The Day We Went to War

by Terry Charman

  Despite the tangled political and religious situation, many Indians still did rally to Britain’s cause. By the end of 1939, mule companies of the Indian Army Service Corps had arrived in France to join the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. And in Britain, the Indian Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps was formed ‘for Indian subjects who wish to join the fighting forces’. ‘The response’, the press proudly announced, ‘has been excellent. Indian students and graduates of British universities are among the recruits.’ Two of the latter, P.B. Mathur of Cambridge and R.P. Swamy of London, were photographed for the papers in their quarters. Also pictured was an Indian cook, ‘preparing a curry which would be far too hot for most Europeans’ taste’. And as the year ended, it was announced that India had delivered over 910,000,000 sandbags for Britain’s Air Raid Precautions.

  Of the countries that made up the British Empire and Commonwealth in 1939, only Eire, or the Irish Free State as it was sometimes still called, was not at war with Germany. The night before Hitler invaded Poland, the Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera had been in touch with Chamberlain concerning Eire’s status in the event of war. De Valera informed the Prime Minister that Dr Hempel, the German Minister in Dublin, had told him that, if war broke out, ‘Germany was anxious to respect the neutrality of Eire.’ Chamberlain reported to the Cabinet, ‘Mr de Valera had replied that his policy was to maintain the neutrality of Eire but he had, it was understood, added that Eire would not, of course, tolerate any German activities, including propaganda, on Eire soil.’

  In the discussion that followed, Dominions Secretary Sir Thomas Inskip told his cabinet colleagues ‘that it been contemplated that we should ask Eire at the least to break off diplomatic relations with Germany, if we became involved in war’. But Sir Thomas also told ministers that Dublin’s representative in London had ‘informed him that he thought that in a week Eire would come in on our side as a result of attacks on shipping’. In the event, neither of these actions occurred. The Germans maintained their legation in Dublin at 58 Northumberland Road, while William Warnock remained Eire’s chargé d’affaires in Berlin. And despite the sinking of the Athenia and other vessels, de Valera’s government remained steadfastly neutral.

  Eire even refused to consider returning to the Royal Navy the use of the three Irish ports that Britain had handed back under the terms of an agreement made in May 1938. The loss of the ports was a major blow to the Royal Navy in its protection of Atlantic convoys, ‘and the resultant toll in ships and lives was to be cruel and hard to bear’. As those same convoys were bringing supplies to Eire, there was naturally enough a lot of resentment and ill-feeling, especially in the Royal Navy, towards Dublin’s policy of neutrality. Anthony Eden who, as Dominions Secretary, had the responsibility for dealing with the de Valera government, noted, ‘Small wonder that the seizure of the ports by force should have been considered by the Cabinet in October 1939, and only abandoned with reluctance by Mr Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty.’

  The First Lord was also concerned about the ‘possible succouring of U-boats by Irish malcontents in West of Ireland inlets . . . If they throw bombs in London,’ Churchill asked First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, ‘why should they not supply fuel to U-boats?’ But even Churchill, in a very rare moment of self-doubt, had to admit, ‘the question of Eirish neutrality raises political issues which have not yet been faced, and which the First Lord is not certain that he can solve’.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Beer Hall

  Bomb

  8 November 1939

  On 8 November, as in every year since coming to power in 1933, Hitler was in Munich to commemorate the abortive 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Because of the war, the commemoration ceremonies had been scaled down. But, as always, Hitler delivered a speech that night in the Buergerbraukeller, where the 1923 Putsch had begun. The tone of the speech was violently anti-British. ‘For 300 years,’ the Fuehrer told his audience of Nazi Party veterans, ‘Britain has conquered people after people. Now she is satisfied; now there must be peace.’ But, Hitler rhetorically asked his audience, ‘Has ever an enemy been deceived in a more infamous manner than the German people by British statesmen during the last twenty years?’

  Hitler’s annual address usually lasted from around 8.30pm to ten o’clock. But this year, he began his speech at 8.10pm and finished less than hour later at 9.07pm. Usually too he would spend time chatting with ‘Old Fighters’ from days of the ‘struggle for power’, but this time he left immediately after his speech to catch the 9.31pm train back to Berlin. Back in the beer hall, according to an eyewitness account broadcast two days later:

  ‘About 100 “Old Fighters” were in the hall, and I myself was about a yard away from the door. Suddenly there was a flash overhead and a sudden pressure forced me out of the door. Almost immediately afterwards came a thunderous sound, and then everything was over before we could think what had happened. The air was so full of dust we could neither see nor breathe. We held our handkerchiefs over our mouths and got into fresh air. When the dust settled, we went back and found that the ceiling had fallen in. There were about fifty “Old Fighters” in the hall uninjured, and we set about rescue work. It was dangerous work because at any moment more of the ceiling might have fallen in. We worked for some time getting out the injured and dead.’

  The final death toll was eight, with a further sixty-three injured, sixteen of them badly. Among the injured was schoolteacher Fritz Braun, the sixty-year-old father of Hitler’s mistress.

  The explosion was the work of just one man, Georg Elser, a thirty-six-year-old joiner from Koenigsbroon in Wuerttemberg. Before the Nazis came to power, Elser had supported the German Communist Party and joined its Red Front Fighters’ League. But he was not really interested in Communist ideology, rather in improving the conditions of the working class. Under Hitler, Elser believed, those conditions had badly deteriorated. To improve them, and to prevent the war which he was sure the Nazis were planning, Elser decided that his only recourse was to eliminate Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. Knowing that they would all be at the Beer Hall Putsch commemoration in November, Elser started his planning in April 1939. He stole explosives from his workplace and reconnoitred the beer hall on visits to Munich.

  From August until November, Elser hid over thirty times in the Buergerbraukeller, painstakingly preparing to install his bomb in a pillar behind the podium from where Hitler would deliver his speech. He even lined the cavity of the pillar with tin to prevent any hollow sound in case anyone tapped on the pillar or damaged the bomb mechanism when the swastika decorations were nailed up. He installed and set the bomb on 6 November, and made one last visit the next night before leaving Munich for the safety of Switzerland.

  ‘The entire world knew that England, whose statesmen had made the annihilation of “Hitlerism” a war aim, was the perpetrator of this vile crime.’ In Gestapo custody Georg Elser, the would-be assassin, gives his account of the attempt on Hitler’s life.

  ‘A man must have luck,’ Hitler said when told of the bomb attempt on his life at the annual commemoration of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch at the Buergerbraukeller, 8 November 1939. The bomb went off thirteen minutes after he finished his speech.

  But he was caught near a customs post near Constance, trying to cross the border illegally, and was still under arrest there when his bomb went off. It was only some hours later that his captors, searching the contents of Elser’s pockets and finding a postcard of the beer hall, began to put two and two together. He confessed on 14 November, and gave a full account of the assassination attempt and his reasons for trying to kill Hitler. He was then taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was given privileged prisoner status while the Nazis debated on his fate.

  Hitler, who regarded his escape as the work of ‘Providence’, learnt of the attempt as his train passed through Nuremberg. Goebbels was with Hitler when he received the news:

  ‘At first the Fuehrer thinks this must be a mis
take. I check with Berlin, and the entire report is correct . . . An assassination attempt, doubtless cooked up in London and probably carried out by Bavarian separatists . . . The Fuehrer and the rest of us have escaped death by a miracle . . . He stands under the protection of the Almighty. He will die only when his mission has been fulfilled.’

  In Britain, Elsie Warren noted in her diary, ‘Hitler gave a speech to-night in a cellar of a beer-garden. A time-bomb exploded twenty minutes after the speech injuring a number of people and killing about five. It is thought that Hess, a high German official was killed. (Sad to announce that later we were informed as to his safety.)’

  While at the Daily Express, Albert Hird thought the bomb attempt a cynical ploy on the part of the Nazis themselves: ‘no one doubts that they put it there themselves, probably with the threefold idea of getting rid of old enemies; as a prelude for an attack on the monarchists who seem to be getting pretty powerful, and as a means of rallying the nation to Hitler. Time will show.’

  In Germany itself, anti-Nazis shared Elsie’s disappointment at the failure of Elser’s bomb. A member of Ruth Andreas-Friederich’s resistance group said, ‘Boy, if it had worked, we’d all be dead drunk under the table by now.’ And another complained, ‘What good are infernal machines to us if they don’t explode when they should?’ While a Berlin milkman felt that ‘Germany was cursed with the worst luck of any nation on earth.’ But this was the minority view. A report on public opinion compiled by Himmler’s security service concluded:

  ‘The morning news told us about the bomb that missed Hitler by twenty minutes. What a hell of a shame it didn’t get him!’ Rescue workers during the aftermath of the assassination attempt at the Buergerbraukeller.

  ‘The attempted assassination in Munich has strengthened the people’s feeling of solidarity . . . Love for the Fuehrer has grown even stronger and the attitude towards the war has become more positive in many circles as a result.’

  CHAPTER 11

  The Venlo Incident

  9 November 1939

  Only hours after Elser’s failed assassination attempt at Munich, the Nazi Party newspaper Voelkischer Beobachter was blaming the British for planting the bomb:

  ‘There is no question that the English Secret Service had a hand in this outrage. But this time the British gentry have mistaken their man. The gloves are now off with the enemies of the state in Germany who fatuously expect to carry on their criminal activities in the pay of the Secret Service. The gloves are off, with German thoroughness.’

  In order to give substance to the claim, Himmler ordered one of his subordinates, Walter Schellenberg, to cross into neutral Holland. There he was to kidnap two British intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact. For the past month or so, the twenty-nine-year-old Schellenberg, posing as anti-Nazi ‘Major Schaemmel’, had been meeting with Captain Sigismund Payne Best and Major R.H. Stevens to discuss the overthrow of the Nazi regime. Schellenberg had told the men that he represented a group of German generals anxious both to rid Germany of Hitler and to conclude peace with the Allies. Best and Stevens swallowed Schellenberg’s story, as did London. Schellenberg was even given a radio set to transmit further intelligence.

  ‘Our number is up, Best.’ Major Richard Stevens (left) and Captain Sigismund Payne-Best in captivity. The original German caption claimed that both men were ‘leading agents in the British Secret Service [and were] arrested on the Dutch frontier as they tried to contact the German opposition’.

  The three men had last met on 7 November in the Café Backus at Venlo, on the German-Dutch border. There they had agreed that the two British agents would meet with a German general the next day to begin definitive negotiations. That meeting was then put off until the afternoon of the 9th. At 4pm Best and Stevens punctually arrived at the café, only to be kidnapped by a group of SS men under Alfred Naujocks, who had led the bogus attack at Gleiwitz radio station back at the end of August. In the ensuing exchange of fire, Lieutenant Dirk Klop, a Dutch intelligence officer who had accompanied the two British agents at their meetings with Schellenberg, was mortally wounded. Best, Stevens and the dying Klop were thrown, Schellenberg said, ‘like bundles of hay’ into a car, and driven across the border into Germany.

  The next day, with rumours of the German attack on Holland in the air, Elsie Warren jotted down in her diary a version of the kidnapping going the rounds: ‘There was an incident on the German-Dutch frontier. A party of Nazis started a shooting affair. Six Dutchmen were kidnapped, one killed. A Dutch car was also taken into Germany. Both Belgium and Holland stand by. They are prepared for any move Hitler might make to invade their land.’

  Hitler had indeed intended to invade both countries on 12 November, using as an excuse an entirely bogus French military incursion into Belgium. But on 7 November, he postponed the date of the attack. This was the first of fourteen postponements by Hitler that autumn and winter, the weather usually being given as the reason. But Elsie Warren heard another reason: ‘it is said that German officials refuse to invade Holland’. Moreover, ‘Holland says that although she is prepared for the worst she has no immediate fear of invasion from Germany.’ This view was comfortingly endorsed by The War Illustrated: ‘and many a worthy Hollander, listening to the radio and sipping his schnapps, must have wondered what all the pother was about. After all, how many times was Holland on the eve of invasion in the last war?’

  A partial explanation of ‘all the pother’ on the Dutch-German border came on 21 November, when Himmler announced that his security service had ‘solved’ the mystery of the Buergerbraukeller assassination attempt. It was done, he proclaimed, at the instigation of the infamous British secret service, two of whose chiefs ‘had been arrested on the Dutch-Frontier’ the day after the bomb attempt. The German press played the story up for all it was worth with photographs of Best and Stevens juxtaposed in the newspapers with one of Elser. Like him, both British agents were incarcerated as privileged prisoners in Sachsenhausen, pending a show trial.

  In the meantime, the Café Backus at Venlo had become a focal point for the world press. Geoffrey Cox of the Daily Express went to the café to interview the waitress who had witnessed the kidnapping. Cox thought the café very exposed and throughout the interview kept a wary eye on the nearby German border guards. He was left alone, but his colleague Ralph Izzard of the Daily Mail had a narrow escape. Izzard and a Dutch newspaperman were interviewing the waitress when German troops surrounded the café. Izzard hid in the lavatory, ready to ditch his British passport down the pan should they find him. But the waitress argued with the Germans persuasively that only the Dutch journalist was present, and they left without searching the café.

  CHAPTER 12

  The War on the Home Front

  As the war entered its third month, elderly spinster Jessie Rex of Hornsey, North London, wrote a letter to young relatives in America. They had written to her asking how Britain at war was faring. ‘We are carrying on as usual,’ she told them, ‘the shops are open in much the usual way . . . occasionally there was a shortage, viz; sugar, but only a temporary affair for a few days.’ But Miss Rex, like everyone in Britain, found the blackout hard to bear: ‘The blackout still needs a bit of getting used to . . . I have been out though, but take a torch . . . I am really nervous of stepping off a kerb without knowing it.’

  Mass Observation polls taken during the war’s first months showed that the blackout was the top grievance among both men and women of all ages. A fifty-year-old housewife told an observer: ‘I’ve just barked my shins on a bicycle in the lane. It’s so dark. Old Hitler’s got a lot to answer for.’ While a twenty-five-year-old man told him, ‘This blackout is a bloody nuisance. I wish old Hitler and his gang would drown themselves.’ A sentiment echoed by an anonymous diarist after the failed Munich bomb attempt on Hitler:

  ‘I think this black-out’s awful. I haven’t been out in the dark once. I don’t mind saying I’m frightened.’ A South London pedestrian takes precautions
when crossing the road in the blackout, 8 September 1939.

  ‘What a hell of a shame it didn’t get him . . . we should have done our Christmas shopping from lighted windows but for that bastard stepping off the platform twenty minutes too soon.’

  Florence Speed in Brixton, on the other hand, thought that ‘the nights are like country nights now, with a velvety darkness which is lovely’. Her own house was ‘draped with black. The fanlight & upper landing windows permanently so, & and the electric bulbs have black shades – very sombre & funereal.’ Her neighbours were much less punctilious about their blackout, as she noted in her diary on 9 September: ‘About mid-night, an ARP warden shouted to the people next door to darken their back windows. There was loud hammering and banging as the curtains were nailed down to the window frames, while the “lady” of the house stood in the garden & bawled instructions. This is their third warning – they are a sleep-shattering family! Only some of them alas! have evacuated.’

  Traffic accidents soared in the blackout: 4,133 persons, including 2,657 pedestrians, lost their lives on Britain’s roads during the four months of 1939. The figure for the corresponding period in 1938 had been 2,494. There were many alarmist stories too about the increase of crime in the blackout. The Daily Telegraph on 13 November reported the battering-to-death in Stepney of thirty-seven-year-old dock labourer Charles Lawrence: ‘It is possible that police officers passed the body when they went to the assistance of Mrs Emily Murty, a middle-aged women, who was attacked in a street near by and beaten over the head . . .’