The Day We Went to War

by Terry Charman

  11.15am (12.15pm), WARSAW

  Patrick Maitland and some others are crowding around a radio set, trying to pick up Chamberlain’s broadcast, but the Germans are jamming it. At the Foreign Office, correspondent Ed Beattie is waiting with one of Colonel Beck’s officials when suddenly the door opens and in bursts another Pole who tells them that Britain has just declared war, and the French are going to follow suit this afternoon. Beattie’s companion breaks down and cries, ‘It has been quite a strain, this waiting,’ he explains.

  11.15am (12.15pm), ESPLANADE HOTEL, BERLIN

  In the Chicago Tribune bureau office, correspondents Sigrid Schultz and John ‘Jack’ M. Raleigh listen to Chamberlain’s speech on the radio. They both gasp as they hear the Prime Minister announce that Britain is at war. As soon as Chamberlain finishes, Raleigh dashes out of the office and into the hotel lobby. He is on his way to the Propaganda Ministry to get more information. One of the hotel desk clerks asks the hurrying correspondent if there is any news and Raleigh shouts back in reply ‘You are at war with France and England!’ The clerk is absolutely stunned. He recoils and turns white, his hands grasping the edge of the counter. Mumbling ‘God in Heaven’, the man stumbles into the manager’s office to pass on the bad news.

  11.15am (12.15pm), WILHELMSHAVEN

  Commodore Karl Doenitz, head of the German Navy’s U-boat arm, is told of Britain’s declaration of war. He is stunned and keeps repeating, ‘My God! So it’s war against England again!’

  11.15am (1.15pm), GERMAN EMBASSY, ANKARA

  Ambassador Franz von Papen has only just received official notification of the British ultimatum. With his staff, he now hears on the embassy’s radio Chamberlain announcing that Britain is at war with Germany. Von Papen, a former Reich Chancellor, was one of those responsible for helping Hitler into power six years ago. Today he is both distraught and horrified at the news. In the safety of the embassy’s garden, he confides in Fraulein Maria Rose, his personal secretary. ‘Mark my words,’ von Papen tells her, ‘this war is the worst crime and the greatest madness that Hitler and his clique have ever committed. Germany can never win this war. Nothing will be left but ruins.’ Despite this, the lightweight, foppish von Papen decides to remain as Hitler’s ambassador to the Turks. He hopes that he may have a chance to ‘deflect the coming catastrophe’ or at least ‘limit the conflict’.

  11.17am, ADMIRALTY, WHITEHALL

  The signal goes out to all Royal Naval warships to commence hostilities against Germany.

  11.17am, HMS CORNWALL, AT SEA OFF SINGAPORE

  Eighteen-year-old Midshipman Peter Austin and the crew are fallen in on the quarter deck listening to a talk by the ship’s captain. The men have already been told that the British ultimatum is going to expire at 18.00 hours, Singapore time. The captain tells his men ‘that we realise that it was now a question of time before we went to war. The object of this war was not to smash the German people themselves, but to uproot Hitlerism and destroy it completely.’ Just as he finishes speaking, the Admiralty signal to commence hostilities is received. On hearing the news, Austin turns and ‘examines the horizon expecting to see the enemy waiting to attack us’. There is of course, as Austin soon realises, nothing in sight at all.

  11.17am, HMS CICADA, HONG KONG

  Lieutenant Patrick Bayly and the other members of the crew of the river gunboat listen to the captain read out the Admiralty signal, adding, ‘God Save the King and keep safe all our families.’ For Bayly and the other men it is ‘a highly emotional moment’.

  11.17am, HMS DELIGHT, INDIAN OCEAN

  Radio operator Bernard Campion is coming to the end of his first ‘dog watch’. The sea is very rough, and in the cramped and stuffy radio compartment the lead-covered codebooks are being constantly flung about by the destroyer’s pitching and rolling. The seasick Campion is counting the minutes to the time he can turn over to his relief. He desperately wants to get back to his hammock. But a new signal arrives. Unusually, it is in plain language, not code. It is the Admiralty signal to commence hostilities. Campion admires its ‘Nelsonian simplicity’. He senses that he is turning over a page of history as he bawls the message up the voice-pipe to the bridge.

  11.25am (12.25pm), BERLIN

  Although Britain and Germany have been at war for the last half hour, from the British Embassy Sir Nevile Henderson sets out for the Foreign Ministry. He has just received a message from von Ribbentrop, requesting an interview. The pavement outside the embassy is completely deserted with just a single Berlin policeman pacing up and down. Sir Nevile is reminded that, on 4 August 1914, the embassy was besieged by a howling mob that smashed the windows and ‘hurled abuse at its inmates and at Great Britain’.

  11.28am, LONDON

  Backbench Tory MP Victor Cazalet, once an early protégé of Churchill’s, comes up to London to attend today’s midday sitting of the Commons. He arrives just as the sirens are sounding and people running to the shelters. At first, Cazalet and fellow MPs joke about the warning, but then he experiences ‘a sort of sinking feeling’.

  11.28am, CITY OF LONDON

  High Anglican Driberg has decided to stay on and attend morning service. Just as it is beginning, the sirens go. For Driberg it is a ‘blood-curdling, spine-shivering sound’. He last heard the sound of sirens in February this year during the last days of the Spanish Civil War. He recalls that then the sirens were followed ‘within five minutes or so by the drone of German bombers, by ear-shattering explosions, by crumbling houses and gutters streaming blood’. Now the young vicar quietly says, ‘People must do what they like – what they think best.’ No one leaves, but Driberg and a few others prudently move to a windowless aisle. The service continues with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

  11.28am, 10 DOWNING STREET

  As soon as Chamberlain finishes, some of his colleagues enter the Cabinet Room. R.A. Butler, Lord Halifax’s deputy at the Foreign Office and a leading appeaser, thinks the Prime Minister’s speech ‘pathetically moving, but scarcely a tocsin ringing to arms’. Just as the Prime Minister is asking his colleagues how they liked his speech, there is a terrible wailing sound. ‘That is an air-raid warning,’ Chamberlain tells them. He is quite calm, Butler notices. Somebody says, ‘It would be funny if it were,’ but Chamberlain keeps on repeating the phrase ‘That is an air-raid warning.’ He reminds Butler of a schoolmaster dinning a lesson into a class of late developers. Then Mrs Chamberlain appears in the doorway. She is carrying a large basket which contains books, thermos flasks and gas masks. Her appearance galvanises everybody into action, and there is a general move towards the underground cabinet war rooms through the basement of Number 10. Butler sees some people scurrying across Horse Guards to take shelter, but he decides to return to the Foreign Office and shelter in the basement there. When he arrives there, Butler finds that he has to sit on the floor, as no furniture has been provided. An officious air-raid warden starts telling Butler and his fellow shelterers that he is not expecting the Germans to use poison gas immediately. Just as he doing so the ‘All Clear’ sounds, and Butler and the others return to their offices.

  11.28am, SNACK BAR, CLARENDON ROAD, NOTTING HILL

  As the sirens start, a customer leaves hurriedly to take shelter. ‘There’s my bacon and eggs gone wallop,’ he tells a passer-by. As the sirens wails, twenty-year-old Doris, the proprietor’s daughter confesses to a ‘funny feeling’ in her stomach, ‘as though it was all upside down’. Her hand is trembling as she offers a customer a cigarette. Doris’s mother looking out sees pedestrians hurrying to take shelter and says, ‘Look! There must be something wrong. They are running. It must be a raid. It’s awful, isn’t it?’ No one in the snack bar seems to have a very clear idea as to the meaning of the air-raid signals being given. But they do see a warden riding around on a bicycle with placards front and back with ‘Take Cover’ on them, just like during the German daylight raids back in 1917.

  11.28am, ROMFORD, ESSEX

  Teenager Nina Masel
is playing the piano in her parents’ semidetached house when her mother suddenly bursts in. ‘Stop that noise,’ Mrs Masel tells Nina as she flings open a window to let in the sound of the sirens. Nina’s father takes charge and tells the family. ‘All get your gas masks . . . Steady, no panicking! . . . Every man for himself . . . Keep in the passage.’ Nan’s eleven-year-old sister begins to sob. She keeps asking, ‘Will it be alright? Will it be alright?’ Nina’s own heart keeps beating hard but it soon calms down. As the Masels have not got an air-raid shelter, the family gather in the passage of the house and sit on the stairs. Then, as nothing seems to be happening, Nina, her father and brother, go out to the front gate. Nina hears some babies crying and sees air-raid wardens wearing gas masks and steel helmets running up and down the road. Finally, to everyone’s immense relief, the ‘All Clear’ sounds.

  11.28am, MORPETH MANSIONS, WESTMINSTER

  Winston Churchill is at his Westminster flat as Chamberlain finishes and the sirens sound. With a nice touch of ironic humour, Mrs Churchill comments ‘favourably upon German promptitude and precision’. The Churchills then decide to go up to the flat top of the building to see what is going on. Churchill sees thirty or forty barrage balloons beginning to slowly rise and he gives his new colleagues a good mark for this ‘evident sign of preparation’. The Churchills leave the roof and make for their nearest shelter, a hundred yards down the street. They are ‘armed with a bottle of brandy and other appropriate medical comforts’. Arriving at the shelter, Churchill sees that everyone is cheerful and jocular, ‘as is the English manner when about to encounter the unknown’. Standing at the doorway, Churchill has an apocalyptic vision 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 drone of hostile aeroplanes’. Instead, the ‘All Clear’ sounds, and an air-raid warden appears shouting the same message. The Churchills and their fellow shelterers disperse. Churchill sets out for the House of Commons.

  11.28am, LONDON

  Conservative MP Beverley Baxter starts making his way to the Houses of Parliament. Like Churchill, he looks up to the sky and sees, ‘high up, in the almost Mediterranean sky, the grotesque defence balloons . . . like distorted, silver boxing gloves’. As he does so, the sirens begin to wail. Like Clementine Churchill, Baxter admits a sneaking admiration for the Nazis’ promptitude: ‘Our ultimatum had expired at eleven o’ clock; now, barely half an hour later, 5,000 machines were bringing their answer . . . at any minute now, that which we had all foreseen would come to pass’.

  11.28am, CHELSEA, LONDON

  Bohemian teenager Joan Wyndham and her family have just heard Chamberlain. As they are sitting around, feeling rather sick, the air-raid warning goes. For a moment, Joan and the others cannot believe their ears. It has not really sunk in yet that Britain is now at war. But they soon recover, and go down to the cellar which they have prepared as a gasproof room. There, they start damping blankets with pails of water as a measure to keep poison gas out. That done, Joan goes and sits on the front doorstep to wait for the first sounds of gunfire. She looks up and sees the barrage balloons that are ‘too lovely in the sun against the blue skies, like iridescent silver fish swimming in blue water’.

  11.28am, BALCOMBE STREET, MARYLEBONE

  Robert Baynes-Powell and his wife Nancy hear the air-raid warning and make for the bathroom, their flat’s safest room in the event of an air raid. They sit there wearing their gas masks and feeling ‘very queasy’ until the ‘All Clear’ sounds.

  11.28am, HARROW, WEST LONDON

  As the sirens sound, writer George Beardmore experiences a sensation of utter panic. He, like so many others, has seen the film Things to Come, and now remembers all ‘the dire prophecies of scientists, journalists and even politicians of the devastation and disease that would follow the first air raid’. He pictures the Houses of Parliament one heap of rubble and St Paul’s Cathedral in ruins.

  11.28am, ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL

  The boys of the St Paul’s Choir School have already been evacuated to Truro. But even without them, this morning’s congregation is unusually large. They are singing:

  ‘O God of Love. O King of Peace

  Make wars throughout the world to cease!’

  Londoners taking cover as air-raid sirens sounded shortly after war was declared, 3 September 1939. Chamberlain had said earlier in the year, ‘If we should ever be involved in war we may well find that if we are not all in the firing line, we may all be in the line of fire.’

  just as the air-raid warning is given. The Bishop of Willesden is taking this morning’s service. He calmly leads the worshippers down to the crypt to take shelter.

  11.28am, GRANADA CINEMA, NORTH CHEAM, SURREY

  The staff have just heard Chamberlain’s broadcast. They are now listening to cinema manager Watson as he gives them a pep talk. ‘And above all,’ Watson is telling them, ‘we must at all times keep calm,’ as the air-raid sirens sound the warning. Before Watson knows what is happening, he is swept aside as most of the staff fly down the stairs into the cinema’s foyer and out into the street. Two or three of the cleaners are on top of the circle steps, clinging to the hand-rails and screaming at the tops of their voices. Despite Watson’s entreaties they refuse to come down, and the manager ruefully reflects that it must be the effect of his speech.

  11.28am, ST JOHN’S WOOD, LONDON

  As the sirens begin to wail, Noël Coward is driving up to Woburn Abbey, the ‘Hush Hush’ headquarters of Britain’s secret propaganda organisation. He has already heard Chamberlain’s ‘lachrymose’ announcement, and is now on his way to hear confirmation of a propaganda liaison job with the French in Paris. As the warning sounds, Coward feels ‘a sudden coldness in the heart’ and an ‘automatic tensing of the muscles’. An air-raid warden appears and waves Coward to take cover immediately. He is ushered into a large apartment building and into the basement. Everybody is calm, except for one young woman carrying a baby, who is in tears. Coward wonders if this ‘is going to be the real knockout blow, a carefully prepared surprise attack by Hitler within the first hour of war being declared’. More and more people are arriving in the already crowded basement. Coward decides that if he is going to die, ‘I would rather die in the open and not suffocate slowly with a load of strangers at the bottom of a lift shaft.’ Thus resolved, Coward makes his way up the stairs to the hall. There he runs into theatrical costumier Morris Angel. Angel is delighted to meet Coward and says, ‘I think this calls for a bottle of bubbly!’ They go up to the Angels’ flat on the third floor to find the electricity is turned off and the Sunday joint ruined. Nevertheless, a bottle of champagne is opened and they toast ‘the King, each other, and a speedy victory for the Allies’.

  11.28am, LONDON

  Virginia Cowles hears the sirens sound. Only two days ago she was in Germany, and on Friday evening had heard similar sirens during an air-raid drill in Berlin. Virginia soon learns that this too is a false alarm. She is told that Captain de Brantes, French assistant military attaché in London, has flown in on a private plane, and been mistaken for a German. She also gets an early example of war neurosis. A fellow journalist assures her that he has heard bomb explosions, and that his own building has even rocked – ‘ever so slightly’.

  11.28am, CROYDON

  As the sirens begin to wail, the Ward family all think they are about to die. But then the ‘All Clear’ sounds and they make tea, ‘that great English panacea’. Sheila and her brother are now really excited at the prospect of being evacuated. They have never been away from home before except for the family’s annual fortnight’s holiday at Broadstairs. But ‘this is going to be different, without our parents’. And now it is finally happening, Sheila finds ‘it is difficult not to enjoy it’.

  11.28am, MINISTRY OF ECONOMIC WARFARE, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

  John Colville and three others are playing bridge in the shelter of the London Sch
ool of Economics. Colville has visions of London being reduced to rubble as in the 1936 film of H.G. Wells’s Things to Come. But he tries to preserve ‘a semblance of nonchalance’ while playing cards. He and the others are just finishing the first rubber when the ‘All Clear’ goes.

  11.28am, ASHFORD, KENT

  Rodney Giesler hears the siren and thinks, ‘Oh, My God, they’re coming.’ The family rush down to the cellar to await the bombs, only to emerge when the ‘All Clear’ is sounded.

  11.28am, EALING, WEST LONDON

  Elsie Warren, a volunteer in the Auxiliary Fire Service, has just been listening to the Prime Minister on the wireless. She thinks Chamberlain delivered ‘a wonderful speech to the Empire’, but ‘sounded very unhappy’. Now, just as she is going out, the siren sounds. Seeing a friend, Elsie tells her, ‘Hurry up inside . . . that’s the air-raid warning.’ But her friend replies, ‘No, it’s just a test.’ As they begin to argue, a warden comes rushing up the street, blowing his whistle, and people start scurrying off to shelter. Elsie gets on her bicycle and pedals furiously off to Ealing Fire Station. There, she takes up her place by the telephone, but the news soon comes through that ‘it was only a friendly plane that caused the excitement’.

  11.28am, MITCHAM, SURREY

  After Chamberlain finishes, Dorothy Tyler’s two brothers decide to go and see some friends to talk things over. Dorothy goes with them. They are just driving off when the siren goes. They turn the car round, and quickly drive back home. Rushing indoors, they grab and put on their gas masks. They then sit down at the kitchen table to wait and see what happens next. Dorothy is worrying about her fiancé, who is in the army. She thinks that he might be sent to fight in Poland.