10.00pm (11.00pm), STEGLITZ, BERLIN
Dedicated anti-Nazi resister Ruth Andreas-Friederich, on hearing the High Command communiqué, writes in her journal, ‘state of war between England and Germany . . . France is also at war with us. Yet neither Frenchmen nor Englishmen are marching across our frontiers. Why don’t they, too, cross some river or other, and put an end to the madness of war before the best blood of all nations has been drained?’
10.30pm, GERMAN EMBASSY, RUE DE LILLE, PARIS
130 members of the German Embassy staff, their families and other ‘protected’ personnel are waiting to leave on the first leg of their repatriation back to Germany. There is a strong police guard outside the embassy building tonight, but there have been no hostile demonstrations against the embassy by Parisians all day.
10.30pm, THE ADMIRALTY, WHITEHALL, LONDON
A message from Malin Head is received in the Admiralty’s wireless room: ‘Important Important Admiral Rosyth Intercept 2059 jamming near SSSS SSSS Athenia GFDM torpedoed position 56 44 14 05’.
10.30pm, BROADCASTING HOUSE
The Home Service announces that General Lord Gort is to command the British Expeditionary on the Continent, and General Sir Edmund Ironside is taking over as Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
11.00pm, WICK, SCOTLAND
The Daily Express’s Northern Scotland correspondent telephones the passenger manager of the Donaldson Line, W.B. Fleming. He tells Fleming, ‘I’ve heard that the Athenia’s been torpedoed. Can you confirm it?’ A stunned Fleming sets about trying to do so.
11.00pm, GARE DES INVALIDES, PARIS
The German Chargé d’Affaires, Herr Brauer, arrives at the station and takes his leave of Messieurs Loze, Director of Protocol at the Quai d’ Orsay, and Langeron, Prefect of Police. The German diplomatic party board the first-class coaches, which are guarded by French security police, and the train sets off for Switzerland just after 11pm.
11.00pm (12pm midnight), BERLIN
The Armed Forces High Command issues another communiqué. It covers all the operations in Poland today, and claims that the Polish incursion into East Prussia has been beaten back. The communiqué tersely ends, ‘there were no hostilities on the Western Front’.
11.00pm, POLISH EMBASSY, LONDON
Count Raczynski receives a telephone call from Churchill, who tells the ambassador: ‘From today I am First Lord of the Admiralty. If you should need me, I am at your disposal at any time.’
11.00pm, BUCKINGHAM PALACE, LONDON
King George VI has decided to follow the example of his father and keep a daily diary. Tonight he writes:
At the outbreak of war at midnight of 4th–5th August 1914, I was a midshipman, keeping the middle watch on the bridge of HMS Collingwood somewhere in the North Sea. I was eighteen years of age.
In the Grand Fleet everyone was pleased that it had come at last. We had been trained in the belief that War between Germany & this country had to come one day & when it did come we thought we were prepared for it. We were not prepared for what we found a modern war really was, & those of us who had been through the Great War never wanted another.
Today we are at war again, & I am no longer a midshipman in the Royal Navy . . .
11.00pm, SS ATHENIA, ATLANTIC OCEAN
Captain Cook changes into civilian clothes. During the last war the Germans used to take ships’ masters prisoner, and Cook wants to avoid the same thing happening to him. But in the rush he leaves his pipe in the uniform jacket.
11.45–3.00am, Putney
‘Home about 11.45 very tired and fell into a lovely sleep only to be awaked [sic] at three o’clock by the air-raid warning! All downstairs yawning heavily to sit in the hall, nothing happened and after a little while the all clear enabled us to get to bed again. The first day of war! How long will this diary be by the time in type – the last day of war?’ (Vivienne Hall)
11.56pm, THE ADMIRALTY, WHITEHALL, LONDON
Another signal about the Athenia is picked up in the wireless room:
IMPORTANT ADMIRAL ROSYTH INTERCEPT 2207 JAMMING NEAR THE ATHENIA GFDM 1400 PASSENGERS SOME STILL ABOARD SINKING FAST BEARING 291 APPROX.
4 September
12.00 midnight, POLAND
‘Sunday today, the first in enemy territory. Splendid weather. Yesterday we did twenty-five kilometres . . . All the villages in our rear have been burned to the ground. The streets are littered with corpses and dead horses. Working parties are digging mass graves; the corpses are piled on lorries, brought to the pits and thrown in – a strange sight.
‘The war is frightful, you see nothing all day long but burnt out houses. Each house must be smoked out, there’s nothing else to be done with the Pollacks.
‘The remaining inhabitants are the worst. Yesterday, a German officer was chatting with some woman from the village, and when he turned round to drink some water from the fountain, he received a blow in the back from one of the women which killed him.
‘After crossing the Warte, a quick Sunday dip was had, but soon we received orders to get ready to move off. Many of my comrades were not yet fully clothed, and so they had no choice other than to get changed in the trucks.
‘Women and children stood in front of their burnt out houses and collected together the last of their belongings, most of which are already burnt.’ (Corporal Wilhelm Krey, 13th Artillery Observation Battery, German Army)
12.00–1.00am, GERMANY
Three Whitley bombers from 51 Squadron, and seven from 58 Squadron, RAF, are over Hamburg, Bremen and nine cities in the Ruhr. They are not on a bombing mission, but are dropping a total of 5.4 million propaganda leaflets. The leaflets tell any German brave or foolhardy enough to pick one up why Britain has gone to war:
WARNING: A MESSAGE FROM GREAT BRITAIN
German Men and Women: The Government of the Reich have, with cold deliberation, forced war upon Great Britain. They have done so knowing it must involve mankind in a calamity worse than that of 1914. The assurances of peaceful intentions the Fuehrer gave to you and the world in April have proved as worthless as his words at the Sportpalast last September, when he said: ‘We have no more territorial claims to make in Europe.’
Never has a government ordered subjects to their death with less excuse. This war is utterly unnecessary. Germany was in no way threatened or deprived of justice.
Was she not allowed to re-enter the Rhineland, to achieve the Anschluss, and to take back the Sudeten Germans in peace? Neither we nor any other nation would have sought to limit her advances as long as she did not violate independent non-German peoples.
Every German ambition – just as others – might have been satisfied through friendly negotiation.
President Roosevelt offered you both peace with honour and the prospect of prosperity. Instead your rulers have condemned you to the massacres, miseries and privations of a war they cannot ever hope to win.
It is not us, but you who have been deceived. 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. Otherwise they would not have dared to misrepresent the combination of peaceful peoples to secure peace as hostile encirclement.
We had no enmity against you, the German people.
The censorship has also concealed from you that you have not the means to sustain protracted warfare. Despite crushing taxation, you are on the verge of bankruptcy.
Our resources and those of our Allies, in men, arms and supplies are immense. We are too strong to be broken by blows and we could wear you down inexorably.
You, the German people, can, if you will it, insist on peace at any time. We also desire peace, and are prepared to conclude it with any peace-loving Government in Germany.
12.00 midnight, SS ATHENIA, ATLANTIC OCEAN
As promised the Knute Nelson arrives to help rescue the liner’s survivors. Some of the Jewish refugees in the lifeboats panic. They think that the Norwegian freigh
ter is actually the crack German liner, the Bremen. One family even throw their passports into the sea, and resolve to pass themselves off as Swiss citizens if the rescue vessel turns out to be German.
12.00 midnight, ‘VILLA VOLPONE’, SOUTH HAMPSTEAD
As the first day of war draws to a close, James Agate jots downs his impressions of the day: ‘So far as I can judge in my suburb, which I have not left to-day, the people are taking the war with extraordinary calmness. In one matter I confess that I have been utterly wrong. I expected every road leading out of London to be cluttered up and impassable. Actually, not only has there been no exodus, but the traffic has been less than on an ordinary Sunday . . . The BBC has been exemplary all day, dispensing music not too heavy and not too light. Homely stuff, with many familiar airs and ballads, things like “Sally in Our Alley”, which at this juncture are strangely moving.’
12.00 midnight, BROADCASTING HOUSE
The BBC Home Service makes its final announcement of the day. From tomorrow pigs cannot be sold for slaughter over a price of thirteen shillings (65p), dead weight. ‘The Londonderry Air’ is played and the BBC goes off the air until 7.00am.
12.05am, WIRELESS ROOM, HMS VANQUISHER
An urgent message is received from ‘C in C Western Approaches’. It reads:
IMMEDIATE PROCEED TO SS ‘ATHENIA’ SINKING IN POSITION 56 42 NORTH 14 05 WEST.
12.56am, WIRELESS ROOM, HMS VIVACIOUS
The destroyer leader gets a signal from Western Approaches:
IMMEDIATE HMS ‘VANQUISHER’ PROCEEDING TO BRITISH SHIP ‘ATHENIA’ SINKING IN POSITION 56 42 NORTH 14 05 WEST. DETAIL ONE OF YOUR DIVISIONS TO ACCOMPANY HER. ACKNOWLEDGE.
1.00am, PARIS
Temporary US diplomat Hubert Earle makes his way home from Harry’s Bar. Tonight he enjoys an unbroken sleep and the luxury of staying in bed late for the first time in three weeks.
2.30am, US EMBASSY, GROSVENOR SQUARE, LONDON
Ambassador Joseph Kennedy is in the country. He is woken up by his private secretary James Seymour, who is phoning from the embassy with news of the Athenia’s sinking. Kennedy gets dressed quickly, returns to London, and issues orders to his staff to find out the names of all American citizens who are on board the liner. He telegraphs the State Department in Washington:
REPORT STEAMSHIP ‘ATHENIA’ OF DONALDSON LINE TORPEDOED 200 MILES OFF MALIN HEAD WITH 1400 PASSENGERS ABOARD. SOS RECEIVED. SHIP SINKING FAST.
2.30am, SS ATHENIA, ATLANTIC OCEAN
Axel Wenner Gren’s Southern Cross now arrives to help in the rescue of the Athenia’s passengers and crew. The yacht’s crew have got hot drinks prepared and have laid out warm clothes for the survivors. One of those survivors is Nicole, the ten-month-old daughter of German Jewish film director Ernst Lubitsch, a Hollywood exile from Nazi Germany. Nicole and her nurse Consuela Stroheimer have just had a lucky escape. Their lifeboat capsized, and with fifty others they were flung into sea. Somehow Consuela has managed to keep little Nicole’s head above water for an hour, but they and 378 others are now safe on board and enjoying piping hot soup. Nearby, the Knute Nelson has so far lifted 430 survivors and her capacity is now stretched almost to the limit. Captain Carl Johan Anderssen was making for Panama, but now, with so many people on board and with only limited food supplies, Anderssen decides to make for the nearest port – Galway, in neutral Eire – instead.
2.45am, EALING FIRE STATION, WEST LONDON
The District Fire Officer is still keeping up a barrage of comic stories and would-be witticisms in order to entertain Elsie Warren and the other girls. ‘Look girls,’ he says, shining his torch on an old sack, ‘I’ve found a pillow case!’ Elsie starts writing a poem about the AFS and is just finishing the penultimate line when one of the others says urgently, ‘Listen.’ It’s the air-raid siren sounding the Alert, and Elsie has never seen such a scramble in all her life. The switchboard operator receives the signal code for ‘raid is on’, which she immediately sends to the fire sub-stations. Elsie and the others dash over to the Fire Chief’s office and each takes over a telephone extension. None of them is feeling ‘any too good expecting a raid any minute’. One of Elsie’s older colleagues who had been in the last war keeps repeating, ‘I don’t care what you say, I’ve got great faith in our Spitfire planes.’ Elsie’s supervisor Miss Harrison only went upstairs half an hour ago to try and get some sleep. Now she’s had a ‘rude awakening,’ and the girls all laugh as she blearily peers round the door in her pyjamas and asks ‘Everyone correct?’
2.50am, TEDDINGTON
‘Raid warning at 10 to 3am. Went down to hall (after saying we wouldn’t) and sat until the “All Clear”. Royal Air Force distributed thirteen tons of six million leaflets in north-western German towns telling G[erman] people we were at war and why. These leaflets!’ (Helena Mott)
Following the torpedoing of the SS Athenia on 3 September 1939, a number of survivors were landed at Galway, where they received assistance from the Irish Army.
3.00am (9.00pm), THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON DC
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivers a nationwide message to the American people. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Roosevelt’s predecessor President Woodrow Wilson told Americans that they must be neutral ‘in fact as well as name’ and ‘impartial in thought as well as in action’. This evening Roosevelt has a different message for his fellow countrymen: ‘This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of the facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.’
Without naming names, FDR makes it clear with whom his own sympathies lay, just the same as they did in 1914, when he was Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy:
Some things we do know. Most of us in the United States believe in spiritual values. Most of us, regardless of what church we belong to, believe in the spirit of the New Testament – a great teaching which opposes itself to the use of force, of armed force, of marching armies and falling bombs. The overwhelming masses of our people seek peace – peace at home, and the kind of peace in other lands which will not jeopardize peace at home.
The President finishes the broadcast on a reassuring note for his millions of listeners:
I have said not once, but many times that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again. I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe it will. And I give you assurances that every effort of your government will be directed towards that end. As long it remains within my power to prevent it, there will be no blackout of peace in the United States.
3.00am, 10 DOWNING STREET
Just as President Roosevelt is beginning his radio speech, the sirens sound again in London. Led by the half-dressed Prime Minister, with Mrs Chamberlain in a dressing gown with her hair down her back, the staff make their way to the basement of Number 10. There, PPS Alec Douglas-Home observes that he and the others are all in various stages of undress. Not so the new Minister without Portfolio and member of the War Cabinet, Lord Hankey. To Douglas-Home’s astonishment, he arrives ‘in the shelter fully dressed with a rolled-up umbrella and bowler hat!’
3.00am, CAMBRIDGE
It is a blazing moonlight night as the sirens begin to wail. The Koenigsbergers, their landlady and her ten-year-old daughter scramble out of their beds and huddle under the stairs. Like so many others in Britain today, the landlady has yet to master how to black-out the windows properly. The Koenigsbergers are afraid that the light showing is going to attract German bombers. Outside the city on her farm, Trainee Land Girl No. 9600 E.M. Barraud can hear the sirens in Cambridge. In the village, air-raid wardens are cycling round, blowing their whistles in warning. For what seems like hours, but is probably only about twenty minutes, the Koenigsbergers await the ‘All Clear’. As it sounds they vow to organise the house’s blackout themselves. They decide too that it is better to stay in bed and risk the bombs rather than shiver
under the stairs.
3.00am, HUDDERSFIELD
George and Marjorie Gothard are fast asleep in bed when the air-raid warning sounds. They finally got to bed at about 10.30pm, both of them really tired out. Marjorie is in a deep sleep as George wakes her and tells her that an air raid is on. Marjorie sits up in bed really frightened, as all the sirens seem to be going. She puts on her slippers and then a leather coat over her nightie. She then dashes upstairs for George Junior and Guy. George is close behind and they find some coats to wrap the boys up in. George then climbs through their bedroom window and lights a candle in their makeshift air-raid shelter. Next, they take the boys in, telling them that it is just a rehearsal. But actually neither of their sons is at all frightened. With the boys now safe, Marjorie fetches the family’s pet dogs ‘Vera’, ‘Demon’ and ‘Cara’ into the shelter. Some neighbours also soon arrive, and Marjorie is pleased to see that, ‘apart from a little palpitation’, everyone is ‘very calm and collected’. The ‘All Clear’ now sounds and the Gothards go back to their bedroom. The boys are going to stay in their bed with them for the rest of the night. Marjorie makes them all a cup of tea. She then tries to get back to sleep, but fails even to doze off.
3.45am, EALING FIRE STATION, WEST LONDON
Elsie Warren’s shift receives the ‘All Clear’ message with a collective sigh of great relief. They put the kettle on and have several pots of tea and a few more laughs. They are all looking forward to finishing their stint at 6.00am.
4.30am, SS ATHENIA, ATLANTIC OCEAN
Two Royal Navy destroyers HMS Electra and Escort have arrived to take part in the rescue. A third destroyer, HMS Fame, is on its way and should arrive in about an hour and a half.
6.00am, EALING FIRE STATION, WEST LONDON
At the end of her shift, Elsie Warren leaves the fire station. ‘The weather is great’ on this, the first full day of the Second World War. Elsie thinks to herself, ‘It seems a shame that a war is on.’
The Day We Went to War Page 24