Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  In the spring of 1976 I was filming the graves of the English kings Henry II and Richard I in Fontevrault Abbey in France. This was for the BBC television series Royal Heritage, which took two years of intensive labour to prepare in time for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. Recording the towering stone arcades of the nave was a refreshing change from the pomp and circumstance of state occasions. I was surprised and not entirely pleased therefore to get a direct message from the Queen. She had heard that the entrance to Helsinki Harbour was past a series of spectacularly beautiful islets. She was about to sail there in the Royal Yacht on an official visit and wondered if I wanted to film the event.

  Only a minute’s reflection decided me in the affirmative. The Queen made few direct interventions in the filming, but they were always helpful. I arranged for an additional camera team to go from London to Finland, hired a local helicopter to film the arrival of the Royal Yacht from the air, and arranged that a second team and myself would board the Yacht while it was under way in the Baltic to get the Queen’s eye view of the approach past the islands. The next day I boarded a Finnair passenger flight from Charles de Gaulle airport to Helsinki.

  It was my first visit to the home of Sibelius. I was met by a bearded government official. He explained that before taking me to my hotel he wanted to show me the most important site in Finland. He would not tell me what it was. We drove up to a green hill overlooking the city. A simple stone entrance led to a wide perspective of rolling hillside. It was entirely covered with uniform white gravestones: a heart-stopping sight. These were the young men who had died in the Winter War with Russia.

  Then I remembered. ‘It was at the beginning of 1940?’ It was. It lasted four months and killed more than 2 per cent of the male population. Finland’s southern border was only fifteen miles north of Leningrad. Despite the secret non-aggression pact signed by Hitler and Stalin in the summer of 1939, its actual results, the partition of Poland, brought the rival dictatorships eyeball to eyeball. Russia had always feared an attack through Finland. This tiny, unprepared and ill-armed country was invaded by the Soviet giant at the beginning of December.

  At first the massed Russian forces were opposed by poorly armed men who threw bottles of flaming petrol against the caterpillar tracks of the tanks: the famous Molotov cocktails. No other nation went to the aid of the Finns, but they had a powerful ally in General Frost. They were trained for guerrilla warfare in the forest and tundra. The Russians were heavily armed, but lightly clad. The winter of 1939–40 was one of the coldest in memory. In a few days more than two hundred Soviet tanks were lost to a mixture of fire, ice and courage.

  To us, reading about these things in the Daily Express, it seemed intolerable that this land of free-thinking independent Davids should be battered to death by the hammers and sickles of the Soviet Goliath. But whose side were the Finns on? The British arranged to sell them some out-of-date fighter planes; so did Italy, which was shortly to join Germany in the invasion of France. There was talk of an army of volunteers (on the lines of the International Brigade in Spain); it never got under way, though the French supported the idea of sending in an army of the defeated and exiled Poles.

  The Soviet invasion broke Finnish resistance before there was time for the politicians of Europe to make up their minds as to how they should react. Perhaps this was just as well, not only for saving Finland from further devastation, but also for faraway Britain. Had we sent a force of 100,000 troops, as was under serious consideration, they would have faced the hug of the Russian bear, and far away in Finland there was no Dunkirk and no twenty-mile stretch of water to retreat across. If Britain had found itself at war with both Germany and the Soviet Union (in the spring of 1940 they were still allies), what would have been the outcome of the war for us?

  We were lucky. Ours was the only nation which was in the war from the beginning to the end and which survived. Finland, defeated by Russia, chose to join with Germany in May 1941 in the hope of getting revenge. She only added to the stones in the graveyard: 85,000 young men died in the Winter War; 500,000 were seriously wounded; 10,000 were permanent invalids. This was the debt my government official found it intolerable to have to carry. For us, in 1939, it was a tingling premonition of what we might be facing.

  5

  REGIONS DOLOROUS

  I

  Farewell, happy fields,

  Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! Hail,

  Infernal world! And thou, profoundest Hell,

  Receive thy new possessor! One who brings

  A mind not to be changed by place or time.

  The mind is its own place, and in itself

  Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

  I first read, and to a considerable extent understood, Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1940. It was to be the set poem I had to study for the London Matriculation exam. It was also a poem whose bitter inflexible stance suited the mood of the day. Just as for the Romantics its heroically evil Satan focused their feelings for Napoleon; so, in this year of destiny, its rhetoric summed up the previous vainglory of Hitler and his beer cellar braggarts.

  Unfortunately there was more to both Napoleon and Hitler than clever showmanship. Leaving out the purely personal hazards of ill-health and accident, 1940 must have been the most fateful year I have lived through (though clearly close run by 1941 and 1942).

  Just look at some of the dates. On 8 April Germany invaded Denmark. Resistance lasted a few hours. Sea battles off the coast of Norway followed. An Allied Expeditionary Force landed near Narvik on 22 April. It was withdrawn within a few weeks. On 10 May Holland and Belgium were invaded. The Dutch capitulated in five days. Belgium capitulated on 28 May. France capitulated on 16 June. The German army reached the Pyrenees on 27 June. In less than two months it seemed the European war was over.

  This brief summary of disaster omits two important facts: on 10 May Chamberlain’s government fell and Winston Churchill was asked to form a coalition government of all three parties. His message to Parliament was brief: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’

  At that moment the British Expeditionary Force was fighting in Belgium. Ten days later a far-sighted admiral began getting together a fleet that might be needed to bring back the retreating army. Ferries, fishing boats, pleasure steamers, Royal Navy craft of all sorts – within a week they were under way, heading for Dunkirk. Dunkirk, that was where it had to be: Calais and Boulogne had already fallen.

  It wasn’t only the larger ships that were involved. In a big Victorian house a few doors from us lived a widow, her four sons and a daughter, all in their twenties or late teens. They were an outstandingly handsome quintet. They, along with many, many others, vanished for a few days. They had sailed their yacht over to the bomb and shell-blasted beaches where the troops were assembled, crouching in dug-outs, waiting to be ferried out to the big ships that would carry them across the Channel to home.

  It was the sort of spontaneous enterprise that the English seem able to carry out well. When it was first considered, it was hoped to evacuate a few thousand of the rapidly disintegrating Expeditionary Force. In fact, in the nine days from 27 May to 4 June, 338,226 British and Allied troops were ferried back to Dover and Ramsgate. The rear guard fought stubbornly, the RAF kept the German bombers at bay and the Royal Navy did superbly what the nation expected of it. They even brought back 800 stray French dogs that had attached themselves to the canineloving Tommies.

  Dunkirk became a myth overnight, like the defeat of the Spanish Armada 350 years earlier. But the Armada was defeated. This was a disaster for Britain, coupled as it was with the collapse of France and of our other European allies. Time has given it the accolade of the ultimate victory. But that was no consolation in those bewildering spring days when battle no sooner seemed to be joined than it was lost. We were expecting a return match on 1914–18: a steady slog in the mud and blood of Flanders. Instead, we were embracing a whirlwind: the Blitzkrieg entered our voca
bulary. How terrible it must have seemed to that little army of professional soldiers who had probably seen service on the North-West Frontier in the 1930s. One of them wrote a book about his experiences at Dunkirk that came out that same year. Reading it at Christmas 1940 gave a clearer understanding of what we were in for:

  A mile behind us, Dunkirk, as the darkness of the night closed in on it, ceased to be visible as a vast welter of black and grey smoke and became a great red, angry, glowing cinder. The pillar of cloud by day became the pillar of fire by night. Against the impenetrable ebony background of the sky it glared forth upon us like a ferocious bloodshot eye. In front, along the near horizon, a couple or so miles distant, long flashes like summer lightning played continually, orange and greenish in hue. They were the explosions of our own shells mingled with the flashes from the German artillery replying. Above this play of summer lightning, every now and then a rocket soared high into the sky, bursting into a brilliant white light. German success rockets recording the capture of some objective. They were disconcerting to watch, bursting as they did with such frequency, and in the darkness seeming to draw nearer and nearer . . .

  On either side, scattered over the sand in all sorts of positions, were the dark shapes of dead and dying men, sometimes alone, sometimes in twos and threes . . . A horrible stench of blood and mutilated flesh pervaded the place. There was no escape from it . . . ‘Water . . . Water . . .’ groaned a voice from the ground just in front of us. It was a wounded infantryman. He had been hit so badly that there was no hope for him. Our water bottles had long been empty, but by carefully draining them all into one we managed to collect a mouthful or two. A sergeant knelt down beside the dying man and held the bottle to his lips. . . .

  Our only thoughts now, were to get on a boat. Along the entire queue not a word was spoken . . . Heads and shoulders only showing above the water. Fixed, immovable, as though claimed there. It was, in fact, practically impossible to move, even from one foot to another. The dead weight of waterlogged boots and sodden clothes pinned one down . . .

  The gunwale of the lifeboat stood three feet above the surface of the water. Reaching up, I could just grasp it with the tips of my fingers. When I tried to haul myself up I couldn’t move an inch . . . I might have been a sack of lead. A great dread of being left behind seized me . . . Two powerful hands reached over the gunwale and fastened themselves into my armpits . . . Before I had time to realise it I was pulled up and pitched head-first into the bottom of the boat. ‘Come on, you b—–. Get up and help the others in,’ shouted a sailor, as I hit the planks with a gasp.

  I saw some of these others landing back in Britain. Canterbury is on the southern toe of England. North of us was the Thames Estuary, east was Ramsgate, south-east Dover and south Folkestone. In that last week in May we began to realise that an amazing act of deliverance was being played out on the narrow seas. On Saturday or Sunday 1 or 2 June my father drove us down to the coast.

  In some ways it was almost like a regatta that we looked down on from Shakespeare Cliff. The sea was full of small boats of every description bobbing about in the summer sunshine. Smears of black smoke blotched the horizon. Grey forms of destroyers clashed here and there, churning up the already turbulent water. By contrast, one of the Thames pleasure boats, a paddle steamer, came limping slowly into harbour, its decks almost awash and crowded with men.

  Dover harbour was equally crowded. Men sat, or lurched about looking for their regiments, shouting out for their friends. Many appeared to be asleep on their feet. This was no army: some had bare feet wrapped in grass, some were on crutches, some clothed only in filthy blankets. Few had rifles or any other arms. The wounded were being tended by nurses on the quayside. Many sat or stood motionless: their jaws dropping, they seemed to be in the last stages of shock and fatigue.

  Yet, through this filthy multitude, smart, brisk transport officers ran backwards and forwards organising the loading onto the trains that were leaving every few minutes. Uniformed members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) were supervising steaming tea urns, handing out sandwiches and bars of chocolate. At another part of the harbour children were being assembled. These were not war orphans, but the children of Dover who were being evacuated. Might not Hitler follow on this defeated host? The children also had to be organised. They had all the mobility that the shell-shocked troops had lost. They dashed in pursuit of their friends, hid from them behind the soldiers. Sometimes they got genuinely lost and tearful. From time to time they burst into song. The thin wavering notes of ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ drifted up to us on the windy cliff top.

  What was it like? It was a unique event. I had never seen anything like it. I wanted to understand it by comparing it with something I knew. The only thing I could think of was that Victorian painting of a railway station. But that was too mundane. Something was missing.

  The outer quay was almost clear of troops. From the deck of the now much lighter paddle steamer came shouted words of command. Another sodden and dirty group of men climbed out onto the quay. They formed up in threes; they shouldered their rifles (they still had their rifles). Then, officers and NCOs at the front, they marched off to the waiting train. I think they were the Scots Guards. That was the element that had been missing from the scene.

  It was restated with unforgettable power in the radio speeches that our new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, made in the next few weeks. I can still hear them ringing through my imagination:

  The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war . . . If we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’

  II

  A danger in this sort of retrospective assessment of a life is making it appear more patterned and organised than it seemed at the time. A disaster of such enormous magnitude might be expected to dwarf everything else. Admittedly, the resourcefulness of the Navy, the courage of the Air Force and the stubborn endurance of the Army had given us the possibility of fighting again on another day. We had saved 338,226 men. But in doing so we had lost 68,000 fighting men, killed, missing or taken prisoner. And, with them, 63,879 motor vehicles, 679 tanks and half a million tons of military stores and ammunition, 243 ships, including six destroyers, and 474 aircraft. Of course, we didn’t know these dreadful figures then. We had nothing to fight Hitler with except Churchill’s rhetoric.

  But the war, even such devastating events as Dunkirk, remained at the periphery of my life. The foreground continued to be my home and my relations to my classmates in the Remove. I was most concerned with the ingenious verbal tormenting by the Pelly brothers and the even more disturbing violence of the English master Mr Johnson. Youthfully handsome with dark curly hair and a splendid voice, he had recently shown unexpected paroxysms of rage at the smallest demonstration of student sloth. This would usually consist of him suddenly swinging round from the blackboard and hurling his chalk at the inattentive pupil – not an uncommon teacher device when carried out a relatively slow pace, but when delivered with all the vim of a Larwood out to upset Bradman, it was quite another matter. When he graduated from the small shrapnel of chalk to the blockbuster of the wooden mounted blackboard duster we began to take bets as to who would get the first fatal injury. A few days later he went over to his desk in the middle of reciting to us Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, leant his head in his hands and burst into tears. Still sobbing, he shut his book and walked out of our life. We were most scandalised that he had left when only halfway through the lesson.

  I naturally relayed this story to my parents when I was at home that evening. My father m
ust have mentioned it to my housemaster, Mr Stephen-Jones, commonly known as The Beak because of his Punchlike nose. He was a personal friend of my father’s and the principal reason that I was allowed to be a day boy at a boarding school: a dubious advantage except on occasions like this. ‘You know your Mr Johnson,’ said my father a few days later. ‘Well, you must promise not to tell anyone, but he’s suffered a bereavement.’ ‘A bereavement?’ I wasn’t sure I knew what it meant. ‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘His wife has left him. As a matter of fact she has gone off with the music teacher at Kings School. Now you mustn’t tell a soul. Promise?’ It wasn’t a difficult word to keep. If I’d let it out, it was such a bizarre story it would have been twisted to rebound on me.

  Nor was that quite the end. On Sundays my father drove me up to the school chapel to attend the service. He would be waiting for me when we all came streaming out an hour or so later. Seeing him, Mr Stephen-Jones came over and leant in on the driver’s side. He murmured too low for me to hear. I guessed it was about Mr Johnson, when I heard Mr Stephen-Jones say something, something . . . couldn’t perform. So was it the music master’s ability to play a tune that had won over Mrs Johnson? Something like that, said my father, but he resolutely refused to go into detail.

  There was one person I could have discussed it with. This summer term of 1940 we had another weekly boarder. Like me, William Harvey was not allowed to play games; tuberculosis had left him with a weak heart. When it was time for cricket we would often go for long walks. Balanced on the spur of hillside above the town there were a number of paths that gave us splendid views of the cathedral. And if we chose the opposite direction, Blean Woods were a mass of bluebells and other wild flowers, and could hardly have changed since the days when the Canterbury pilgrims must have wandered through them.

  My friendship with Harvey was a good example of how propinquity can draw together the most unlikely couples. We had hardly an interest in common. He was extremely practical: he loved tinkering with machinery and working out electrical circuits. I liked to imagine what the town would have been like when the first parties of pilgrims came over the hilltop and saw it below them. That was the sort of unanswerable speculation that cannot have appealed in the least to Harvey, but he was kind enough to enter into the spirit of the occasion by suggesting that most of the travellers would have been more concerned with getting their aching feet into a hot bath than in admiring the view. Equally, I would be incapable of understanding the ballistics that spun a revolver shot in the direction you wanted it to go, however patiently Harvey explained them. His father had kept a German Mauser automatic that he had acquired in the First World War. We were at one in believing that we would shortly have the opportunity to test its capability.