During the late winter and early spring of 1940, the term “jitters” came into fashion. Hitler was forever talking on the radio, but what did he really intend? Restaurant and barbershop conversations buzzed with rumors about the date and landing site of the anticipated German assault. Anxious villagers raised their binoculars to scan the skies. Churches fell silent, as bell ringing was reserved for spreading an alarm in the event of invasion. Meanwhile, hands were kept busy stitching quilts and rolling bandages. To children, some sacrifices were greater than others. The Stop Me and Buy One ice-cream salesmen vanished from the streets, their refrigeration units to be held in readiness for the transport of blood.
When World War I began, it was said that “the lamps are going out all over Europe.” In World War II, the sense of encompassing darkness was reinforced by measures taken to deprive enemy bombers of potential targets and illuminated landmarks. In London and the surrounding countryside, windows were covered at night with thick black curtains that proved stifling. Air-raid wardens checked on every house to guard against any telltale glow. For the same reason, streetlights were turned off and car headlights masked. Although intended to save lives, the blackout in that first year had the opposite effect. For every Briton killed by the Germans, more than a hundred died in automobile or pedestrian accidents.
Worries about an invasion had preceded the declaration of war. In addition to civil defense measures, plans were made to send children and caregivers from London and vulnerable coastal regions to inland villages and remote towns. Lists were drawn up and the countryside canvassed to identify spare bedrooms, a task made easier by the departure of young men and women to military service. The children with their manila name tags departed from Paddington Station, each carrying a small bundle of tinned milk, tinned corned beef, tinned chocolate, and a packet of Woolworth’s cookies. After consuming those delicious items, the youngsters collected the metal containers for recycling. Despite the meticulous planning, the evacuation project soon lost momentum. Families were understandably distressed at being separated, especially when the enemy had yet to show up. Many of the children who were supposed to leave London never did; many who did soon returned.
THE DECLARATION OF war accelerated the flow of Czech and Slovak refugees to the British capital. Soon the office established by Jan Masaryk began to take on the aspects of a full-fledged shadow government. My father was given a new job, to organize and manage radio programs for the audience back home; these began on September 8, 1939, just a week after the Wehrmacht had crashed its way into Poland. “The hour of retribution is here,” proclaimed Masaryk:
The limits of the patience of the Western democracies have been reached and the struggle to exterminate Nazism has begun. Our program is a free Czechoslovakia in a free Europe and for the attainment of this we are ready to sacrifice all.
Radio in the 1930s had an impact comparable to that, in more recent years, of television and the Internet. For the first time, a world leader could project his voice thousands of miles into the kitchens and living rooms of strangers, creating a seemingly boundless opportunity to share information—or propaganda. For citizens at war, particularly those kept close to home by rationing and blackouts, the radio became a center of existence.
The facilities where my father began work were on George Street, near Marble Arch. The BBC made its airwaves available to him at scheduled intervals, as it was doing for the Poles, the Serbs, and the representatives of other occupied lands; the British either originated or sponsored programs in sixteen foreign languages.
In the war’s first year, it was possible for friends in Prague to advertise the BBC broadcasts openly, albeit indirectly. In Czech parlance, the pet name for Jan is “Honza,” also the name of a hero in Bohemian puppet stories who regularly outsmarted Austrian authorities. When signs appeared in windows suggesting that The Tale of Honza could be heard that evening, people knew to tune in. The Nazis eventually caught on, but by then the programs had become, for Czech loyalists, an exhilarating addiction. “We huddled around the radio each night as if gathering for prayer to hear fifteen cherished and illegal minutes of news from the BBC,” recalled one wartime resistance leader. “I can hear the theme music now, through the static of fifty-odd years.”
Wartime broadcast range of the BBC
Jan Kaplan Archive
To receive the signal, Czechs had to install in their radios a homemade device—called a “little Churchill”—involving a bedspring and a toilet paper roll. The authorities required that every radio bear a sticker warning that the penalty for tuning in to a foreign station was death. Schoolchildren were urged to inform on anyone who attempted to defy this prohibition, including classmates and neighbors, even parents. Accordingly, regular listeners were careful to hide the device and to retune their radio after signing off.
In addition to his other duties, my father had responsibility for negotiating with the Foreign Office concerning program contents. Each script was prepared in English as well as in Czech and was reviewed by British supervisors for adherence to security requirements. Nothing could be said that might disclose information useful to the enemy. The Czechoslovak leaders, too, had to approve, which brought my father into frequent contact with Beneš and other senior officials.
The broadcasts were recorded on aluminum disks that did not survive because they were immediately melted down and made into new ones. However, the BBC archives in Caversham Park do have the minutes of staff meetings—in which my father participated—and also broadcast transmission logs that list the program subjects and include comments about what did and did not go well.
Each broadcast was slotted for exactly fifteen minutes, including introductions. This meant that the scripts had to be the right length and the announcers had to read at the correct pace. The writers did their best to tailor the texts, but some people talked more rapidly than others. This sometimes led to furious signaling, indicating that some material should be dropped or that the reader should slow down. In one case, an announcer was given a list of news briefs, the ninth marked “Must be read last,” followed by items ten and eleven. Timepieces that were out of sync could generate headaches as well; if the BBC’s clock disagreed with that of the studio, the program might begin in the middle or with twenty seconds of dead air.
After months of experiments, the producers settled on a three-part menu: political instruction, the “main talk,” and “news of the day.” Thus the most vital portions—exhortations to the public and coded signals to the resistance—could be read without fear of running over. The main talks, often written by my father, were limited to six minutes.
Producers frequently used music and sound effects such as recorded gunfire and the whoosh of planes. The technique added a touch of drama but also the risk of mechanical malfunction. One program was interrupted by an unwanted Beethoven scherzo; others were marred by discordant sounds—grinding engines, quacking ducks—that crept in when the tapes ran on too long. Rustling papers and coughing fits (most announcers smoked) added to the cacophony.
Before long, the programs were running thrice daily: at 7 a.m., 6:30 p.m., and around midnight. My father wrote scripts continually, while also editing and reviewing the work of others. He did not take the microphone according to any set schedule but could be heard several times a week, usually in late-night commentaries. These generally covered either patriotic topics (such as T. G. Masaryk’s birthday) or those tied to current events—the latest speech by Hitler or FDR. Because of his fluency in Serbo-Croatian and knowledge of the local culture, he also broadcast to Yugoslavia. My father worked hard because of his passion for democracy but also because we needed money; the more he wrote, the more he was paid, which was still not much. From start to finish, the government in exile was a bare-bones operation.
These late-night broadcasts were designed to provide what we, in our era, might call “rapid response.” Agents monitoring radio programming in Prague and
Bratislava were asked to report each evening on the latest Nazi propaganda. Whenever possible, London’s rebuttal was conveyed within hours. This required quicker than usual writing, translating, and vetting, a process that worked sometimes smoothly, other times not. The British censor, for example, got on people’s nerves. As the program on November 23, 1942, began, he moved backward toward his customary chair and, per a subsequent report, “sat down on air.” The ignominious pratfall was greeted by the Czechoslovaks with “restrained hysteria.”
This incident, though juvenile, illustrated the tension that existed between the two cultures. The Britons felt they were within their rights to dictate what was said from their facilities. The exiles, from Beneš on down, remained angry about Munich and impatient with Chamberlain’s foreign policy. They had no choice, however, but to accept the role of junior partner. When my father was contacted by the sympathetic H. G. Wells about producing a week of anti-Munich broadcasts, he had to decline out of deference to the sensitivities of his hosts.
Another aspect of my father’s job was to decide who among the many Czechoslovak politicians in exile would have access to airtime. Beneš and Masaryk received priority, but many less senior officials yearned for the chance to hear themselves talk. The matter was so sensitive that a thirty-member committee was appointed to provide advice. Decisions were highly political because some speakers were more divisive than others, a balance was needed between democrats and Communists, and Beneš wished to ensure that Slovaks felt included. Accordingly, my father hired Vladimir “Vlado” Clementis, a Slovak Communist, to assist in the broadcasts. I remember Clementis well, for reasons that will be described later, but also because he had a prominent bulge in his forehead caused by, I was informed, a steel plate. Why? No one seemed to know. It should be noted that the desire for balance in selecting speakers did not extend to gender. Although my father raised the possibility of including women, the idea was dropped for fear that female voices would not be taken seriously.
WHEN THE WAR began, Beneš was sure that the West would win. The British were not. On September 6, 1939, Cadogan confided to his diary, “We shall fight to the last and may win—but I confess I don’t see how!” A month later, former prime minister David Lloyd George urged his compatriots to make peace with Hitler. “People call me defeatist,” he said in an interview, “but what I say to them is: ‘tell me how we can win.’ ”
That autumn, the Red Army and Wehrmacht completed their conquest of Poland. Tens of thousands of soldiers, civilian officials, intellectuals, Jews, aristocrats, and priests were murdered and dumped into mass graves. Soviet and German officers met in the middle of the country, where they erected border markers and stationed sentries who faced one another daily without exchanging a word. The new boundary left Polish families divided and without recourse on either side. One refugee compared the choice between living under German or Soviet rule to that of standing bareheaded in the pouring rain or beneath a running gutter.
At the end of November, the Soviets sought to secure their northern flank by invading Finland, hoping to replicate their partner’s Blitzkrieg tactics and conquer their peace-loving neighbor in two weeks. Thousands of tanks charged across the border, only to be slowed by forests and swamplands. The gutsy (and angry) Finns, with their white camouflage uniforms and skill at cross-country skiing, were able to harass the invaders and inflict heavy casualties. Lacking an effective antitank gun, they invented a means of attack—consisting of a bottle of flammable liquid and a match—that they named after the Soviet Union’s foreign minister: the Molotov cocktail. The invasion dragged on for four months before the overstretched aggressor and the outnumbered defender agreed to an armistice. Finland survived but with the loss of a tenth of its territory and 30 percent of its economic assets.
As 1939 finally drew to a close, the foul British weather matched the people’s mood; rain soaked the countryside in December, followed by the coldest January in more than forty years. The Thames froze solid. Heavy snows delayed coal deliveries and made transportation of any sort a trial. Chamberlain had recruited Churchill for the war cabinet, an encouraging move but one that had the effect of quieting criticism of the government by the hawks in Parliament.
Each day, the few hours of light were spent in preparation: rubbing the rawness off military recruits, stockpiling equipment, filling sandbags, and building new and more daunting barriers to attack. Across the English Channel, the French were content to sit behind their fortifications, making no move against Germany. The Luftwaffe flew reconnaissance missions; the RAF dropped pamphlets. There were skirmishes at sea, but all was generally quiet on the western front. As the weather grew warmer and the daffodils bloomed, spirits began to lift; perhaps the worst was already over. In a cheery talk to the House of Commons, Chamberlain announced that the British armed forces had made great strides. He was now, he said in April, “ten times as confident of victory,” claiming that the Germans had failed to strike in time. “One thing is certain,” he declared, Herr Hitler has “missed the bus.”
Few pronouncements had a shorter life. Within days of Chamberlain’s boasts, the Nazis had seized the capital, principal ports, and airfields of Norway. The British, caught off guard, tried to counter with an expeditionary force that put ashore in various spots along that country’s coast. However, their troops were poorly equipped to fight in the snow, hampered by a disorganized chain of command, and forced to confront German units that were well dug in and generously supported from the air. None of this was reported by the War Ministry, which instead portrayed the defensive operation as a stunning success. These false accounts were intended to boost morale and did, in fact, cause hopes to soar; but the brief taste of victory made the truth even harder to face.
On May 2, 1940, Chamberlain returned to the House of Commons with a less sprightly step and news that the British forces, having failed to dislodge the enemy, were being withdrawn. The opposition indignantly demanded a review of the war’s handling, leading to a debate five days later. Standing before his colleagues, the prime minister downplayed the recent fiasco and issued an appeal for unity, suggesting—as beleaguered war leaders habitually do—that criticism would only provide aid to the enemy. This was not the message that the country hungered to hear. Instead of an admission of mistakes and a call to arms, Chamberlain offered a litany of excuses and a suggestion that everyone remain calm. Parliament being Parliament, barely a sentence escaped his lips without being interrupted or jeered.
The debate droned on for hours but climaxed in early evening when a legislator from Chamberlain’s own party closed with the words Oliver Cromwell had said to Parliament three hundred years previously: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” After that bruising rebuff, Chamberlain’s vote of confidence was so narrow he felt it necessary to try forming a new government with broader representation. The opposition agreed but with one condition: Chamberlain must indeed go. On May 10, the prime minister reluctantly informed King George VI that he was resigning his position. The king wondered hopefully whether his replacement might be Lord Halifax. No, came the reply, not Halifax, the other fellow.
WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS stately, plump, and sixty-five years old. He had held virtually every important official position except those of prime minister and foreign secretary. In so doing, he had attracted acclaim and derision in roughly equal measure. The two-time prime minister Stanley Baldwin once observed:
When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, and ability. Then came a fairy who said, “No person has a right to so many gifts,” picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom.
In 1915, as first lord of the admiralty, Churchill had presided over the disastrous British attack on the Gallipoli peninsula in the Dardanelles. In the twenties, as chancel
lor of the Exchequer, he had overseen damaging reductions in the British defense budget. In the 1930s, he had railed against Gandhi and staunchly opposed loosening the imperial rein in India. Churchill could always be counted on to defend freedom with matchless tenacity—provided those exercising it spoke with the right accent and had the proper skin color. Yet for all his faults, the new prime minister would quickly validate the views of those who believe that when history most requires it, Fate lends a hand.
On the day Churchill claimed his new office, Germany attacked the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium in preparation for an assault on France, the great prize of continental Europe. One of the lessons of World War I had been that the aggressor is eventually driven back, so perhaps this, finally, would be Hitler’s Icarus moment. The French had confidence in the Maginot Line, as did the British, many of whose leaders had been treated to a tour. No one anticipated that the Nazis would quickly penetrate the French defenses, not even German general Erwin Rommel, who wrote:
The flat countryside spread out around us under the cold light of the moon. We were through the Maginot Line! It was hardly conceivable. Twenty-two years before we had stood [against] . . . this self-same enemy and had won victory after victory and yet finally lost the war. And now we had broken through . . . and were driving deep into enemy territory.
The Germans circumvented the heaviest barriers and concentrated their tanks on the weakest points. Armored units, aided by the terrorizing effect of Stuka dive-bombers, shattered the enemy forces in both north and south, leaving the French in disarray. Cadogan wrote of May 15 that it was “an awful day. . . . Don’t know where this will end. News still v. bad. . . . Now the ‘Total War’ begins!”
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