The Day War Broke Out Read online

  An entire nation held its breath – and waited. The telephone system (still relatively new) nearly ground to a halt because of the volume of calls, the exhausted operators taking several hours to put through what were known then as trunk calls (long-distance calls within the same country) from London to provincial cities. The armed forces were mobilised. Police leave was cancelled. Driving tests were suspended. Bus services were cut to save fuel. Banks were closed for one day but reopened afterwards. In London, newspaper articles advised women to keep a reserve stock of food. Not many rushed to comply as they had done after Munich – such behaviour might seem unpatriotic. The Treasury withdrew support for sterling, allowing it to fall against the US dollar to conserve British gold stocks.

  Big hospitals in London like St Thomas’s began to clear their wards where possible, sending convalescents or patients with minor ailments home. Large London hospitals had already been told in mid-August to stop admitting patients unless the case was an emergency. Plans for hospital staff and patients to be moved by Green Line coach to bases in the country were now underway. Businesses finalised their preparations to move to safer areas, some preparing to send key personnel to the country.

  Large retailers, too, made their own war preparations. In Manchester, the Kendal Milne department store was requisitioned for the Civil Service, with air-raid shelters created in the basement. (Trading did not cease, however: drapery and fashion departments were open to the public on two floors.) In Great Yarmouth, local department store Arnolds had its basement eventually converted into an emergency hospital, while trading continued on the floor above. Air-raid shelters were set up in basement areas of big London stores like Selfridges; some of these ‘shop shelters’ stored first-aid equipment and emergency food and water supplies.

  That last warm weekend of the summer, all over the country people were praying for peace. Some churches remained open night and day, so that people might slip in at any time for a few moments of prayer. Britain’s railway stations were jammed with travellers, many of them soldiers en route to join their units. A vast array of barrage balloons (large balloons anchored to the ground by cables as an obstacle to low-flying enemy aircraft) hovered in the sky above. Yet families continued to picnic in beauty spots, enjoying the last moments of their holiday. In so many ways, under such peaceful blue skies, it seemed somewhat unreal that the horror of war was about to be unleashed.

  On 2 September, the temperature was over 70 degrees F (21 degrees C) for the fifth consecutive day. During the night, huge thunderstorms swept the country. In Portsmouth, a rumour started that the war had begun: four barrage balloons, struck by lightning, had caught fire, lighting up the sky. The last day of peacetime was over.

  In London’s Downing Street and Whitehall a huge patriotic crowd gathered, many staying through the night, mostly silent, waiting for news that did not come until the following morning.

  Britain delivered its ultimatum to Germany, by letter, on the morning of 3 September at 9am. The letter stated that unless Germany agreed to withdraw its troops from Poland by 11am, Britain would ‘fulfil its obligations to Poland’. The night before, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, still hesitated, hoping against hope that Hitler would heed the ultimatum and remove his troops from Poland.

  Such hopes were in vain. An announcement was made on BBC Radio at 10am that the Prime Minister would be addressing the nation at 11.15am.

  Across the country, people stopped what they were doing that bright morning: women still sewing their blackout curtains, men digging in their gardens or struggling to install home-made shelters, holidaymakers receiving the news by chance through landladies, open windows or on doorsteps, the many families who didn’t own a wireless invited, for the first time, into their neighbours’ living rooms, all assembling to hear the fateful words:

  This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.

  The seventy-year-old Chamberlain sounded wrecked, truly exhausted. He had held out for peace, almost at any price, and believed Hitler’s assurances – and been bitterly cheated by an implacable, relentless enemy. (He would resign in May 1940 during the disastrous Allied campaign in Norway, dying of colon cancer just six months later.)

  Across Britain, millions struggled to absorb the news. The National Anthem was played just after Chamberlain’s words had faded away; as was still their habit, many people rose to their feet for it.

  Then, eight minutes after Chamberlain’s broadcast, airraid sirens were heard over London, parts of the Midlands and East Anglia for the first time. People rushed outside their homes: was this it? Some people even hastily donned their gas masks or ran into Anderson shelters they had already erected. What should they do? Yet it was the briefest of confusions. In fact, it was a totally false alarm, provoked by the sighting of a single French aircraft.

  That same day, an Act of Parliament was passed, bringing in conscription for all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one. Over 400,000 Territorial Army recruits were formally incorporated into the British Army. Britain’s armed forces were just 500,000 strong before the declaration of war; by 1943, they would total 4.25million.

  At 6pm that night, the people listened to King George VI broadcast to the nation:

  For the second time in the lives of most of us we are at war. Over and over again we have tried to find a peaceful way out of the differences between ourselves and those who are now our enemies. But it has been in vain. We have been forced into a conflict. For we are called, with our allies, to meet the challenge of a principle which, if it were to prevail, would be fatal to any civilised order in the world.

  It is to this high purpose that I now call my people at home and my peoples across the seas, who will make our cause their own. I ask them to stand calm and firm and united in this time of trial. The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead and war can no longer be confined to the battlefield. But we can only do the right as we see the right and reverently commit our cause to God. If one and all we keep resolutely faithful to it, ready for whatever service or sacrifice it may demand then, with God’s help, we shall prevail. May He bless us and keep us all.

  Older women who had already lost loved ones, children, husbands or fiancés, brothers, in the previous war, understood the bitter reality of what lay ahead.

  People of both sexes wept. Youngsters saw their parents cry for the first – or only – time, the children unable to comprehend the true meaning of the PM’s words. Although some younger children envisaged war’s onset as a welcome event, since persistent playground rumour claimed that if there was a war, all schools would be shut down indefinitely.

  There was fear, anger and, of course, much bewilderment about what lay ahead. If there was any kind of mass panic, as feared, it went unrecorded anywhere in the broadcasts or newspapers of the time. That night, most went to bed with heavy hearts, some fearful of immediate attack, as all over the country searchlights scanned the night sky for the bombers. Yet the day itself ended peacefully.

  Overall, the mood was apprehensive but calm, stoic, a quiet resolve, characteristic traits of the British which would surely help everyone through the very worst days and nights in the six years to come. Visitors to London from New York were amazed at the outward sangfroid of people on the streets of the city – in the heart of New York, by contrast, there was a fevered atmosphere when the news came through, even though at that stage, the US would remain neutral until December 1941, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted the US into the Second World War.

  The following day, 4 September, newspaper photos of workers in London, making their way as usual to the office, but with gas masks in their little boxes slung over their shoulders, underl
ined the theme of quiet British stoicism. Interestingly, preparations had already been made to deploy that British ‘stiff upper lip’ for use as wartime propaganda. The now well-known ‘keep calm and carry on’ morale-boosting poster had been designed by the Ministry of Information in July 1939. Yet for some reason, the poster itself was never sanctioned for wide use during the war (2.5 million copies were printed, yet stocks were eventually pulped as part of a wartime paper salvage campaign and it was only in 2000 that a surviving copy was discovered at a bookshop in Alnwick, Northumberland).

  Yet one of the strangest events that followed the announcement of the outbreak of war took place throughout that first week of September 1939. This was known as the massacre of cats and dogs. Millions of pets were put down – at the request of their owners. In London alone, 400,000 were killed humanely by vets and animal charities, though there were unofficial estimates that the number destroyed was closer to twice that.

  This was not an order imposed by the government or, indeed, encouraged by the animal charities, rather a decision made by families who could not bear to consider the fate of their household pets if their homes were bombed or they themselves killed – or if they could no longer feed their pets when rationing took precedence.

  On London’s streets, animal charities and vets’ surgeries saw long queues of people waiting to hand over their much-loved cats and dogs. The incinerators at the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) could not cope with the numbers of corpses they received, eventually organising a pet cemetery in its grounds in East London.

  The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), the world’s oldest animal charity, confirmed afterwards: ‘The work of destroying animals was continued, day and night, during the first week of the war.’ The National Canine Defence League (now Dogs Trust) reported that so extensive was the slaughter of dogs, its supplies of chloroform had run out.

  For all this, however, many families chose not to put down their pets. Devotion to domestic animals, as much a part of the British psyche as stoicism, was not disposed to disappear in wartime.

  As for my own family witnesses to the historic moment of Chamberlain’s return from Munich, I never did find out what my parents thought about it all – or even what they were doing in the crowd at the Stock Exchange that night of the disastrous announcement of ‘peace for our time’. I knew something of their subsequent wartime history, of course, but I only chanced upon the press photo in a magazine article in 2009, and by then it was too late to ask them about that night.

  Their register office marriage, like millions of others, was a rushed affair in 1940. I did not arrive until the war had ended. Yet through sheer good fortune, they and their immediate families survived the chaos and wreckage of what lay ahead: bearing witness to the courage and endurance of Britain’s armed forces, the millions of volunteers on the Home Front ‘doing their bit’, fighting the civilian’s war right the way through and beyond the darkest days of the Blitz and the bombing of Britain’s cities.

  During the Second World War, 400,000 British people lost their lives (including 60,000 civilians killed on British soil). Many other countries went on to endure devastation on an unprecedented global scale: an estimated fifty to sixty million lives were lost. Yet on that Indian summer’s day in September, as the people of Britain made their way to church and back, sat down afterwards at the table to tuck into their Sunday roast, or listened to the radio again (King George VI’s broadcast to the nation that evening was much applauded. It had been a struggle for the shy King, whose stammer made every speech a huge ordeal, but he very much wanted to do it), Britain turned a page in its history – its future completely unknown.

  The rhythm and routine of everyday life was poised to change completely: the state would have control of virtually every aspect of each citizen’s life. Ahead lay rationing and shortages, years of separation, long hours of work for those in factories, hospitals and on the land or voluntarily helping the war effort.

  For many men, the horrors of carnage amid the camaraderie would be seared into their memories for good. Families would be torn apart, loved ones injured, killed, or kept prisoner in spartan, and sometimes horrific, conditions. Homes would be wrecked by bombs, even grief would become commonplace. A few, in remote rural areas, would manage to live out the war years in relative peace, yet millions of lives would be affected in one way or another.

  It would be six years before peace was finally declared in September 1945 [following the Japanese surrender] and another ten years beyond that before the country really started to recover and get back on its feet. Pre-war Britain, just as it was on that warm September morning in 1939 when peacetime slipped away, would be consigned to history. The phrase ‘before the war’ would fall into common parlance.

  After the day war broke out, nothing would ever be quite the same again.

  2

  CHAOS

  IMAGINE THIS: YOU ARE A SMALL CHILD, LIVING IN A CITY or large town, old enough to go to school. Your parents have been informed, by letter from the government, that in the possible event of war you and your siblings, if any, will need to be evacuated, for safety, to the countryside in small groups. If you have younger siblings, under five, your mother can accompany them.

  This evacuation plan is not compulsory, it is for each family to decide what happens. But if you are over five years old and your parents want you to go, your mother will not be accompanying you – and she will not be told where you are being taken, or with whom you’ll be living upon reaching your destination. It is an emotionally charged situation for everyone.

  In 1938, the plan to evacuate certain areas of Britain most likely to be bombed and separating large numbers of children from their parents to live with total strangers was an unprecedented event comparable to a military operation, should Britain’s cities be subjected to a huge bombing attack from Germany.

  The authorities believed that taking control before such a devastating event by planning to move large numbers away from the cities beforehand would save lives – and prevent mass panic.

  Britain’s initial large-scale evacuation plan, developed in the summer of 1938, by the Anderson Committee (its chairman was the former Governor of Bengal and Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson) looked at how the country would respond to the threat of prolonged and destructive aerial attack.

  Public Information Leaflet No. 3, Evacuation: Why and How, sent out to households in July 1939, described it thus:

  The scheme is entirely a voluntary one, but clearly the children will be much safer and happier away from the big cities where the danger will be greatest. There is room in the safe areas for these children; householders will have volunteered to provide it.

  They have offered homes where the children will be made welcome. The schoolchildren will have their schoolteachers and other helpers with them and their schooling will continue. Do not hesitate to register your children if you live in a crowded area. Of course it means heartache to be separated from your children, but you can be quite sure they will be well looked after. That will relieve you of one anxiety at any rate.

  The plan split the country into three zones: Evacuation, Neutral and Reception. The first Evacuation zones included Greater London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, with Reception areas, i.e. safe areas where the evacuees would be received, in rural places like Kent, East Anglia and Wales. Neutral areas were places that would neither send nor receive any evacuees.

  The evacuees were split into four categories: school-age children, the elderly or infirm, pregnant women and mothers with babies or pre-school children (who were to be evacuated together).

  In November 1938, the Anderson plan became the official government Evacuation Scheme. But where to house the evacuees? In the reception areas, accommodation would be needed to house an estimated 3,500,000 evacuees (England and Wales) and 400,000 in Scotland.

  In January 1939, local authorities in the reception areas were asked to survey private
homes to work out how many places – or billets, as they were called – would be available to house the evacuees.

  The process of taking in families or unaccompanied children was called billeting. The word ‘billet’ generally means the living quarters in which a person is assigned to sleep; technically, it referred to a soldier’s living quarters. Yet the word was used in wartime either for those seeking a billet, i.e. wishing to rent a room in a family house, as well as for families outside the cities willing to take in a city evacuee or their family.

  Calculating the numbers of available billets in reception or safe areas was a huge task. It involved surveying more than five million homes. Furthermore, billets were assessed in terms of availability rather than suitability.

  Rural areas back then did not necessarily offer much in the way of home comforts: any heating usually came from a wood-burning fireplace and nearly half of homes in rural areas had no indoor lavatory – although deprived areas like London’s East End could also be found lacking modern sanitation, for example, 90 per cent of homes in the Stepney area did not have one either.

  More than one million rooms were privately reserved for people leaving the cities but not participating in the government evacuation scheme. These were the more affluent families more likely to make private arrangements to go to relatives, rent cottages, book hotels or boarding houses in areas like the West Country, rural Wales or Scotland.

  It was compulsory for families with available billets in reception areas to host the inner-city evacuees in their homes, anyone refusing to do so faced the threat of a fine. Billeting allowances were paid to these householders taking in evacuees: initially, the allowances paid were 10 shillings and 6 pence a week for a single child and 8 shillings and 6 pence a week per child if more than one child was billeted. These allowances changed slightly, according to variations in the ages of evacuated children, during the war years.