The Day We Went to War (24 page)

11.15am, C
ARN
, I
NISHOWEN
, S
OUTHERN
I
RELAND

Glasgow schoolboy Bob Crampsey is on an extended holiday at his aunt and uncle’s. But he is homesick. With war threatening he wants to go back to Glasgow. Fortunately, Bob’s father has arrived earlier this morning to take him back. Mr Crampsey came over on the
Royal Ulsterman
, which was ‘crammed to the rails with evacuees’. He then motored down from Belfast. Now Bob, his father, aunt and uncle sit in the stone-floored kitchen, listening to the battery radio as Chamberlain announces that Britain is at war with Germany. As they hear the Prime Minister’s words, Bob sees his father and uncle exchange glances. Instantly, he knows they are thinking back to the Great War, in which both men fought. Then quietly, as ‘God Save the King’ dies away, Mr Crampsey tells Bob to get ready for the journey home.

11.15am, C
HARING
C
ROSS
R
OAD
, L
ONDON

Sir Kenneth Clark listens to the Prime Minister in a café not far from the National Gallery. Finally, Clark thinks, Chamberlain has come to acknowledge ‘the reality of evil’, which the British people have ‘dumbly recognised for the last two or three years’.

11.15am, B
ALCOMBE
S
TREET
, M
ARYLEBONE

Barrister and volunteer ARP stretcher-bearer Robert Bayne-Powell records his reflections on hearing Chamberlain speak: ‘Chamberlain spoke shortly and well. So it has come as I feared it would. God grant us victory and, after it, the wisdom to make a treaty which will not seem to the vanquished so necessary to be revised as the “Versailles
Diktat
”. Germany, in the event of our victory, should be helped economically, but crushed politically, perhaps by dismemberment into the pre-1870 states.’

11.15am, E
VESHAM
, G
LOUCESTERSHIRE

Popular travel writer and novelist Cecil Roberts is motoring back to London from Liverpool. Last night he broke his journey in the
attractive Cotswolds town of Evesham. Going out this ‘sweet and clear’ morning to get a Sunday newspaper, he hears the sound of Chamberlain broadcasting from an open window. He is invited in by the young housewife, who has a baby in her arms. Ten people are crammed in the little parlour, listening to the Prime Minister. Among them is the young husband, a railway porter, sitting with a little girl evacuee on his knee. Chamberlain finishes and the National Anthem is played. Everybody stands and looks gravely at each other. Roberts catches the eye of the husband. He seems to be saying, ‘I know this means that in a few weeks I shall be a soldier. Next year at this time my wife may be a widow and my girl have no father.’ As the last bars of ‘God Save the King’ fade away, his wife turns off the radio. ‘Mr Chamberlain spoke beautifully,’ she says, her voice choking with tears.

11.15am, M
INISTRY OF
E
CONOMIC
W
ARFARE
, L
ONDON
S
CHOOL OF
E
CONOMICS
B
UILDING
, L
ONDON

Twenty-four-year-old junior Foreign Office official John Colville has just arrived at the LSE building. He is being seconded from the FO to work at the new ministry. But as yet he and his new colleagues have nothing to do. A radio is produced and switched on. Colville and the others listen to Chamberlain’s broadcast. Colville thinks it is made ‘with slow, solemn dignity’. On hearing the news that Britain is now at war, Colville experiences a sense of numbness. But, the young civil servant is soon ‘rudely revived by the sirens moaning out the war’s first air-raid warning’.

11.15am, B
IRMINGHAM

Frank T. Lockwood is a commercial artist with Cadbury Brothers Ltd at Bournville. He has only just got back from holiday at Fairbourne, where fifty evacuees arrived yesterday. With his family, Frank, who served with the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF during the Kaiser’s War, listens to the Prime Minister’s broadcast. Frank has the
overriding impression of Chamberlain’s ‘genuine sadness’ as he hears the Premier announce, ‘with emotion’, that Hitler has rejected the British ultimatum. Frank considers that Chamberlain has given ‘a reasoned and memorable speech’. But even today, with Britain at war, Frank thinks it seems very strange to hear the Prime Minister speaking of ‘Hitler’ and not ‘
Herr
Hitler’. After Chamberlain finishes, Frank decides to carry on improving domestic air-raid precautions. As he works at the back of the house, Frank can see ‘a considerable number of barrage balloons’ up in the blue sky.

11.15am, J
ERSEY
, C
HANNEL
I
SLANDS

Writer Norman Scarlyn Wilson, author of some of the bestselling ‘Teach Yourself’ books, listens to the Prime Minister in the lounge of his hotel. Wilson is struck by the effectiveness of Chamberlain’s simple words. ‘Here was no great oratory, no sonorous periods, no phrasemaking, but words one could understand, words born of sincerity and honesty of purpose.’ As the Prime Minister finishes, Wilson and his fellow guests stand for the National Anthem.

11.15am, SS
A
THENIA
, A
TLANTIC
O
CEAN

Second Radio Officer Donald McRae picks up the news of Britain’s declaration of war from the radio station at Valentia.

11.15am, B
ARKING
, E
AST
L
ONDON

Twenty-two-year-old dance-band vocalist Vera Lynn is at home with her parents. Today is her father’s birthday and the family are sitting out in the garden, enjoying the sunshine, when they hear on a portable radio that Britain is now at war. Over the last three or four years, Vera has done well, and she is now appearing with Britain’s top dance band, Ambrose and His Orchestra. Today, with war declared and all places of entertainment due to be closed indefinitely, Vera is worried about the future and thinks, ‘Just as I’m beginning to get well-known, bang goes my career.’

11.15am, E
SSEX

Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, fourteen-year-old son of a Labour MP, is on holiday with his family. The day before yesterday, his father had to leave the holiday home to return to Parliament. Now Tony and his brothers listen to Chamberlain on a radio set they have hired for the holiday. Tony thinks Chamberlain is much too self-pitying. Today, he has no sympathy for the Prime Minister, nor for his policy of appeasement. Tony is very politically aware for a teenager, and for some time now has regarded war as inevitable. Last year he even bought his own gas mask for five shillings (25p).

11.15am, M
ITCHAM
, S
URREY

Dorothy Tyler is a nineteen-year-old athlete who competed in the Berlin Olympics three years ago. Usually on Sundays she trains at the News of the World track at Mitcham. But this morning she is at home with her mother and two brothers to hear the Prime Minister’s broadcast. Dorothy’s first reaction is a selfish one. She won’t now be able to go to Helsinki to take part in the 1940 Games. This is a great disappointment as she is a world-record holder and favourite for a gold medal.

11.15am, C
HESHAM
B
OIS
, B
UCKINGHAMSHIRE

Thirty-nine-year-old Great War veteran Derek Barnes listens to ‘Chamberlain’s tired, heart-broken voice telling us that we were at war with Germany for the second time in twenty-five years’. As the Prime Minister speaks, Derek looks round his quiet, sunny, green garden. His two-year-old baby son ‘is staggering about the lawn, picking daisies with the podgy earnestness of the two year adventurer’. Derek remembers how, in August 1914, as a teenager he had ‘cheered and cheered and prayed only that the war might last enough for me to join the army’. ‘And,’ he sombrely recalls, ‘it did.’ Now he and his wife blink back the tears. Their immediate reaction this morning is ‘entirely selfish, entirely personal’. Derek’s
own overriding emotion is that of anger. He is inflamed ‘with fury at the futility of governments which had failed to give realization to the universal longing of their inarticulate peoples for peace and gentleness’. Pacing up and down the garden he shouts to his wife, ‘You couldn’t find a single German man or woman who doesn’t want peace. Not a soul in all of England or France, either! And yet these bloody governments, with their blasted politics, land us all in
this
!’ But even as he sounds off, to his own intense amazement and forgetting his age, Derek recognises in a flash, ‘I must go to this war – leaving all that I loved behind me – precisely because I loved it.’

11.15am (12.15pm), H
OTEL
A
NGLETERRE
, C
OPENHAGEN

Ewan Butler and the other correspondents who have managed to get out of Germany in time, gather in a colleague’s hotel room. There, they hear on his radio, ‘the tired, sad voice of Neville Chamberlain’, announce that Britain is at war. The correspondents open champagne and drink a toast to victory. Butler then goes down to the bar, where he encounters two stout prosperous Danish businessmen he met there last night. ‘Ah!’ they cry out cheerfully, ‘so you are at war! Come and have a drink!’ And Butler, relieved that the waiting is now over, gratefully joins them.

11.15am (12.15pm), E
NGLISCHER
G
ARTEN
, M
UNICH

Atomic scientist Professor Hoenigschmitt is taking a Sunday-morning stroll in Munich’s English Garden. He is only a hundred or so yards inside the park when he hears what sounds like a shot. He sees a figure slumped on a park bench quite near to the entrance by Hitler’s prized House of German Art. Rushing up to the bench, the Professor immediately recognises the slumped figure as that of Unity Mitford. He has met her in the past at the house of a mutual friend. He urgently calls for help and the police arrive. They flag down a Luftwaffe car and order the driver to
rush Unity to Munich’s university clinic. Unity is hovering between life and death, ‘very white and corpse-like’, when she arrives at the clinic.

11.15am (12.15pm), W
ARSAW

Patrick Maitland and some others are crowding around a radio set, trying to pick up Chamberlain’s broadcast, but the Germans are jamming it. At the Foreign Office, correspondent Ed Beattie is waiting with one of Colonel Beck’s officials when suddenly the door opens and in bursts another Pole who tells them that Britain has just declared war, and the French are going to follow suit this afternoon. Beattie’s companion breaks down and cries, ‘It has been quite a strain, this waiting,’ he explains.

11.15am (12.15pm), E
SPLANADE
H
OTEL
, B
ERLIN

In the
Chicago Tribune
bureau office, correspondents Sigrid Schultz and John ‘Jack’ M. Raleigh listen to Chamberlain’s speech on the radio. They both gasp as they hear the Prime Minister announce that Britain is at war. As soon as Chamberlain finishes, Raleigh dashes out of the office and into the hotel lobby. He is on his way to the Propaganda Ministry to get more information. One of the hotel desk clerks asks the hurrying correspondent if there is any news and Raleigh shouts back in reply ‘You are at war with France and England!’ The clerk is absolutely stunned. He recoils and turns white, his hands grasping the edge of the counter. Mumbling ‘God in Heaven’, the man stumbles into the manager’s office to pass on the bad news.

11.15am (12.15pm), W
ILHELMSHAVEN

Commodore Karl Doenitz, head of the German Navy’s U-boat arm, is told of Britain’s declaration of war. He is stunned and keeps repeating, ‘My God! So it’s war against England again!’

11.15am (1.15pm), G
ERMAN
E
MBASSY
, A
NKARA

Ambassador Franz von Papen has only just received official notification of the British ultimatum. With his staff, he now hears on the embassy’s radio Chamberlain announcing that Britain is at war with Germany. Von Papen, a former Reich Chancellor, was one of those responsible for helping Hitler into power six years ago. Today he is both distraught and horrified at the news. In the safety of the embassy’s garden, he confides in Fraulein Maria Rose, his personal secretary. ‘Mark my words,’ von Papen tells her, ‘this war is the worst crime and the greatest madness that Hitler and his clique have ever committed. Germany can never win this war. Nothing will be left but ruins.’ Despite this, the lightweight, foppish von Papen decides to remain as Hitler’s ambassador to the Turks. He hopes that he may have a chance to ‘deflect the coming catastrophe’ or at least ‘limit the conflict’.

11.17am, A
DMIRALTY
, W
HITEHALL

The signal goes out to all Royal Naval warships to commence hostilities against Germany.

11.17am, HMS
C
ORNWALL
,
AT SEA OFF
S
INGAPORE

Eighteen-year-old Midshipman Peter Austin and the crew are fallen in on the quarter deck listening to a talk by the ship’s captain. The men have already been told that the British ultimatum is going to expire at 18.00 hours, Singapore time. The captain tells his men ‘that we realise that it was now a question of time before we went to war. The object of this war was not to smash the German people themselves, but to uproot Hitlerism and destroy it completely.’ Just as he finishes speaking, the Admiralty signal to commence hostilities is received. On hearing the news, Austin turns and ‘examines the horizon expecting to see the enemy waiting to attack us’. There is of course, as Austin soon realises, nothing in sight at all.

11.17am, HMS
C
ICADA
, H
ONG
K
ONG

Lieutenant Patrick Bayly and the other members of the crew of the river gunboat listen to the captain read out the Admiralty signal, adding, ‘God Save the King and keep safe all our families.’ For Bayly and the other men it is ‘a highly emotional moment’.