Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Many of the operations launched under the aegis of successive Directors Combined Operations, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten and Major-General Robert Laycock, seem to have been planned in the manner of a schoolboy who knows that his chum whom he has persuaded to lock the headmaster in his study is going to get six of the best for his trouble, but assures him that the fun will be worth it. There was often little thought given to the recovery of the raiders, nor the training that they might need in order to evade capture. Indeed, in Operation Freshman, the glider-borne sappers were supposed to meet local SOE agents, blow up the heavy water plant and then escape to neutral Sweden. Sweden was 200 miles away; the men had no training in skiing and did not speak Norwegian. Even if, against all the odds, they had got to Sweden, the Swedes at that stage of the war would have been far more likely to hand them over to the Germans, or at best intern them for the rest of the war, than allow them safe return to England.

  Another occasion when the Commando Order was implemented was in December 1942, when Operation Frankton saw a group of Royal Marines, later popularized as the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’, being launched from a submarine at the mouth of the River Gironde, whence they were to canoe into Bordeaux harbour and attach limpet mines to a number of ships carrying war materials for Germany. Having done that, they were expected to escape across occupied France by a circuitous route into neutral but pro-German Spain, and then to Gibraltar, a distance of 1,500 miles. Only the officer commanding could speak any French, and, while they succeeded in placing their mines and doing considerable damage to shipping, of the twelve Marines involved, two damaged their canoe on launch and took no part, two overturned in the tidal race and were drowned, six were betrayed or otherwise captured and executed, and only Major Herbert Hasler and Marine William Sparks managed to get over the Pyrenees and reach safety in Gibraltar.

  Except on very rare occasions, such as when they were attached to partisans in Italy or the Balkans, SOE agents, by the clandestine nature of their role, could not wear uniform and if caught were liable to torture and execution, particularly if they happened to be nationals of the country in which they were working. While SOE had many British agents who were fluent in the language of the country to which they were sent, and could get away with it if questioned casually by an Italian or a German, very few of them could fool a native speaker so bilingual operatives or nationals of the country to which they were sent were often preferred, once they had passed rigorous security checks. British agents in a European country had a reasonable chance of survival (of the 470 sent to France, 117 were killed or otherwise died85), but in Asian countries (Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya) they had to lie very low indeed. Only in Germany and Japan were SOE unable to operate – the population were firmly behind their leaders and their police, and the security forces were just too thorough. Not all agreed with what SOE were doing; the ‘conventional’ intelligence services were suspicious, at least at first, and Bomber Command was always reluctant to divert any assets away from its primary role of dropping very large amounts of high explosive on the German homeland. SOE was, however, unique amongst government departments in peace or war in that it showed a budget surplus when it was wound up in January 1946, largely by an operation which bought luxury watches in occupied France and diamonds from de Beers and then sold them in China at a huge mark-up, the justification being that it not only made friends with influential Chinese but provided the finance for other operations more directly concerned with the war effort.

  Details of much of what SOE and its junior colleague OSS did were never written down, and of what was recorded some was destroyed after the war and some was not declassified until relatively recently. This lack of evidence in the public domain has given rise to animated debate as to what the results of SOE’s operations were, and how much they contributed to winning the war. No one would claim that organizations such as SOE could win a war all by themselves; like guerrillas, they can only operate either against an enemy already fatally weakened or in support of a conventional force, but by tying down Axis troops that would otherwise be at the front in the guarding of ammunition dumps, railways, bridges and factories, by maintaining the fiction that an invasion of Norway was a possibility, by encouraging those who wanted to resist against occupation and by providing the weapons, the communications and the training to allow them to do so, the handful of men and women deployed around the globe amply repaid the investment in them.

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  It is part of the heroic myth of Britain in the Second World War that everyone pulled together, helped each other and was steadfast in their determination to beat the Nazis and fascists and stick it out, come what may. That vision was helpful at the time and has sustained Britain’s perception of herself since, but it is far from the whole story. For the first time in her history, Britain embarked on total war – that is, with everything subservient to the war effort – from the earliest days. Unlike in the first war, conscription was introduced from the outset, and those too old, too young, too unfit or in civilian occupations considered essential to the war effort could join the Home Guard, the Air Raid Precaution service, the Observer Corps or any of the myriad voluntary organizations, many of which made no contribution whatsoever but allowed people to think they were doing their bit. While the television series Dad’s Army is not entirely accurate, there is much truth in it, and Home Guard units varied from the hopelessly incompetent to the vaguely useful in their role of providing static guards against parachutists and saboteurs who never came. When war broke out, the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) last used between 1914 and 1918 was wheeled out again, giving the authorities powers that the Gestapo would have welcomed. At first, only enemy aliens considered to be a security risk were interned; others were permitted to return to their home country or allowed to stay where they were.* After Dunkirk, invasion scares and fears of Fifth Columnists led to all such individuals being interned, in makeshift camps, mainly on the Isle of Man but with some being shipped to Canada and Australia. When this caused protests about over-reaction, common sense prevailed and are view led to a large number of the internees (many of whom were refugees from Germany or Italy in the first place) being released. Meanwhile, the imposition of food rationing, essential to a nation that imported a large proportion of its food, produced probably the healthiest generation of Britons ever, in that the ration was carefully balanced and contained what was needed rather than what was necessarily liked, but it also led to a thriving black market, hoarding and smuggling. Restaurants and cafés stayed open and served meals, albeit with restricted menus, and gave rise to the claim that the rich could eat what they liked while the poor had to subsist on the ration.

  The blackout in cities, where all street lights were extinguished, car headlights dimmed and windows covered to give no assistance to German bombers, inevitably led to an increase in traffic accidents, burglaries and what would now be described as muggings, with a commensurate decrease in the number of young, fit police officers to deal with them. Civil executions for murder went up from a total of forty-three in the five years 1935 to 1939, to sixty-three in the five years 1940 to 1944. The damage caused by air raids and the dispersal of the population into air-raid shelters provided ample opportunity for looting, which was hushed up as far as possible but punished in an increasingly draconian manner.* The existing criminal population, or that part of it which had not been conscripted, was swollen by those who did not see it as their patriotic duty to serve and had deserted, living in a shadow world but knowing full well that, whatever the Army Act said, they were not going to be executed. It has been estimated that, once the war got going, there were at any one time up to 20,000 deserters from the armed forces,86 and, although many of these had left their units to solve a domestic problem, or to avoid punishment for some offence or were actually Absent Without Leave,† life as a genuine deserter was difficult: no ration book, no identity card, no possibility of legal employment, no benefits, and no going anywh
ere near home, where all police stations would have the man’s description. Only if the fugitive could be absorbed by the existing criminal underworld would he be relatively safe: the black market in stolen or forged ration books and identity cards was buoyant. The use of firearms in the commission of a crime was relatively rare in pre-war England: now, with deserters often bringing their weapons with them, it increased. Deserters who knew their way into military vehicle depots were particularly valued by the criminal gangs, as from the summer of 1942 the previously tiny ration of petrol for the private motorist was abolished altogether.

  Class warfare has always been a popular British sport, and the policy of the evacuation to the countryside of children from inner cities vulnerable to German air raids forced the middle classes, who were in the main the recipients of the evacuees, to take a long, hard look at the lower working (or not working) classes who provided the bulk of them. Many of the children came from conditions of appalling poverty in rundown slums and were verminous, malnourished, infected with scabies and head lice, and in many cases had never seen or been put in a bath. As bad as the children were, some of the mothers who accompanied them were worse: ill-mannered sluts interested only in going to the pub while neglecting their children. These ragamuffins and slatterns were not the majority, but they were the ones who attracted publicity and criticism, and they split their hosts into two groups: those who wanted to pull up the drawbridge and have nothing to do with the mob, and those who realized that something must be done and who supported the Beveridge Report when it came out in late 1942. Sir William Beveridge was a civil servant, and later a Liberal MP, who had been directed to look at the way the state looked after, or did not look after, its citizens, particularly its needy citizens. His report was the foundation of today’s British welfare state and, while many may feel now that it is no longer suitable for twenty-first-century society, it was revolutionary at the time, proposing a cradle-to-grave system of care with a free health service, enhanced unemployment benefits, sick pay, and old age and widows pensions. Allied to it was a raising of the school leaving age to fifteen and free secondary education for all. It was to be financed by a compulsory deduction from wages – National Insurance – and was to produce a standard of living ‘below which no one should be allowed to fall’, while politically it was being held out as a reward for the British people’s efforts and hardships nobly borne. The prime minister and his immediate circle were uninterested – winning the war was all that mattered now, and in any case Churchill was suspicious of anything that smelled of socialism – but a large number of Conservatives and the entire Labour Party did support Beveridge, forcing Attlee to work very hard to prevent a split in the wartime coalition. The recommendations of the report were, of course, subsequently adopted as part of both parties’ manifestos for the 1945 election, although many voters felt that the Conservatives were at best lukewarm towards it.

  Most countries had a laidback attitude to broadcasting, either letting market forces rule or selling off wavelengths to the highest bidder. Two countries reserved the control of broadcasting to themselves: the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. From the earliest days of broadcasting, the British government was determined to retain control of the airwaves and the BBC had an absolute monopoly of all radio (and television) broadcasting within the United Kingdom. The BBC carefully nurtured the belief that it always told the truth, regardless of how unpleasant that might be, and it had a huge influence not only in the UK but, particularly as London now housed the kings of Greece, Norway and Yugoslavia, the Queen of the Netherlands, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg and assorted governments-in-exile, in the occupied and neutral countries too – indeed, it might be argued that the BBC achieved more than SOE, OSS and Combined Operations all put together. The BBC did not, of course, tell the unvarnished truth, but it told fewer and smaller lies than Radio Berlin and was trusted more than any other belligerent’s radio – including Voice of America.*

  One might have thought that in wartime, where every piece of hardware coming out of the factory door could mean the difference between victory and defeat, industrial squabbles and trade union militancy might be put in abeyance for the duration, but this was to prove a vain hope. The shift to total war meant full employment and thus workers and their unions could afford to be more militant without the fear of the sack. In the five years before the war, 1935 to 1939, 10 million man-days were lost to strikes and go-slows; in the five years 1940 to 1944, 9 million were lost, and the most days lost in the whole of that ten-year period were the 3.7 millionlostin 1944.87 While Germany resisted a move to total war in its economy until 1944, the British directed labour from a very early stage, and, when it became apparent that there was a shortage of labour in the coalmines, one in ten of all conscripts was directed towards the mines – the Bevin Boys. While the system tried to send men who were already miners, or who were volunteers, down the mines, there were those who had no objection to putting on a uniform and wielding a rifle but were horrified at the thought of hacking at a coal face hundreds of feet underground. Similarly, by 1942 women between the ages of eighteen and forty were liable to conscription for war work, which led to an upsurge in volunteering for the women’s uniformed services as preferable to being directed into a factory. Inevitably, as the calls of home and factory conflicted, absenteeism was rife.

  As always in wartime, promiscuity, venereal disease and illegitimate births rose. In an age when efficient contraception hardly existed and bastardy was a disgrace, casual sex other than the commercial variety was much scarcer than it is today, but the plea that the young man was going away and might be dead tomorrow was persuasive. Of the 255,000 live births between 1940 and 1945, 102,000 were out of wedlock, a huge leap from the pre-war period.88 At the end of the war, divorce, far more difficult to achieve then than now, became more common as men who had been away for years returned to find their wives had taken up with other men, or had simply got used to fending for themselves and had grown apart from their husbands. The arrival of large numbers of foreign, Empire and American troops, many with more pay than their British equivalents, led to increases in prostitution, unwanted pregnancies (and illegal abortions) and considerable jealousy: a night spent jitterbugging with a gabardine-attired American and a present of a pair of silk stockings was rather more attractive than a visit to the pictures and a bag of chips with a British soldier in his hairy battledress.

  If the British were not all pulling together and singing ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, then at least the government knew what the trends of public opinion were. In an early and surprisingly sophisticated exercise in opinion polling, it used Mass-Observation, a commercial organization founded in 1937, to find out what people really thought and used that information to shape opinion or to at least nudge it in the desired direction. Press censorship and the use of cunningly, or often not so cunningly, disguised propaganda in the form of films, posters and radio broadcasts did help to keep the bulk of the population in favour of the war and broadly approving of the government’s conduct of it, while an exaggeration of the threat – invasion, parachutists disguised as nuns, the importance of the Home Guard – sufficed to support a broad public consensus even if it only papered over the existing deep divisions in British society. While life for those at home was in many ways bleak – rationing, shortages, blackout, restrictions on movement, increased taxation – it was nevertheless preferable to defeat and occupation, and despite the cracks most people really did think that by fighting on they were doing the right thing, and could at least be united in blaming the war for all manner of problems, including those that had nothing to do with it.

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  Unlike Britain, the continental United States did not suffer air raids or mass blackouts, except along the East Coast, or suspension of the electoral process, but she did gear up for war production, and while Britain increased her industrial capacity fourfold and Germany twofold between 1939 and 1945, America increased hers twe
nty-five-fold. The Second World War finally got the US out of the grip of the Great Depression. In 1940 there were 8 million Americans unemployed, and by the end of 1942 there were virtually none; in 1939 the gross national product was $91bn and in 1945 it was $215bn. The ability of Americans to adapt and convert and improve was truly staggering. In 1940 the British ordered sixty cargo ships to a simple design from American shipyards. Known as Liberty Ships, the first few took 200 days to build – perfectly normal for that time – and then Henry J. Kaiser got involved. Kaiser was an industrialist who was better known for building dams and bridges rather than ships, but in 1942 he acquired shipyards in California, amended the Liberty design, introduced welding rather than riveting and cut the time down, first to forty days and then to an incredible twenty-four. By 1944 the Kaiser yards and others using his methods were turning out an escort carrier every week and the time for a Liberty Ship was down to seventeen days.

  For American workers, for American factory owners and for American industry generally, the war came as an economic bonanza, and the United States was the only belligerent country where the standard of living of the population actually rose during the conflict. Farmers, badly hit by the Depression, found that they could sell whatever they produced and, although petrol rationing was three gallons a week for the private motorist, car manufacturers were able to turn their plants to producing Jeeps, DUKWs, trucks, tanks or aircraft. As in Britain, the return of full employment increased the powers of trade unions, and, although the major ones – the American Federation of Labour and the Congress for Industrial Organization – had signed a no-strike agreement, dissatisfaction with controls of wages (which were in reality generous) while profits soared led to 14,000 strikes, involving 7 million workers. However, as employers were doing very well indeed, most of these disputes were simply bought off.