by Jon E. Lewis
Under Operation Sealion, Germany then embarked on the defeat of her last enemy: Britain. On 10 July, recognizing that invasion of Britain could not begin until the air over the Channel was under Nazi control, the Luftwaffe of Herman Goring began its campaign to crush Fighter Command. The ensuing Battle of Britain lasted until 30 October 1940, by when the Luftwaffe had been decisively beaten by “The Few”, the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots of the RAF.
It was Hitler’s first check.
HITLER ORDERS WAR, 31 AUGUST 1939
Adolf Hitler
Most Secret
Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of War: 31 August
1.
Now that all the political possibilities of disposing by peaceful means of a situation on the Eastern Frontier which is intolerable for Germany are exhausted, I have determined on a solution by force.
2.
The attack on Poland is to be carried out in accordance with the preparations made for “Fall Weiss”, with the alterations which result, where the Army is concerned, from the fact that it has, in the meantime, almost completed its dispositions
Allotment of tasks and the operational target remain unchanged.
The date of attack - 1 September, 1939.
Time of attack - 04.45 [inserted in red pencil].
This time also applies to the operation at Gdynia, Bay of Danzig, and the Dirschau Bridge.
3.
In the West it is important that the responsibility for the opening of hostilities should rest unequivocally with England and France. At first, purely local action should be taken against insignificant frontier violations.
Adolf Hitler
On the following morning, sixty-two German divisions (six of them armoured) crossed the border into Poland; the Poles had forty divisions (none of them armoured).
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS DISCUSSES WAR AND PEACE, LONDON, 2 SEPTEMBER 1939
Ralph Glyn, MP
Diary: September 3
Last night in London was one of the great times in modern history. The half-hour in the Commons – 7.30 to 8 – was perhaps the most decisive half-hour that we have known.
All through the day the House had been in a schoolboyish, almost hysterical mood; they were laughing and shuffling. There was a feeling that something fishy was happening in Downing Street. The Cabinet was still sitting. Ministers were telephoning Paris – and the Germans were bombing Poland. Why were we not at war?
At half-past seven we met again, this time subdued and tense. Chamberlain we knew would declare war. The Ambassadors were looking down; Count Edward Raczijnsky pale and worn. Chamberlain came in looking grey – a kind of whitish-grey – and glum, dour. Captain Margesson, the Secretary to the Treasury, came behind him, purple with anxiety. Chamberlain’s statement! ... In the house we thought he was only halfway through when – he sat down. There was a gasp, first of horror, then anger. His own back-benchers leaned forward to cry, “Munich, Munich!” The House seemed to rise to its feet with Mr Arthur Greenwood, the Labour leader.
Mr L.S. Amery, sitting very small near Anthony Eden, jumped up to shout at Greenwood – “Speak for England.” Others took up the cry. Chamberlain white and hunched. Margesson with sweat pouring down his face, Sir John Simon, the Foreign Secretary, punctiliously looking holy.
Greenwood spoke slowly and very simply. He spoke for England and what is more he saved Chamberlain by most skilfully suggesting that it was the French who were delaying. Then one or two back-benchers, Chamberlain’s own supporters, got up. It was not a joint Anglo-French pledge to Poland, they said, it was a British pledge – why were we not fulfilling it? The House swung against Chamberlain again. Winston Churchill, I saw, was getting whiter and grimmer. He turned round to look at Eden, who nodded as if to say, “You speak, I’ll follow.” I know that Churchill was about to move a vote of censure on the Government – which would have fallen. But Chamberlain looked across at Churchill: “I’m playing straight,” his glance seemed to say, “there really are reasons for delay.” Churchill sat back, relaxed, uneasy.
Then James Maxton, the pacifist, rose, gaunt, a Horseman from the Apocalypse, doom written across his face: “Don’t let’s talk of national honour: what do such phrases mean? The plain fact is that war means the slaughter of millions. If the Prime Minister can still maintain the peace he will have saved those lives, he mustn’t be rushed.” Again the House swung and was poised. We all thought in the curious hush: What if the gaunt figure of doom were right after all? Slaughter – misery – ruin – was he right? But the alternative: Hitler trading on our fears, Germany treading on freedom, Europe under terror. The whole House was swayed in unison with the drama which itself was living.
Another back-bencher spoke: “We must keep our pledge – Hitler must be stopped.” Once again we were swinging against Chamberlain, when Margesson, damp and shapeless, rose to move the adjournment. In a kind of daze it was carried.
We broke up, some feeling sick from the reaction – two members were sick – all were uneasy and ashamed. I went home, lay awake all night, slept a bit towards morning, and was awakened by the air-raid warning. Had the Germans read the feelings of the country? Were they attacking first?
BRITAIN DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY, 3 SEPTEMBER 1939
Neville Chamberlain
The text of the Prime Minister’s speech, broadcast on the fine late summer’s morning of 3 September.
I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10, Downing Street.
This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.
I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany. You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that I could have done and that would have been more successful.
Up to the very last it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honourable settlement between Germany and Poland, but Hitler would not have it. He had evidently made up his mind to attack Poland whatever happened and although he now says he put forward reasonable proposals which were rejected by the Poles, that is not a true statement.
The proposals were never shown to the Poles, nor to us, and, though they were announced in a German broadcast on Thursday night, Hitler did not wait to hear comments on them, but ordered his troops to cross the Polish frontier. His action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will. He can only be stopped by force.
We and France are today, in fulfilment of our obligations, going to the aid of Poland, who is so bravely resisting this wicked and unprovoked attack on her people. We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace. The situation in which no word given by Germany’s ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel themselves safe has become intolerable. And now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage.
At such a moment as this the assurances of support that we have received from the Empire are a source of profound encouragement to us.
When I have finished speaking certain detailed announcements will be made on behalf of the Government. Give these your closest attention. The Government have made plans under which it will be possible to carry on the work of the nation in the days of stress and strain that may be ahead. But these plans need your help.
You may be taking your part in the fighting services or as a volunteer in one of the branches of Civil Defence. If so you will report for duty in accordance with the instructions you have received. You may be engaged in work essential to the prosecution of war for the maintenance of the life of the people – in factories, in transport, in pu
blic utility concerns, or in the supply of other necessaries of life. If so, it is of vital importance that you should carry on with your jobs.
Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
HOMEFRONT: LONDON AT WAR, 3 SEPTEMBER 1939
Mollie Panter-Downes
Mollie Panter-Downes was the London correspondent for the New Yorker.
For a week everybody in London had been saying every day that if there wasn’t a war tomorrow there wouldn’t be a war. Yesterday people were saying that if there wasn’t a war today it would be a bloody shame. Now that there is a war, the English, slow to start, have already in spirit started and are comfortably two laps ahead of the official war machine, which had to await the drop of somebody’s handkerchief. In the general opinion, Hitler has got it coming to him – or, in the local patois, “ ’E’s fair copped it.”
The London crowds are cool – cooler than they were in 1914 – in spite of thundery weather that does its best to scare everybody by staging unofficial rehearsals for air raids at the end of breathlessly humid days. On the stretch of green turf by Knightsbridge Barracks, which used to be the scampering ground for the smartest terriers in London, has appeared a row of steam shovels that bite out mouthfuls of earth, hoist it aloft, and dump it into lorries; it is then carted away to fill sandbags. The eye has now become accustomed to sandbags everywhere, and to the balloon barrage, the trap for enemy planes, which one morning spread over the sky like some form of silvery dermatitis. Posting a letter has acquired a new interest, too, since His Majesty’s tubby, scarlet pillar boxes have been done up in squares of yellow detector paint, which changes color if there is poison gas in the air and is said to be as sensitive as a chameleon.
Gas masks have suddenly become part of everyday civilian equipment and everybody is carrying the square cardboard cartons that look as though they might contain a pound of grapes for a sick friend. Bowlegged admirals stump jauntily up Whitehall with their gas masks slung neatly in knapsacks over their shoulders. Last night London was completely blacked out. A few cars crawled through the streets with one headlight out and the other hooded while Londoners, suddenly become homebodies, sat under their shaded lights listening to a Beethoven Promenade concert interspersed with the calm and cultured tones of the BBC telling motorists what to do during air raids and giving instructions to what the BBC referred to coyly as expectant mothers with pink cards, meaning mothers who are a good deal more than expectant.
The evacuation of London, which is to be spaced over three days, began yesterday and was apparently a triumph for all concerned. At seven o’clock in the morning all inward traffic was stopped and AA scouts raced through the suburbs whisking shrouds of sacking off imposing bulletin boards, which informed motorists that all the principal routes out of town were one-way streets for three days. Gars poured out pretty steadily all day, yesterday and today, packed with people, luggage, children’s perambulators, and domestic pets, but the congestion at busy points was no worse than it is at any other time in the holiday season. The railways, whose workers had been on the verge of going out on strike when the crisis came, played their part nobly and the London stations, accustomed to receiving trainloads of child refugees from the Third Reich, got down to the job of dispatching trainload after trainload of children the other way – this time, cheerful little cockneys who ordinarily get to the country perhaps once a year on the local church outing and could hardly believe the luck that was sending them now. Left behind, the mothers stood around rather listlessly at street corners waiting for the telegrams that were to be posted up at the various schools to tell them where their children were.
All over the country the declaration of war has brought a new lease of life to retired army officers, who suddenly find themselves the commanders of battalions of willing ladies who have emerged from the herbaceous borders to answer the call of duty. Morris 10s, their windshields plastered with notices that they are engaged on business of the ARP or WVS (both volunteer services), rock down quiet country lanes propelled by firm-lipped spinsters who yesterday could hardly have said “Boo!” to an aster.
Although the summer holiday is still on, village schools have reopened as centers where the evacuated hordes from London can be rested, sorted out, medically examined, refreshed with tea and biscuits, and distributed to their new homes. The war has brought the great unwashed right into the bosoms of the great washed; while determined ladies in white VAD overalls search the mothers’ heads with a knitting needle for unwelcome signs of life, the babies are dandled and patted on their often grimy diapers by other ladies, who have been told to act as hostesses and keep the guests from pining for Shoreditch. Guest rooms have been cleared of Grown Derby knickknacks and the best guest towels, and the big houses and cottages alike are trying to overcome the traditional British dislike of strangers, who may, for all anybody knows, be parked in them for a matter of years, not weeks.
Everybody is so busy that no one has time to look up at the airplanes that pass overhead all day. Today was a day of unprecedented activity in the air. Squadrons of bombers bustled in all directions and at midday an enormous number of vast planes, to which the knowing pointed as troop-carriers, droned overhead toward an unknown destination that was said by two sections of opinion to be (a) France and (b) Poland. On the ground, motor buses full of troops in bursting good humor tore through the villages, the men waving at the girls and howling “Tipperary” and other ominously dated ditties that everybody has suddenly remembered and found to be as good for a war in 1939 as they were in 1914.
London and the country are buzzing with rumours, a favorite one being that Hitler carries a gun in his pocket and means to shoot himself if things don’t go too well; another school of thought favors the version that he is now insane and Goring has taken over. It is felt that Mussolini was up to no good with his scheme for holding a peace conference and spoiling what has become everybody’s war. The English were a peace-loving nation up to two days ago, but now it is pretty widely felt that the sooner we really get down to the job, the better.
POLAND: "WE MARCHED AROUND IN CIRCLES": THE TRIALS OF A CADET SOLDIER, 3 SEPTEMBER-5 OCTOBER 1939
Private K.S. Karol, Polish Army
Karol was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy undergoing a compulsory military course when Germany attacked Poland.
The camp’s commander . . . announced that the war would be a long one and that we would have a chance to fight when we reached eighteen or even twenty-one years of age. For now, however, he wanted some volunteers to protect public buildings, perhaps in Warsaw, thereby freeing a company of the regular army for duty on the front. Every one of us a patriot, we all took a step forward. I imagine that we resembled closely those schoolboys of the Kaiser’s Germany, described so well by Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front. Just as with them, patriotic ardor glazed over our eyes. For Jurek, Rysiek, and myself – Stefan Wegner’s three protégés – enthusiasm consisted above all of antifascist elan. I also promised myself that in the Hour of Victory, after crushing the Germans, I would redirect my gun at the oppressor regime in Poland. But guarding public buildings would do until then: our army at the front had to have its rear guard well secured.
The only problem was that the front seemed to be everywhere, beginning with the road we took to Warsaw. In undisputed command of the air, the Luftwaffe bombed everything that moved, at least in western Poland. In the beginning, we were terrified. During the first raid, Sergeant Major Bartczak, a stupid and cruel man, even ordered a peasant woman to strangle her baby so that it would stop exposing us to risk with its crying. Fortunately the brave woman refused. Slowly we became used to the Luftwaffe; it had claimed no victims among our little troop, which comprised a hundred “auxiliary soldiers” and ten or so regular soldiers who flanked us. The real problems were slow p
rogress in marching and the palpable lowering of morale, prompted by the fear that perhaps we weren’t on the winning side after all.
Where were our planes? Did Poland have any planes? Some of us took comfort from pretending that our air force was active on the front, unlike the Luftwaffe, which was being used against civilians, including women and children. But this explanation, based on trust in the moral superiority of our pilots, collapsed when, on September 5, we at last reached the suburbs of the capital. Muffled rumblings of artillery fire convinced us that the front couldn’t be very far away; and, alas, there wasn’t a Polish plane in sight. Worse still, nourished by the myth of the combined might of France and Great Britain, we half expected to see their squadrons flying above our country. Instead, they were conspicuous by their absence.
Things were bad – much worse than our most pessimistic fears. The weary eyes of our camp commander betrayed fatigue and confusion; in Warsaw they hadn’t any need of us, and it was too late to send us back to Lodz, which was now occupied by the Germans. Our leader recovered his verve only after meeting a group of officers among whom was a major who agreed to speak to him, to help him, to help us. I remember that after their conversation they separated on a perky note: “See you again, after another miracle on the Vistula.” I too was sure that the Polish Army still had the capacity to wage a victorious battle on the outskirts of the capital. Hadn’t my mother told me that in the hour of danger our people were capable of surpassing themselves, of revealing unsuspected reserves of heroism?
Nevertheless, our small troop was not supposed to contribute to this exploit. Our leader, after assembling our supplies and receiving his instructions, ordered us to march – singing – in the direction of Lublin. In our song, even the trees were supposed to salute us, because it was “for our Poland” that we were going into combat.