The Story of Britain

by Patrick Dillon

  So he and the French prime minister, ignoring what the Czechs thought, made an agreement to let Hitler have part of Czechoslovakia. Most people cheered them for stopping another war, but some were ashamed of what Britain had done. One of them was a Conservative MP called Winston Churchill.

  “The only way to deal with bullies,” Churchill said, “is to stand up to them.” Many people didn’t trust Churchill because he was loud and a showoff, but he was quite certain Britain was doing the wrong thing. “We should stick up for our principles,” he insisted. “Instead of trying to make friends with Hitler, we should build planes and ships, and fight to stop him!”

  Sure enough, Hitler was not content with Czechoslovakia. Suddenly he announced that he and Stalin were going to divide up Poland between them, just as if it was a coat they both wanted, not a country full of free men and women. The German army had invented a new kind of warfare called Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war”. Planes dropped bombs from the sky, while tanks advanced so quickly that no one had time to fight back. In just a few weeks, the Germans took over half of Poland while the Russians took over the other half.

  There was no way the British could ignore that. They had promised the Poles that if ever they were in trouble, Britain would help. Neville Chamberlain made a broadcast on the radio to explain what had happened.

  “I have to tell you now,” he said sadly, “that this country is at war with Germany.”

  All over Britain families sat by their radios, listening in silence. They couldn’t believe they had to fight Germany again. It was only twenty years since “the war to end all wars”. They remembered brothers who had been killed, and friends who had marched off to fight and never come back.

  Now it felt as if they had all died for nothing.

  The Second World War Begins

  AS soon as the war began, children who lived in cities started having nightmares. “I dreamed planes dropped bombs and blew up our home,” they said.

  Since the Great War, aeroplanes had become much stronger and faster. They could carry explosive bombs, and incendiaries which started fires. They could even carry bombs full of poisonous gas, so on the first day of the war gas masks were handed out to everybody.

  “We’d better send the children away to safety,” people said, “in case the Germans bomb us.” So boys and girls from London and the other big cities packed suitcases and went off to live in the country.

  Meanwhile, people left in the cities got ready for war. They dug air-raid shelters and prepared sirens to warn everyone if an attack was coming. On the coast scientists built radar stations to spot enemy aircraft approaching. Radar – which the Germans didn’t yet know about – was a new invention that used radio waves to detect things much further away than you could see them.

  But for months nothing happened and people started calling the new war against Germany a “phoney war”. And then, just when they were starting to think it wouldn’t be as bad as the last one, Hitler attacked Norway and Denmark. The British were taken by surprise and failed to stop him, and people were so angry with Neville Chamberlain that he had to resign. The Conservative and Labour parties agreed to form a joint government with Winston Churchill as prime minister.

  Then Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium and France. His planes and tanks attacked so quickly that no one could do anything. Holland and Belgium were conquered, and the French army retreated, unable to stop the Germans. The British army, which was already in France, didn’t even have time to dig trenches. All it could do was run before it was surrounded. Leaving their tanks and guns behind them, the British retreated until they reached the English Channel at a little town called Dunkirk, and couldn’t go any further. There seemed nothing for them to do but surrender.

  You can’t fight a war without an army. It looked as if Britain and France had lost the war already.

  Dunkirk

  THEN the government sent out a message on the radio. “Would everyone who owns a small boat please sail to Dover immediately!”

  Hundreds of yachts and fishing boats set off from all round the coast. At Dover their owners were met by navy officers and told they were going to rescue the army in Dunkirk. Some of them had never crossed the Channel before, but they filled their engines with fuel and headed for France.

  When they reached it, they saw hundreds of thousands of soldiers standing on the beach. The navy’s ships were too big to get close to the shore and pick them up, but the little boats could go right up to the water’s edge. Ignoring the German aeroplanes that flew overhead, they steered through breaking waves to where the soldiers waited patiently on the sand.

  One boatload was taken off, and then another. Time and again the motor launches hurried back to the beach, and returned laden with exhausted and wounded soldiers. Time and again their skippers ducked as aeroplanes dived towards them. But they never gave up. To and fro they went until more than three hundred thousand men had been rescued and brought back to Britain. They had to leave all their guns and ammunition behind, but at least the British still had an army. And that meant they could go on fighting.

  The Battle of Britain

  HOWEVER, they had to go on fighting alone.

  The French were angry that the British had escaped back to Britain. They couldn’t hold out against the Germans by themselves, and a few weeks later France surrendered and the Germans marched into Paris. It seemed as if Adolf Hitler was unbeatable. He had captured Czechoslovakia and Poland, Belgium, Holland and France. Austria, Italy and Russia were on his side. Britain was the last free country left in Europe. How long could it be before German bombers and tanks came to conquer Britain as well?

  But one person wasn’t ready to give up: Winston Churchill.

  People switched on the radio to hear his speeches. Thinking about Hitler made them scared, but Churchill’s words made them brave again.

  “What is our aim?” he said. “Victory – victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival!”

  Everyone expected the Germans to invade, so retired soldiers were organized into a second army, called the Home Guard. Most of them were middle-aged men who had fought in the Great War, and because they didn’t have enough rifles, they practised drilling with pitchforks.

  “Dad’s Army!” people scoffed. All the same, they were glad Dad’s Army was there to protect them.

  Before Hitler could invade, though, he had to defeat the Royal Air Force. His own air force, the Luftwaffe, was much bigger, and its leader, Goering, told him he would soon smash the RAF. One day, people in France heard a droning noise above them and looked up to see thousands upon thousands of German planes flying towards Britain.

  “The British haven’t got a chance!” the French groaned, shaking their heads.

  But thanks to radar, the Royal Air Force knew the Germans were coming.

  “Scramble!” shouted RAF officers when the warning came, and pilots ran across the grass to their planes, parachutes bumping clumsily on their backs. They leaped into the cockpits and set off along the runway, travelling faster and faster until they were airborne.

  Many of the pilots had only just left school. They weren’t very experienced, and as they saw the German planes approaching, their mouths turned dry with fear. But when the fighting started, there was no time to be afraid. Their little planes twisted and wheeled in the air, trying to escape the bullets of the German fighters and shoot down the German bombers.

  When the fight was over they landed again, guns out of ammunition and wings scarred by bullet holes. They hardly had time to refuel before another warning came. They fought and landed, but the sirens sounded yet again.

  “Scramble!” shouted the officers, and the exhausted pilots ran out to their planes for the third time.

  It seemed as if those days of fighting would never end. The Germans had so many planes they could attack time and time again, while the British pilots could never rest. They slept by the
ir machines, so they’d be ready to take off at any moment. Their ground crews worked night and day to mend broken engines, patch bullet holes and reload guns.

  People in Kent watched the Battle of Britain from the ground. Schoolchildren ran out of their classrooms when planes flew overhead, and sometimes saw one dive to the earth in flames, or spotted a parachute dangling in the sky. Sometimes planes crashed next to villages and people would go to see the twisted metal wreckage, marked with either the RAF roundel or the German swastika.

  The British had one advantage: their planes were better. The Hurricane wasn’t as quick as the German Messerschmitt but it was very sturdy, while the newest plane in the RAF, the Spitfire, was the best fighter in the world, quick to climb and swift to turn. Every evening the pilots gathered on their airfields to see which of their friends hadn’t come back. As each day passed they grew more and more tired. But they never gave up or became downhearted. They knew that with each Messerschmitt they shot down they were one step closer to winning.

  And one morning, the girls who worked the radar looked at their screens for the approaching Germans and saw nothing. Guards scanned the clouds with binoculars but found no German fighters. The pilots waiting by their Spitfires stared up at the sky, but the Germans didn’t come. It took a while for everyone to realize what had happened – the Germans had given up. They couldn’t beat the RAF. The Battle of Britain had been won.

  Afterwards Winston Churchill thanked the brave pilots who had saved Britain against such terrible odds.

  “Never in the field of human conflict,” he told the House of Commons, “was so much owed by so many to so few.”

  The Blitz

  HITLER was furious. “How can the British hold out against me?” he snarled. “If we can’t beat the RAF, we’ll scare them into surrendering instead.”

  So he ordered the Luftwaffe to bomb British cities. All over London, sirens wailed. People going to work or on their way to the shops looked round in panic.

  “Quickly!” wardens shouted. “Into the air-raid shelters! The bombers are coming!”

  Some people had built shelters in their gardens. Others had put fortified cages under their dining tables. But most hurried to the nearest Tube station, where, deep underground, they hoped to be safe from German bombs. The trains stopped as crowds ran down the escalators and sat on the platforms. They felt the ground shake as the first bombs fell, saw the lights flicker if a bomb fell near by, and when there was a particularly loud explosion, they looked nervously at each other.

  “Do you think that was the church being bombed?”

  “Or the cinema?”

  The Germans attacked day and night. People soon got used to sleeping in the Tube stations. Many of the children who had been evacuated to the countryside had come home by then, and when the sirens wailed their parents hurriedly woke them up.

  “Don’t forget your dressing gown!”

  “Take a bottle of water!”

  Families marked out their own areas of platform and brought blankets to sleep in. The children lay half awake, listening to the bombs exploding and wondering what it was like up on the surface.

  But some people weren’t allowed to take cover – firemen and air-raid wardens had to put out the fires and rescue the injured. Up on the surface, orange flames lit the sky, while bombs exploded and walls collapsed with a roar of falling rubble.

  “Save St Paul’s!” wardens shouted. “We mustn’t let them burn the cathedral!”

  So night after night they ran along the roof of St Paul’s, desperately beating down fires. But hundreds of other buildings were destroyed. Each morning, when tired people came up from the air-raid shelters, they looked around to see a city they hardly recognized.

  “Where’s the town hall?”

  “The butcher’s gone!”

  Sometimes the shop where they had bought a new toothbrush only the day before had become a crater in the ground. And sometimes, when they turned the corner of their streets, looking forward to breakfast and a cup of tea, families saw that their own homes had been bombed as well. They saw their beds hanging over broken floors, wallpaper flapping from the naked stairs, and smashed crockery on the floor of their ruined kitchen.

  Thousands were killed in the Blitz. Shelters in gardens could keep off flying debris but not protect people from a fire. When the air-raid shelters were hit directly by bombs, everyone inside them was trapped.

  Even Buckingham Palace was bombed. The king, George VI, was a shy man who had never expected to be king. His elder brother, Edward, had been crowned first, but Edward had fallen in love with a woman called Wallis Simpson, whom no one wanted to be queen, so he had to give up the throne. After their palace was hit, King George and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, visited bombed-out families in the East End to comfort them. The East End was hit hardest of all, because the Germans wanted to destroy the docks along the river Thames.

  Three hundred years earlier, much of the city of London had been destroyed in the Great Fire. The Blitz destroyed even more.

  Other cities were attacked as well. Plymouth was bombed because the navy used it as a base. Liverpool and Manchester were attacked. Sheffield was bombed because the Germans wanted to destroy its steelworks. Perhaps the worst hit of all was the great industrial city of Coventry. The Luftwaffe attacked it without warning, and in one terrible night the cathedral was burnt to the ground, along with most of the ancient city, while thousands of people were killed.

  Hitler thought fear would make the British give up. But the Blitz had the opposite effect. When they saw their cities in ruins, people became more determined than ever to hold out against the Nazis.

  Life in the War

  AS the war went on, life became harder for everyone. Most of the men left home to join the army, so women went to work in the factories. Because farmers and miners were away fighting the war, girls were sent to the countryside to bring in the harvest and boys became coal miners. Everyone had to cover their windows at night so German pilots wouldn’t see the lights of cities below. Drivers had to put black tape over their car headlights. In the countryside all the road signs were taken away, so that if the Germans invaded they wouldn’t be able to find London.

  The biggest problem was food. For years there had been too many people for the farmers to feed, and most of Britain’s food came from other countries by ship. It was hard for ships to reach Britain any more because Hitler’s submarines, or U-boats, were waiting to sink them, so no one had enough to eat.

  The government turned parks into allotments for people to grow vegetables in, and rationed food so what there was would be shared equally. Each week everyone was allowed a small amount of meat, a tiny lump of cheese, a little butter. Each person had a ration book they had to show shopkeepers before they were allowed to buy anything. As the war went on, everyone grew hungry and thin.

  It wasn’t only food that ran short. Shops started to run out of needles for sewing; out of paper, cloth and paint. There wasn’t enough fuel for heating so people shivered with cold. Some families drew lines on their baths to make sure they didn’t use too much hot water. Women had to make their own clothes. During maths and history lessons, girls sat in class knitting socks for soldiers.

  All the same, no one complained. They knew how evil Hitler was, and knew that if they let him win, the British would lose all the rights they had fought for over hundreds of years: to vote, to live how they wanted, and to be judged by fair courts under fair laws.

  But it was all very well to say they wouldn’t give in. The British were still alone, and Hitler ruled the whole of Europe. They might hold out, but how on earth could they beat him?

  The Allies

  FORTUNATELY Hitler made two terrible mistakes. A hundred and fifty years before, Napoleon had conquered all of Europe – except for Britain – and he too had seemed unbeatable. Then he had decided to attack Russia, a country so vast it could never be conquered, and a few years later his rule was over. Now Hitler decided to attack Ru
ssia as well.

  “The Russians can never stand up to us Germans!” he announced. “Fascists are far better than communists.”

  A huge German army attacked the USSR. The Russians weren’t ready, and retreated hundreds of miles. But Russia’s length is measured not in hundreds of miles but in thousands, and for every thousand Russians the Germans killed or captured there were a million still ready to fight. The Germans ran out of food, their tanks ran out of petrol, their soldiers were exhausted, and there were always more Russians to attack them. Hitler had sent his men into a battle they couldn’t win. The Russians had been enemies of Britain ever since the revolution, but after the German attack they became allies against Adolf Hitler and Britain was no longer alone.

  Then an even stronger friend came to help.

  Ever since the start of the war, the Americans had helped the British all they could by sending food and weapons across the Atlantic Ocean. The ships travelled in convoys, but many were sunk by German U-boats and their sailors drowned. Even so, enough food and weapons arrived to keep the British fighting.

  The American president, Franklin Roosevelt, was a friend of Winston Churchill and hated Hitler. Most Americans didn’t want to fight a war in Europe, though, so all Roosevelt could do was send supplies.

  Then Hitler made his second mistake.

  The Japanese, who were allies of Hitler, wanted to be the greatest power in the Pacific Ocean, so without even declaring war they attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, destroying some of America’s strongest ships. Only afterwards did the Japanese declare war; and a few days later Hitler declared war on America as well. At last Roosevelt had a reason to join the war and come to Britain’s aid.

  Meanwhile, although France itself had been defeated, many Frenchmen wanted to go on fighting. Their leader, General de Gaulle, was living in exile in London, and made a broadcast to them on the radio.