling to Canada with his mother, Andreana, sister Barbara, four, and brother Andrew, just two and a half. The Gunyon family had moved to England in 1938 but with the onset of war, Andreana’s parents had cabled her to bring the children back to Canada.

  Here is Philip’s account of how the family survived the sinking of the Athenia:

  In the early morning hours of Saturday, 2 September 1939, my mother, younger sister, brother and I left our home in London, bound for Canada. Father was in Brazil, where his company had posted him several months before. We passed through sad, quiet streets to Euston station. Silent, tired people were setting out to work, children with gas masks in cardboard boxes slung around their
necks were being herded onto trains to the country. The threat of war hung over the whole country.

  The station was crowded with others leaving the city for safety, mostly mothers with small children and older people. Looking out of the window as our train slowly wound its way to Liverpool, I remember looking down into the rear of depressing-looking tenements. During that trip, the only smiling face my mother saw was the agent who put us on board the tender Skirmisher, heading out to the Athenia.

  She was anchored in midstream Mersey, ready for a quick getaway after loading the passengers and baggage who boarded in Liverpool. Of these, 101 were American citizens, lucky enough to have secured a berth for their return home on the last available liner.

  Although very tired by now, Mother was feeling glad that we were on our way and that we children might be spared the inevitable air raids on London. But she still had a strange feeling of insecurity. Our cabin was small, with three bunks for the four of us, and she spent that first night curled up at the foot of my two-year-old brother’s bunk. Other passengers settled down for a pleasant evening of dancing, card playing and singsongs.

  Chief Officer B. Copeland began his usual nightly tour of the ship, paying particular attention that the blackout provisions were in proper order. Just after darkness fell, the Athenia cleared the Chicken Rock lighthouse off the southern tip of the Isle of Man and set course on her next leg, racing through the night at fifteen knots.

  The next morning, 3 September, feeling much rested, we were ready to enjoy the glorious sea air. During the day, Captain James Cook, OBE, ordered a lifeboat drill.

  Athenia was equipped with twenty-six lifeboats, two of which were motorised. Capacity was 1,828 passengers. The ship also carried twenty-one Gradwell life rafts, eighteen lifebuoys and 1,600 lifejackets. Mother recalled that the officers were strict and passengers understood the seriousness of it all. Our boat station was on the deck just above our cabin. To reach it, we walked down a passage, through the smoking room, up a flight of stairs and then a short way along the deck. I recall the ship’s paint, shining white in the bright sun. If the grown-ups were worried, I didn’t feel that way.