On 31 August 1939, two days after Clare Hollingworth’s reconnaissance trip, a pair of black Ford V8s drove down the same road from Gleiwitz towards the Polish frontier. In early evening daylight they turned off into a clearing in the Ratibor Wood. The car boots were unlocked and all seven Germans changed into bits of Polish Army clothing and picked up black Luger pistols. A man called Karl put on headphones and squatted down by the other car boot to get a signal from the radio inside. At 19.27 he heard the code words ‘Großmutter tot’ (Grandmother dead). They got into the cars and drove back towards the tall wooden radio transmitting tower that was visible for miles around.
Their leader, SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Alfred Helmut Naujocks, now looking entirely Polish, was the first man up the stairs and through the glass doors of Gleiwitzsender, the German radio station. He pistol-whipped a man in an office who fell heavily, knocking over a chair and a hatstand which crashed on to a metal filing cabinet. Then Naujocks was through into the studio where another of his team, the announcer Heinrich, had already taken a seat at the green baize table with the microphone on it, holding the fake script they had prepared with its lines praising independent Poland and denouncing Hitler and the Nazis.
Through the soundproof glass Naujocks could see Karl the radio engineer getting frantic in the cubicle as he failed to find the landline switch to Breslau to make any kind of broadcast. But eventually Karl banged ‘go’ on the glass. Heinrich read the phoney script rapidly and loudly. Then Naujocks faked interruption by shouting and firing four banging pistol shots inside the small studio. The pretend Polish rebels cut off the signal and ran out of the building.
Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo had also done his part of the job, operation konserve, delivering what they called the ‘tinned goods’. A fresh corpse now lay sprawled on the radio-station steps, dressed in civilian clothes. The dead man was tall and fair, about 30, with a strong, handsome face. This ‘tin’ was originally going to be selected from among the inmates of Sachsenhausen, the Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin opened in 1933, but indenting for an already processed prisoner would have left a paper trail through the ever-meticulous bureaucracy. So a local Polish-Silesian man with strongly patriotic views called Franciszek Honiok had been secretly arrested, drugged, dressed and killed with a bullet to the head, so he could be left on the steps, one of the apparent Polish perpetrators of the raid on the wireless station.
At 7 a.m. the next morning, Friday, 1 September 1939, Naujocks was sitting unshaven in the office of his boss, the ‘Blond Beast’, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Central Security Office, being congratulated on a secret agent’s job well done. Three weeks before, the ruthless and calculating Heydrich had told him, ‘Actual proof of these attacks by the Poles is needed for the foreign press as well as for German propaganda purposes.’ It had worked: the fake Poles had provided ‘proof of these attacks’ and the Chancellor himself, Adolf Hitler, had telephoned Heydrich at 5 a.m. to praise the provocation. No one would be allowed to find out the truth about the raid from abroad. On 1 September 1939 all Germans were banned from listening to foreign radio broadcasts, on pain of imprisonment or penal servitude. The penalty for spreading news from foreign broadcasts was death.
That same day, the front-page story of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party official paper, was all about the outrageous ‘Polish’ attacks of the 31 August, on a gamekeeper’s house at Pitschen, on the customs post at Hochlinden – and particularly on the Gleiwitz radio station. ‘Armed insurgents’ had apparently managed to read out a propaganda statement in Polish and German before alarmed listeners to the broadcast could alert the local police. During the ensuing shoot-out, the newspaper said, one of the Polish ‘bandits’ had been killed. (This of course was Franciszek Honiok, the ‘tinned goods’.)
And that was why, early in the morning of 1 September 1939, young Clare Hollingworth could be seen holding a telephone receiver out of the window of her hotel room in Katowice so that the British embassy in Warsaw could hear for itself the sound of the guns, tanks and planes from Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt’s Armeegruppe Süd, invading Poland with the dawn chorus.
The use of propaganda and deception seen at Gleiwitz had long been a leitmotiv of Nazi behaviour. From the Reichstag fire, through the Berlin Olympics and the activities of Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda, one can trace a deliberate policy of deceiving the outside world. Gleiwitz or Gliwice in southern Poland later became a satellite of the industrial extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the site of a factory plant where forced labour packed the chemicals for Wehrmacht smokescreens. The Nazis always believed in Verschleierungsfähigkeit, ‘the obscuring power of smoke’.
The Gleiwitz raid was also a kind of tribute by imitation to similar British operations. Heydrich, the architect of the Nazi racist state despite persistent if ill-founded rumours of his own Jewishness, was just one among many Nazis who were, as the historian and wartime SIS officer Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out, ‘indefatigable readers of novelettes, especially about the British Secret Service – that Machiavellian institution which, they believed, had built up the British world-empire’. Heydrich wanted to be called ‘C’ too, like the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service. He went on to become the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, and was assassinated in Prague. The two roadsweepers who attacked his car with grenades in June 1942 were really Czech soldiers – but they were trained at Aston House in Hertfordshire by a British secret service, the SOE. The man who taught them to throw hand grenades like cricket balls was Alfgar Hesketh Prichard, a keen sportsman and crack shot just like his late father.
On the evening of Friday, 1 September 1939, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, lamented ‘this terrible catastrophe’ in the House of Commons. Of course, nobody could yet foresee the horrors that those German divisions were dragging behind them into Poland: destruction, looting, rape, torture and the murder of millions. Nor could anyone imagine the worldwide ripples of damage and death in the six years to follow. But because both Britain and France were pledged by treaty to defend Poland from aggression, and because the German Government did not withdraw its military forces by 11 a.m. British Summer Time on Sunday 3 September 1939, two decades of a dubious ‘peace’ came to a close.
Just after 11 o’clock on that Sunday morning, following a recorded talk on Making the Most of Tinned Foods, 70-year-old Neville Chamberlain came on the BBC wireless to announce from the Cabinet Room in Downing Street, in a tired and sad voice that sounded to one listener like ‘stale digestive biscuits’, that the ultimatum to the German government had expired, ‘and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany’.
Britain began the Second World War as it ended the First: scattering twenty million pages of propaganda over Germany. ‘Truth raids’, the Air Minister, Sir Kingsley Wood, proudly called them. From ponderous Whitley bombers, the RAF dropped thousands of blocks of leaflets in German-style Gothic type that fluttered apart into separate sheets as they fell. What A. P. Herbert in Punch called ‘bomphlets’ or ‘bomphs’, Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris grumpily saw as tonnage of ‘free toilet paper’. These first propaganda leaflets, printed by HM Stationery Office and following a line of thought emanating from Lord Halifax’s Foreign Office, were aimed at encouraging the many ‘good Germans’ who, it was hoped and believed, opposed Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. Their tone was more like a highbrow newspaper editorial than a punchy popular advertisement, because they had been written by the author of a literary travel book, The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron.
The very first sheet, dropped on 3 September 1939, was a note to the German people warning them that they had been deceived by their leaders: ‘For years their iron censorship has kept from you truths that even uncivilized peoples know. It has imprisoned your minds in, as it were, a concentration camp.’ Not only to German civilians were these sheets o
fficially verboten. When an American war correspondent asked a censor at the British Ministry of Information for the text of the leaflet, he was refused on the grounds that ‘We are not allowed to disclose information which might be of value to the enemy.’ The journalist pointed out that the enemy now had two million copies of the sheet, so could he please have one as well. The hapless official blinked and agreed that there must be something wrong there. (This sort of embarrassment was only resolved in early November when the head of the secret department producing the leaflets began taking all the newspaper proprietors into his confidence.)
The Franco-British plan on the outbreak of war in September 1939 was much as it had been in 1914. Another two-corps British Expeditionary Force was soon over in Flanders, on the left of the French line, ready to block the Germans should they advance once again through Belgium. It seemed like a rerun with different names. Instead of Calais and Boulogne, the disembarkation ports were Cherbourg and Brest. Although Winston Churchill was soon again in charge of the navy as he had been from 1911 to 1915, the army corps were commanded this time by John Dill and Alan Brooke, and the commander-in-chief was the gallant Grenadier Guardsman Lord Gort, who had won the VC, three DSOs and nine mentions in dispatches in WW1, but had never had a major command.
In the murky linoleumed corridors and shabby offices of the War Office in London, the mufti of city suits and stiff collars vanished ‘for the duration’ on 1 September, and people tried not to show too much curiosity about each other’s shoulder badges, buttons and ribbons, which told the stories of their previous wars. Dudley Clarke, now lieutenant colonel, carried on at his deputy assistant military secretary’s desk. He noticed Lord Gort’s daughter, one of the new generation of young women then appearing in Whitehall, looking trim in her new ATS uniform and black shoes. Another was the remarkable administrator Joan Bright, who became fond of the old War Office as a mausoleum:
its ancient ways, its unwashed walls, the uneven water-marks revealing the length of the office-cleaner’s arm, the ceilings thick with dust and the dim evenings in blacked-out rooms which held the stale smell of scores of smokes and dozens of thick-cupped, thick-made teas … I liked the officers who were polite to women and the sturdy, loyal, flat-footed messengers who untiringly provided us with tea, cigarettes, drawing-pins and booty in the shape of pieces of carpet scrounged to cover the bare boards of our rooms.
In his BBC broadcast on 3 September, Neville Chamberlain admitted that the failure of his long struggle to bring peace was ‘a bitter blow’. He concluded:
Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things we shall be fighting against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
God Save the King was played, and all around the country many people stood up. Some of them were crying. Others sat in a doggedly British mood of grim apathy. This looked like the Kaiser’s War all over again, though it was Poland that had been invaded this time, rather than Belgium. But how much worse would warfare be this time, after twenty-five years of scientific progress?
At that moment the air-raid sirens began their banshee wailing across southern England. Winston and Clementine Churchill watched the balloons go up: dozens of cylindrical barrage balloons or ‘blimps’ slowly rising to be tethered above the city skyline like fat silvery fish.
Police constables appeared on bicycles, blowing their whistles and sporting sandwich boards that read ‘Take cover’.
Inside the War Office, overlooking Horse Guards’ Arch, Dudley Clarke followed the procedure on his clipboard, storing papers, opening windows, gathering steel helmet, ‘respirator, anti-gas’ and emergency rations before descending to join the brass-hats in the newly strengthened basement. The Churchills too (accompanied by Inspector Walter Thompson, recently returned as personal armed bodyguard) made their way to the public shelter just down the street, with refreshments of brandy. ‘Everyone was cheerful and jocular, as is the English manner when about to encounter the unknown,’ Churchill wrote in The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his history of the WW2. But as he stood in that London street on a bright September morning, Churchill’s imagination
drew pictures of ruin and carnage and vast explosions shaking the ground; of buildings clattering down in dust and rubble, of fire-brigades and ambulances scurrying through the smoke, beneath the drone of hostile aeroplanes. For had we not all been taught how terrible air raids would be?
Bombing haunted the 1930s. ‘The bomber will always get through,’ said Stanley Baldwin gloomily in 1932, and British planning for air-raids included mass evacuation by train, public and private shelter-building, as well as the manufacture of millions of gas masks and sand bags. HMSO published Air Raid Precautions for Animals, price 3d; art treasures were quietly removed from London or stored deep underground.
Dudley Clarke’s memoir of the first year of the war, Seven Assignments, opens like a John Buchan adventure novel. It tells how Clarke, a 40-year-old soldier with a touch of Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay, had been working late at the War Office on 31 August 1939 and came home after midnight to his cream and green bachelor flat. There he found, lying on the doormat, the visiting card of an aristocratic German staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gerhardt Count von Schwerin.
Clarke had first met von Schwerin at Easter 1939, when staying with his friend Major Kenneth Strong, the assistant military attaché at Berlin, and later that year in England, in July, when von Schwerin had been sent openly by the German General Staff to find out whether Britain would really honour its obligations to Poland if the country were attacked. Clarke and von Schwerin were not exactly friends but they were of the same age and when they met in London they broached the subject of imminent war between their two countries. ‘Send me a word of warning first,’ Dudley had said, jocularly, in a taxi. Now, in a moment of pure Buchan, he found an embossed card, with Auf wiedersehen written on the back:
For a while I sat turning it over in my fingers, and then I went to the telephone by the window-seat. Outside the lights were still blazing in Piccadilly; but it was for the last time. At that very moment the forces of Nazi Germany were advancing into Poland.
Starting on Friday, 1 September 1939, three million reluctant and name-tagged people, including the very young, the pregnant, the disabled and the blind, were evacuated from cities like London and Glasgow, Birmingham and Liverpool to ‘Safety Zone’ towns and villages that did not really want them. The private British railways were placed under state control. Identity cards, based on the census register, were issued. The BBC’s nascent television service to 25,000 viewers was cut off. All ham radio transmitting equipment was confiscated. Cinemas, dance halls and theatres were closed. All ARP wardens were mobilised, along with the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the first ‘blackout’ was instituted at sunset, 7.47 p.m. This meant that no street lighting was switched on and all householders were forbidden to let a single chink of light escape from their doors or windows. Drivers of motor vehicles could not use their headlights, lest bombers above should spot them. Even electric torches were to be smothered with crepe paper and always held downwards. From ‘Black Friday’ onwards, thousands of people would injure themselves stumbling about in dim homes and on dark wintry streets, and there were many more night-time car crashes and road deaths. But the thousands of hospital beds which had been cleared were not waiting for accidents like these, but for casualties imminently expected from enemy aerial bombing. Corporation swimming-baths had been drained and cardboard coffins stacked to await a multitude of corpses.
However, after half an hour of dread on the morning of Sunday the 3rd, with everyone braced for the Nazi bombers’ ‘knock-out blow’, the sirens sounded the ‘All Clear’ and everyone left their air-raid shelters to find the sunny sandbagged streets as tranquil and undisturbed as before. The false alarm from the Thames estuary, instead of the ruthless thunder and lightning attack that everyone feared the Germans would
deliver on the first day, was a fitting opening to that queer period of fighting and not fighting that Churchill called ‘the pretended war’ and then ‘the Twilight War’, but which impatient American journalists finally dubbed ‘the Phoney War’. This lasted eight months, although the food rationing that was introduced then endured in some form for fourteen years. Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags is the most acute satire on ‘that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance which people called at the time the Great Bore War’.
14
Winston is Back
That same Sunday, Churchill made his way to the House of Commons where, after the debate, Neville Chamberlain offered him a place in the War Cabinet, with the post of First Lord of the Admiralty. (The Board signalled to all Royal Navy ships ‘Winston is back’.) That evening, on the wall behind his familiar old chair in the First Lord’s office, Churchill found the wooden mapcase he had had fixed in the panelling twenty-eight years before. When he flung open the door, he saw the chart still marked with the disposition of the German Fleet on 23 May 1915, the day he had left.
Churchill came back to naval problems familiar from 1914–18. On the first day of war, as in WW1, the order was given to sever the two German undersea communication lifelines that connected Emden in Germany on the one hand with the Azores and the Americas, and on the other with Lisbon and Africa. This chopping of the telegraph and telephone cables left Nazi Germany relying on wireless systems or radiotelephony, whose codes and ciphers could be intercepted by the British ‘Y’ or listening service, and passed on to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
The old enemy was using new mines and better submarines to try and choke off the British Isles. Once again, U-boats were a headache and shipping became a prime German target. In WW1, Britain had lost half its merchant fleet, but in WW2, the Axis would sink 60 per cent or 11.3 million tons of British shipping, and kill over 50,000 British Empire merchant seamen, making theirs a more dangerous occupation than any of the armed forces. German Naval Intelligence cryptanalysts in B Dienst had been breaking British ciphers since the Abyssinian crisis of 1935 and thus knew exactly where many Royal Navy and Merchant Service ships were. War at sea was far from phoney.
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