War Diaries, 1939-1945

by Astrid Lindgren

  6 APRIL

  This morning, German troops invaded Yugoslavia and Greece! It wasn’t unexpected, that’s for sure. Ever since King Peter’s coup the situation’s been growing more and more tense. After all, the Serbs have never given way to coercion. The tension will be almost unbearable as we wait to see whether things will go as rapidly for Germany in the Balkans as they did in Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. And to see how the Italians in Albania will fare with Greece on one side and Yugoslavia on the other. Hitler issued one of his usual bombastic and pathetic orders of the day.

  [Press cutting of Hitler’s orders of the day to ‘Soldiers on the south-eastern front’, translated into Swedish. Unidentified newspaper source. Plus two shorter cuttings: Adua in Abyssinia falls to British forces; British admiralty vs. Axis Powers losses in the sea war, in tonnage.]

  12 APRIL

  It was rapid! Yugoslavia is no more. ‘Croatia’ has been declared independent; as for the rest, it’s one big mess that I can’t work out. The Serbian army’s been decimated. In Greece, the Germans reached Salonika several days ago. Any day now the Germans and British will engage in Greece. In Africa, the Germans’ arrival has turned to war, to Britain’s disadvantage.

  CONTINUED ON EASTER DAY

  Damn and blast! Just the other day we were so pleased that Yugoslavia was putting up resistance and taking back power from the pro-German government – and now there barely seems to be a country called Yugoslavia. Things move fast in our time. The vultures are now converging from all directions for their share of the spoils – Hungary, which is actively participating in the war, Bulgaria and Romania. As I understand it, Yugoslavia’s in a state of total collapse. Greece still seems to be holding out and in the southern part of the country we hope the British are at the ready. But for now the Germans are in another of those periods that make us think they’re invincible. But everything will be decided in the Atlantic, so they say. Britain’s loss of tonnage is pretty vast. But there’s one thing for sure, if this goes on much longer, Europe will starve to death. I reckon that before long, Portugal and Sweden will be the only ones with any food.

  Just imagine us still not being at war. How can it be possible? Here, we’ve seen one country after another dragged into the fire, but Sweden is still going strong [in English].

  This autumn, after ten years at Vulcanusgatan, we’re moving to an expensive and very nice flat in Dalagatan. It feels pretty awful to be embarking on that sort of undertaking at a time when one can’t believe the future will ever settle back into the calm normality of before. But we’ll only be on the first floor, so perhaps the bombs won’t penetrate that far down.

  28 APRIL

  The Greeks are plainly on their last legs. The king and the government have left Athens, and there’ve been indications from various quarters these past few days that the Germans have entered the capital. But the war definitely isn’t quite over yet. The Greeks have been phenomenal, anyway, you have to give them that, keeping up the fight ever since 28 October last year.

  3 MAY

  War between Iraq and Britain! The Iraqi regime has implored Hitler for help. Arabia may be on the move. What a ghastly prospect!

  The Greek campaign is over. The British have completed another successful ‘embarkation’ (that’s one thing they’re good at). I assume the king and government have retreated to Crete.

  13 MAY

  Today’s huge sensation – Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, flew to the British Isles in a Messerschmitt plane and parachuted safely to the ground, where a Scottish farm-worker looked after him and took him to hospital in Glasgow. Now we’ve seen everything! It happened on Saturday night. Though the world was left in ignorance of it until now. The German papers initially assumed it was a fatal accident and wrote obituaries for him. Word that he had landed in Scotland came as a shock to the German people. The official party line is that severe physical pain had left him prey to ‘delusions’. One passage from Berlin claimed that he ‘imagined that by personal sacrifice he could forestall a development which in his eyes would end with the complete crushing of the British empire’. Hee hee! Rudolf Hess looks more honourable and wholesome than the other party bigwigs – and perhaps this step shows that he is more honourable. The whole world is extremely curious at the moment to know what prompted his flight.

  22 MAY

  It was Karin’s seventh birthday yesterday. I wrote in my diary on this day last year: ‘God grant that the world will look different by Karin’s next birthday!’ And it certainly does look different, but there’s no sign of any changes for the better. Possibly Sweden and the other Nordic countries are in slightly less danger, the main focus now seems to be on the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. Yesterday the Germans launched an air invasion on Crete, or was it the day before? What’s left of Greek resistance is concentrated there, with British assistance.

  Just like last year, summer arrived on Karin’s birthday. It was the first day you could go out without a coat. But everything’s much, much later this year – I don’t think I’ve ever known such a cold spring. Today, though, was really warm and you could really see everything turning green all of a sudden. Karin, Sture and I went out to Judarn and it was lovely; Lars went to the scouts’ elk-horn festival.

  For her birthday yesterday, Karin got her first bike and various other goodies such as dolls’ shoes, books, plasticine, coloured crayons, woollen gloves, money, chocolate and so on. Elsa-Lena, Matte, Anders and their mothers were here. Then we parents celebrated the birthday with a visit to Dramaten [theatre] (while the birthday girl was sleeping) with Gullanders and Viridéns, followed by supper in the back restaurant at the Strand [hotel].

  Tomorrow we’ll put Karin and Matte’s names down for school. Though Karin can already read pretty well. She’s learning to swim and ride a bike now, too.

  Well, we’ll have to see how things look by Karin’s next birthday, and whether we have peace or not. It’s not worth getting one’s hopes up.

  25 MAY

  Today is Mother’s Day and yesterday – according to Sture – was Mother’s Eve. That was why I found myself getting an early present of a fine pair of silk stockings, a book, Mrs Miniver, and a box of chocolates, plus two pink roses (though I had to buy those myself) and a ‘picsher’ from Karin: ‘To Mother’. And today Sture and Karin went out to buy a cake covered in green marzipan. Lars spent last night and the early hours of this morning in a bunker on Kungsholmen, summoned there as a scout ‘in accordance with Emergency Legislation §10,’ I think that was it. They must be doing air-raid exercises. It’s been a lovely warm day, and Karin, Sture and I went out to Djurgården very early and left the flat in quite a state. Lars was supposed to get himself cleaned up while we were out but was still filthy when we got back and had to be chased back into the bathroom.

  Djurgården was lovely with all its pale-green leaves, but when I got back I promised myself never to go out and leave the place that untidy again.

  In the afternoon I went out towards Karlberg with the kids, i.e. Karin rode her bike and Lars held on. After a couple of hours in the heat we were pretty irritable and the children argued and I was cross with Lars, who treated Karin very loutishly.

  Then we had hash for dinner in high good humour, followed by cake; I washed up and Karin came round selling plasticine sweets. Then it was Karin’s bedtime and I read her some of A Little Princess. Lars read Albert Engström. Now both children are in bed, Sture’s at his desk reading Albert Engström and I’m on the sofa beside my pink roses, writing this.

  See how peacefully we live in Stockholm in 1941, while the rest of the world looks wretched. The battlecruiser Hood, the world’s largest warship, was sunk off Greenland by the German battleship Bismarck. It had a crew of 1,300 men, of whom very few were saved. Thirteen hundred souls less in the world, in the blinking of an eye!

  There’s trouble in Crete. Germany has apparently occupied the western section of the island. If the Germans really do manage to conquer
Crete by invading from the air, there’s a risk that Britain will finally experience the long-anticipated invasion attempt on its own island.

  They’re imposing a tax on luxury goods here soon!

  28 MAY

  And then the Bismarck was sunk in its turn, by a British battlecruiser torpedo. I saw on a newspaper billboard that there were 3,000 men on board. That may be an overestimate, but probably not by much. The loss of the Bismarck must mean more to the German navy than the Hood to the British.

  According to the headlines in the evening papers, the British have now abandoned their resistance in Crete.

  Roosevelt gave a ‘fireside chat’ yesterday and proclaimed a national state of emergency in the USA.

  1 JUNE

  Iraq has asked for a ceasefire. The British are the victors there, for a change. But they’ve definitely run out of fight on Crete.

  8 JUNE

  Today the British anticipated the Germans for once, by marching into Syria, which is apparently today’s battleground. De Gaulle’s French forces are fighting alongside the British.

  At work today there were lots of worrying rumours from Gotland. German troop ships skirted the west coast of the island and this clearly made everyone feel extremely nervous. A lot of the soldiers wrote formal goodbyes to their loved ones.

  Kaiser Wilhelm died the other day and will be buried in Dutch soil. So he, one of the leading figures in the last war, didn’t get to see the end of this one.

  16 JUNE

  Our old king is 84 today. May he outlive this war.

  I’m in such a melancholy and anxious mood tonight. Again it’s one of those warm, rain-dampened summer evenings I recall from the eventful days of last summer. And things seem to be happening now. Relations between Germany and Russia are at a critical point. It says in the evening papers that there’s general mobilization in Russia. Germany’s had significant forces stationed on its eastern border for a long time, of course, and this past week it’s been transporting its men to Finland in large numbers. They were the ones who passed close to Gotland and made everyone so uneasy there. If it comes to war between Germany and Finland on one side and Russia on the other, we’ll be in a terrible situation. The question is whether we’ll have any chance of staying out of it. The Germans no doubt want Gotland as an airbase.

  Today I got everything ready for the trip to Furusund. On Saturday I finished work for the summer after a pleasant farewell lunch at Pilen with Hamberg, Bågstam, Flory, Anne-Marie, schoolmaster Kjellberg and someone I didn’t know. This evening A.M. came round, worried, and I’m worried, too. Kock and several of the other officers are leaving their posts.

  Karin and Matte finished their swimming lessons at the Palace of Sport today. And Karin can ride her bike. All would be sweetness and light, if it weren’t for the anxiety. Sture maintains that Germany and Britain will join forces against Russia, and that this was Hess’s peace plan. But that’s just too fantastical to be true.

  22 JUNE

  This morning at half-past four, German troops crossed the Russian border from both Romania and Germany, and perhaps in other places too. So now it’s war between the former allies, and poor Finland’s in the firing line again. Germany claims Russia has totally failed to stick to its treaty with Germany and has in fact done all it can to injure Germany, and Russia claims the opposite and says Germany attacked without provocation. Vast numbers of troops are now ranged against one another on either sides of borders from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea in the south.

  The future is one big question mark. How will things go for Sweden? All leave has been cancelled over midsummer. In the shipping lanes off Furusund, several steamers have just had to sit there waiting and some have turned back, presumably because they couldn’t get through to their destinations. Large parts of the Baltic have been mined by the Germans.

  It’s been a hot summer’s day with brilliant sunshine. Sture came out from town on a packed ferry and hadn’t heard a thing about any war because he’d been on the boat since 8 o’clock. But everyone’s very worried. Only Grandmother has stayed calm, and says, ‘It’ll all be over soon.’ But I think that, on the contrary, it’s just started. The really strange thing is that one has to back Germany now. It would be too awkward, of course, to side with Germany against Russia and with Britain against Germany. It’s all such a mess. We can hear the booming of heavy guns on this radio we’ve just borrowed. Oh yes, and Italy’s also declared that it considers itself at war with the Soviet Union.

  28 JUNE

  I ought to paste in Hitler’s speech on the outbreak of war here, but I’ll have to do it at the end instead. I’m sitting in bed, looking out on the fine drizzle over the sea, after an unsettled night doing battle with mosquitoes, with the thunder of guns in the distance. At any rate, the ladies’ defence volunteers in Copenhagen claim that’s what we can hear, from the Åland Sea.

  Since I last wrote, the Swedish government has granted permission for one German division from the north of Norway to travel through Sweden to Finland, which in other words means we’ll let through any number of them. We’ve no other option, of course. Once more, it’s Finland that is at stake. The Russians are bombing in Finland again – Åbo [Turku], for example, has taken a terrible pounding, and Åbo Castle has suffered major damage. Hungary has declared itself at war with Russia.

  The Germans are providing no information about how far they’ve got in Russia – and the reason is said to be that Russia’s lines of communication are in disarray, so the Germans don’t want to reveal their position.

  The Baltic states are busy liberating themselves – at any rate, I think the Russians are gone from Lithuania.

  National Socialism and Bolshevism – it’s rather like two giant reptiles doing battle. It’s not pleasant having to side with either reptile, but for now one can only wish the Soviet Union will get well and truly thrashed, given all that they’ve grabbed for themselves in the course of this war and all the harm it has done to Finland. In Britain and America they now have to side with Bolshevism, which must be even harder and I’m sure the man in the street finds it hard to keep up with it all. Queen Wilhelmina of Holland said on the radio that she was prepared to support Russia but with one reservation: that she still disapproved of the principles of Bolshevism.

  The biggest bodies of troops in world history are massed against each other on the eastern front. It’s appalling to think of. Is Armageddon looming?

  I’ve been working my way through some general history here in Furusund and it makes for dreadfully depressing reading – war and war and war and suffering for humanity. And they never learn but just carry on drenching the planet in blood, sweat and tears.

  2 JULY

  Since my last entry, the Germans have made good progress. Russian forces of 300–400,000 have been encircled at Białystok and are facing certain death, Libau [Liepāja] and Riga have been taken, according to today’s Aftonbladet Murmansk has fallen, etc., etc. There’s been an appalling amount of bloodshed. Lemberg [Lviv] has fallen. There was fighting there during the First World War, too, I remember.

  13 JULY

  The Stalin Line has been broken. It runs in the area of Daugava, Dnieper and Dniester. That’s not particularly far from Moscow.

  What’s more, America occupied Iceland a little while back. And French resistance in Syria, which seems to have been more formal, has been broken and a local ceasefire has been brokered between the British and French. I think that’s all the important news since I last wrote.

  But it’s clear that things are grim on the eastern front. As the Russians retreat, they are to evacuate the country on Stalin’s orders, which means they have to remove the civilian population. And I bet that’s not being done with kid gloves. It’s a relief that I lack the imagination to visualize all the suffering.

  19 AUGUST

  I’ve been completely neglecting my diary. I hardly know what has been going on, only that things are very tense between the USA and Japan, so a
declaration of war can be expected at any moment; that the war continues in Russia but perhaps not at quite the same pace as before, although the Finns have retaken large areas round Lake Ladoga and the Germans have also pushed far into the country; that Roosevelt and Churchill met in the middle of the Atlantic and released a joint declaration of their views on peace, that US aid to Britain has been increasing bit by bit; that – according to information in today’s reports – the Germans don’t believe in ultimate victory (and Russia will prove hard-boiled), that the British are bombing for all they are worth, and, well, that’s all I can remember for now.

  Tomorrow the war will be two years old. To me it feels as if it’s been going on for ever.

  [Press cutting of a picture of Churchill in profile with cap and cigar, with Astrid’s handwritten caption: ‘Hitler’s No. 1 Enemy!’ Press cutting from Dagens Nyheter, 31 August 1941: ‘Two years of war’.]

  The Finns have retaken Vyborg [Viipuri] – it must be an emotional moment for every Finn. The Finnish flag is flying from Vyborg Castle again – even though it had to be hastily made out of a bed sheet. The Finns will probably soon have taken back everything they lost in the peace settlement of 13 March 1940, and then I hope they’ll stop and let Germany deal with the rest.