The Day We Went to War (35 page)

10.00pm, M
INISTRY OF
W
AR
, P
ARIS

The first French war communiqué is issued. It reads simply: ‘Operations have begun, involving the entire land, naval and air forces.’ It is released now so that it will make the morning papers’ later editions. Some of their first editions are already out. An editorial in
Le Petit Parisien
tells its readers:

Hitler has remained deaf to the last warnings of the British and French governments as he has to suggestions from Rome. Perhaps he imagined that once more his audacity could drive back justice and reason. Already, millions and millions of human beings pronounce the name of Hitler with a holy horror. If he wanted that ‘honour’ he has it and will continue to have it. Mr Chamberlain was right to say that today was a sad day for him. As he said, with a sort of heroism, all that he believed in and everything for which he worked has fallen into ruins. Today is also sad for all of us who, with him and our own leaders, have made superhuman efforts to spare mankind from the terrible struggle which is beginning. Mr Chamberlain has nothing to reproach himself with, and neither have we.

10.00pm, D
AILY
E
XPRESS
B
UILDING
, F
LEET
S
TREET
, L
ONDON

The presses are rolling off hundreds of thousand of copies of Britain’s largest-selling daily newspaper. In his William Hickey column Tom Driberg writes, ‘Now I suppose we must just set to and win. Some of us have, in a sense, been at war since January 1933, when paganism and persecution became officially OK in Germany; but we can’t sit back and say, “I told you so”. We’re all in it.’

10.00pm (11.00pm), B
ERLIN

The German High Command issues a communiqué on today’s fighting. It states that German troops have captured the city of Czestochowa, the site of Poland’s holy shrine of the Black Madonna, and have also reached and crossed the River Vistula (Weichsel).
And the Luftwaffe, it claims, shot down seven Polish planes and one balloon over Warsaw with no loss to themselves.

10.00pm (11.00pm), S
TEGLITZ,
B
ERLIN

Dedicated anti-Nazi resister Ruth Andreas-Friederich, on hearing the High Command communiqué, writes in her journal, ‘state of war between England and Germany . . . France is also at war with us. Yet neither Frenchmen nor Englishmen are marching across our frontiers. Why don’t they, too, cross some river or other, and put an end to the madness of war before the best blood of all nations has been drained?’

10.30pm, G
ERMAN
E
MBASSY
, R
UE DE
L
ILLE,
P
ARIS

130 members of the German Embassy staff, their families and other ‘protected’ personnel are waiting to leave on the first leg of their repatriation back to Germany. There is a strong police guard outside the embassy building tonight, but there have been no hostile demonstrations against the embassy by Parisians all day.

10.30pm, T
HE
A
DMIRALTY
, W
HITEHALL
, L
ONDON

A message from Malin Head is received in the Admiralty’s wireless room: ‘Important Important Admiral Rosyth Intercept 2059 jamming near SSSS SSSS Athenia GFDM torpedoed position 56 44 14 05’.

10.30pm, B
ROADCASTING
H
OUSE

The Home Service announces that General Lord Gort is to command the British Expeditionary on the Continent, and General Sir Edmund Ironside is taking over as Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

11.00pm, W
ICK,
S
COTLAND

The
Daily Express
’s Northern Scotland correspondent telephones the passenger manager of the Donaldson Line, W.B. Fleming. He
tells Fleming, ‘I’ve heard that the
Athenia
’s been torpedoed. Can you confirm it?’ A stunned Fleming sets about trying to do so.

11.00pm, G
ARE DES
I
NVALIDES
, P
ARIS

The German Chargé d’Affaires, Herr Brauer, arrives at the station and takes his leave of Messieurs Loze, Director of Protocol at the Quai d’ Orsay, and Langeron, Prefect of Police. The German diplomatic party board the first-class coaches, which are guarded by French security police, and the train sets off for Switzerland just after 11pm.

11.00pm (12pm midnight), B
ERLIN

The Armed Forces High Command issues another communiqué. It covers all the operations in Poland today, and claims that the Polish incursion into East Prussia has been beaten back. The communiqué tersely ends, ‘there were no hostilities on the Western Front’.

11.00pm, P
OLISH
E
MBASSY
, L
ONDON

Count Raczynski receives a telephone call from Churchill, who tells the ambassador: ‘From today I am First Lord of the Admiralty. If you should need me, I am at your disposal at any time.’

11.00pm, B
UCKINGHAM
P
ALACE,
L
ONDON

King George VI has decided to follow the example of his father and keep a daily diary. Tonight he writes:

At the outbreak of war at midnight of 4th–5th August 1914, I was a midshipman, keeping the middle watch on the bridge of HMS
Collingwood
somewhere in the North Sea. I was eighteen years of age.

In the Grand Fleet everyone was pleased that it had come at last. We had been trained in the belief that War between Germany & this country had to come one day & when it did come we thought we
were prepared for it. We were not prepared for what we found a modern war really was, & those of us who had been through the Great War never wanted another.

Today we are at war again, & I am no longer a midshipman in the Royal Navy . . .

11.00pm, SS
A
THENIA
, A
TLANTIC
O
CEAN

Captain Cook changes into civilian clothes. During the last war the Germans used to take ships’ masters prisoner, and Cook wants to avoid the same thing happening to him. But in the rush he leaves his pipe in the uniform jacket.

11.45–3.00am, Putney

‘Home about 11.45 very tired and fell into a lovely sleep only to be awaked [
sic
] at three o’clock by the air-raid warning! All downstairs yawning heavily to sit in the hall, nothing happened and after a little while the all clear enabled us to get to bed again. The first day of war! How long will this diary be by the time in type – the last day of war?’ (Vivienne Hall)

11.56pm, T
HE
A
DMIRALTY
, W
HITEHALL
, L
ONDON

Another signal about the
Athenia
is picked up in the wireless room:

IMPORTANT ADMIRAL ROSYTH INTERCEPT 2207 JAMMING NEAR THE ATHENIA GFDM 1400 PASSENGERS SOME STILL ABOARD SINKING FAST BEARING 291 APPROX.

4 September

12.00 midnight, P
OLAND

‘Sunday today, the first in enemy territory. Splendid weather. Yesterday we did twenty-five kilometres . . . All the villages in our
rear have been burned to the ground. The streets are littered with corpses and dead horses. Working parties are digging mass graves; the corpses are piled on lorries, brought to the pits and thrown in – a strange sight.

‘The war is frightful, you see nothing all day long but burnt out houses. Each house must be smoked out, there’s nothing else to be done with the Pollacks.

‘The remaining inhabitants are the worst. Yesterday, a German officer was chatting with some woman from the village, and when he turned round to drink some water from the fountain, he received a blow in the back from one of the women which killed him.

‘After crossing the Warte, a quick Sunday dip was had, but soon we received orders to get ready to move off. Many of my comrades were not yet fully clothed, and so they had no choice other than to get changed in the trucks.

‘Women and children stood in front of their burnt out houses and collected together the last of their belongings, most of which are already burnt.’ (Corporal Wilhelm Krey, 13th Artillery Observation Battery, German Army)

12.00–1.00am, G
ERMANY

Three Whitley bombers from 51 Squadron, and seven from 58 Squadron, RAF, are over Hamburg, Bremen and nine cities in the Ruhr. They are not on a bombing mission, but are dropping a total of 5.4 million propaganda leaflets. The leaflets tell any German brave or foolhardy enough to pick one up why Britain has gone to war:

WARNING: A MESSAGE FROM GREAT BRITAIN

German Men and Women: The Government of the Reich have, with cold deliberation, forced war upon Great Britain. They have done so knowing it must involve mankind in a calamity worse than that of 1914. The assurances of peaceful intentions the Fuehrer gave to
you and the world in April have proved as worthless as his words at the Sportpalast last September, when he said: ‘We have no more territorial claims to make in Europe.’

Never has a government ordered subjects to their death with less excuse. This war is utterly unnecessary. Germany was in no way threatened or deprived of justice.

Was she not allowed to re-enter the Rhineland, to achieve the
Anschluss
, and to take back the Sudeten Germans in peace? Neither we nor any other nation would have sought to limit her advances as long as she did not violate independent non-German peoples.

Every German ambition – just as others – might have been satisfied through friendly negotiation.

President Roosevelt offered you both peace with honour and the prospect of prosperity. Instead your rulers have condemned you to the massacres, miseries and privations of a war they cannot ever hope to win.

It is not us, but you who have been deceived. For years their iron censorship has kept from you truths that even uncivilized peoples know. It has imprisoned your minds in, as it were, a concentration camp. Otherwise they would not have dared to misrepresent the combination of peaceful peoples to secure peace as hostile encirclement.

We had no enmity against you, the German people.

The censorship has also concealed from you that you have not the means to sustain protracted warfare. Despite crushing taxation, you are on the verge of bankruptcy.

Our resources and those of our Allies, in men, arms and supplies are immense. We are too strong to be broken by blows and we could wear you down inexorably.

You, the German people, can, if you will it, insist on peace at any time. We also desire peace, and are prepared to conclude it with any peace-loving Government in Germany.

12.00 midnight, SS
A
THENIA
, A
TLANTIC
O
CEAN

As promised the
Knute Nelson
arrives to help rescue the liner’s survivors. Some of the Jewish refugees in the lifeboats panic. They think that the Norwegian freighter is actually the crack German liner, the
Bremen
. One family even throw their passports into the sea, and resolve to pass themselves off as Swiss citizens if the rescue vessel turns out to be German.

12.00 midnight, ‘V
ILLA
V
OLPONE’,
S
OUTH
H
AMPSTEAD

As the first day of war draws to a close, James Agate jots downs his impressions of the day: ‘So far as I can judge in my suburb, which I have not left to-day, the people are taking the war with extraordinary calmness. In one matter I confess that I have been utterly wrong. I expected every road leading out of London to be cluttered up and impassable. Actually, not only has there been no exodus, but the traffic has been less than on an ordinary Sunday . . . The BBC has been exemplary all day, dispensing music not too heavy and not too light. Homely stuff, with many familiar airs and ballads, things like “Sally in Our Alley”, which at this juncture are strangely moving.’

12.00 midnight, B
ROADCASTING
H
OUSE

The BBC Home Service makes its final announcement of the day. From tomorrow pigs cannot be sold for slaughter over a price of thirteen shillings (65p), dead weight. ‘The Londonderry Air’ is played and the BBC goes off the air until 7.00am.

12.05am, W
IRELESS
R
OOM
, HMS
V
ANQUISHER

An urgent message is received from ‘C in C Western Approaches’. It reads:

IMMEDIATE PROCEED TO SS ‘ATHENIA’ SINKING IN POSITION 56 42 NORTH 14 05 WEST.

12.56am, W
IRELESS
R
OOM,
HMS
V
IVACIOUS

The destroyer leader gets a signal from Western Approaches:

IMMEDIATE HMS ‘VANQUISHER’ PROCEEDING TO BRITISH SHIP ‘ATHENIA’ SINKING IN POSITION 56 42 NORTH 14 05 WEST. DETAIL ONE OF YOUR DIVISIONS TO ACCOMPANY HER. ACKNOWLEDGE.

1.00am, P
ARIS

Temporary US diplomat Hubert Earle makes his way home from Harry’s Bar. Tonight he enjoys an unbroken sleep and the luxury of staying in bed late for the first time in three weeks.

2.30am, US E
MBASSY,
G
ROSVENOR
S
QUARE,
L
ONDON

Ambassador Joseph Kennedy is in the country. He is woken up by his private secretary James Seymour, who is phoning from the embassy with news of the
Athenia
’s sinking. Kennedy gets dressed quickly, returns to London, and issues orders to his staff to find out the names of all American citizens who are on board the liner. He telegraphs the State Department in Washington: