by Andrew Marr
A book of this range cannot hope to tell that whole story. But we can try to weave together the most important facts and ask the obvious questions. How well did we do? How did we change? In general, we have the military books and the home-front books. The former seem to be for male readers, written by armchair strategists, full of detail about guns and kit and aircraft and contemporary first-person battle narratives. The latter embrace political histories and the ‘people’s history’. But if the term ‘People’s War’ means anything it means a war that shaped and was fought by the population. So the military story cannot be pushed to one side. Norway, the battle for France, Dunkirk, the Battle of the Atlantic, Libya and the rest provide the essential context and force. Without them, the changes in British life cannot be understood. Britons fought bravely, as did other peoples. But for the first half of the war British forces were poorly organized and equipped and suffered defeat after defeat. Simply to remember the bravery and the humour is to miss half the point. We were never invaded. Actually, we were. But we were invaded by our friends, the Americans. And that invasion has never quite ended.
Neville’s War
For eight surprisingly quiet months Britain had a popular war leader. His approval rating in the new-fangled opinion polls reached 70 per cent. Through the autumn, freezing winter and early spring of 1939–40, despite early fears of mass bombing attacks, Chamberlain’s war seemed almost as staid as the man himself. As war was declared, the first air-raid siren went off and almost immediately a mass evacuation of children from the cities began. The British army arrived in France and had taken up positions in chilly dugouts, barns and houses alongside the French and Belgians. They were woefully ill equipped, but this was not yet apparent. There, endlessly, nothing happened. British troops impolite enough to fire at Germans on patrol were rebuked by their French allies. But no bombs fell. At sea there were early embarrassments: a U-boat managed to get right inside the main naval anchorage at Scapa Flow and sink an elderly battleship. There were successes too, notably the sinking of the Graf Spee, a German battleship, and Churchill made the most of his return to the Admiralty in boosting those. Yet the main use of the navy was for a blockade of Germany, on which ludicrous hopes rested. That country was living better than Britain, was well supplied for its immediate industrial needs and was far better prepared for war. Yet Chamberlain, vain as ever, wrote that he had a hunch the war would be over by spring because the Germans would realize ‘it isn’t worth their while to go on getting thinner and poorer’. The RAF set out to bomb Germany . . . with leaflets. After the initial fear when war had been sombrely declared, the country became puzzled, caught between suspicion and optimism.
Many thought it would end quickly after all. And then people grew bored. With that national talent for obvious puns so doggedly pursued by newspaper sub-editors, they called it the Bore War. (Only later did the Americanism ‘phoney war’ become current.) Churchill campaigned against boredom. He addressed the country on the wireless, by now in most middle-class homes, and spoke as if he was in charge of a great deal more than the Royal Navy. His grand historical sweeps and sideswipes at numerous neutral nations infuriated Chamberlain but began to reshape Churchill’s reputation far beyond Whitehall. Chamberlain’s own cabinet reshuffles were barely noticed. The sole exception was the sacking of Leslie Hore-Belisha, an energetic minister who had introduced pedestrian crossings and begun to reorganize the army but had antagonized generals and ministers. Chamberlain had been going to make him minister for information – he had a talent for publicity – but was persuaded not to. Why? Because Hore-Belisha was Jewish and it was thought the Germans would sneer. He was offered another post but turned it down. The newspapers were rightly outraged.
Meanwhile, the expensive restaurants stayed open, the parties went on and new models of car were produced by an industry that was still far from dedicated to tanks or warplanes. Yet Britain was already a different country. However lackadaisical or confused the Chamberlain cabinet might have been about prosecuting the war, it was relatively vigorous in reorganizing things at home. Before the war had begun it had been responsible for the shadow-factory system, which allowed the dispersal and acceleration of the war-making industry, as well as for the increased aircraft production already described. Reviving DORA, the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act, as the Emergency Powers (Wartime) Act, the government gave itself virtually dictatorial control over most of public life, allowing it to eavesdrop on, follow, intern, censor, direct and arrest citizens on the basis of decrees or orders. Phones were bugged. The propaganda-driven Ministry of Information began its work, though not very convincingly. New ministries, including those for Supply and Food, took new powers, controlling many imports and allocations. All together 1.5 million people had been enrolled and trained for the various forms of civil defence. A national registry of all citizens was compiled and everyone issued with a brownish coloured ID card and number. Rationing, based on lessons learned in 1917–18, did not actually begin for three months after war broke out; but as soon as the register was ready, everyone was given a ration book too. The first halting efforts were made to bring trade-union as well as business leaders into the direction of war industry. Neville Chamberlain may have been something of a ninny, but he was a hard-working and methodical ninny.
Socially, the single biggest immediate change was the official evacuation, in just three days in September 1939, of nearly 1.5 million people from cities to small towns and villages. These evacuees were the minority of those moving. By some estimates almost a third of the population shifted, most of them people moving privately, the better off buying places in boarding houses or hotels or staying with friends to escape the coming massacre from the air. Those who stayed spoke disparagingly of ‘funk holes’. But the evacuation which really counted was the official one, of poorer people to ‘reception areas’ thought unlikely to be attacked. Here, though volunteers were sought, compulsion was available. Most of the official evacuees, some 830,000, were school children, but mothers and infants, pregnant mothers and 7,000 disabled people were sent too. They left London and almost all the major industrial, port and capital towns, from Southampton and Portsmouth on the south coast, up through the Midlands to Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle and all the major Scottish cities too. Most people were evacuated by Britain’s then still-extensive railway system, though some went by bus or even by boat. School populations were deported en masse. Yet fewer than half those eligible to be evacuated actually went. Many refused to believe the imminence of the threat. Other families decided that, if they were to be killed, they preferred to die together.
Almost as soon as the evacuees set off, clutching bags with spare socks and pants, toothbrushes (if they had them) and food, the transport plan broke down. Not many anxious rural communities received the numbers they expected. In some towns and villages it was all fairly orderly. Officials were waiting to take the tired and confused children to church halls or schools, from where they would be allocated a family. In others the locals simply pitched up and took whichever evacuees they fancied. Hulking boys would be appropriated by farmers looking for cheap labour, while picky housewives selected the smartest, cleanest or simply most appealing children. The dirtier, poorer specimens were often left like rejected vegetables, hoping someone would finally pick them. So began one of the most dramatic social experiments to hit Britain. And, as the premier historian of the home front put it: ‘Because they had bottled themselves up in the train, or because they were upset at being parted from their parents or because they thought the country darkness must harbour ghosts . . . from Aberdeenshire to Devon, countless numbers of children wet the bed.’134
They did more than that. Very many, from the poorest districts of Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and east London, had fleas or head lice, skin diseases such as impetigo and little education in cleanliness. They were not used to bathing, brushing their teeth or using a modern lavatory. Some simply defecated inside, or weed in the corner of the bedroom. Other
s had never sat down at a table to eat before, and had never slept in a bed. Their language, by the standards of polite Britain, was foul. So was that of many evacuated mothers, who, with their cigarettes, liking for drink and relaxed attitude to parental discipline, seemed sluts or slovens to the vicars’ wives, shopkeepers or teachers on whom they might be billeted. Many children had only thin plimsolls as shoes, others had been sewn into their clothes for the winter; many had no changes of clothes, and no underclothes, nor ever had had. Thus, with a mixture of horror, revulsion and compassion, middle-class Britain had its powdered nose rubbed in the stinking reality of slum life for the first time. Some families reacted with Christian kindness and coped so well that the evacuated children did not want to go home. They grew fatter, saw with awe their first sheep, cow or apple tree and tasted food so creamy and fresh it might have come from another world. Other families blamed ignorant, immoral parents in the cities, and demanded that their evacuees be taken away again. A minority, undoubtedly, were cruel and abusive.
Though the extent of the most extreme squalor of evacuees was exaggerated, and the folk-tales spread by village gossip, the truths uncovered by evacuation shocked many conservative, perhaps rather smug parts of Britain. Anglican Englishwomen met their first Jew, Scottish Presbyterian farmers their first Roman Catholic. As we saw earlier, Britain in the thirties had become radically divided, with some areas becoming prosperous while others rotted. With evacuation, the two touched. It was a physical touch, involving smells and sounds, that was far more powerful than mere words. We cannot measure such things. But the vivid memories half a century on, and the ferment of press comment at the time, never mind anguished debates among politicians, suggest that evacuation was a nationwide social shock. No matter what an eloquent, chain-smoking intellectual hammering away at a New Statesman typewriter could say – even George Orwell himself – it was better said by the sight of scabies at bath time, or puzzlement at the sight of fresh eggs. Within months, when the bombers failed to arrive over the cities and factories, hundreds of thousands of families returned home again. By Christmas more than half had gone back. Many would have to flee again, and by then the arrangements would be better. Meanwhile, quietly but throughout the land, evacuation had already begun to shift the politics of the British.
Evacuation, however, was only part of it. Millions of sandbags, woven in Dundee and filled with sand from beaches and open-cast diggings, were piled up in front of official buildings, hospitals and at railway stations. Over the capital, and some other cities, portly silver barrage balloons wobbled in the sky. Trenches were dug in parks and prefabricated air-raid shelters, named Anderson shelters after the minister in charge, were widely distributed. Among the many war preparations that never turned out to be useful, luckily, was the provision of gas masks. Well before the outbreak of war, some 38 million of them had been issued, accurately described as ‘a grotesque combination of pig-snout and death’s head’, and elaborate preparations had been made to cope with a macabre range of possible toxic attacks. A year into the war, many people had stopped bothering to carry the gas masks, though children were offered novelty versions, and there was even a gas-bag system for babies. Well tutored by terrifying newspaper predictions of hundreds of thousands of casualties, and popular memories of the use of gas in the earlier war, local councils had ordered in shrouds and cardboard coffins for the expected slaughter.
The ‘blackout’ was another early and dramatic innovation that would last for most of the war. Nobody was allowed to let any light stream from their windows after dark in case it alerted German pilots. Householders had to pin or nail thick curtains to windows. Street lights were turned off. Cars were allowed only a thin strip of illumination for headlamps. The anti-light mania was taken to ludicrous lengths, so that even glowing cigarettes or weak domestic torches (hardly visible from a Dornier) might lead to a bellow of ‘put that bloody light out’. One result was that the number of people killed in road accidents doubled. Another was an increase in al fresco sex. But beware: on the streets new officials were striding, armed with new powers. A hierarchy of air-raid protection (ARP) wardens had been planned as early as 1937 and by the Blitz they would prove both useful and heroic. But in the early stages of the war, 200,000 strong, they seemed to many to be paid busybodies, striding around ‘their’ areas as if they owned them while ticking off or reporting neighbours. The semi-military organization of the civilian population would prove one of the most dramatic aspects of Britain’s war effort. Not only the ARPs but the volunteer firemen and the women of the WVS – the Women’s Voluntary Service, formed in 1938 – and before long the Home Guard filled Britain with a new officialdom. They were visible signs that Chamberlain’s state, run by old liberal-minded Conservatives brought up to view the state with suspicion, was growing fast. Already, Hitler was having an effect.
What, though, of the job of fighting him? Before the dreadful spring surprise of 1940, by which time Chamberlain was leaving Number Ten, the official attitude to Hitler’s war machine was smug. His troops were reported to be keen, but raw. Even the shattering defeat of Poland had not made generals in the West understand the power of blitzkrieg, using armour, aircraft and infantry as one. It was assumed that if the Germans did attack France directly, a long and brutal war of attrition would follow which – in the worst case – the British government believed could go on in Flanders for three years. Britain had a smaller army than Germany, far smaller, but the French had a huge army and boasted some of the most advanced tanks in the world. The British Imperial General Staff placed great weight on the fighting ability of France, organized in and around its world-famous Maginot Line of bunkers, fortresses and heavy artillery. Churchill seemed to agree, going by his public utterances. But he was getting other advice too. The National Gallery director Kenneth Clark went to Paris before the German advance and found everyone, including the propaganda ministry, inexplicably upbeat: ‘I suddenly realized why everyone in Paris was so jolly. The French were not going to fight. They had borne the brunt of the first war, both in losses of men and in occupied territory, and they did not intend to go through it again.’ Back in London he reported this to Churchill: ‘He sat hunched up, and occasionally nodded and grunted. He did not speak. He knew it already.’135
Meanwhile, searching for somewhere else to fight, Paris and London both alighted on Scandinavia. While this may seem odd now, it had some sound sense behind it. A famous German steel maker, Fritz Thyssen, who was anti-Nazi, had sent London a memo arguing that whoever controlled the huge iron deposits in northern Sweden and Norway would win the war. After the Soviet Union had used its new friendship treaty with Germany to allow it to attack Finland, and was suffering unexpected reverses, there was an excellent-looking reason for intervention in the region. Britain and France had stood back during the Spanish Civil War. But this was the invasion of a neutral country by the Red Army, which was still regarded as the ‘real enemy’ by many in both countries. Perhaps an operation could both help the Finns and cut off Germany from a crucial steel supply?
RAF planes were sent to help the noble Finns. An office was opened in London in January 1940 to encourage volunteers to go and fight for Finland – 300 men did so – while the cabinet asked the chiefs of staff to debate the pros and cons of declaring war on Russia as well as Germany. Before this hare-brained idea took hold, the Finns were suing for peace. In Whitehall, the debate went on. Should Norway and even Sweden have their neutrality violated? Churchill was an ardent advocate, not surprisingly. His critics winked at one another and muttered ‘Gallipoli’, not surprisingly. It was eventually agreed that the navy would mine Norwegian waters to stop the Germans getting their steel and that, meanwhile, British and French forces would ‘secure’ Narvik in the north of Norway and then move into Sweden, despite the horrified protests of the Norwegian and Swedish governments. (So much for Allied protestations when the Germans did the same to Denmark, Holland and Belgium.) All this took much time in Whitehall and in conversatio
ns between the French and British. Meanwhile, choosing the same date as his enemies, Hitler pounced. Taking personal control of the operation, he overruled military commanders. Using subterfuge and air power, the German army seized the major Norwegian ports and airports and within six weeks had taken over the country. British and French forces carried on fighting for a while before being evacuated and the German navy suffered losses, but it was a humiliatingly easy victory for Hitler. British troops had arrived without the snowshoes necessary to move overland. French alpine forces had their skis, but had brought the wrong bindings. The Royal Navy, egged on by Churchill, had followed German ships in the wrong direction. It was not all disastrous. The warship losses suffered by Germany ensured that, later on, her navy would be unfit for its part in an invasion of Britain.
Even so, the Norway campaign was a major defeat with huge implications. It showed that a dictator with courage and opportunism could flat-foot the dithering of democracies. Berlin was crowing, and rightly. It demonstrated that the British–French alliance was inefficient. It provided shocking evidence of the poor organization and equipment of the British army and reminded everyone that the Royal Navy, however vital to the survival of Britain, was of limited use in winning a continental land war. Other lessons were more ambiguous. From a Churchillian perspective, Norway showed the fallacy of the optimistic belief that, left alone, Hitler would sit still and become steadily less dangerous. Others, though, pointed out that he had seized Norway because and before Britain was about to do the same. Churchill drew the lesson that a bigger, earlier attack would have been successful and that Whitehall’s dithering had been disastrous. Before the campaign started he had exploded privately to an admiral that ‘the squandering of our strength proceeds in every direction . . . Do you realize that perhaps we are heading for defeat?’136 His critics pointed to his interference in military matters, his public boasting and his lust for romantic adventures.