The Day We Went to War (36 page)

REPORT STEAMSHIP ‘ATHENIA’ OF DONALDSON LINE TORPEDOED 200 MILES OFF MALIN HEAD WITH 1400 PASSENGERS ABOARD. SOS RECEIVED. SHIP SINKING FAST.

2.30am, SS
A
THENIA
, A
TLANTIC
O
CEAN

Axel Wenner Gren’s
Southern Cross
now arrives to help in the rescue of the
Athenia
’s passengers and crew. The yacht’s crew have got hot drinks prepared and have laid out warm clothes for the survivors. One of those survivors is Nicole, the ten-month-old daughter of German Jewish film director Ernst Lubitsch, a Hollywood exile from Nazi Germany. Nicole and her nurse Consuela Stroheimer have just had a lucky escape. Their lifeboat capsized, and with fifty others they were flung into sea. Somehow Consuela has managed to keep
little Nicole’s head above water for an hour, but they and 378 others are now safe on board and enjoying piping hot soup. Nearby, the
Knute Nelson
has so far lifted 430 survivors and her capacity is now stretched almost to the limit. Captain Carl Johan Anderssen was making for Panama, but now, with so many people on board and with only limited food supplies, Anderssen decides to make for the nearest port – Galway, in neutral Eire – instead.

2.45am, E
ALING
F
IRE
S
TATION,
W
EST
L
ONDON

The District Fire Officer is still keeping up a barrage of comic stories and would-be witticisms in order to entertain Elsie Warren and the other girls. ‘Look girls,’ he says, shining his torch on an old sack, ‘I’ve found a pillow case!’ Elsie starts writing a poem about the AFS and is just finishing the penultimate line when one of the others says urgently, ‘Listen.’ It’s the air-raid siren sounding the Alert, and Elsie has never seen such a scramble in all her life. The switchboard operator receives the signal code for ‘raid is on’, which she immediately sends to the fire sub-stations. Elsie and the others dash over to the Fire Chief’s office and each takes over a telephone extension. None of them is feeling ‘any too good expecting a raid any minute’. One of Elsie’s older colleagues who had been in the last war keeps repeating, ‘I don’t care what you say, I’ve got great faith in our Spitfire planes.’ Elsie’s supervisor Miss Harrison only went upstairs half an hour ago to try and get some sleep. Now she’s had a ‘rude awakening,’ and the girls all laugh as she blearily peers round the door in her pyjamas and asks ‘Everyone correct?’

2.50am, T
EDDINGTON

‘Raid warning at 10 to 3am. Went down to hall (after saying we wouldn’t) and sat until the “All Clear”. Royal Air Force distributed thirteen tons of six million leaflets in north-western German towns telling G[erman] people we were at war and why. These leaflets!’ (Helena Mott)

Following the torpedoing of the SS
Athenia
on 3 September 1939, a number of survivors were landed at Galway, where they received assistance from the Irish Army.

3.00am (9.00pm), T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE,
W
ASHINGTON
DC

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivers a nationwide message to the American people. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Roosevelt’s predecessor President Woodrow Wilson told Americans that they must be neutral ‘in fact as well as name’ and ‘impartial in thought as well as in action’. This evening Roosevelt has a different message for his fellow countrymen: ‘This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of the facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.’

Without naming names, FDR makes it clear with whom his own sympathies lay, just the same as they did in 1914, when he was Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy:

Some things we do know. Most of us in the United States believe in spiritual values. Most of us, regardless of what church we belong to, believe in the spirit of the New Testament – a great teaching which opposes itself to the use of force, of armed force, of marching armies and falling bombs. The overwhelming masses of our people seek peace – peace at home, and the kind of peace in other lands which will not jeopardize peace at home.

The President finishes the broadcast on a reassuring note for his millions of listeners:

I have said not once, but many times that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again. I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe it will. And I give you assurances that every effort of your government will be directed towards that end. As long it remains within my power to prevent it, there will be no blackout of peace in the United States.

3.00am, 10 D
OWNING
S
TREET

Just as President Roosevelt is beginning his radio speech, the sirens sound again in London. Led by the half-dressed Prime Minister, with Mrs Chamberlain in a dressing gown with her hair down her back, the staff make their way to the basement of Number 10. There, PPS Alec Douglas-Home observes that he and the others are all in various stages of undress. Not so the new Minister without Portfolio and member of the War Cabinet, Lord Hankey. To Douglas-Home’s astonishment, he arrives ‘in the shelter fully dressed with a rolled-up umbrella and bowler hat!’

3.00am, C
AMBRIDGE

It is a blazing moonlight night as the sirens begin to wail. The Koenigsbergers, their landlady and her ten-year-old daughter scramble out of their beds and huddle under the stairs. Like so many others in Britain today, the landlady has yet to master how to black-out the windows properly. The Koenigsbergers are afraid that the light showing is going to attract German bombers. Outside the city on her farm, Trainee Land Girl No. 9600 E.M. Barraud can hear the sirens in Cambridge. In the village, air-raid wardens are cycling round, blowing their whistles in warning. For what seems like hours, but is probably only about twenty minutes, the Koenigsbergers await the ‘All Clear’. As it sounds they vow to organise the house’s blackout themselves. They decide too that it is better to stay in bed and risk the bombs rather than shiver under the stairs.

3.00am, H
UDDERSFIELD

George and Marjorie Gothard are fast asleep in bed when the air-raid warning sounds. They finally got to bed at about 10.30pm, both of them really tired out. Marjorie is in a deep sleep as George wakes her and tells her that an air raid is on. Marjorie sits up in bed really frightened, as all the sirens seem to be going. She
puts on her slippers and then a leather coat over her nightie. She then dashes upstairs for George Junior and Guy. George is close behind and they find some coats to wrap the boys up in. George then climbs through their bedroom window and lights a candle in their makeshift air-raid shelter. Next, they take the boys in, telling them that it is just a rehearsal. But actually neither of their sons is at all frightened. With the boys now safe, Marjorie fetches the family’s pet dogs ‘Vera’, ‘Demon’ and ‘Cara’ into the shelter. Some neighbours also soon arrive, and Marjorie is pleased to see that, ‘apart from a little palpitation’, everyone is ‘very calm and collected’. The ‘All Clear’ now sounds and the Gothards go back to their bedroom. The boys are going to stay in their bed with them for the rest of the night. Marjorie makes them all a cup of tea. She then tries to get back to sleep, but fails even to doze off.

3.45am, E
ALING
F
IRE
S
TATION
,
WEST
L
ONDON

Elsie Warren’s shift receives the ‘All Clear’ message with a collective sigh of great relief. They put the kettle on and have several pots of tea and a few more laughs. They are all looking forward to finishing their stint at 6.00am.

4.30am, SS
A
THENIA
, A
TLANTIC
O
CEAN

Two Royal Navy destroyers HMS
Electra
and
Escort
have arrived to take part in the rescue. A third destroyer, HMS
Fame
, is on its way and should arrive in about an hour and a half.

6.00am, E
ALING
F
IRE
S
TATION
, W
EST
L
ONDON

At the end of her shift, Elsie Warren leaves the fire station. ‘The weather is great’ on this, the first full day of the Second World War. Elsie thinks to herself, ‘It seems a shame that a war is on.’

6 September

W
ORTHING

Resumé of the week

‘It has been impossible to write daily for the last week as life has suddenly become very difficult under wartime conditions. Very few people felt this terrible blow would fall and right up to Sunday morning there was the glimmer of hope. On Friday the Germans “crossed the frontiers to resist the Poles” and the newspapers immediately declared “war begins”. Everyone’s spirits sank but rose again when Mr Chamberlain gave Hitler one more chance in a message sent on Saturday with a time limit up at eleven o’clock on the Sunday morning . . . two air-raid warnings already – one on Sunday morning about 11.35 (twenty minutes after the declaration of war) . . . I must try to write this daily now but so far I have not blacked out my bedroom window – blow! That’s where I do my reading and writing.’ (Joan Strange)

The German war flag is raised over the ruins of Westerplatte, 7 September 1939. In describing the bombardment of the garrison, a German reporter wrote, ‘It seems as if all the fire and lightning of hell has been let loose.’

C
HAPTER
5

The Fall of Poland

As Britain and France finally honoured their pledges to Poland, Hitler’s forces successfully pressed on with the invasion. Two invading army groups, comprising of fifty-two divisions and totalling 1,516,000 men, launched a double pincer movement from the south and the north. They were supported by 897 bombers and 426 fighter planes of the Luftwaffe. No declaration of war had been made. But in his Reichstag speech of 1 September justifying the invasion, Hitler had claimed that regular Polish troops had invaded German territory the previous evening. This was an allusion to the faked incidents at the Gleiwitz radio station and the Hochlinden customs post.

From the start of the campaign, the Poles found themselves faced by an enemy who had crushing superiority in aircraft, tanks, guns and men. But the Poles fought bravely, as even Hitler acknowledged in a speech at Danzig, and no more so than at Westerplatte, near the city-port. There a company of 180 men under Major Henryk Sucharski and Captain Franciszek Dabrowski held out for six days and nights against attacks by land and air, and from bombardment by the old battleship
Schleswig-Holstein
’s eleven-inch guns. From Warsaw, Polish commander-in-chief Marshal Smigly-Rydz wired them, ‘Soldiers of Westerplatte fight! You are fighting the fight of Poland. Poland watches your gallant struggle with pride. Fight for Poland to the last man.’