by Jacky Hyams
We woke next morning to see the papers covered with pictures of the crowds in London all going mad. As we sat down to our usual breakfast, porridge, sugar and milk, then bacon and egg and fried bread – we had not suffered as city dwellers had as we had our own smallholding – Dad looked at me and said: ‘We have the Japanese to finish yet and that will be a long haul, you could end up in this war yet.’ He was not to know it was my most ardent wish. I wanted to be in there with the Army and not skulking about at home. He hoped it was over before they wanted me, daft as I was. I did go much later and find my own little war and he was right, you do not volunteer for that kind of thing twice.
We all got back to work a day later and were standing around chatting about what we had done when the boss came in and shouted: ‘Okay, you lot, back to work, the bloody war is not over yet!’ Little did we know that the USA was preparing Armageddon for the Japanese and the rest of the world would live under its cloud for the next fifty years.
For a couple of days, we rejoiced, felt free and uplifted, enjoyed it all, then back into the grist mill. From my experience it settled nothing – but we were not to know that.
Where I lived, we’d had nearly three years of night raids, some heavy bombing, people killed, property destroyed. Now it had gone, we thought the good times were coming. Only they did not: it got worse. Things were rationed that had not been rationed in the war, the austerity years, so our war seemed never-ending. But rationing ended in 1954, house building started, and there was plenty of work for those wanting it.
By 1947, I was in the Army and still able to smell a dance hall twenty miles away. Yet the war had shaped my life and my future. It was exciting, frightening and very funny in turns, the pace of living had increased as we came to a day to-day style of doing things, the cry being ‘We might not be here tomorrow.’ That was only half said in jest. And it took us a long time to get back to a normal life.
I pray for my grandchildren’s sake it never happens again.
As Frank Mee outlined, the VE Day celebrations had a dramatic and totally unexpected finale. The war with Japan was expected to go on for a year or so, but the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans at the beginning of August 1945 changed everything. On the morning of 15 August, it was announced that the Japanese had surrendered unconditionally and VJ Day celebrations began; the Second World War officially ended on 2 September 1945.
Events in Britain proved equally unexpected. On 26 July, the nation’s beloved wartime ‘Winnie’, Winston Churchill, had been forced to resign as Prime Minister, following the Conservative Party’s defeat in the first general election held in Britain for more than a decade. On the same day, the leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, became the country’s new leader. Attlee’s victory represented huge social change ahead: it would usher in the formation of the welfare state and the birth of the National Health Service for Britain. Yet as far as war’s ending was concerned, the meeting between ‘The Big Three’ Allied powers, heads of state, Harry S. Truman, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference in Germany from 17 July to 2 August 1945, where it was hoped the key issues of the international post-war world would be resolved, was clouded by an atmosphere of suspicion and unease.
Stalin was initially unwilling to negotiate the future of those Eastern European countries then occupied by Soviet forces. In due course, the negotiation would lead to huge swaths of Europe remaining more or less under Soviet control until 1991.
Churchill, already on edge about the result of the general election, had to leave the conference on 26 July for the election result – and his place at Potsdam was taken, days later, by the new British Prime Minister Clement Attlee.
It was a huge shock. Britain had undoubtedly loved and respected its wartime warrior, but the country yearned for change. When Churchill’s leading physician, Lord Moran, criticised the ingratitude of the nation, Churchill’s response was typically astute: ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.’
Truman, for his part, had only recently become the American President. In April 1945, less than a month before Hitler took his own life, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died, so consigning to history his important personal friendship with Churchill during the war years. Truman, formerly Roosevelt’s Vice-President, had very serious preoccupations during the Potsdam talks. In total secrecy, he signed off on the subsequent use of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August. He was unaware that, by then, Stalin had his own nuclear agenda: the Soviets were already in the process of developing their own atomic weapons.
The conference achieved agreement on the status of demilitarised Germany, splitting it into four separate occupation zones, controlled by the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. But mostly, in historical terms, it was a marker to the end of the power of the British Empire – and the beginning of the Cold War. By August 1949, the Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb. The nuclear arms race, which was to dominate global politics through the 1950s and beyond, was well under way.
Six years of war had left the country with huge overseas debts, rundown industry and an acute housing shortage, with almost a third of all houses damaged by bombs. For millions of women like Megan Ryan, VE Day and its celebration was a time for reflection. That day, her twenty-sixth birthday, she had learned that her husband, Peter, in hospital, was out of danger.
That evening, after the children were asleep in bed, I went outside and sat on the low front wall before the house – the wall from which the ornamental iron railings had long since been taken for the war effort. It was a warm, still evening and the long street was quiet. But from almost every window light streamed out, splashing onto the pavement. Curtains had been pulled aside and blackouts had been removed. For the first time in nearly six years we were released from the necessity of hiding out in darkness and people were reacting by letting the lights from their home shine out.
Too tired to move, I sat thinking about those six years. When they began, I’d been twenty, full of enthusiasms, ambitions, certainties and energy of youth. I’d married, borne children, but the war had stolen from us the simple ordinary joys of a young couple shaping a shared life.
Our first home had been burnt to rubble and with it had gone many of the gifts which relatives and friends had given us and which should have been treasured for life, while what had been salvaged would always bear the marks of that night of destruction. We had known the agony of separation and the too rare, too short, too heightened joys of reunions. Apart, we had endured illnesses and dangers and fears for each other. As a family, too, we had been separated and now must learn to live together, overcoming the barriers set up by experiences which had not been shared.
I thought of those who had been dear to us who had not lived to see this. Of John, who had stood at the altar with us on our wedding day, John who had been trapped in his cockpit when his plane sank beneath the waves. Of Ron, constant companion of my brother since schooldays, who had vanished without trace when the troopship he was on had been sunk by the Japanese. Of Peter, my girlhood friend’s gay, kind brother, who had been shot while trying to escape from the prisoner-of-war camp to which he had been taken. They were all so young. The youngest died at nineteen, the oldest at twenty-four. I sat thinking of them and then went indoors to stand looking at the sleeping faces of my two little boys, whose lives lay before them in a world at peace.
Philip C. Gunyon, survivor of the sinking of the Athenia on the day war broke out, was living with his family in Oakville, Toronto, on VE Day. He had just turned thirteen.
I was just completing my first year in Grade 9 at Oakville High School. We didn’t get the day off, but there was a sense of closure, knowing that Hitler was dead and that his armies had been vanquished on the Eastern and Western Fronts. I had followed these stories during 1944 and there was a sense of relief that it was over now. But over only in Europe. We still had
the Japs to finish off and our neighbouring Americans were still doing so at a frightful cost. I was wondering how long it would take for the other shoe to drop.
My dad had spent many years in Japan for his English firm, Mather and Platt, and he had joined the Royal Canadian Navy, Special Branch, as an interpreter and had been sent to Australia and, eventually, Shanghai to interrogate Japanese prisoners. So, I was wondering when he’d get home. [Eventually, in 1946.] But on that day in May, I was thinking too about a girl in my class whose big brother now lay in a grave in Holland and I remembered the Remembrance Sundays in November during the war, when the names of the other Oakville men who had been killed were read out in St Jude’s Church, where we went every Sunday.
In the city centre of Toronto, VE Day was celebrated by a jubilant crowd intent on enjoying themselves. However, in Philip’s quiet suburb, twenty-five miles outside the city, there were no big street parties for the 5,000 or so inhabitants.
‘There was only a sense of relief and thanksgiving.’
The conflict had been total war. It had involved and affected everyone in Britain. High taxes, conscription, food and other rationing and many shortages, as well as air raids on many cities and the all-encompassing government regulations and restrictions. No one in the country could avoid war’s effect.
How much hardship and tragedy each family endured can never be calculated or assessed. The Second World War’s toll of 400,000 British people killed was, in fact, lower than the 750,000 who had been killed in the First World War – which had lasted one year less.
As already described, when war broke out in 1939, the immediate impact was not, as anticipated, a swift aerial bombardment. Instead, the true impact on the civilian population took place gradually: month by month, year by year.
Food rationing began in January 1940. Then the events of April to June 1940 brought harsher circumstances. After 10 May 1940, when German forces started to overwhelm Belgium, Holland and France, the real impact of war on Britain’s civilian population started to take hold.
The Dunkirk Evacuation of 338,226, British, French and Belgian troops from the beaches of Dunkirk, France, by a hastily assembled fleet of 800 vessels, comprising Royal Navy and French warships, civilian merchant ships, fishing boats, steamers, river cruisers, and even small sailing craft was heralded as a ‘miracle’, a triumph over adversity, a heroic rescue mission against the odds.
Nonetheless, the story of the evacuation of Dunkirk on 3 June 1940 assumed the proportions of a victory of sorts, mostly thanks to the courageous efforts of hundreds of ordinary people who determinedly set sail to participate in the rescue.
The Battle of Britain: Nearly a year after war began came the Battle of Britain and the German aerial attempt to destroy the Royal Air Force prior to an invasion of England, which aside from bombing raids on cities, saw a concerted assault on Britain’s airfields and radar stations in southern England. It lasted from 10 July to 15 September. The scale of the Luftwaffe attack was huge, but the country’s defences – thanks to the efforts of the RAF, backed up by advanced radar and efficient anti-aircraft defences, and underpinned by the pre-war decision to begin production of the much-needed modern fighters, the Spitfire and Hurricane – held firm. There were heavy losses, especially of pilots, but in the final tally, the Luftwaffe came off worse. There is still debate about how serious Hitler was in planning Operation Sealion, the invasion of southern Britain, but with the RAF and the Royal Navy – then the most powerful maritime force in the world – still operational, any such attempt would have been blasted off the surface of the English Channel.
The Blitz (September 1940 to May 1941): the large-scale, nightly air attacks on Britain’s cities gave millions of civilians their most severe and bitter taste of war.
London was first, with severe bombing raids every night for two months, then came the aerial assaults on Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Southampton, Plymouth and other cities. Some thirty thousand people were killed and many more injured, close to four million houses were ruined or damaged. At this point, a second wave of evacuation from London began, though many opted to remain, some in essential voluntary roles as firemen, air-raid wardens or ambulance drivers. (A government programme of factory dispersal in 1940 meant that factory production, so crucial in wartime, was not harmed dramatically. Moreover, factory managers and workers were resolute in their determination to just get on with the job and ‘do their bit’.)
Smaller-scale ‘tip-and-run’ air raids continued after the Blitz. Damaging retaliatory raids on towns like Bath, York and Canterbury, called ‘Baedeker raids’ (after the popular series of German travel guides published by Baedeker) because of their historic or cultural value, took place in April and May 1942, and would continue sporadically over the next two years.
The V1s and V2s: The most serious resumption of enemy air raids came not long after D-Day in June 1944, when the Germans began to launch the deadly V1 flying bombs, pilotless aircraft that dropped to earth when their engines cut out, detonating an 1,800-pound warhead.
In September that year, the V2 rockets – the world’s first long-range ballistic missiles – were launched against London and South-East England, killing 10,000 people and bringing a renewed evacuation of London. These lethal weapons were also used towards the end of the war in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Unlike the V1s – numbers of which were destroyed by fighters or anti-aircraft fire – they could not be seen or heard in flight, and they carried a larger warhead of 2,200 pounds.
Only when the launching sites in Northern France and Belgium were finally overrun by Allied forces in March 1945, mere weeks before hostilities in Europe finally ended, did their use cease.
The foregoing describes, very briefly, the brutal effect of the Second World War on Britain’s civilian population. The emotional impact, however, reached far beyond the bombed-out homes in cities and towns. The upheaval of war brought massive disruption to everyday family life. It broke up everything, families and entire neighbourhoods.
Many of those who had been bombed out had to change their address time and again. From September 1939 to the end of 1945, there were sixty million changes of address across the country – out of a civilian population of thirty-eight million. Housing conditions, family separation, sudden news of the loss of loved ones and the effect of women’s mobilisation placed enormous and long-lasting strain on wartime families.
In September 1939, few had believed that women would be called up to go into the forces. At the end of 1941, conscription for women was introduced (though women would not be fighting in combat). By mid-1943, 90 per cent of single women and 80 per cent of married women were engaged in some kind of war work.
Many women had to leave their homes to work elsewhere, specifically in munitions or armaments factories in different parts of the country. For a population where mobility for working people had been quite limited by today’s standards, such upheaval brought its own terrors, especially for younger, unmarried women, knowing little outside their immediate environment, but finding themselves working a fifty-five-hour factory week alongside strangers. Those strangers, however, might include young childless women already widowed by war’s impact. Evacuation too, as we have seen, would carry a long-lasting emotional impact down the years.
Yet the spirit of the people, for all the deprivation and heartache, remained mostly intact in those years after September 1939. Millions had carried out war work on a purely voluntary basis, despite the blackouts, the rationing and shortages, the shelters and the bombs. Men and women of those times, when interviewed, always, without fail, refer to their absolute pride in ‘doing their bit’ for their country. The stakes were of the highest order: survival against the odds. Yet there is little question that the nation’s inherent qualities – the quiet reserve, the stoicism and the humour, still regarded as very British traits – enabled so many to navigate their way through the worst.
The author J. B. Priestley summed up the mood
of the times when he wrote:
The British were absolutely at their best in the Second World War. They were never so good in my lifetime before it and I’m sorry to say that they’ve never been so good after it.
© Getty Images/ Popperfoto / Contributor
© Getty Images/ Fox Photos / Stringer
The crowds outside Number 10, Downing Street await the news which would determine the fate of the country.
Neville Chamberlain, poised to broadcsat the infamous announcement which was to change the face of Britain and the world.
© Getty Images/ Fox Photos / Stringer
For the first time, on 3 September 1939, British citizens, some waving the cardboard cases carrying their gas masks, descend into a shelter in St James’s Park, London.
© Getty Images/ Fox Photos / Stringer
© Getty Images/ Arthur Tanner / Stringer
© Getty Images/ Fox Photos / Stringer
Piles and piles of sandbags – a scene which would soon become familiar as the country prepared to defend itself from the enemy.
Preparations for war were far-reaching, requiring everyone to pull together.
A group of women paint the road to guide people in the blackout.
© Mirrorpix/ Daily Mirror/George Greenwell
Gas masks were distributed – here a warden is fitting masking tape to a mask.
© Mirrorpix/ Sunday Mercury/ Staff