The Day We Went to War

The Day We Went to War

Terry Charman

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Published in 2010 by Virgin Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company
First published in the UK by Virgin Books in 2009 with the title
Outbreak 1939

Unless otherwise stated photographs and text © The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum
2009
Foreword © Melvyn Bragg

The poster ‘Take Your Gas Mask Everywhere’ is reproduced with kind permission of RoSPA
(The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents)

The television programme
Outbreak
is an ITV Studios Production for ITV,
History Channel and France 3 in association with the Imperial War Museum
and ECPAD © ITV Studios Ltd 2009

Extract on pages 142–143 ©
Daily Express

Terry Charman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is substantially a work of non-fiction. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in some minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true

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C
ONTENTS

Cover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

By the Same Author

Foreword by Melvyn Bragg

Introduction

1
    
Countdown to War

2
    
Friday, 1 September 1939

3
    
Saturday, 2 September 1939

4
    
Sunday, 3 September 1939

5
    
The Fall of Poland

6
    
The War in the Air

7
    
The War on Land

8
    
The War at Sea

9
    
The Empire at War

10
   
The Beer Hall Bomb

11
   
The Venlo Incident

12
   
The War on the Home Front

13
   
Wartime Entertainment

14
   
Lord Haw Haw

15
   
The Winter War

16
   
Christmas and the End of the Year

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

List of Unpublished Sources

Index

To James Taylor

The Day We Went to War

T
ERRY
C
HARMAN
is the Senior Historian at the Imperial War Museum, where he has worked since 1974. He is a frequent lecturer on the First and Second World Wars and has contributed to magazines and journals on a range of subjects. He has also worked as a consultant for a wide range of publications and has appeared on and been associated with numerous documentaries, television and radio programmes and films, including
Foyle’s War
and
Schindler’s List.
He is the author of
The German Home Front 1939–1945
.

By the Same Author

The German Home Front 1939–1945

‘Unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.’ Neville Chamberlain, 3 September 1939.

F
OREWORD

I just missed the start of the Second World War. On Sunday, 3 September 1939 I was not quite ready for landing. That happened on 6 October. Nevertheless the war was the landscape and currency of my childhood – its background noise, its daily prayers, the atmosphere of life both at that time and in some ways forever since.

Windows were blacked out nightly to give the German bombers no chink of light and even we children staggered rather drunkenly around the twisting alleys of the small town with weak pencil torches nervously flashed on and off but always pointed downwards. Rationing ruled the kitchen. Stories of war were our daily bread and games of war our childhood antidote. The wireless was the altar and news bulletins the daily service. It was a time when children conceived violent hatreds of nations and peoples they knew nothing of, when no propaganda was too black and yet the greatest tragedy of all was – to take my own experience – not even whispered in the streets. We did not know the depth of evil out there.

There were outings now and then, mainly to the seaside, to Silloth ten miles away, and the churches filled in social gaps with gaslit
youth clubs. There would be dances in the blacked-out basement of a Congregational church where women, often in coats against the cold, danced with women or taught their children the steps of old ballroom dances.

And there were treats. Children whose fathers were in the war got a present now and then from sympathetic families doing their bit and felt very special because of it.

I lived in north Cumbria in the north-west of England, a borderland near Hadrian’s Wall, a place both ruined and ripened in wars over the centuries – Romans, Vikings, Normans and in the Middle Ages 300 years of reiving border warfare with the Scots.

Then came the imperial wars with local regiments called up in heavy numbers to plant and to defend the flag. My grandfather and five of his brothers went through the First World War. My father and three of his brothers were in the Second.

Where I lived was involved in battles in the air not because it was on the aerial frontline but because it was so far from it. Fractured aeroplanes hedge-hopped from the south-east of England to a place thought to be out of range and out of sight of the German bombers. They were ‘turned around’ and sent back south into battle.

There were soldiers marching even in this small market town, Wigton, population 5,000. There were morale-boosting marches when the music played and little boys ran alongside in the gutters. There were soldiers and sailors and airmen on leave with the occasional story of combat and horror but those were tight-lipped days. And there were the casualties to men from the town and, early on, the growth of fear as the defeats could not be concealed and towards the end the birth of an even greater bottomless fear as the atom bomb entered into history.

And so when I realised that the seventieth anniversary of World War Two was all but on us, there were hundreds of iron filings which rushed to that magnet of the war in my past. You only rarely have a complete idea immediately. This was one of them.

I wanted to make a television programme about the day the Second World War broke out, the very day. To track through that day, to show what happened here in my own country and also in France, Germany, Poland, Australia, America, the Commonwealth and elsewhere. The proposition was accepted by ITV for an hour-long documentary.

You always want more and it would have been good to have two or three programmes which included a long and complex lead up to the war but others in print and in exhibitions will I’m sure do that.
Outbreak
stuck to the day.

There is something very satisfactory in the shape of a day. By concentrating on that we could embrace and contrast great acts of state with private mundane actions from members of the general public. There would be the grand drama unfolding but also, I hoped, the sense and evidence, the humour and personal fears in ordinary lives.

Above all I wanted the story to be told by those involved in the day either through archive (which was rich) or through finding people who could remember 3 September 1939.

That led the research team to some remarkable discoveries, not only in this country but in Germany, France, Poland, Australia and the West Indies.

We could go from a woman holding up a dress in which she had been christened on that Sunday, 3 September to a woman who had been on the SS
Athenia
sunk on the same day. We could go from the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire to words and recollections of Winston Churchill, from the memories of Richard Attenborough and children sent away from London to the countryside as evacuees to words from the Prime Minister of the day and from King George VI.

The team employed several telling strategies. For instance, descendants of the main players would read the words written about the time – Lady Soames quoted her father Winston Churchill. There
was Neville Chamberlain’s grandson. They played back the speech of King George to those who had listened to it at the time including George Cole, Betty Driver, Vera Lynn, Tony Benn and Nicholas Parsons, and their reactions were telling.

When the Imperial War Museum indicated interest, I was delighted. It was like being awarded a degree. The Museum had already drawn up its own plans to commemorate the seventieth anniversary with an exhibition and an accompanying book by its Senior Historian Terry Charman. With his immense knowledge of the period and his eye for detail, we were fortunate indeed to have Terry’s services as historical consultant on the programme. In his thirty-five years at the Museum, he has assisted many eminent historians, including Asa Briggs, Sir Martin Gilbert and Professor Richard Holmes with their books. Now he has had the opportunity to write his own.

There cannot be many books that bring together both the vituperative diary entries of Dr Goebbels and the risqué jokes of Max Miller. Drawing on the immense and almost unrivalled collections at the Imperial War Museum, the book has skilfully woven together the stories of not only the Great and the Good, but also of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. We meet the vain and alcoholic Colonel Beck, Poland’s foreign minister, who nonchalantly accepts Britain’s guarantee to his doomed country between two flicks of his cigarette ash, and at the same time physiotherapist Joan Strange of Worthing, who perceives only too clearly the evil nature of the Nazi regime through her work for Jewish refugees.

Our programme dealt with just the one day, 3 September 1939, but the book goes on to cover the last months of 1939, and the first of what became known at the time as the ‘Phoney War’. But while the RAF confined itself to dropping propaganda leaflets,
Outbreak
shows that there was no Phoney War at sea. Nor was it phoney in Poland, where right from the start the Nazis unleashed a campaign of racial terror that eventually led to the deaths of over
six million Poles, Jewish and non-Jewish. Nor in Finland, a victim of aggression, not on Hitler’s part this time, but from his new ‘ally’ Stalin. We learn how on 25 December 1939, while the British enjoyed a near-normal Christmas, the citizens of Helsinki spent most of it in air-raid shelters. We encounter both the sinister ‘Lord Haw Haw’, William Joyce, for whom the British people had such a morbid fascination during the war’s first months, and ‘Our Gracie’ – Gracie Fields – still not recovered from a serious illness, but determined to entertain the ‘boys’ out in France.