The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  But unfortunately for Hitler the British knew his plans. The rescue of the German code machine, Enigma, early in 1941 from the U-Boat U-110, which was on the surface after her crew abandoned ship, enabled British cryptanalysts to decipher the codes in which messages were sent from the high command in Berlin to all the German armies. At Bletchley Park in Oxfordshire, a team of academics, mathematicians and crossword-puzzle fanatics sat up night and day working out variations on the codes and listening to German messages being tapped out across Europe. Thanks to Enigma Britain was able to recover after almost losing what Churchill in March 1941 called the Battle of the Atlantic. This was the war against German U-boats which since the occupation of France had threatened Britain’s supply of food and oil from America. From ports on the French Atlantic coast, German submarines hunted in what were called wolf-packs and destroyed hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping.

  The British codebreakers had already intercepted information about Operation Barbarossa passing from Berlin to the German armies in the east. But when the British government informed the Russians they refused to believe it. They thought it was a capitalist trick to divide Germany and Russia. But they were soon to realize it was nothing of the kind. Leaving only forty-four divisions behind to guard the west, on 22 June German army divisions advanced over a thousand-mile front between the Carpathian mountains in the south and the Baltic Sea in the north. Stalin’s bloody purge of his generals in the late 1930s caused the British government to underestimate the Russian army’s potential. But Russia had three times as many tanks as the Germans, a gigantic, deeply patriotic population and a high command with a careless attitude to soldiers’ lives. Her roads were another secret weapon: they were so hopelessly bad that they prevented any invader getting very far. Unlike the level, tarmacked motorways of Holland, Belgium and France which had been a boon to German tanks, at a touch of rain the sandy Russian roads turned to mud. They were almost as effective at holding down German armies as the Russians themselves. It was the one feature of the Russian campaign that the Germans had not considered.

  As they penetrated further into Russia, the Germans’ methods of high-speed warfare could no longer work. A military campaign in Russia had to be different. There could be none of the swift moves forward as in the west. As for cutting the Russians off from their baggage trains–the Russians did not have baggage trains. Half starving, they lived off the land and any animal that moved. By December 1941 Hitler’s armies, dug deep into Russia, had been brought to a standstill, struggling fruitlessly against the giant snows which blotted out all landmarks and froze their tanks. Nevertheless to the rest of occupied Europe it was not at all clear that Hitler was coming to grief.

  However, that winter an event occurred that proved to be as important as Hitler’s decision to invade Russia. America was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor on 7 December. Three hundred Japanese planes flew all the way to Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Without any warning, and without declaring war on America, they bombed the US fleet where it lay at anchor in the harbour. Three thousand American servicemen were killed, four out of eight American battleships were sunk and the ensuing uproar in the United States was momentous. America at last entered the war.

  What had been a European war had thus become a truly global conflict with a new arena in the Pacific, and with Nationalist China brought in as America’s ally against Japan. Fortunately Hitler declared war on America a few days later, on 11 December. Had he not done so, the American Congress might have insisted that their war should be confined to south-east Asia and the Pacific, which would have left Europe still struggling under Nazism. Until Japan’s unprovoked attack on the US navy in Pearl Harbor much of America looked upon the conquest of Europe by Hitler as a European problem.

  The far-seeing Roosevelt had been backing Britain unofficially since a plea for help by a beleaguered Churchill after the fall of France in the summer of 1940. The US president had lent Britain fifty destroyers in return for America being allowed to lease British bases in the West Indies. By the generous arrangement of Lend-Lease from March 1941, American food and matériel were supplied to Britain on credit. This had solved Britain’s cash-flow shortage caused by the war’s interruption to her usual business. But it was not at all the same thing as having American troops fighting alongside British soldiers as they were from 1942, or having the full weight of America’s manufacturing engine on the allied side. But now that the United States, the greatest industrial nation in the world, had joined the fight, Nazism could be defeated. And Roosevelt agreed that Germany should be defeated before Japan.

  One of the Axis powers since 1937 and long hostile to the western democracies, Japan had decided to take advantage of France’s and Britain’s predicament in the west to become the dominant power of the Pacific and south-east Asia. The French and British colonies of the Dutch East Indies, Indo-China and Malaya held 80 per cent of the world’s rubber, a very important commodity in a twentieth-century world of tanks and cars, and would provide Japan with the oil and rubber she needed to become self-sufficient. Following a downturn in her economic fortunes, she was ruled by the army from 1940; a year later the aggressive General Tojo was head of the government. To him Japan’s rightful dominance of the Pacific was being thwarted by the British base at Singapore and the American fleet stationed in Hawaii. Tojo regarded the American warships as ‘a dagger pointed at the throat of Japan’. If Pearl Harbor were destroyed, Japan would be able to control the Pacific with impunity. The plan very nearly succeeded. Only a prolonged American campaign in the Pacific over the next four years prevented Australia from being occupied. But Japan was triumphant among outposts of the British Empire in the Far East. Both Hong Kong and the supposedly impregnable Singapore were in Japanese hands by mid-February 1942.

  The Japanese also took over Burma, and their arrival at the border with India was used by the Congress Party in India to extract an assurance of post-war independence from the British, failing which they would welcome in Japanese troops to liberate them. The British slowly drove the Japanese out of Burma and down the Malay Peninsula to retake Singapore after three and a half years. Among many brave allied soldiers, the Chindits in Burma under General Orde Wingate became legendary for their daring.

  Nevertheless, in late 1942 apart from Britain most of Europe, from the French border with neutral Spain to half-way across Russia was in Axis hands. It was not at all clear for how much longer the rest of Russia could hold out. The epic battle for Stalingrad, the city which controlled entry to the Caucasus and its oilfields had been raging since September. And despite Enigma the threat from the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic was still so severe that allied ships were being sunk at the rate of three a day.

  The only positive feature of the way the Germans abused the countries they occupied was that it produced resistance movements in almost all of them, made up of heroic peoples of all kinds who kept the spirit of the country alive. Yugoslavia’s partisans remained pro-British thanks to the daring activities of the commando Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean. He urged Churchill to back their leader Tito in 1943 and parachuted into Yugoslavia to arrange a supply of arms for them. For the rest of the war twenty-five German divisions were tied down by Tito’s little band of partisans hidden in caves all over the mountains of Yugoslavia.

  Both women and men like the mysterious French resistance hero Jean Moulin carried on deadly games of espionage on behalf of the allies to inform them of German troop movements, to sabotage the German defences and to help the allies’ special forces which began secretly to be parachuted into occupied Europe. Their role was often to spirit Jews out of harm’s way, for since 1941 with a monstrous project euphemistically called the Final Solution the Nazis had embarked on a programme of mass extermination of the Jewish race, gypsies and Slavs in death camps in Poland. Once a country was occupied all Jews were rounded up, their property was stolen and they were sent by railway to the death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau.

  The ent
ry of America into the war raised the problem of strategical aims. As the larger country America was now the senior partner in the alliance with Britain, but her vision of the world she wished to see after the war did not coincide with Britain’s. America did not want to spend money on troops to protect the British Empire. Equally, as Churchill put it, ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ This underlying theme lent some tension to what were otherwise mainly good relations between the allies.

  And there had been bad news for Britain’s imperial interests in the Western Desert in the first half of 1942 when Tobruk fell to Rommel. It was as depressing for British morale as the fall of Singapore had been three months before. The British had to abandon the Egyptian frontier to the Germans as well as half of their Egyptian territory and make an urgent retreat right back inside Egypt to entrench themselves at El Alamein, only fifty-five miles from the key port of Alexandria. On 30 June Rommel moved his army right up to El Alamein to face them. The danger was so acute that the British fleet, which had been at anchor outside Alexandria, turned down the Suez Canal to take shelter in the Red Sea. The Egyptians believed that the British had lost the war for Egypt and were about to pull out. But they stood fast and, under General Auchinleck, managed to beat off Rommel in the first Battle of El Alamein that July. But it was not until late October, at the final battle of El Alamein, by which time the British had acquired a new commander, the dynamic General Montgomery, and massive reinforcements in the shape of American Sherman tanks, that the Desert Fox (as Rommel was known to the admiring British) was at last defeated. When this triumph was followed in January 1943 by the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the turning point of the war had been reached.

  Although Roosevelt did not like underwriting what he considered to be Britain’s imperial aims, the American people needed to see something being done now that they had entered the war. Roosevelt therefore fell in with Churchill’s plan to secure Egypt, by driving all German and Italian forces out of north Africa. By May 1943 this was successfully achieved, after British and American troops had landed in Morocco and Algeria the previous November.

  At the beginning of 1943 Stalin urged the British and Americans to open a second front in Europe: if they landed in northern France it would take the pressure off the Russians. After some argument, it was agreed that such an invasion should not take place until sufficient troops had been gathered on the south coast of England to ensure as far as possible that it was a complete success.

  But it was decided to put the Nazis on the retreat in mainland Europe by invading from the south via Italy. The Axis forces had made this easier to achieve because they had poured troops into north Africa and not left enough to defend mainland Europe. German plans were further thrown by a clever piece of deception on the part of the British with The Man Who Never Was. The body of a dead soldier was planted off the coast of Spain with plans in his wallet suggesting that the invasion of Europe was to take place on Sardinia. Sardinia was indeed a far more logical way of getting back into France, as it was almost directly south of the French port of Marseilles. In fact the allies landed in Sicily on 10 July. This would mean fighting their way up the Italian peninsula, but it offered a safer route back into Europe than the French coast, particularly as Mussolini had turned down Hitler’s embarrassing offer of German troops to defend the Italian mainland. Capturing Sicily would help free up the Mediterranean which had more or less become an Axis lake. The island of Malta had held out so gallantly as the Axis air forces tried unsuccessfully to bomb it into submission that George VI awarded her people the George Cross.

  A little cautious optimism was at last growing among allied leaders thanks to a coup d’état on 25 July 1943 which saw the overthrow of Mussolini. The new Italian government under Marshal Badoglio surrendered to the allies in September. Germany was then forced to fight her former Axis partners the Italians as well as the British and American forces. Nevertheless, the allied advance up the Italian mainland was extremely slow, and it took almost two years to reach the northern border.

  So savage was the fighting that nine months later, on 4 June 1944, the allies had only just reached Rome, a four-hour train ride from Naples. But two days later in a tremendous amphibious operation allied troops under the overall command of the US general Dwight Eisenhower, landed on the coast of occupied France.

  Thanks to the continued freedom of the islands of Britain, all the men and matériel needed for the invasion could be stockpiled on her southern coast, and camps set up for the training of 300,000 men steadily mushroomed. Despite their visibility, it was important to keep as much of the operation secret as possible. The camps revealed to the German high command that an attack was imminent, but they did not indicate where it would take place. Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the commander-in-chief of the Armies of the West, thought that the crossing would happen at the narrowest part of the Channel, with the invaders landing between Calais and Dieppe. Hitler and Rommel (now effectively in command of the Channel defences) both had an inkling it might be Normandy. Following his hunch, in the spring of 1944 Rommel ordered mines to be laid in the waters off the Normandy coast.

  On D-Day, 6 June taking full advantage of allied air superiority, in an extraordinary logistical exercise the allies managed to land 156,000 troops, who were mainly British, Canadian and American, on the beaches of Normandy. Five days later, the rest of the soldiers had crossed from England along with 54,000 vehicles, and were creating an eighty-mile bridgehead, fanning out west and south. Although Field Marshal Montgomery, commanding the landing forces, would say that D-Day had gone like clockwork, its success was by no means a foregone conclusion. The weather was rough and stormy. Though this gave the expedition the advantage of surprise, as the Germans did not think the allies would risk a landing in such weather, there were very heavy casualties–some 10,000 among allied troops, with perhaps 2,500 killed outright on the beaches. But the losses might have been heavier had so many German divisions not been tied down in Italy. From small landing craft, thousands and thousands of gallant allied soldiers threw themselves on to the shore. Behind them the artificial ‘Mulberry’ harbours specially built for the landings were towed in, allowing the disembarkation of supplies. Meanwhile American airplanes rushed in and bombed the bridges all along the Seine and Loire, preventing Panzer divisions from racing up to Normandy to stop the allied soldiers.

  The Normandy landings signalled the beginning of the end of the Nazi tyranny. By September 1944, from east and west, from Russia and France and Italy, the allies were sweeping the German armies before them. That month France was liberated. Britain was no longer plagued by the V1s, the flying bombs or ‘Doodlebugs’, now that their launch-sites had been captured, but for a few months the new V2 rockets caused limited destruction. Also in September Montgomery’s advance into Germany suffered a setback at Arnhem in Holland when airborne troops dropped to seize bridges over the Rhine were killed or captured. But on the whole the allies were beginning to win.

  In January 1945 Russian forces under General Zhukov captured Warsaw, the capital of Poland, which had previously been in German hands, and began moving through East Prussia. Soon less than 400 miles separated the Russians from their western allies’ most forward positions. Hitler, more alarmed by the approaching Russians than by the Americans and British, decided to throw troops at the threat in the east on the River Oder. This freed up the Anglo-American forces in the west and enabled them to get across the Rhine. After that, the end came very quickly. By the end of April the Russians were in Berlin, Hitler then committed suicide and on 8 May Victory in Europe Day was proclaimed after Germany had at last surrendered. The war against Japan continued for another three months.

  In Britain people danced in the streets. Light-hearted with relief, they flooded into Piccadilly and the Mall to cheer Churchill and the royal family, who had refused to leave London. Every London landmark bore the scars of war, including B
uckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament, and most major British cities had been hit by bombs too.

  Some 60,000 British civilians had been killed by the Luftwaffe; nine million people had been working for one military organization or another; almost every family had lost a son, brother or a father in the war. They had dug potatoes for victory as exhorted to by Churchill so that they did not have to rely on imported food, and they had lived on tiny rations. They had also paid higher taxes. America, by helping to finance the war, had given Churchill the tools he had asked for ‘to finish the job’, and the British had at last finished it.

  By the end of 1945 Britain was a very different place from what she had been in 1939. She was far more unified internally. The camaraderie of total war had dissolved many class differences. Churchill’s government enjoyed unanimous support during the war and had outlined plans for social reforms that were welcomed by pretty well everyone. After such an epic struggle, most people in Britain believed that there should be a safety net to protect the poor and vulnerable, like the widows whose husbands had died for their country. There should be a good education for gallant soldiers’ sons. There was a new idealism after the ordeal of war. People had a keen sense of the fairer country that Britain should become.

  At the same time the world and Britain herself were full of a gloomy pessimism. The terrible, unimaginable figure of fifty-five million people had died worldwide, five times the number who had died in the Great War, and there were around twenty million refugees in Europe. Unspeakably cruel things had been done to human beings, by the Nazis to the Jews, by the Japanese to their allied prisoners. But the allies had also unleashed a weapon of destruction on the world which would overshadow it for more than forty years–the atom bomb. In order to end the war in Japan quickly and to prevent its occupation by Russian troops, two atom bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each explosion killed approximately 80,000 people and caused birth defects to thousands more unborn Japanese children. Enormous mushroom clouds rising above white heat announced that man had discovered a power which could annihilate life on earth. Though nine-tenths of their shipping had been destroyed, the Japanese had been refusing to surrender, and they were still holding thousands of allied prisoners in conditions of extraordinary brutality. On 14 August 1945, one week after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Emperor of Japan announced that his country had surrendered unconditionally.