In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  It was in his factory, too, that Churchill prepared the confrontation with Hitler, a war he felt was inevitable and should not be avoided. For deep down Churchill was, after all – and almost all his biographers point to this – a man of arms. He was not a statesman like Roosevelt, who was forced to wage a war and who understood that waging war was sometimes a part of politics. With Churchill, it was just the opposite: he was a man of arms who understood that politics was sometimes a part of waging war. All military operations had to be discussed with him minutely. He was tough and romantic, a typical wartime leader, and after the victory of 1945 the British electorate immediately voted him from his post. That was no ingratitude, but a logical reaction to Churchill's unique character.

  As early as 1935, Churchill was preparing himself for the struggle. In deepest secret he received information from concerned officials and officers regarding the true state of Britain's defences. On the basis of the guestbook at Chartwell, for example, Martin Gilbert was able to reconstruct a visit by the head of the German department at the Foreign Office, Ralph Wigram, on 7 April, 1935. What did this man suddenly have to talk to Churchill about? It was made clear only decades later, when the Foreign Office released its documents from that time: the British Secret Service had suddenly received new information about the alarmingly precipitous growth of the Luftwaffe, which had almost reached the critical mass needed to go to war. According to the newest calculations, the Germans had some 850 planes at their immediate disposal, while the British had no more than 450. To the officials’ dismay, their superiors did nothing whatsoever with these reports. On 2 May, 1935, Churchill used this information to bludgeon the government with a scathing speech.

  Other important informants included Sir Desmond Morton and Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell. Morton, who was head of the British Industrial Information Service, lived not far from Chartwell, and at the weekend he would often walk the paths and green fields to Churchill's house, carrying under his arm a portfolio with top-secret information about German industrial production, or about the Kriegsmarine, the Wehrmacht or the Luftwaffe. Lindemann, a professor of physics at Oxford, was one of Churchill's best friends and a welcome guest in the household. He was amazingly well informed about all new technological developments with possible military consequences. He fervently advocated support for Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of radar, who turned directly to Churchill in 1936 when the further development of his invention seemed about to become bogged down in military bureaucracy. Lindemann was also the man who pointed out to Churchill the vast possibilities offered by nuclear fission. Churchill was so impressed that he wrote an article in Pall Mall about a bomb of the future, no bigger than an orange, powerful enough to ‘blast a township at a stroke.’ He also believed in the great opportunities offered by the rocket. He imagined ‘flying machines, guided automatically by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot’ which would carry explosives ‘in an incessant procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard’.

  In the field of war production, Jean Monnet was one of the key players behind the scenes. ‘In 1938, Daladier had gone to Munich in the certain knowledge that the Germans can bomb Paris whenever they choose,’ he wrote in his memoirs. One week after the Munich Agreement, the French government sent Monnet on a secret mission to the United States. In mid-October he had his first meeting with President Roosevelt, at Roosevelt's cluttered holiday home on the Hudson, full of guests and children. Even at that point Roosevelt considered Hitler the arch-enemy of freedom, and therefore of the United States, but he still had to convince most Americans of that.

  From autumn 1940, planes began rolling off the American production lines by the thousand, as did trucks, jeeps and tanks. Without the American people realising it, a war force was being prepared. That America was able to leap immediately into battle as from late 1941 was due in large part to the production lines set up by Roosevelt, Monnet and a handful of others from 1938, at a time when most Americans were oblivious of the dangers ahead.

  ‘I knew that we were only at the beginning of a long effort,’ Monnet wrote concerning spring 1940,‘but the machinery for action was in place, and it would never stop.’

  Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

  Brasted

  NEVER HAD THE BRITISH SENSE OF PECULIAR UNITY BEEN SO STRONG as it was in high summer 1940. After the fall of France, King George VI wrote to his mother about what a relief it was ‘now that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.’

  For the first time in many generations the British were once again preparing to resist an invasion from the continent. Signs and street markers were taken down. To keep gliders from landing, golf courses and cricket pitches were blockaded with carts, automobiles, beds and tree stumps. The civilians were instructed, in the event of a landing, to lay soup plates upside down in the streets: the Germans would think they were antitank mines. Everyone was under suspicion. When an English pilot was forced to make an emergency landing amid the hedgerows of Kent, he was immediately held at gunpoint by a ‘fairly elderly nurse’ who had climbed over a fence with a toy rifle and ‘pointed the weapon at him in a most threatening fashion’.

  At the University of Sussex a number of studies have been preserved, carried out by the British Mass Observation organisation, one of the world's first trend-watching agencies. On 16 May, 1940, the observers of ‘Morale Today’ noted: ‘It does not occur to people that we could be defeated. The former peace and quiet has been disturbed, but is still in place. Should that suddenly fall apart, a moral explosion will follow.’ 19 May:‘Outwardly calm, inwardly anxious covers the general tone of today.’ 21 May: ‘The fear that a Nazi invasion is possible is now beginning to appear. The bewilderment and distress is more severe today than ever before …The result of the speeches given in the last few days by Churchill … is to engender a feeling of relief, not because the situation is not serious, but because the people feel they know the worst, which is a new experience for them.’

  The writer Rebecca West saw, on evenings in June, pale-faced people sitting in Regent's Park. Some of them, she wrote, walked over to the roses in great earnestness and inhaled the fragrance, as though to say: ‘That is what roses are like, that is how they smell. We must remember that, down in the darkness.’

  The first German bombs fell in the Greater London area on 8 June, 1940, on a stretch of open countryside close to Colney. A goat was killed. In the months that followed the English people watched as a gigantic aerial battle developed above their heads, day after day. In his diary, Harold Nicolson wrote that he was sitting with friends in the garden at Sissinghurst when he saw the German planes approaching, ‘twenty little, silver fish in arrow formation’. During lunch there was a dogfight: ‘There is a rattle of machine-gun fire and we see Spitfires attacking a Heinkel. The latter sways off, obviously wounded.’ A Londoner, who had been talking at his club to a young man with a bandaged arm, noted in his diary: ‘Life is certainly exciting when a youngster can be shot down in the sea in the morning and be in a club in Berkeley Square the same evening.’

  The Battle of Britain was actually the battle for the Channel. As long as the much more powerful British fleet was still at sea, a German invasion could be ruled out. The Germans hoped to use the Luftwaffe to cripple that fleet, so that their landing troops could cross the Channel unchallenged. But before they could do that, they had first to dispense with the Royal Air Force.

  Robert Watson-Watt's invention played a major role in winning that battle. In deepest secrecy, a whole chain of radar stations – the first in the world – were built along the English coast. This allowed the RAF to remain perfectly informed of the arrival of every new wave of German aircraft, without the need for constant patrolling. Surprise attacks were no longer possible, pilots and planes remained available for the fighting itself.

  Despite its massive air power, however, the Luftwaffe was not prepared for a typical air war, and particularly not for an air war against Britain. The German fighte
r, the Messerschmitt 109, was a better plane than the British Hurricane and at least as good as the Spitfire, but it was not suited for long-distance flights: the fuel tanks were so small that the planes could remain in British airspace for no more than half an hour.

  The Blitz that came later, the series of German bombardments of London and other cities, was also an improvised affair. The Heinkel, Dornier and Junker bombers were designed to operate in unison with troops on the ground, and to attack enemy tanks and infantry from the air. In practice, they proved unsuited for carrying the enormous quantity of bombs needed truly to devastate a large industrial country.

  In the end, Germany's plans for an invasion proved no more than fleeting. The Wehrmacht had received absolutely no training in landing operations, the country's capacity for troop transport was insufficient and Germany had almost no landing craft. Now, for the first time, the under-side of the blitzkrieg coin became apparent: the Wehrmacht, and the German wartime economy, were attuned to brief, overwhelming explosions of energy, and not to long, exhausting struggles. By late July 1940, according to some of those in his immediate surroundings, Hitler had already turned his attention to something completely different: the march on Russia.

  The White Heart pub in Brasted, close to the Kentish airfield of Biggin Hill, was the RAF pilots’ local. The building itself has since been enlarged, but the area around the bar where the young airmen noted their ‘hits’ has remained unchanged. They were often too tired to get drunk; there were days when they made up to six flights, strafed and bombed during take-off, getting into dogfights with ME 109s, being wounded, ejecting from their planes and hitchhiking back to the base, from where they would take off again the next morning. The chalkboard with their names on it is still hanging on the wall. ‘Hold my glass for me, I'll be right back,’ they would say before disappearing into the sky.

  During summer 1940, the life expectancy of the British pilot was four, perhaps five weeks.

  Chapter TWENTY-NINE

  London

  THE REALITY OF THE BLITZ LIVES ON TODAY ONLY IN THE NIGHTMARES of the elderly, and in a handful of war museums. It is striking to see how quickly the normal historical perspective in London has made way for the myth and the spectacle. In city museums on the continent, the key words for this particular epoch are silence and serenity. One sees photographs, a black-and-grey scale model of a badly wounded town, a handful of scorched objects, and that is usually it. In London, things are very different.

  A top attraction at the moment is the Britain At War Experience, a ‘realistic experience’ where, after paying a few pounds, one can walk down a wartime street, hear wartime radio reports and sit in a fairy-tale air-raid shelter listening to the howl of the sirens and the thudding of the Heinkel bombers. The climax is the cleverly reconstructed ruins of a housing block, complete with flashes of anti-aircraft fire, a few limbs tossed around and the melancholy burbling of a burst water main. ‘Jolly good!’ the schoolboys standing beside me shout.

  In summer 1940, London was the world's biggest metropolis. The city had more than eight million inhabitants (New York had almost seven million.) One out of every five Britons lived there. It was where all the lines of the British Empire converged. And after Hitler had abandoned his plans for an invasion, it was the most obvious target for the German bombardments.

  The Germans started the Blitz more or less out of frustration, without any clear planning, as a sequel to the Battle of Britain. During the first half of that summer they had focused on dominating British airspace, in preparation for a possible landing. Their bombardments had been limited largely to airfields and other military installations. On 24 August, more or less by accident, a pair of Stukas dropped the first bombs on central London. Churchill seized the opportunity: in ‘revenge’, eighty RAF bombers pounded Berlin. Hitler was infuriated. Nearly 600 German bombers came back during the next two weeks to bomb English cities, factories and airfields. Then, at 5 p.m. on 7 September, the first major attack on London began. The docks were the primary target, but working-class neighbourhoods, the East End in particular, were also badly damaged. Some 300 men, women and children were killed. The next morning Churchill paid a visit to a bomb shelter that had been squarely hit. Forty people had been killed. Churchill burst into tears. The people shouted: ‘We thought you'd come. We can take it. Give it ‘em back!’

  Five days later, Buckingham Palace was hit for the first time. ‘I'm glad we've been bombed,’ said Queen Elizabeth. ‘Now I feel we can look the East End in the face.’ On Sunday, 29 September, firebombs rained down on the City. The entire district, reduced to ashes in the Great Fire of 1666, was alight once again. Nineteen churches, thirty-one guild halls and all of Paternoster Row, including five million books, went up in flames. By late September almost 6,000 Londoners had been killed, and another 12,000 wounded. Harold Nicolson compared himself to a prisoner in the Conciergerie during the French Revolution: ‘Every morning one is pleased to see one's friends appearing again.’

  Something of the real story can be derived from the reports from Mass Observation. Some of the Londoners surrendered to their fear. Others tried, despite it all, in stubborn, angry fashion, to get on with daily life. Yet others kept their mortal fear in check with jokes and songs. Barbara Nixon, an Air Defence volunteer, saw her first victim: ‘In the middle of the street lay the remains of the baby. It had been blown clean through the window and had burst on striking the roadway.’ Celia Fremlin, a Mass Observation reporter, described the mood in a bomb shelter in Cable Street, at the start of the bombardments: ‘They were screaming and saying, “I can't stand it, I'm going to die, I can't stand it!.”’ When she came back to the same shelter three nights later, the people were singing. The reason was simple enough:‘Once you've gone through three nights of bombing and come out alive, you can't help feeling safe the fourth time.’ Bernard Kops, a fourteen-year-old at the time, remembered the first major attack on 7 September as ‘a flaming world’: the ground floor of a flat, filled with hysterical women and crying infants. The men started playing cards, the women sang songs. ‘But every so often twenty women's fists shook at the ceiling, cursing the explosions, Germany, Hitler.’

  In the course of October 1940, the Luftwaffe shifted its focus to cities such as Birmingham, Sheffield, Hull, Glasgow and Plymouth. On 14 November, Coventry was bombed for a full ten hours. Afterwards the cathedral lay in ruins, a third of the homes were uninhabitable, 550 inhabitants were dead and almost 900 critically wounded. The psychological effect of the bombardment was much greater than in other cities; Coventry was much smaller, and everyone had the feeling they had been personally attacked. The Mass Observation reporter noted more expressions of fear, panic and hysteria than in all the previous attacks put together. ‘Women were seen to cry, to scream, to tremble all over, to faint in the street, to attack a fireman, and so on …’

  There was little the Luftwaffe could do during the winter months, but from March 1941 the Heinkels and Junkers were back in full force. The heaviest and most prolonged attack of all took place on Saturday, 10 May, 1941. London was, as people put it, ‘Coventrated’. Westminster Abbey, the Tower and the Mint were heavily damaged, a quarter of a million books went up in flames in the British Museum, the north wing of the Houses of Parliament was destroyed. About 1,500 Londoners were killed, a third of all the city's streets were impassable, all train stations, save one, were blocked, and 150,000 families were left without water, gas or electricity.

  Then the bombardments stopped. The Luftwaffe sent all its planes east for the attack on the Soviet Union. There began an intermission that lasted almost three years, a sombre, dingy, frustrated period in the city's history that was later referred to as ‘no light in the middle of the tunnel’.

  Entire chunks of the city centre, including the busy shopping and office area between St Mary-le-Bow and St Paul's Cathedral, returned to the primal state of the old London, a wilderness of mud, rubble and tall grass, a plain where only a few footpaths bore the names
of former streets. In Bread Street and Milk Street there grew wild flowers the likes of which had not raised their heads there since the days of Henry VIII: lilies of the valley, ragwort and others.

  The ‘little Blitz’, as the exhausted Londoners of that day called this period, began in February 1944, in retaliation for the British bombing of German cities. Then, in the final summer of the war, something happened that had not been seen before. Starting in June, little, unmanned jet planes began flying into the city: the V-1s, recognisable by the loud buzzing of their motors, then a sudden silence when the machine stopped and before the bomb fell. Suddenly Londoners were stretched to their limits again: the capriciousness of these merciless, deadly ‘robot bombs’ generated a nervousness greater than the worst of the Blitz attacks.

  A few months later, another new weapon appeared from the drawing boards of Wernher von Braun and his enthusiastic technicians: the V-2, the world's first long-distance missile. From launching pads in places like Wassenaar and the Hague in the Netherlands, the V-2 rocketed to London in only a few minutes, moving at several times the speed of sound. The V-2 was an extremely advanced weapon: the missile flew to the edge of the stratosphere and even included several ingenious guidance systems. Radar, air-raid siren, anti-aircraft fire, Spitfires – all were useless in the face of this technology. A V-2 could flatten an entire street, kill everyone who lived there. The last of approximately 1,000 V-2s struck the city in late March 1945, landing in Tottenham Court Road, on the eighteenth-century chapel of Reverend George Whitefield, at the place where the Whitefield Memorial Church now stands.