The Day We Went to War

by Terry Charman

  2.00pm, WESTMINSTER

  Winston Churchill and wife Clementine are guests at the flat of their son-in-law, the Austrian-born entertainer Vic Oliver. Their daughter Sarah married the much older Oliver against their will nearly three years ago. Although there is still tension over the marriage, the Churchills, Sarah and Oliver today are as one as they raise their champagne glasses to toast ‘Victory’.

  2.00pm, EALING FIRE STATION, WEST LONDON

  Elsie Warren finishes her shift and goes to Westbourne Park. Elsie reflects that ‘the past few days have been very morbid’ under the shadow of war. Now in the park with the sun shining, ‘the folly of war seems so stupid’.

  2.00pm (3.00pm), ADLON HOTEL, BERLIN

  Alex Adams and the rest of the British Embassy staff are now incarcerated on the first floor of the Adlon. For their own protection, they are assured by the Berlin police. The second floor is already reserved for the staff of the French Embassy. The British diplomats find that they can still use the hotel telephone to ring numbers within Berlin, and so they get some of their essential belongings sent to them at the hotel. Naval attaché ‘Tommy’ Troubridge even manages to have a case of champagne delivered for an impromptu celebration. As he waits for ‘Tommy’s’ party to begin, Adams is relaxing on his bed, reading a John Buchan novel. Suddenly, there is a knock on the door and the sound of heavy breathing. A burly German enters, and Adams sees in the reflection of the wardrobe mirror that he is carrying an axe. In a flash, Adams is off the bed and gripping the back of a chair. He is determined to keep it between himself and the intruder. Adams’s voice is unsteady as he asks the German what he is going to do with the axe. ‘I have been sent to open a wooden case,’ comes back the simple reply. Adams gives a sigh of relief, and directs the German to the naval attaché’s room, where the case of champagne awaits. Adams follows on not far behind, keen now ‘to slake an anxious thirst’.

  2.00pm, FOREIGN OFFICE, WHITEHALL

  Oliver Harvey, Lord Halifax’s Private Secretary, notices the ‘strange silence’ in the Foreign Office after all this morning’s excitement. Halifax gives orders that the Office is to close this afternoon, and Harvey thankfully goes home and drops exhausted into bed.

  2.15pm, WILHELMSHAVEN, GERMANY

  Flying Officer McPherson’s Blenheim bomber has successfully completed its mission. Unfortunately, flying at 24,000 feet, the aircraft’s radio has iced up. McPherson is thus unable to send back to base immediate information as to the disposition of the German warships. But they have taken seventy-five valuable reconnaissance photographs. McPherson can proudly write in the ’plane’s logbook: ‘Duty successful . . . the first RAF aircraft to cross the German frontier.’

  2.30pm, EALING, WEST LONDON

  Elsie Warren arrives home to find that her Sunday dinner has got cold. Her mother is in good spirits and believes that despite the declaration of war, ‘it can’t come to much’.

  2.30pm (3.30pm), BERLIN

  Seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Else Danielowski is travelling on the ‘S’ Bahn suburban railway. She and her fellow passengers have heard of Britain’s declaration of war. Looking across the carriage she senses that everyone is sharing the same feeling that ‘a huge thick cloud was bearing down upon us’. Nobody is the least bit cheerful, let alone defiant.

  2.30pm (3.30pm), WARSAW

  The weather is changing, and not for the better, and with it the mood of the capital’s inhabitants. The feeling of exultation has passed. It is drizzling now, the wind has risen and it is turning cold. A party of foreign correspondents are being taken out to view the Jewish children’s home and hospital that was bombed yesterday evening. It is situated at Otwock, a few miles from Warsaw. The flimsy building has been blown into matchwood, while part of it is still smoking from the fire caused by incendiary bombs. The correspondents are told that eight Jewish children between the ages of three and seven were burnt to death in their beds. They are shown one of the bodies, completely carbonised, still in the twisted metal of a bed. Reporter Cedric Salter, looking down on the body, thinks that it does not look as though it could ever have been human, and is not therefore particularly terrible unless you permit yourself ‘to imagine the agony that it must have suffered before it was reduced to this handless, footless, hairless, faceless blob looking more like a badly overcooked joint of lamb than a human being’.

  3.00pm, TRENT PARK

  John Colville and his brother Philip, who is awaiting his call-up to the Grenadier Guards, have motored over to Sir Philip Sassoon’s former home. Sir Philip died only three months ago and left Trent Park to his cousin Mrs Gubay. Trent Park has an excellent private twelve-hole golf course which the Colville brothers are now going round. John reflects what a peaceful way it is to spend the first afternoon of a new world war.

  3.00pm, OLYMPIA EXHIBITION HALL, LONDON

  Eugen Spier and his fellow internees are now joined by Captain Siebert and his crew from the German merchant vessel Pomona. They have tried to scuttle their ship in the Port of London after being refused permission to sail. Their arrival now means that anti-Nazis like Spier and Weiss are outnumbered. The newcomers strut around giving the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute and taunt the Jewish internees ‘with the foulest anti-semitic and anti-religious insults’. They boast that the war will be won by Christmas and they will all sail home in ships of the surrendered Royal Navy.

  3.00pm, BELFAST

  In East Bridge Street, a Territorial Army soldier of the 8th (Belfast) Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment is set upon by six armed members of the Irish Republican Army. They strip him of his khaki uniform and burn it before running off.

  3.30pm, CITY OF LONDON

  ‘I reported at 3.30 at the [ARP report] centre, passing through unfamiliar streets. Every person had his or her gas mask slung across their shoulders and fireman, policemen and air raid wardens had tin hats and very smart uniforms. Soldiers passed in lorries and the little world I have known so long has disappeared.’ (Vivienne Hall)

  3.45pm, BELFAST

  Another Territorial Army soldier is attacked by the same IRA gang. This time they shoot him in the stomach and he is seriously injured. He is the first British serviceman to be injured in the Second World War.

  4.00pm, 10 DOWNING STREET

  Neville Chamberlain has now put together his new administration. Running Britain’s war effort will be the nine-strong War Cabinet. Apart from the Prime Minister himself, it consists of Churchill, now back in office as First Lord of Admiralty, and the two other service ministers, Leslie Hore-Belisha at the War Office and Sir Kingsley Wood, the Secretary of State for Air. Chamberlain’s three closest pre-war colleagues are all also included; Lord Halifax at the Foreign Office, Sir John Simon at the Treasury and Sir Samuel Hoare, who now leaves the Home Office to become Lord Privy Seal. Completing the team are two non-party experts, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield as Minister for Coordination of Defence and Lord Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet in the last war, as Minister without Portfolio. Anthony Eden, now back in office as Dominions Secretary, and Home Secretary Sir John Anderson are also going to be regular attendees.

  ‘Aren’t we a very old team?’ Chamberlain’s War Cabinet. From left to right (standing): Lord Hankey (Minister without Portfolio); Leslie Hore-Belisha (Secretary of State for War); Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty); Sir Kingsley Wood (Secretary of State for Air). From left to right (seated): Lord Chatfield (Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence); Sir Samuel Hoare (Lord Privy Seal); Neville Chamberlain (Prime Minister); Sir John Simon (Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Lord Halifax (Foreign Secretary).

  Apart from Churchill, and, to a lesser extent, Hore-Belisha, it is not a very inspiring collection of personalities to galvanise Britain’s war effort against the Nazis. Chamberlain, as he himself recognises, is not cut out to be a war leader. ‘Holy Fox’ Halifax, ‘Slippery Sam’ Hoare and Simon are all heavily tainted by appeasement. Wood, though efficient and with acute political antennae, is seen as merely a prot�
�gé of Chamberlain’s. Chatfield, despite his grand-sounding title, has little political clout, and Hankey, while a great civil servant, is virtually unknown to the general public. As regards Hore-Belisha, many of his cabinet colleagues and the military ‘top brass’ think him ‘publicity mad’ and lacking in substance. His Jewish ancestry also tells against him in the mildly anti-semitic atmosphere of the British Establishment.

  Churchill towers over them all. Today has proved that he has been consistently right in his warnings about Hitler’s aggressive designs. He is seen by many as the man who will put both backbone in his colleagues and much-needed drive into the nation’s war effort.

  5.00pm, PARIS SOIR OFFICE, PARIS

  Editor Pierre Lazareff writes in his diary, ‘This time it’s definite. We’re in. We’re at war. No wild enthusiasm. There’s a job to be done; that’s all. As our men leave to join their regiments they can be heard to say, “We’ve got to put an end to this.”’

  Just as in Britain, Lazareff recalls that the French ‘have been told for months now, that “on the very first day of the war, there will be raids on all the big cities . . . and Paris will be destroyed within a few minutes”. A number of citizens have left Paris, but not many. Parisians stroll around with their gas masks slung over their shoulders. Every once in a while, they look up into the sky, but there is no trace of panic. Life goes on.’

  4.00pm (5.00pm), BERLIN

  At the British Embassy all telephone lines are now cut. Sir Nevile and his staff’s only contact is now through the United States Embassy which is now looking after British interests in Germany as the ‘Protecting Power’. In Britain, the Swiss Legation is doing the same for Germany. Outside the Adlon Hotel newsboys are giving away an extra edition of the Deutsche Allegemeine Zeitung to passers-by. Its headlines read:

  BRITISH ULTIMATUM TURNED DOWN

  ENGLAND DECLARES A STATE OF WAR WITH GERMANY

  BRITISH NOTE DEMANDS WITHDRAWAL OF OUR TROOPS IN THE EAST

  THE FUEHRER LEAVING FOR THE FRONT

  TODAY GERMAN MEMORANDUM PROVES ENGLAND’S GUILT

  4.00pm (5.00pm), FRIEDERICHSTRASSE STATION

  William and Margaret Joyce see that newspaper extras announcing Britain’s declaration of war are being given away by newsboys under the bridge outside the station. The Joyces join Berliners scrambling for copies. On their faces, Joyce sees no signs of anger or hatred. They just look at each other as if the incredible has just happened.

  4.00pm (5.00pm), BERLIN

  Life correspondent William Bayles is holding an impromptu drinks party for some other Americans. They celebrate war, Bayle wryly notes, ‘with more complete abandon than we had ever celebrated a diplomatic peace’. They soon polish off a case of champagne.

  4.00pm (5.00pm), UNITED STATES EMBASSY, BERLIN

  Embassy clerk William Russell notes down some of the rumours flying round the German capital this afternoon:

  France will not take part in the war.

  Russia has given an ultimatum to England.

  The first Italian divisions are already pouring through the Brenner Pass into Germany.

  Von Papen is in Paris to negotiate.

  The German and French armies on either side of the Rhine River are fraternizing with each other and have refused to fight.

  It is said that Saarbruecken has been shelled by the French and has been destroyed stone by stone.

  None of them turns out to be true.

  4.30pm, FRENCH GENERAL HEADQUARTERS, CHTEAU DE VINCENNES

  French commander-in-chief General Maurice Gamelin sends out secret instructions to France’s armed forces: ‘our ultimatum expires at 5pm today unless the Germans accept it. But to act in accord with the British Air Force we have decided not to commence operations until tomorrow morning at 5am.’

  4.30pm, BROADCASTING HOUSE

  Chief Announcer Stuart Hibberd takes a break from reading news bulletins. He goes to Regent’s Park for a breath of fresh air. In the park, Hibberd, who fought at Gallipoli in the last war, looks up to a sky seemingly full of barrage balloons. On the ground he sees an RAF lorry that is securing one of these ‘monster fish’, Hibberd also notices there is a large earth-pin nearby. Dozens of civilians, both men and women, are hard at work, filling sandbags to protect the RAF balloon crew. Pleased to see this sign of national solidarity, Hibberd makes his way back to Langham Place. He has to be on hand for the King’s broadcast at 6.00pm.

  5.30pm (6.30pm), FRENCH EMBASSY, WARSAW

  At the Frascati Palace, which houses the French Embassy, Ambassador Noël hears, with considerable relief, that his country is now at war with the Third Reich. The mood and size of the crowd outside has diminished since the euphoria of the morning’s announcement of the British declaration. But there is still a large number of Poles outside cheering, and Noël hears snatches of ‘La Marsellaise’ being sung. Colonel Beck now arrives, but his chauffeur finds it difficult to get through the crush of demonstrators outside the embassy’s gates. Beck eventually makes it through. He presents to Noël, with whom he has not enjoyed the best of relations, Poland’s thanks to France for honouring her obligations. The two men have to meet in a small salon on the ground floor of the ornate embassy. The larger reception rooms are being cleared of paintings, furniture and other valuable objects to save them from destruction or damage in air raids. Noël escorts Beck to his car. The French ambassador is surprised that the Colonel is being given such a rapturous reception by the crowd. Until only recently Beck had never gone out into the streets of the capital without a strong escort, his car driven at a high speed. Today he is being acclaimed as the man of the hour.

  4.55pm, PARIS

  The French ultimatum is about to expire and France will soon be at war with Germany. A rumour is circulating around the French capital that Chamberlain and Daladier decided that Britain should be the first to declare war because people in both France and Poland were by no means sure that she would fight.

  6.00pm (7.00pm), FRENCH EMBASSY, WARSAW

  Now that Beck has gone, Ambassador Noël sets out to make a symbolic gesture towards Franco-Polish solidarity. He is driven across Warsaw to Pilsudski Square to the Tomb of Poland’s Unknown Warrior. In front of the tomb is a statue of Polish Prince Joseph Poniatowski, a marshal of France who died in 1813, fighting in Napoleon’s ranks. This afternoon, Poles have showered the French embassy with bouquets of flowers. Now Noël lays some of them at the tomb of the Polish Unknown Warrior of the Great War. He also places a wreath at the foot of the Poniatowski statue. In the twilight the ambassador’s gesture is seen by a few passers-by. They appreciate the gesture and call out, ‘Vive La France.’

  5.00pm, PARIS

  The French ultimatum to Germany expires and France is now at war with Germany. Just as in Berlin today, there are no scenes of patriotic fervour in the French capital this afternoon comparable to that of 1914. Then the crowds shouted A Berlin! (To Berlin!), and threatened to cut off the Kaiser’s moustache. Today, on the café terraces and boulevards, the slogan is the more resigned Il faut en finir (We’ve got a put to stop it). Geoffrey Cox, driving down the Boulevard Montmartre in fellow reporter Alan Moorehead’s Ford V8, notices that the crowds are as thick as on a normal Sunday. But their faces are tense, and their steps more hurried today. Suddenly the car splutters and stops. The two men have to get out and push it. In the middle of a stream of impatient horn-blaring traffic Cox quickly glances at his wristwatch. It is just after five o’ clock. France too is now at war.

  5.00pm, TATE GALLERY, MILLBANK

  Director John Rothenstein finishes working. The Tate was closed to the public eleven days ago at midday on 24 August, and the greater part of the Gallery’s collection has now been safely evacuated. While it was being packed up ready to go, Rothenstein received an unexpected visit from the King. He cheerfully tells the Tate’s director, ‘I thought I’d have a look at them before they go, although if it weren’t for those labels of yours, I wouldn’t know one from another. Would you?’


  Rothenstein now returns home to find Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald’s car outside the house. MacDonald himself is asleep on the sofa. He has come, tired out, from Parliament. He tells Rothenstein, ‘You see, I’ve nothing to do. My resignation, like those of the rest of the Ministers, is in the Prime Minister’s hands. Only the Service Ministers are at their desks.’ With no notion of whether or not he is still in the Cabinet, MacDonald sits down with the Rothensteins to listen to the King’s broadcast at 6.00pm.

  6.00pm, BUCKINGHAM PALACE, LONDON

  King George VI broadcasts to the peoples of Britain, the Empire and Commonwealth from his study at Buckingham Palace. The King is wearing the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. He has resolved not to wear civilian clothes in public again until victory has been won. Queen Elizabeth is listening in another room of the Palace as her husband begins to speak:

  In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself.

  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 the principle which permits a State, in the selfish pursuit of power, to disregard its treaties and its solemn pledges: which sanctions the use of force, or threat of force, against the sovereignty and independence of other States. Such a principle, stripped of all disguise, is surely the mere primitive doctrine that might is right; and if this principle were established throughout the world, the freedom of our own country and of the whole British Commonwealth of Nations would be in danger. But far more than this – the peoples of the world would be kept in the bondage of fear, and all hopes of settled peace and security of justice and liberty among nations would be ended.