All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945. Max Hastings
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tradition was a source of pride to its people, but in consequence the nation declared war on the strongest power in Europe while capable of contributing only limited ground and air reinforcements to the French armies deployed against Germany. Any land initiative was dependent on the will of the Paris government. France had begun to rearm before Britain, but still awaited delivery of large orders of tanks and aircraft. The Allies were too weak either to precipitate a showdown with the Wehrmacht or to mount an effective air assault on Germany, even if they had the will for one. During the winter of 1939 the RAF staged only desultory daylight bomber attacks on German warships at sea, with heavy losses and no useful results.
Common sense should have told the Allied governments that Hitler was unlikely to delay a clash of arms in the west until they were adequately equipped to challenge him. Instead, perversely, they persuaded themselves that time was on their side. They sought to exploit their naval strength to enforce a blockade of the Reich. Gamelin spoke of launching a big land offensive in 1941 or 1942. The two governments clung to hopes that the German army and people would meanwhile ‘come to their senses’ and acknowledge that they could not sustain a protracted struggle. In Poland, so the Allies’ Panglossian thinking went, Hitler’s reckless territorial aggrandisement had achieved its last triumph: the Nazis would be overthrown by sensible Germans, then an accommodation could be sought with a successor regime.
The Allies formalised their joint decision-making through a Supreme War Council, of the kind that was established only in the final year of the previous European conflict. It was agreed that the British and French would share the cost of the war effort sixty-forty, proportions reflecting the relative size of their economies. France’s politics and policies were profoundly influenced by fear of the left, prospective tools of Stalin. In October 1939, thirty-five communist parliamentary deputies were detained in the interests of national security. The following March, twenty-seven of these were tried and most convicted, receiving prison sentences of up to five years. In addition, some 3,400 communist activists were arrested, and more than 3,000 foreign communist refugees interned.
Among the Allies’ mistakes in forging their strategy, insofar as they had one, was to focus upon strengthening their armed forces while conceding little attention to morale; ministers ignored the corrosive influence of inactivity on public sentiment. In the minds of many French and British people, the war effort seemed purposeless: their nations were committed to fight, yet were not fighting. The French were acutely sensitive to the economic strain imposed by sustaining 2.7 million men under arms. They urged on the British the virtues of action almost anywhere save on the Western Front. Mindful of France’s 1.3 million World War I dead, they recoiled from provoking another bloodbath on their own territory. But their proposals for marginal operations – for instance a Balkan front in Salonika, to pre-empt German aggression there – found no favour in London. The British feared such a step would merely provoke the Italians to make common cause with Germany. Ministers would not even speak publicly of creating an ‘anti-fascist front’, for fear of upsetting Benito Mussolini.
Unable to define credible military objectives, many British and French politicians craved a patched-up peace with Hitler, granted only that he should accept some face-saving moderation of his territorial ambitions; their peoples recognised this, coining the phrases ‘Phoney War’ and ‘Bore War’. The social-research organisation Mass Observation reported ‘a strong feeling in the country that the wretched war is not worth going on with…We can suspect that Hitler has won News-Round 1 in this war. He’s been able to give his own people a tremendous success story – Poland.’
It is hard to overstate the impact of months of passivity upon the spirit of France’s forces. In November 1939 British corps commander Alan Brooke described his sensations on witnessing a parade of the French Ninth Army: ‘Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly…men unshaven, horses ungroomed, complete lack of pride in themselves or their units. What shook me most, however, was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks…I could not help wondering whether the French are still a firm enough nation to again take their part in seeing this war through.’ Exiled Poles, of whom some thousands were now attached to the French forces, noted with dismay the equivocal attitudes displayed by their allies: pilot Franciszek Kornicki wrote that ‘both the French communists and fascists worked against us, and Lyons was full of the former. One day somebody made a friendly gesture, but another day someone else would swear at you.’
A French soldier, the writer Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote in his diary on 26 November: ‘All the men…were raring to go at the outset, but now they are dying of boredom.’ Another soldier, Georges Sadoul, wrote on 13 December: ‘The days pass, interminable and empty, without the slightest occupation…The officers, mainly reservists, think no differently from the men…One feels they are weary of the war, they say and repeat that they would like to go home.’ On 20 February 1940, Sartre observed: ‘The war machine is running in neutral…Only yesterday a sergeant was telling me, with a gleam of insane hope in his eyes: “What I think is, it’ll all be arranged, England will climb down.”’
The British were equally baffled. Jack Classon, a young shopworker in Everton, Lancashire, wrote to a friend in the army: ‘The war doesn’t seem to make much headway, does it? We read one thing in the paper in the morning, the denial the following day, & it’s killing business. You can blame my gloom on the black curtains that drape the shop & the blued windows that stare at you when you go upstairs…The Curzon cinema has had for the last week or so Henry Croudson the organist as guest…some people are enjoying that more than the picture, his most popular number at the moment being “We’ll Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line”. The audience raises the roof when he plays that.’
One and a half million British women and children, evacuated from the cities amid the threat of German bombing, suffered agonies of homesickness in an unfamiliar rural environment. One of them, Derek Lambert, a nine-year-old from London’s Muswell Hill, later recalled: ‘We went to strange beds and lay with fists clenched. Our toes found tepid hot water bottles and our fingers silk bags of old lavender inside the pillows. An owl hooted, wings brushed the window. I remembered the London sounds of distant trains and motor cycles, the breaking limbs of the mountain ash, next door’s dog, the droning radio, the fifth stair groaning and the ten-thirty throat-clearing; I remembered the familiar wallpaper where you could paddle a canoe through green rapids or drive a train along sweeping cuttings…We sobbed in awful desolation.’
Most evacuees were drawn from the underclass, and shocked rustic hosts by their rags and anarchic habits: urban children, victims of the thirties Depression, were unaccustomed to meals at fixed hours, some even to knives and forks. They were used to subsisting on ‘pieces’ – bread and margarine, fish and chips – eaten on the move, together with tinned food and sweets. They recoiled from soup, puddings and all vegetables save potatoes. Many paraded their alienation by resorting to petty delinquency. The habits of their mothers dismayed staid rural communities: ‘The village people objected to the evacuees chiefly because of the dirtiness of their habits and clothes,’ recorded Muriel Green, a garage assistant in Snettisham, Norfolk. ‘Also because of their reputed drinking and bad language. It’s exceptional to hear women swear in this village or for them to enter a public house. The villagers used to watch them come out of the pubs with horror. The holiday camp proprietor said: “You should see them mop down the drink.”’ By Christmas, with Britain still unbombed, most of the evacuees had returned to their city homes, to the mutual relief of themselves and their rural hosts.
If there was little substance to Britain’s war effort, there were many symbols: sandbagged public buildings, barrage balloons floating above London, a rigorous blackout in the hours of darkness. Before peace came, accidents in the blackout killed more people than did the Luftwaffe: in the last four months of 1939 there were 4,133 deaths on the roads, 2,657 of these pedestrians, a figure almost double that for the same period in 1938. Many more people died as a consequence of non-highway mishaps: some 18 per cent of those interviewed by Princeton pollsters in December 1940 said they had injured themselves groping in the dark; three-quarters of respondents thought air-raid precautions should be eased. Defence regulations were so stringently enforced that two soldiers leaving the dock at the Old Bailey after being condemned to death for murder were rebuked for failing to pick up their gas masks. Two and a half million people