Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  … wherever I go, people rush up to me and shake me by the hand, congratulate me, and smile on me—because of you, and I felt I must pass on some of their wishes and good will to you.

  There was such a lovely picture of you on the Newsreel the other day, and the buzz and excitement that swept through the theatre, suddenly made me feel so inordinately proud that I was your daughter, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had never really told you, through shyness and inarticulateness—how much I love you, and how much I will try to make this career that I have chosen—with some pain to the people I love, and not a little to myself—worthy of your name—one day—112

  The note was signed, “Your loving Sarah.” She was his favorite, and he needed her now. Security was so tight that every servant had to be investigated and cleared; even conversations with most friends and relatives were tense. Discussions of nearly everything now on Winston’s mind was forbidden, so Clementine entertained less and less, grouping “outsiders,” as the Churchills called them, together at dinner parties. Mary, seventeen and just out of school, lived with her parents, worked in a canteen and Red Cross workroom, and was enjoying her first taste of London society. Not everyone, she recalls, was barred from discussions of restricted information: “There was the small golden circle of trusted colleagues known to be ‘padlock,’ and to whom, of course, that trust was sacred.” Nevertheless, the circle was very small. In wartime every cabinet member had to be careful in conversation, and this was especially true of the Admiralty’s first lord. As Winston had said of Jellicoe in the first war, he was the only minister who could lose the war in an afternoon. Even the list of outsiders was short, excluding many with whom they had been close in the past.113

  It certainly did not include Unity Mitford, who arrived back in England with a self-inflicted bullet wound in her neck. She had not cared to live through a war between her homeland and her beloved führer. The government did what it could to protect the privacy of her return, posting a guard with a fixed bayonet at the dock gate—“Nazi methods,” fumed an Express reporter—but when her father protested that the whole family was being persecuted as Nazi sympathizers, Winston declined to intervene. Lord Redesdale and his talented daughters would have to muddle through on their own.114

  The knitting bee into which Lady Diana had been drafted was only one of Clementine’s projects. Life aboard the small boats which had been commandeered by the Admiralty and transformed into minesweepers was spartan and uncomfortable; therefore Clemmie made a successful public appeal for contributions to the Minesweepers and Coastal Craft Fund. She also served as a volunteer at the Fulmer Chase Maternity Home for officers’ wives. By now she had become resigned, if not reconciled, to the company of Brendan Bracken and the Prof, and invited them to join other “padlock” friends, relatives, and “Chartwell regulars” in celebrating Christmas at Admiralty House. For Churchill it was a rare moment of relaxation; even so, he disappeared from time to time to check Pim’s maps, aware that on this most sacred of holidays there were Britons who could not observe it, whose duties kept them at peril on the sea.115

  In the United States thirty years later, Americans protesting the Vietnam War displayed bumper stickers asking: “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The answer is that the war would become inconvenient, depressing, vexing, and, most of all, a bore—which is what Britons called World War II’s first eight months: the Bore War. To Chamberlain it was the Twilight War, to Churchill the Sinister Trance, to Frenchmen the Drôle de Guerre, to Germans the Sitzkrieg, and to U.S. Senator William Borah and his fellow Americans the Phony War. But for the average Englishman it remained a bloody bore.116

  In that strange lull following the fall of Poland a state of war existed between the Third Reich and the Anglo-French forces confronting them, but after Gamelin’s offensive de la Sarre the only Allied casualty on the Continent was a British corporal who suffered a flesh wound while cleaning his rifle. Britain had been psyched up in September, ready for sacrifice; two stock comments at the time were, “We can’t let old Hitler get away with it again, can we?” and “It’s got to come, so we might as well have it and have done with it.” An Englishwoman wrote that “we seemed to me to be going to war as a duty,” because “it was the only wise course to take…. I began to hope (feeling very glad nobody knew) that the air raid would begin at once and the worst happen quickly.” After Chamberlain’s broadcast declaring war on Germany, a young office girl in Sheffield stood with her parents as the national anthem was played; she had “a funny feeling inside…. I know we were all in the same mind, that we shall and must win.” A middle-aged schoolmistress noted: “At 11:15 I went up, and we sat round listening to Chamberlain speaking. I held my chin high and kept back the tears at the thought of all that slaughter ahead. When ‘God Save the King’ was played we stood.”117

  The country had braced itself to withstand a shock, believing its cause just, and then—nothing happened. As one Englishman put it: “The sense of mission turned sour.” Chamberlain, demanding that the wage claims of workers be withdrawn, insisted that the wealthy had already made voluntary sacrifices. Audiences, even in Birmingham, laughed at him. Admiralty control of merchantmen often determined what was imported and what was not, and the first lord’s ruling that all ships must zigzag to evade U-boats—a carryover from the last war—doubled the length of voyages. As a result there were shortages of everything: food, coal, and—though the government had encouraged householders to keep backyard hens—grain to feed poultry. Sugar, bacon, ham, and butter were rationed: by the fifth month of the war forty-eight million ration books had been issued in the United Kingdom. Mutton, smoked to look like bacon, became known as “macon”; native and imported butter were lumped together and officially designated “nation butter.” In London Gracie Fields bellowed out a new hit:

  They can muck about

  With your Brussels sprout,

  But they can’t ration love!

  There was even a shortage of noise. Under the Control of Noises (Defence) Order, ambulance sirens, factory whistles, and automobile horns were prohibited. Later, church bells were added. The thought behind this was that such sounds might alarm citizens or confuse those responsible for defending the city. It does not seem to have occurred to the authorities that Britons who had been hearing these noises all their lives might find silence alarming. In the territorials ammunition for rifles and Bren guns was rationed, and frequently officers, whose only personal weapons were their pistols, were unable to fire a single practice round. MPs like Sandys who were also reserve officers were accosted, at officers’ mess, with complaints and questions. One question which they themselves would have liked to raise in the House irked property owners, which many of them were. In the first week of the war the government had requisitioned private property for wartime use. Tenants were evicted, warehouses emptied, livestock ousted from barns which were then locked. Winter deepened, spring approached, and the housing, warehouses, and barns stood empty. What had the government wanted them for? And where were the evacuees, now streaming back into London, going to live?118

  Doubt, suspicion, and distrust of authority—the mood known as “bloody-mindedness” in the British army—appeared and spread. The lower classes were especially restive. As late as May 3, when all continued quiet on the western front, Jock Colville’s Downing Street diary noted “a somewhat alarming report from the Conservative Central Office…. It seems that the war is not popular among the lowest sections of the community, that there is a suspicion it is being fought in the interests of the rich, and that there is much discontent about the rising cost of living.” He added perceptively: “This is but a slight foretaste of what we shall have to face after the war.” But the discontent was everywhere. A public opinion poll found that 46 percent of the British people were gloomy, 20 percent saw “a dark future” which would eventually reveal “a silver lining,” 22 percent were fatalistic, and only 12 percent were optimistic. Churchill belonged with those believing in a s
ilver lining. At the end of the war’s first week he wrote Ambassador Corbin that “if there is full comradeship I cannot doubt our victory”; and, in another letter, he reaffirmed his conviction that—quoting his Boer War captors, who had given him a lifelong maxim to live by—“all will come right if we all work together to the end.”119

  But Winston, whose home and office were in the same building, did not have to cope with the blackout, the most exasperating irritant of a war in which the enemy had yet to appear. On Christmas Day, King George VI, following precedent, addressed his people over the BBC. He had inherited his father’s gift for tedium—“A new year is at hand,” he said. “We cannot tell what it will bring”—and his closing remark was more appropriate than he knew. “Go out into darkness,” he told them, “and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.” Englishmen knew bloody well they were going out into darkness, but they preferred the known way, believing it safer, and were convinced that after nightfall nothing was better than light.120

  In the beginning the impenetrable darkness had been rather exciting, like Guy Fawkes Day. But it could also be dangerous. In January a Gallup poll reported that since the outbreak of war about one Briton in five had been hurt in blackouts: bowled over by invisible runners, bruised by walking smack into an Air Raid Precautions post, stumbling over a curb, or being knocked down by a car without lights when they were on a street or road and didn’t know it. Criminals appeared in the Square Mile, the heart of London, and even sortied into the West End. Just before Christmas some shopping centers tested what was known as “amenity lighting”—equivalent to the glow of a single candle seen seventy feet away. It was judged more depressing than utter darkness. Youth had fun with it, as youth always does. In the tube they merrily sang bawdy music hall ballads popular when Churchill was a handsome young cavalry officer—“Knees Up, Mother Brown” was a hit once more. Mass Observation reported a new fashion; a young couple would enjoy “intercourse in a shop doorway on the fringe of passing crowds, screened by another couple waiting to perform the same adventure. It has been done in a spirit of daring, but is described as being perfectly easy and rather thrilling.”121

  When war broke out, or was reported to have broken out, Air Raid Precautions wardens had been popular. Usually they were kindly, avuncular neighbors, looking a bit sheepish at first in their helmets as they went from door to door testing gas masks and explaining that no chink of light should escape a dwelling. But as time passed people grew tired of waiting for the Luftwaffe. One man told an interviewer that he felt like a patient in a dentist’s waiting room: “It’s got to come and will probably be horrible while it lasts, but it won’t last forever, and it’s just possible these teeth won’t have to come out after all.” It was just possible that Nazi Heinkels or Junkers would never appear in the night skies over England, so Mum or Dad might carelessly leave a shade up an inch or two, or a door ajar. Then the fatherly wardens turned into monsters. Their shining hour would come, and soon; in the Bore War, however, many of them were stigmatized to a degree which is puzzling today. But it should be remembered that in those days an Englishman’s home was considered his castle; a premium was placed on privacy. And many men in tin hats were seen as a threat to it.122

  In one remarkable instance a hundred-watt bulb had been left burning in an unoccupied house. The warden, a young, powerfully built man, found himself eyeball to eyeball with a double-locked mahogany door, framed in oak and set in concrete. He left, returned with a long iron bar, and, gathering his muscles for one heroic effort, burst into the room and turned off the lamp. The damage was fifteen pounds. An understanding magistrate reduced the usual two-pound fine to one pound. One outraged Londoner said he hated wardens more than Nazis and wanted to strangle them. If the German bombers had come it would have been different, but they hadn’t. “What was the point of it?” asked Laurence Thompson, speaking for countless thousands. The English people, he wrote, were “a decent, puzzled, discontented people who had braced themselves to withstand Armageddon, and found themselves facing the petty miseries of burst water pipes, a shortage of coal, verminous evacuees, and the dim spiritual erosion of the blackout.”123

  The burst pipes, amounting to an epidemic, derived from the coldest European winter in forty-five years, an act of God which did not strengthen confidence in the King’s endorsement of His benevolence. The coal shortage contributed to it, of course, but even without the inconveniences of wartime, Britain and the Continent would have suffered. Trains were buried under thirty-foot drifts; snowplows dug them out, but even so they were over twenty-eight hours late in reaching their destinations. Among civilians communications were often impossible. You couldn’t phone, you couldn’t send a wire; hundreds of miles of telephone and telegraph wires were down. In Derbyshire the drifts towered over cottage roofs. The Thames was solid ice for eight miles—from Teddington to Sunbury. And the Strait of Dover was frozen at Dungeness and Folkestone. Afterward, one editorial surmised: “It is probable that on January 29, when chaotic transport conditions prevailed over a large part of England, due to snow and ice, Berlin had little idea of the extent of our wintry weather.”124

  It did not occur to that insular editor that the Continent might be sharing Britain’s misery. Actually, the Continent was just as frigid. Even the Riviera was desolate, and Berlin, like London, was snowbound. The weather, which had not saved Poland, gave the Allies a reprieve. Seldom, if ever, have meteorological conditions so altered the course of a war, though the issue of who benefited most is debatable. Telford Taylor believes that because “the extremity of that bitter winter alone prevented Hitler from launching [an attack] against an ill-equipped and ill-prepared Anglo-French army… the weather saved the British army, which at that time had only half the strength it was to attain by spring.” Certainly they felt blessed at the time. But afterward, when the OKW hierarchy was interrogated at Nuremberg, it became clear that during that arctic hiatus the Führer, in a brilliant stroke, completely changed his western strategy and thereby gained his margin of victory. How the Allies would have fared in the autumn of 1939 is moot. The fact that the French collapsed in the spring of 1940 is not, and the fewer troops the BEF had when France fell, the better, for in the ultimate crisis all of them had to be rescued.125

  Hitler’s military genius in the war’s early years—his gift for reviewing the choices presented by die Herren Oberbefehlshaber (the commanders in chief) and unerringly selecting the right one—can hardly be exaggerated. Later, after his victories persuaded him that he was invincible, he provided the same generals with evidence to support their contention that his strategy was a succession of blunders. It wasn’t; he achieved his remarkable triumphs despite them, in part because he understood them, and, more important, their soldiers, better than they did. Most of the world outside the Reich assumed that the Wehrmacht would rest after overwhelming Poland while the Führer digested his new conquest. Ironside disagreed. On September 15—twelve days before the surrender of Warsaw—the CIGS told the War Cabinet that the French believed the Wehrmacht “would stage a big attack on the Western Front” within a month, and he himself thought a German offensive possible before the end of October. It seemed improbable. Even Churchill wrote Chamberlain later that same Friday that in his view a German attack on the western front “at this late season” was “most unlikely.” A turn eastward and southward through Hungary and Rumania made more sense to Winston. He doubted that the Führer would turn westward until “he has collected the easy spoils which await him in the East,” thereby giving his people “the spectacle of repeated successes.”126

  His vision was clouded there. However, no one outside the War Office and the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, and very few in them, matched his analysis of the Polish campaign. In that same letter he wrote that he was “strongly of the opinion that we should make every preparation to defend ourselves in the West.” In particular, French territory on the border “behind Belgium
should be fortified night and day by every conceivable resource,” including “obstacles to tank attack, planting railway rails upright, digging deep ditches, erecting concrete dolls, land-mines in some parts and inundations all ready to let out in others, etc.,” which “should be combined in a deep system of defence.” The panzers which were overrunning Poland, he wrote, “can only be stopped by physical obstacles defended by resolute troops and a powerful artillery.” If defenders lacked those, he warned, “the attack of armoured vehicles cannot be resisted.”127

  Hitler shared Churchill’s admiration for tanks, and for that very reason he wanted to invade the neutral Low Countries before such obstacles could be built. He also assumed—illustrating his ignorance of how democracies work—that the Allies would soon occupy Belgium and Holland. Two days after Ironside’s presentation to the War Cabinet and Churchill’s advice to the prime minister, the Führer told the OKW commanders in Zossen that immediately after the Polish surrender he wanted to move the entire Wehrmacht across Germany and strike at the Allied forces. The Generalstab was shocked. They had been counting on several months of positional warfare in the west while they retrained their men and planned the army’s order of battle. He was adamant; a few weeks later, on October 10, he issued his Directive No. 6, ordering immediate preparations for an attack through Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland “at as early a date as possible” with the objective of defeating the French and establishing “a base for conducting a promising air and sea war against England.” To his staff he said he wanted the invasion under way by November 12.128