1939

by Angela Lambert

  Priscilla Brett (now Lady Beckett), was also at York races that August, staying with her future parents-in-law, and she too remembers people being called to their regiments over the tannoy: ‘There was a great sense of drama: we hadn’t the foggiest idea what it would be like. In a way we thought it would be much more dreadful than it was, because of the memories of the last war, and the horrors of that.’ Ronnie Kershaw was one of the young men called up at that time and, far from being apprehensive, he greeted his call-up with delight – or so, at any rate, it seems to him now:

  I was called up in August, and I was very, very pleased. I didn’t like the job I was doing very much, so it was a great relief. I was made a 2nd Lieutenant at about 10/6d a day: so there I was in the Army. At the end of August I went to camp and then after camp I didn’t have any more leave. But right up until the end of July I think most people hadn’t believed there was going to be a war. They didn’t really think that Hitler would risk it against England. They never thought he would be mad enough – they thought something would happen to prevent it. That was my view as well: but I soon changed it !

  Christian Grant had known throughout the summer that war was imminent:

  What gave me the greatest clue that something terrible was expected was that the grown-ups – our parents’ generation – were so frightfully nice to us; and we sort of knew that they were giving us a particularly wonderful, beautiful summer because they knew more than we knew. It didn’t oppress or frighten one, because at that age one has no concept of what a war is. One certainly didn’t appreciate that all the young men one was dancing with were going to be killed. Of my men friends, my young men friends, twenty-two of them joined up on the same day, when war started, and at the end of the war only two were alive. And one was a mental wreck and the other was on crutches. And that was the whole of my gang. En bloc, my gang was slaughtered.

  In the last few days of August people were hastening back from their holidays. For those who had been abroad, this was often a considerable problem. Sarah Norton’s mother packed up their villa at St Raphaël with scarcely an hour’s notice:

  We’d all been trying to forget what was happening, and had mostly succeeded in having a wonderful time – and then when things really were getting a bit tricky my mother suddenly decided that we had to leave immediately. We were in my father’s car with my parents and my brother and one other person who wanted a lift and then suddenly lots of other people turned up, begging for lifts, but there was nothing we could do – there was no more room in the car. My mother was quite calm about it all but there was no nonsense: she said, in half an hour we’ll leave, and we did. I hadn’t even had time to change out of my shorts, so I arrived at the Ritz in Paris still wearing them, but my mother said, ‘Don’t worry, dear, nobody’11 notice your shorts.’ The next problem was getting on to a boat to cross the Channel, but we managed that and my brother Johnnie and I were sent straight up to Scotland.

  Now there was nothing to be done except wait. Rosamund Neave said:

  People knew it was going to happen yet they couldn’t grasp it and couldn’t do anything about it, so it was a very static time … becalmed … almost like a stillness over the whole country. My mother was beginning to put things away in trunks and to lay in supplies. She bought masses of tea and masses of vests, for some reason. People were coming down from Scotland and back from their holidays. It was a very strange time.

  August came to an end, and so did twenty-one years of peace.

  Part Three

  The War: Real, Phoney and Aftermath

  Chapter Nine

  This Country Is at War with Germany

  On the very brink of war, events moved with leaden slowness. It was like the nightmare of being chased through a swamp, every footfall sinking deeper, each step slower, being dragged irresistibly down. Right up until the last minute the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, was negotiating with Hitler. Britain offered to tolerate the return of Danzig and the Polish Corridor to Germany, in return for the guarantee of a free port on the Baltic. What was the point – except further to convince Hitler that Britain would not fight?

  Reservists were being called up in France, Britain and Germany. Vehicles were being requisitioned; petrol supplies were limited. Stocks of blackout material were exhausted. Country families in England were standing by to receive evacuee children – one-third of all children under five in the areas most at risk were expected. Works of art were removed from the National Gallery and other London museums and stored away in places of safety: some of them hidden in Manod Quarry in the Welsh hills. Stained glass from the windows of York Minster and Canterbury Cathedral was also removed. Two hundred thousand German troops were massed along the Polish frontier. Hitler cancelled the Nuremberg rally planned for 2 September. In the East End, people were filling sandbags.

  The sun shone. The country held its breath.

  On 31 August, Hitler gave the order to attack Poland. At 4.45 a.m. on 1 September, German troops marched across the Polish frontier, and at 6 a.m. Warsaw was bombed by German aeroplanes. Churchill was woken by a telephone call early that morning from the Polish Ambassador in London, Count Raczynski, to inform him of the news. He passed it on to the War Office, astonished to find that no one there had yet heard. He then drove up from Chart well to London, where Chamberlain asked him to join a special War Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill agreed. A message – but not yet an ultimatum – was sent to Hitler warning that unless German forces were withdrawn from Poland, Great Britain would stand by the Anglo-Polish pact and give its full support and assistance to Poland.

  All day the bombing of Polish cities continued, and a million German troops marched in to Poland.

  On 2 September it began to rain ; first a steady, warm summer rainfall, then a downpour: ‘terrific, ominous’, Churchill recorded.

  The British Cabinet was insisting that an ultimatum must be sent to Germany. Chamberlain and Halifax were still trying to prevaricate; still hoping for a miracle. Mussolini was said to be on the point of proposing a conference. France had said that an ultimatum must give a week’s grace for the withdrawal of German troops. The French Army needed more time to complete mobilization.

  At 7.30p.m. on 2 September the House of Commons met. Chamberlain’s temporizing was heard in silence. Arthur Greenwood, the acting Labour leader, spoke: ‘Every minute’s delay now means the loss of life, imperilling of our national interests and imperilling the very foundations of our national honour.’ Harold Nicolson’s diary describes the reaction:

  He was resoundingly cheered. The tension became acute, since here were the PM’s most ardent supporters cheering his opponent with all their lungs. The front bench looked as if they had been struck in the face.

  The House adjourns. The lobby is so dark that a match struck flames like a beacon. There is great confusion and indignation. We feel that the German ships and submarines will, owing to this inexplicable delay, elude our grasp. The pm must know by now that the whole House is against him.1

  In Poland some 1,500 people had already been killed in the bombing of over thirty cities.

  The Cabinet met at 11 p.m. that evening, some of its members insisting that an ultimatum must be sent at once. The most Halifax could do by way of compromise was to delay its sending until 9a.m. the following morning, and this was agreed.

  At nine o’clock, therefore, on the morning of 3 September, the German government was asked for an assurance that German forces would suspend their advance upon Poland, otherwise a state of war would exist between the two countries. The two hours given for a reply elapsed without any such assurance being received. Chamberlain broadcast to the nation at 11.15 a.m.

  I know to the square yard where I was when war was declared [says Christian Grant]. It’s rather like where I was when I heard that Kennedy had been shot. On 3 September 1939, I was standing in my old nursery in our house in Scotland. I happened to be entirely by myself. My old nursery had been turned
into a bedroom and I just happened to be there with the radio on. Chamberlain’s voice came over the radio. Oh, I remember it very, very well.

  Helen Vlasto remembers it too:

  On a sunny summer holiday morning my grandmother’s family house party began to assemble in the large drawing room of a house called Maryland at Frinton-on-Sea. It was Sunday 3rd September, and we were all to meet at the appointed hour of 11.15 around the wireless set to hear the now inevitable declaration of war. I can still see us all vividly and can remember consciously saying to myself: ‘This is the most poignant moment of your life to date, and you will never forget it.’ … The drawing room was heavy with the scent of great bowls of roses, cut lavender drying on the wide, sunny window seats, and foreign cigarettes. Here we foregathered, all awaiting confirmation of our worst fears. … Now each of us was busy with immediate plans that must be made when those awful words were let loose upon the air for all to hear:

  ‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Number Ten, Downing Street … and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’

  We were at war, but in our garden, nothing had changed. The September sun still shone thoughtlessly down, unmindful of the new and monstrous turn of events. The bees continued to bumble among the roses, and the butterflies to weave their erratic and inconsequential course towards the early Michaelmas daisies and the buddleias.2

  Elizabeth Lowry-Corry is another whose memory of that moment is sharp: ‘I do remember, with great intensity, the outbreak of war. On that Sunday we had this wonderful old parson conducting the service, and I remember that service and how we took communion … and everyone’s faces, and the beautiful day.’ Ronnie Kershaw remembers that directly after Chamberlain’s announcement (by some error) an air-raid siren was heard.

  I remember being in London when that air-raid warning went off on the Sunday morning. I was on top of a building somewhere, guarding it; and you could see hundreds of balloons going up – barrage balloons – and it was an awful moment. You thought you were going to be bombed to hell. And nothing happened at all. But in that moment I realized I had a horrible fear of death. If you remember, the average length of life for a serving officer in the First World War was supposed to be very, very low indeed, and so we thought our chances were minimal.

  However extraordinary it may seem, there were a number of debs that year for whom the announcement that Britain was at war came as a complete surprise. Lady Elizabeth Scott was one: ‘I’m afraid the whole summer seemed to be given up to having a good time, and no one of my generation ever thought ahead to the future, or to the possibility of war. I certainly never thought it even a remote possibility that there could be a war – until it was announced that morning of 3 September.’ Lady Cathleen Eliot was another: ‘Politics were not discussed in my family so it was a complete surprise when war was declared and the atmosphere changed overnight.’ Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian had little inkling until the last moment and, even when her father tried to warn her of what was coming, she scarcely believed him:

  I had no idea of the approach of war – the only radio at our London house was in the servants’ room in the basement – until one day at the very end of the Season, in July, my father suddenly said in a taxi we were sharing, ‘There is going to be another war.’ I tried out this statement on various friends, to be met with gasps of surprise.

  When war broke we all wrote to each other – brave letters wishing each other luck, particularly to every young man – convinced we should all die.

  Those who had least idea of what was coming were the girls whose families regarded it as ‘not done’ to discuss politics and the events preceding the outbreak of war. Diana Trafford had been aware that war must be in the offing:

  I did occasionally wonder how many of us would survive the coming war and what would happen if we lost, but it was definitely bad form to discuss such things. I don’t know if anyone else thought along those lines. Having listened to First World War stories, especially from the servants, I suppose I more or less expected a continuation from 1918.

  I was called up by the ATS a week before war was declared, and my company commander assigned me to the quartermaster’s stores. The morning war was declared I was counting cups when the QM came in and said, ‘Well, the balloon’s gone up and we are at war.’ We were all young in the stores and stood silent and rather shocked, and the QM turned to me and said, ‘Let’s have a look at that cup down there.’ Blindly and without thinking I pulled it out and brought the whole 128 down in a crashing tangle of broken china, which started us all laughing and broke the tension. The QM said, ‘It’s all right – your dad will pay for it out of his income tax. Get a broom and sweep it up.’ I have always thought of him as one of the many, taken for granted, who made winning the war possible.

  For a number of people, the first reaction to the announcement that war had been declared was one of relief. Uncertainty is the hardest thing to live with. Now at least the suspense was over. Christian Grant confirms this:

  I think a lot of people had a sense of relief. There had been so much coming and going – will they, won’t they? will they, won’t they? – I think one can cope much more with a given disaster than one can with the threat hanging over one. I don’t think either the men or the girls realized at first that people would be killed – not until it started happening. And that didn’t happen for the first six months at least.

  The uncertainty was soon replaced by a new fear: the fear of the unknown. No one knew what to expect. They – especially the girls, who were less immediately involved – wondered, would it be like the last war, with millions dying in the trenches? Would it be a Blitzkrieg, with death falling on civilians from the skies? Would it be a war of chemical poisons? To begin with people carried their ugly gas-masks everywhere, in case of attack. {Vogue in November showed a chic, ingenious little handbag to conceal the unsightly thing.)

  Some of the men had a jaunty, careless attitude to death. It was unthinkable that they, personally, might be killed. Lord Cromer – who, as Rowley Errington, had been one of the great charmers of that Season – was just twenty-one when the war began. At that age, and after that sort of summer, it was difficult to take death seriously.

  No, I never expected to get killed … no, no. You always thought it was something that would happen to someone else. I think some people were very fatalistic, but it wasn’t talked about – it wasn’t concentrated on, in the ghastly, macabre way of the 1914–18 war. And yet, at the beginning, I think we visualized it ending up as trench warfare. If you were a footsoldier, which I was at that time, you naturally tended to look at it that way.

  Nearly all the men, if not career officers, had been in the Army reserves, the RNVR or the RAFVR for at least the past few weeks. But military training does not, for obvious reasons, harp on the probability of death ; rather on the necessity for order, discipline and preparation. Some of the preparations were almost comically inadequate. Lord Cromer again:

  The first few weeks, I remember, the youngsters were all taught to do sword drill, and we all used to go out to parade every morning, on the cricket pitch, having borrowed a sword. Literally, a sword: a real one, an old-fashioned sword – like the Life Guards use for ceremonial occasions. It wasn’t a frightfully useful introduction to combat but it kept us out of mischief.

  All the reservists in my particular regiment had been called up when war broke out on 3 September. The reservists were the most extraordinary body of people, because having fought in the First World War they were twenty or thirty years older; and then there was my age group, who were all very young. We were a very motley crew. Nobody knew what to do.

  Lord Haig had found the Season, his Finals at Oxford and his polo-playing so immensely tiring that by the end of that summer he was in a state of considerable exhaustion. ‘You burned your energies out a bit, and I do remember the first year of the war when I went out to join my regiment in Palestine, what a wonderful relief it was, to be absolved fro
m all this hassle.’ Lord Haig tells an extraordinary story, extraordinary only in the context of its time, for very soon not just Hitler, not just the Nazis, but the entire German race was being portrayed as sub-human, much as they themselves had been presenting the Jews. The story concerns a German friend whom he had met the previous year in Munich:

  He wrote to me in July 1939 to say that war was inevitable – it’s been marvellous, and let’s hope we survive the war and meet again in the future, but for now … One had of course known quite a number of Germans, especially from the aristocracy, who were against the Nazi way of thinking; my friend refused ever to become an officer. They could force people to join up and fight for the Fatherland, but they couldn’t force them to become officers, and so although he took part in battles throughout the war and was seriously wounded three times, he wouldn’t become an officer. So in that way he remained true to himself. And when you read the papers screaming propaganda about the German menace, although menace there was, I was able to see it in proportion.

  That sense of proportion, particularly on 3 September, would not have been widely shared. Yet, for some, the war brought no sense of relief, but rather a sickening sense of failure. Chamberlain, whose attempts at appeasement sprang not from cowardice but from a deep desire for peace, said in the House of Commons on the morning of 3 September: ‘Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed during my public life has crashed in ruins.’

  Unity Mitford’s life, too, had crashed in ruins. She had been a total convert both to National Socialism and to Hitler himself. Her ardour was obsessional, but, as her sister Diana wrote, ‘Her love of Germany was deep, but it was equalled by her love of England. Rather than see these two countries tear each other to pieces she preferred to die.’3 In the Englischer Garten in Munich, at the moment when England declared war on Germany, Unity tried to kill herself. A bullet entered her brain, but she did not die until 1948.