Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  After the first evacuation of the cities in September 1939, many people had trickled back to their homes; but as Hitler’s forces massed across the Channel, fear reasserted itself and another emigration took place. Driving about the south coast, the American reporter Vincent Sheean got the impression that it was the better off who went first, boarding up their houses and moving further inland. In St Margaret’s, near Dover, a woman whom he had known before the war stood in the door of her cottage and told him ‘how it was’:

  ‘The gentry’s all gone away,’ she said, her eyes twinkling with some enjoyable malice. ‘It was the same in the last war. I never did ’old with going away the minute there’s a bit of trouble.’

  ‘For the second time the war is coming nearer, looming up large and threatening,’ wrote the author Frances Partridge (a pacifist and conscientious objector) in her diary on 3 April.

  Air raids, invasion, refugees. One’s whole body reacts with a taut restlessness, as though one had a lump of lead for stomach and sensitive wires from it reaching to toes and fingers.

  As a second exodus from cities took place, villages were flooded once more. Between 13 and 18 June about 100,000 children were evacuated from London and ‘invasion corner’ – the towns on the south coast. Some 17,000 went to the West Country and South Wales, in blazingly hot weather, and by the time one trainload reached Plymouth the young passengers were gasping for water. When drinks were administered by sailors waiting on the platform, some quick-witted young fellow called out, ‘Blimey, we must be near the sea!’

  Frances Partridge was one of a reception committee in Hampshire, standing by in a village:

  The bus came lumbering in … As soon as they got out, it was clear they were neither children nor docksiders, but respectable-looking middle-aged women and a few children, who stood like sheep beside the bus looking infinitely pathetic. ‘Who’ll take these?’ ‘How many are you?’ ‘Oh well, I can have these two but no more,’ and the piteous cry, ‘But we’re together.’ It was terrible. I felt we were like sharp-nosed housewives haggling over fillets of fish. In the end we swept off two women of about my age and a girl of ten … Their faces began to relax. Far from being terrified Londoners, they had been evacuated against their will from Bexhill, for fear of invasion, leaving snug little houses and ‘hubbies’.

  By the end of June another 100,000 people had left the South East, and the population of some towns in Kent and East Anglia had shrunk by 40 per cent. The north country author and broadcaster J. B. Priestley recalled a visit to the ghost town of Margate:

  In search of a drink and a sandwich, we wandered round, and sometimes through, large empty hotels. The few signs of life only made the whole place seem more unreal and spectral. Once an ancient taxi came gliding along the promenade, and we agreed that if we hailed it, making a shout in that silence, it would have dissolved at once into thin air.

  With this second influx, the rural population again rose sharply. The village school at Thurgarton, in Nottinghamshire, which had taken in twenty-two children from Sheffield the previous autumn, now received another eighteen from Southend. The school became so crowded that some lessons took place in a barn next to the pub, the Coach and Horses. Among the evacuees was Gladys Totman, then seven, who remembered her foster-home, Hill Farm, as ‘sheer paradise’.

  There was always something going on – new calves and lambs, pink silky piglets in an old galvanised bath in front of the kitchen range, hunting free-range eggs and picking plate-sized field mushrooms or blue buttons on late autumn mornings. We were all included in the farm activities such as hay-making, harvest, potato-picking, gathering blackberries, sloes and hazelnuts. At harvest time there was a school holiday, and we all joined in; we rode on the huge carts … we carried big baskets of bread, cheese, apples and cold tea in quart beer bottles up to the men who worked in the fields well into the dusk. Acorns were collected by the sackful to supplement the pigs’ diet, and rose hips to make syrup for vitamin C.

  This time hundreds of people brought their domestic animals with them, so that the countryside was freshly inundated with cats and dogs which had survived the initial massacre; many dogs were destabilized by the sudden change of habitat, or by loud noises, and bolted when let out. Their arrival exacerbated the problems of farmers, who accused them of worrying sheep or killing chickens. Some were recovered after frantic hunts by their owners; others disappeared for good, and a few demonstrated uncanny powers of direction-finding, making their own way home over long distances. Later, there were reports of dogs sensing the distant approach of enemy aircraft and beginning to whine or bark long before humans picked up any audible warning of an air raid.

  Spy fever became ubiquitous. It was assumed that if enemy agents were dropped by parachute, they would surely aim for the countryside, where they might come to earth unseen, rather than urban areas, where they would be spotted and apprehended. For this reason the land became rife with suspicion. Official orders issued to country people, should a parachutist be discovered, included the instruction: ‘DO NOT GIVE ANY GERMAN ANYTHING. DO NOT TELL HIM ANYTHING. HIDE YOUR FOOD AND YOUR BICYCLES. HIDE YOUR MAPS.’

  Challenges at road blocks caused travellers untold irritation, for nobody could move across country at night without being stopped and questioned; rumours spread like fire, and there were countless false alarms – none more ridiculous than one which started when a young man with a furtive manner and a strange accent was discovered wandering about in Oxfordshire. Because the Canadian soldiers who found him could not understand what he was saying, they arrested him. When questioned, he gave an address that quickly proved false; and when taxed with being a German agent who had descended by parachute, he said he was exactly that. Moreover, he gave the name of a well-known local farmer, claiming that this man was the chief German agent in the area, to whom he had been ordered to report. To the chagrin of the farmer, and the disappointment of the authorities, the entire story proved a fabrication: the stranger was Welsh, a parson’s son who had once worked for the farmer, but now had deserted from his anti-aircraft unit – a crime for which he was sentenced to two years in gaol. It was purely his accent that had foxed the Canadians.

  In that febrile atmosphere spy mania flourished. All strangers were suspect. A man walking along a lane with a pack on his back was obviously a spy – until he turned out to be a farm worker on his way to a distant field. Scratches which appeared on telegraph poles were waymarks incised by agents to guide the German infantry when they invaded. Arrow-shaped flower beds in cemeteries had been deliberately planted with white flowers so that they pointed towards ammunition dumps. A farmer who covered a field with heaps of white lime was suspected of deploying them in a pattern that would indicate the direction of a railway junction to a pilot overhead.

  The population was warned against impostors. ‘Most of you know your policemen and your ARP wardens by sight,’ ran an official pamphlet. ‘If you keep your heads, you can also tell whether a military officer is really British or is only pretending to be so.’

  Particular suspicion attached to nuns – or to people dressed like them – who were almost certainly enemy spies in disguise, with weapons hidden under their habits. Amateur sleuths followed black-clad figures eagerly, only to be disappointed when the fugitives turned round and revealed themselves as elderly women. One day on a train the writer Virginia Woolf insisted to her husband Leonard in a stage whisper that a woman who had got into their carriage was a German spy. In fact she was an embarrassed and innocent nun.

  In fact a few spies were arriving, some by parachute, some by ship or submarine. In the autumn of 1940 twenty-odd German agents came to Britain, but all were so incompetent or amateurish that they were quickly rounded up, mainly because the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park had cracked the wireless code used by the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service) and were reading messages between Berlin and its outstations. Forewarned and forearmed, the British arrested the new arrivals one after another – all
except one man who escaped and shot himself. After interrogation, five of the prisoners were executed, fifteen were gaoled and four were taken on to become double agents.

  A leaflet issued by the Ministry of Information gave civilians detailed instructions on how to behave if the Germans arrived. Just as in 1803, when fear of invasion by Napoleon’s armies was widespread, the inhabitants of Hastings had been advised to stay at home ‘for the preservation of their lives and property which would be much endangered by any attempt to remove from the Town’, so now people were told: ‘You must remain where you are. The order is to “stay put” to avoid clogging up the roads and being exposed to aerial attack … Think always of your country before you think of yourself.’

  Individual motorists were ordered to immobilize their cars by taking the rotor arm out of the distributor whenever they left them; the police were empowered to remove some essential part of the mechanism from any vehicle they found inadequately crippled, and to leave a label on the car saying that the part could be recovered from a police station. Another Government order prohibited the use of ‘wireless receiving apparatus’ in all road vehicles.

  A leaflet reminded farmers that their first duty was to ‘go on producing all the food possible … Unless military action makes it impossible, go on ploughing, cultivating, sowing, hoeing and harvesting as though no invasion were occurring.’ ‘Plough now! By day and night’ exhorted one of the Ministry’s posters. Farmers also received instructions for putting their tractors out of action if there was a danger that the enemy might capture them.

  Parish Invasion Committees were formed ‘to draw up precise inventories of things available likely to be of use – horses, carts, trailers, wheelbarrows … crowbars, spades, shovels … paraffin lamps etc’. The Ministry of Information issued a short film, Britain on Guard, only eight minutes long, with script and narration by J. B. Priestley, which included an excerpt from Churchill’s ‘we shall fight on the beaches’ speech, and the stirring declaration that Britain was responsible ‘for the future of the civilised world’. Along the south coast farmers made plans to move their cattle and sheep inland, their overriding aim being to ensure that neighbours did not manage to annex any of their animals during a sudden, unseasonable transhumance.

  With nerves on edge, people began to agitate for permission to take up arms to defend themselves. From their redoubts in the Home Counties superannuated colonels dropped hints in letters to the press: ‘Retired men over the age limit are of course a confounded nuisance in wartime, but’ … ‘Parachutists? The great army of retired-and-unwanted at present … can all use the scatter-gun on moving objects with some skill.’ The newspaper tycoon Lord Kemsley suggested to the War Office that rifle clubs should be formed as the basis of a home defence force, and the Sunday Pictorial asked if the Government had considered training golfers in rifle shooting, to pick off German parachutists as they descended. The Home Office, worried that private defence forces might start to operate outside military control, issued a press release laying down that it was the army’s task to engage enemy parachutists: civilians were not to fire at them. In the House of Commons an MP asked the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, whether, ‘in order to meet the imminent danger of enemy parachute landings’, he would sanction the immediate formation of a corps of older, armed men ‘trained for instant action in their own localities’.

  Together with senior military officers, the Government had been putting together a plan, and on the evening of 14 May, after the nine o’clock news, Eden came on the radio with a stirring announcement:

  We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain as are British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to come forward now and offer their services in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the Local Defence Volunteers. The name describes its duties in three words. You will not be paid, but you will receive uniforms and will be armed.

  Anyone might join, said Eden, simply by handing in his name at the local police station. The result was phenomenal. Men were heading for their nearest station before he had finished speaking, and within seven days 250,000 too old or too decrepit to fight in the armed services, or already in reserved occupations, signed up for the LDV. On the day after Eden’s broadcast the War Office announced that volunteers would be issued with denim uniforms and field service caps – and these had to suffice until serge khaki battledress and armbands became available.

  Such was the enthusiasm that in July the number of volunteers rose to 1.5 million, but at first the organization of the new force was chaotic, as different factions had different ideas about its role. Almost at once it became known by its alleged motto: Lie Down and Vanish. Was its purpose merely to act as an armed constabulary, observing the movements of any German troops who landed, or was it to be more aggressive, and attack invaders whenever possible?

  Within days the embryonic organization had a new title. Churchill, disliking ‘Local Defence Volunteers’, which he found uninspiring, changed its name to the Home Guard. Enthusiasm was particularly strong on the south coast, where any invasion force was most likely to land. When a company was formed in Worthing, with platoons in the town and outlying villages, two local benefactors each offered £1000 for the purchase of arms and equipment, and a theatre was taken over as a headquarters.

  One of its first units was established at Storrington, a village north of Worthing, where recruits set up their headquarters in an evacuated monastery and began to patrol the South Downs on the lookout for paratroopers, besides guarding a railway tunnel against sabotage. Little did they know how quickly they might have become engaged with German forces – for in the final version of Hitler’s invasion plan, after a landing between Brighton and Eastbourne some units would have swung westwards along the line of the Downs, and Storrington would have lain directly in their path.

  If anyone sought to ridicule the new organization, there were plenty of spokesmen to defend it. ‘It is no mere outlet of patriotic emotion that we are endeavouring to recruit,’ said Lord Croft, the Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for War, in the House of Lords, ‘but a fighting force which may be at death grips with the enemy next week, or even tomorrow.’

  Another leading advocate of the need for a people’s army trained in guerrilla warfare was Tom Wintringham, the Communist writer and editor who had visited Moscow in the 1920s and commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, during which he was twice wounded. In the summer of 1940 he set up a private training school in Osterley Park, Lord Jersey’s stately home in Isleworth, teaching street fighting and the use of explosives; but because of his Communist background, the War Office did not trust him. Having first tried to close the school, they took it over in September 1940, setting up training establishments of their own. Wintringham himself was never allowed to join the Home Guard, since membership was banned to Communists and Fascists.

  Twenty-eight years later the Home Guard would be immortalized (and ridiculed) by the BBC television series Dad’s Army, which became one of the nation’s favourite programmes. At the outset in 1940 much about the organization was ridiculous, not least its weapons, which included wooden rifles, pitchforks, pick-handles, ancient revolvers, swords, daggers, stilettos, clasp knives and coshes made from garden hosepipe filled with lead. The force’s initial low rating derived partly from a remark by Churchill, who told the War Office that ‘every man must have a weapon of some kind, be it only a mace or a pike’. Taking him at his word, the War Office ordered 250,000 metal poles with surplus rifle bayonets welded to the ends – a move much resented by the volunteers, as it made them sound idiotic, and no more use than bystanders in the production of a Shakespeare comedy.

  Other objects of mockery were their ill-fitting denim overalls, which had a revolting smell when new. When squads started marching about on their evening parades, little boys would run after them, derisively calling out the sizes from the
tickets on their backs and trousers, and comparing them unfavourably with the physique of the wearers.

  A good deal about the nature of the organization is revealed in The British Home Guard Pocket-Book, a small volume which first appeared in October 1940. Its author, Brigadier General Arthur Frank Umfreville Green, had fought in the Boer War and First World War. In 1940 he was sixty-one, and his rank and seniority made him an obvious choice for the commander of some Home Guard unit; but he preferred to let junior officers exercise control, while he went round teaching his own special subject, musketry. He was also something of a writer, with two published novels to his credit, and clearly had a robust sense of humour. His pocket-book, though primarily an instruction manual, was so engaging that it sold 22,000 copies in its first year and was reprinted five times before going into a second edition in 1942.

  The text – 150 pages of detailed advice on leadership, training, weapons, battle drill, reconnaissance, patrolling, digging trenches, creating obstacles, handling explosives and many other topics – was both outspoken and intensely practical, and his first chapter set the tone:

  As I see it, our only excuse for existence is to look out for Germans and to help the military to kill them, or – better still – kill themselves.

  Discipline does not consist merely in smartness on parade – it consists in all working as a team and obeying a permanent or temporary Leader promptly, vigorously and intelligently …

  Duds, Dead-Weight and Passengers – are they of any use to H.G.? What are we to do with malcontents and subversive individuals and inefficient men? The answer is easy. As Mr Middleton [the radio gardener] teaches us to prune roses, so can we prune our duds. ‘Ruthlessly’ is the operative word. We are at war, and there is no time to spare. If you see dead wood or anything unhealthy – cut it out.