The Day We Went to War

by Terry Charman

  Fellow Conservative MP Leopold Amery also went to see Sir Kingsley to urge him to take more offensive action. Amery, one of the senior statesmen of the party, but who had been out of office since 1929, suggested to the air minister that the RAF attack the Black Forest with incendiary bombs. The vast wooded area was full of arms dumps and other war supplies, so it was a legitimate military target. Moreover, as it had been a very dry summer, the wood would burn very easily. But, Amery argued, it would have to be done quickly before the autumn rains came. Sir Kingsley, who unlike Spears and Amery had not served during the First World War, and whose previous portfolios had been Health and the Post Office, flatly turned down the suggestion, ‘with some asperity’.

  Airmen loading propaganda leaflets to be dropped over Germany, into a Whitley bomber. Public reaction to the RAF’s leaflet raids was mixed. Comments ranged from the contemptuous ‘fighting with bloody pamphlets’ to the gentler ‘I’m glad they dropped them pamphlets instead of bombs.’

  ‘You can leave it to our great little air minister. He will lead the RAF on to winged victory.’ During a visit to the RAF units in France in October 1939, Sir Kingsley Wood, Secretary of State for Air, is photographed on a converted Paris bus.

  ‘Are you aware it is private property?’ he asked the combative Amery. ‘Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!’

  ‘It takes a lot to turn an appeaser into a belligerent,’ was Spears’s acidic verdict when told of the interview by Amery.

  But the reports that Wood and his War Cabinet colleagues were getting were hardly reassuring. On 6 September they received news of what became known as ‘The Battle of Barking Creek’:

  ‘Air raid warning (red) was received at 0640 on 6th and later unconfirmed reports of twenty-eight hostile aircraft near Hornchurch. RDF (radar) and observer reports indicated a massed attack on London and the Thames Estuary. Fighters were sent to intercept. Hurricane fighters were engaged by our own guns. Spitfires then attacked Hurricanes. Two Hurricanes were shot down by Spitfires and one Spitfire crashed . . . British submarine ‘Seahorse’, returning from patrol, was attacked and damaged by an Anson aircraft . . .’

  There were genuine German air raids on Britain during the first months of what was soon to become known as the ‘Phoney War’. But they too were confined to attacks on British warships rather than land targets. The first came on Monday, 16 October. Royal Navy ships were attacked in the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh. Peter Walker, Provost of South Queensferry, witnessed the raid from his house, just two miles away from the scene of the action:

  ‘I heard a terrific explosion, and saw a great waterspout rising from the river into the air. A bomb was released and I could plainly see it fall. More ’planes came over. A terrible hail of shells went up from the anti-aircraft batteries. It seemed as if the raiding aircraft reeled. Then they seemed to recover. Numbers of bombs fell – but all dropped into the water. It seemed impossible that the ’planes could live in the barrage of shrapnel put up by the anti-aircraft guns. A shot struck one ’plane and I saw part of the machine fall into the Firth.’

  Its crew were picked up by John Dickson’s fishing vessel Day Spring. His son, John Junior, helped with the rescue:

  A Heinkel He IIIH bomber brought down at Long Newton Farm, Humbie, near Edinburgh, 28 October 1939. Of the four-man crew, two died and two were captured. A London clerk was overheard to say, ‘I hope they don’t start getting very fierce, just yet. I don’t feel like being bombed: I’d be ever so scared if they did come.’

  ‘We threw ropes to the crew of the sinking ’plane, and when we hauled them on board we discovered that they were all three wounded. They told us that another member of the crew had gone down with the ’plane. They were all young chaps. The man who appeared to be the senior had a bad eye injury. Another had been shot in the ribs and we stretched him out on the deck. The third man had been shot in the arm and it was broken. The three men were very grateful for being rescued, and the leader, who spoke English fairly well, took a gold signet ring from his finger and gave it to my father . . . “This is a ring for saving me,” he said.’

  The next day, the naval base at Scapa Flow was the target, and sporadic raids continued throughout the rest of the year. Casualties were negligible but as 1939 closed Major-General Charles Foulkes, an authority on civil defence and gas warfare, warned:

  ‘Of course, we must not assume that air raids are not a very real source of danger to this country. But public attention was, for a long time, confined to how they might be endured rather than how they might be met and defeated – an attitude which is not in harmony with the spirit that the nation has shown in its past history.’

  CHAPTER 7

  The War on Land

  On land, the Allied effort was not much more successful or indeed warlike than that in the air. The first units of the British Expeditionary Force started crossing over to France on 4 September, but the main effort began six days later. In five weeks, 158,000 men and their equipment were transported across the Channel without a single casualty, as war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha proudly announced to the Commons on 11 October. Their transports were covered with confident graffiti: ‘Look out Adolf, here we come!’, ‘Berlin or Burst!’ But, unlike their predecessors of 1914, ‘The New Contemptibles’, as the press dubbed them, did not immediately get to grips with the enemy. In fact it was not until 9 December that the first British soldier was killed in action. In his (illegal) diary entry for that day, Second Lieutenant Alec Pope of 1st Battalion, The King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry, wrote:

  ‘A quiet day. Saturday night our fighting patrol ran into its own booby trap and were bombed and fired on by our ambush party. One man killed and five wounded. Max took out a Rescue Party through “D” Company lines and I acted as Covering Party. My covering patrol left out by mistake – reported “missing” – but we all fetched up safely . . .’

  The man killed was twenty-seven-year-old regular soldier Corporal Thomas Priday, the son of Allen Priday and his wife Elizabeth of Redmarley in Gloucestershire. Priday’s funeral at Luttange Communal Cemetery was an Anglo-French occasion, with a French honour guard and the local corps commander present. Such occasions were seen as necessary to shore up the military Entente Cordiale, and to counteract German propaganda, which was forever harping on that Britain would fight to the last Frenchmen. The day before Corporal Priday was killed, Alec Pope had picked up a German propaganda leaflet shaped like an autumn leaf. Its message in French read:

  ‘Autumn. The leaves fall. We shall also fall. Leaves fall because God so wishes it. But we fall because the English wish it. Next spring no one will remember either the dead leaves or the soldiers who are killed. Life will pass on over our graves.’

  These leaflets and the propaganda broadcasts of French fascist Paul Ferdonnet, ‘The Traitor of Stuttgart’, undoubtedly had their effect on sapping morale among the poilus that autumn. Not that General Gamelin’s forces were doing much fighting themselves. A secret military convention concluded with the Poles in May 1939 had agreed that ‘from the moment the bulk of the German forces marched against Poland, France would launch an offensive against Germany, putting in all her available forces from the fifteenth day after mobilisation’. Even before that date, Gamelin had agreed to both the French Armée de l’Air launching air attacks and land forces undertaking, ‘a series of offensive actions against limited objectives’.

  But despite desperate entreaties from the beleaguered Poles, Gamelin limited his action in September to the so-called ‘Saar Offensive’. Only nine divisions out of the eighty-five on France’s north-eastern front were involved, and there was no Allied air activity apart from a few reconnaissance flights over the Siegfried Line. But in both the French and British media the ‘offensive’ was presented in a grossly exaggerated terms. The press and newsreels were full of images of French troops ‘triumphantly’ advancing through German villages towards the Siegfried Line. The Times claimed that French forces were in occupation o
f 100,000 acres of German territory, which sounded a considerable achievement. In reality, it was just about twenty-one square miles.

  The two Allied commanders-in-chief, Lord Gort VC (left) with General Maurice Gamelin, photographed in October 1939.

  Men of the British Expeditionary Force disembarking in France, September 1939. The first fighting troops started to land on 10 September. To the consternation of the British censor, Daily Express reporter Geoffrey Cox broke the news two days later. This led to the seizure of the edition which featured Cox’s story.

  French troops in a captured German village during Gamelin’s Saar ‘offensive’ on the Western Front. ‘More than half of our active divisions on the north-east front are engaged in combat. Beyond our frontier the Germans are opposing us with a vigorous resistance.’

  Back in Huddersfield, Marjorie Gothard wrote in her diary on 15 September: ‘French troops have cut off Saarbrucken and dominate communications with the German interior. High points all round the town are held by the French. It is now certain that Saarbrucken will fall to the French and enable the army to proceed straight to the main forts of the Siegfried Line.’

  The next day, she noted that the ‘news’ was even better: ‘The French have seized dozens of German villages, their grip is tightening like a vice around Saarbrucken, the fall of which is considered imminent.’

  But even as Marjorie was writing up her diary, Gamelin had already decided to call off the ‘offensive’. In a letter to the Polish military attaché, he had made extravagant claims about its success. ‘We know,’ he untruthfully told the Pole, ‘we are holding down before us a considerable part of the German air force.’ Furthermore, ‘prisoners indicate the Germans are reinforcing their battle-front with large new formations’. In reality, not a single German soldier, tank, or plane was diverted from Poland to reinforce the Western Front. The French began to withdraw the bulk of their troops from the ‘conquered’ territory on 30 September. It was done much to the annoyance of Premier Daladier who feared ‘the reaction of public opinion not only in France, but throughout the world’. The withdrawal was completed on 4 October, with only a light screening of French troops left in position. Ten days later, Gamelin, convinced that the Germans were about to launch a major attack, issued a rousing order of the day. It was worthy of Napoleon himself:

  ‘Soldiers of France! At any moment a battle may begin on which the fate of the country will once more in our history depend. The nation and the whole world have their eyes fixed upon you. Steel your hearts! Make the best use of your weapons! Remember the Marne and Verdun!’

  Two days later, on 16 October, the Germans duly attacked, but only in company or battalion strength. By evening the next day, at the cost of 198 casualties, they had regained every one of those 100,000 acres.

  For the rest of the autumn and winter, the French and British settled down to a defensive war on the Western Front, with routine patrols and very limited local attacks. The newspapers were full of photographs of VIPs visiting the BEF and ‘human interest’ stories about Gort’s men, and how they were furthering the Entente Cordiale. Typical was that of one in December when British Bren gun carriers hauled a French wine merchant’s van out of a ditch. ‘So again,’ the caption read, ‘the soldiers of 1939 are giving practical proof that the alliance has something more than military significance.’ To those who complained about the lack of action, came a stern warning in a broadcast from Major-General Sir Ernest Swinton:

  ‘The war is not being run to provide news. And when I hear people complaining about the lack of news from France and talking about “All Quiet on the Western Front”, I say “Thank God that there is no news of battles; thank God that the commanders have learned something from 1914–1918, and that the Allied troops are not going to be thrown in haste, without due preparation, against a stone wall, or rather, a steel and concrete maze, bristling with every sort of gun.”’

  A return to trench warfare? Scottish troops reinforcing a trench in France, November 1939.

  ‘You have been chosen to go into action as the vanguard of the British Army. . . The enemy awaits your arrival with expectancy. The opportunity is yours to maintain and enhance the glorious traditions inscribed on your colours.’ Men of the Gloucestershire Regiment use their Bren gun carriers to rescue a French wine merchant’s delivery van from a ditch.

  CHAPTER 8

  The War at Sea

  Only at sea did the Allies, and especially Britain’s Royal Navy, actually seem to be getting to real grips with the enemy. The sinking of the SS Athenia by U-30, with the loss of 112 lives, including twenty-eight Americans and Canadians, was only the first in a series of sinkings by U-boats during the war’s first months. But under Churchill’s bellicose leadership, the Royal Navy was hitting back. Just as in 1914, so again in 1939, Churchill was reluctant just to sit back and let naval matters take their course. First priority was to try and intercept the crack 51,000-ton North German-Lloyd liner Bremen, which was on its way back from America.

  Evert Post, a Dutch member of the liner’s crew, told the Amsterdam newspaper Het Volk: ‘After we left New York on 30th August we went at top speed. During the night we carried no lights, and no one was allowed even to light cigarettes on deck. In daytime all hands were in the lifeboats with pots of paint and long brushes, painting the hull a greyish colour. No radio reports were sent out.

  ‘On 3rd September Captain Ahrens called everybody into the saloon and told us war had broken out. “I swear solemnly,” he said, “that the English won’t get me alive, nor my ship. I prefer to sink her.” The crew answered with “Hochs” and gave the Nazi salute. Next day the captain again called us together again and said, “Between England and Iceland where we are now, British warships are watching every ten miles. We are in a lion’s den.”

  ‘Every day lifeboat drill was held. The forepart of the ship was evacuated, in case we ran into a mine. Everywhere on deck were set barrels of petrol, to be set on fire if a British warship came near. Everyone wore his best clothes, as we would not have been able to take any baggage into the boats with us. No one slept or undressed.’

  Eventually, on 6 September, the Bremen reached the Soviet port of Murmansk after a voyage of 4,750 miles. And in Berlin, a rumour was soon going the rounds that Hitler had offered the Bremen to the Russians in exchange for 100 submarines.

  Churchill, intensely annoyed at missing the Bremen, then ordered the establishment of battle groups to seek out and sink the underseas enemy. On 14 September, one such group, led by aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, was attacked by the U-39. The U-boat fired its torpedoes at the carrier, but all missed. Ark Royal’s destroyer escorts then launched an immediate counter-attack on the submarine and sank her – the first U-boat to be sunk in the Second World War. Three days later, the Germans got their revenge when U-29 sank the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous, while on patrol off the Bristol Channel. Sixteen-year-old Boy Seaman John Desmond Wells from Seaton, Devon, was reading in his hammock when the torpedo struck. The explosion momentarily stunned him:

  ‘After groping about I managed to get to the upper deck. Many men were running about but there was no panic. I slid down a blister [a form of protection on the ship’s side], to within six feet of the water and stayed there for ten minutes. Other men did the same. It was apparent that the ship was sinking, her bows being nearly under water. I jumped clear and swam in the direction of a destroyer which was standing about a mile off. There were also two other destroyers and two merchant vessels.’

  While in the water awaiting rescue, John and the other men sang ‘Roll Out the Barrel’.

  Naval writer eighteen-year-old Tom Hughes from St Anne’s, Lancashire, was in the water for nearly three hours before being rescued:

  ‘As for myself, I just swam and swam. Those three hours in the water seemed much longer. I must pay tribute to the handling of the destroyer that saved us. She was so navigated that the swell created by her progress helped us to swim towards her.

  ‘As
I got fairly near her a fellow swam alongside me and said, “Help me.” I gripped him by the hair and when a man off the destroyer caught me to pull me aboard I was still hanging on. That chap’s long absence from the barber’s saved his life.’

  The carrier’s escort destroyers immediately set about trying to locate and sink the U-boat, which ironically enough had been about to return to Wilhelmshaven because of fuel shortage, when she sighted the Courageous. Her skipper, Kapitänleutnant Otto Schuhart, having fired off his last three torpedoes, thought, ‘The noise of the depth charges was enormous, it was the worst we heard, but we kept our heads because we were sure to have had a great success. The next day we heard by English radio that we had sunk the carrier Courageous and we were very proud of our success . . . but we were well trained for this task and we had only done our duty.’

  Forty-nine-year-old Captain William T. Makeig-Jones went down with his ship, together with over 500 members of the crew. Civil servant and poet Humbert Wolfe penned a tribute to them:

  FOR THE LOST OF HMS COURAGEOUS

  You have given all.

  Fate has no more to ask.

  But we, for whom you died, Do here renew

  Our sacred promise to complete the task

  For the love of England – and because of you.

  A month later on 14 October, an even more spectacular success was achieved by Germany’s U-boat arm. Kapitänleutnant Gunther Prien in the U-47 sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak at anchor at the Scapa Flow naval base.

  Eighteen-year-old Vincent Marchant of Doncaster was asleep in his hammock when the Royal Oak was hit at 12.58am:

  ‘I ran to the upper deck to see what happened. There was a second explosion twenty minutes later, followed by a third and then a fourth. By that time the ship was tilting. She was sinking rapidly. Remembering what had happened on the Courageous and the lesson that taught us, I stripped myself of all my clothing and, tying my safety belt around my waist dived into the water. Searchlights were playing over the surface and I could see hundreds of heads bobbing around.