Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  The Dunkirk evacuation would turn out to be the moment when the British snatched victory from the jaws of tragedy. ‘What began as a miserable blunder … a catalogue of misfortunes and mis-calculations’, J.B. Priestley intoned with the full gravity of the occasion in his special Wednesday evening Postscript broadcast, ‘ended as an epic in gallantry’.1 The evacuation at Dunkirk was the opening salvo in the People’s War, and Priestley was one of the first to notice it. In that broadcast, he praised the bravery of the civilians who heeded the Royal Navy’s call to action and helped out the best they could. Thousands of ships – from large naval destroyers and passenger ferries to small, private motor boats – embarked on a titanic effort to rescue troops from the beachheads and harbours around Dunkirk. Those who crossed the Channel navigated tricky shoals and floating mines only to face a scene of carnage: German artillery belching deadly fire from the French coastline and murderous planes buzzing overhead. One Luftwaffe pilot called it ‘unadulterated killing’.2 Nonetheless, small watercraft, piloted mainly by civilians, braved the shells and gunfire numerous times as they ferried soldiers from the beaches to the large ships waiting in the deeper water just offshore.

  On 3 June, with the evacuations still in progress, Alice Bridges sadly noted in her diary that a friend’s son was missing in the chaotic retreat. Several men had seen him wading through the water towards the transports, but none had heard from him since. ‘One of the boys’ who had seen him came back, Alice reported, ‘all shaky with nerves’; it was the continual aerial bombing, he confessed, that had broken him down. Less than three months later, huddled in an air-raid shelter, Alice herself would soon learn the nerve required to bear the Luftwaffe’s wrath.

  When the Dunkirk operation began, Churchill believed around 50,000 men could be taken safely away from the beachhead; over 100,000 would be a miracle. After the week-long evacuation, over 11,000 British servicemen had perished, 14,000 were wounded and 41,000 were taken prisoner or missing, and most of Britain’s weaponry and equipment remained strewn across the shores of Dunkirk. But when the last rescue ship returned to British shores, more than 330,000 British and French soldiers had been saved.

  When she learned of Belgium’s surrender in late May, Natalie Tanner anticipated three events: Italy would come in on the side of the Germans, France would surrender and finally, Britain would capitulate. Although the first two events did indeed occur, Natalie could never have imagined the immense impact that the evacuation at Dunkirk would have on her prediction. Defeat at Dunkirk would have inevitably sunk British morale; but instead, Britain lived to fight another day.

  Soon after the epic retreat, Irene Grant was overjoyed to learn that her nephew was one of the soldiers who made it back safely. Still, she and her family feared the future: Dunkirk seemed to be a prelude to an inevitable German invasion. They knew Newcastle would be a potential target for the Nazis, yet they decided that they would not leave their home. Alice Bridges also mulled over the prospects of a German invasion. The thought of it turned her blood to ice. ‘We must win, we must win,’ she cried, ‘I will not live under a brutal power.’

  During the lovely June days of 1940, Natalie Tanner listened to events as they developed on the Continent, sleepily drifting in and out of strains of glory and battlefield bravery as she lay in bed while her husband busily dressed for work, listening again at 9 o’clock in the evening. Practically every day during the first half of June, except for 5 June – when Natalie was too depressed by the hot weather and by Churchill’s now famous ‘We will fight them on the beaches’ speech to do anything – one could find her enjoying the weather at the local swimming pool.

  She was not alone. On 10 June, Natalie arrived at the pool to find it in an utter mess from the bathers the previous day. The workers told her that at least 2,000 people had come out to swim and revel in the warm weather. She helped them clean up the bottles and trash left over from the throng of people, reflecting to herself, ‘There is no doubt, the British are a litterminded lot.’ Before she could enjoy the fruits of her labour, however, a number of soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force who had escaped the onslaught at Dunkirk showed up to bathe. By the time they left, the sun had gone in and Natalie only took a quick, though refreshing, swim. Later that day, she went into nearby Bradford and talked over events with the regulars at her favourite cafe.

  Across the English Channel in Paris, coal-black plumes rose from the city, obscuring the deep blue skies above. Large fires emanated from the petrol reserves that were purposely burned to keep them out of the invading army’s hands, and smaller fires trickled forth from the houses and buildings that had suffered in Paris’ first air raid on 3 June. In that raid, three airports were destroyed and over 200 people died. When Alice heard of the bombing, she thought of the children in Paris and worried fearfully about the fate that awaited her own child. Irene Grant called for immediate retribution. ‘Get Berlin bombed,’ she cried. ‘Let the German people know fear. War is ruthless and must be.’

  A week later, with the Germans only nineteen miles from Paris, the French government abandoned the capital and headed south. To the indignation of many French soldiers streaming into the capital from the front, the government had decided not to defend Paris. To avoid mass destruction of property and lives, the French government declared it an ‘open city’. German troops walked into Paris on 14 June. ‘Paris fallen,’ Nella Last reported sadly. Her friends at the WVS now wondered when London would fall. The tension was nearly unbearable as Britons anxiously watched events unfold across the Channel; both Irene Grant and Nella Last confessed several times in the days after Dunkirk to feeling ‘terrified’ or ‘frightened’.

  Several days after the fall of Paris, Churchill met the French government on the run and urged them to fight, proposing a radical plan to unite the two nations officially. Although the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, was enthusiastic, he was overridden by the hero of the First World War, eighty-three-year-old Marshal Pétain, and French General Weygand. Pétain said that a Franco–British union would make France no more than a colony of Britain, and he preferred to deal with the Nazis. Weygand was confident that, once the Nazis turned their full force upon Britain, they would ‘wring her neck like a chicken’.3 It was better, they thought, to broker a peace on their own. On 22 June 1940, France signed an armistice ceasing hostilities with Germany; Britain had lost its last ally.

  The news of the fall of France shook Nella Last’s confidence. She now questioned everything that had carried her to this point. ‘My head felt as if it was full of broken glass instead of thoughts and I felt if I could only cry … For the first time in my life,’ she confessed, ‘I was unable to “ask” for courage and strength with the certainty I would receive it.’ But, as a domestic soldier, it was her duty to carry on. She sniffed sal volatile, splashed herself with water, put on a pretty flowered dress and a bit of rouge and lipstick, then went out to the garden and picked a few roses to liven up the table.

  The effort revived her. She regained her composure and had tea laid by the time her husband came home. The two shared significant glances when he walked in the door and she said simply, ‘Bad – very bad’, then poured the tea. As she passed by him, he drew her close and leaned up against her, looking up at her with the same fear in his eyes that she had recently felt herself. But hers had gone and, feeling ‘strong and sure’, she bent over to kiss him. Perhaps with admiration, amazement or a mixture of both, he quietly said, ‘You never lose courage or strength, my darling.’ Only she knew the struggle it had been to fight off the ‘bogey’ this time, but she kept that to herself and smiled. Such a confession, she thought, would ‘rob him of his faith’.

  In the dark period between the evacuation and the French defeat, Churchill rallied the people with his unforgettable doggedness and rhetorical mastery:

  We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall nev
er surrender.4

  The speech struck a chord in the British spirit and echoed down the halls of history from the moment the words were spoken, directly after the retreat at Dunkirk. When the Battle of France ended, he went to the people once again to prepare them for the mortal combat that was to come, beseeching them to:

  … brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’5

  But perhaps the famous cartoonist, David Low put the situation perfectly when he drew a British soldier standing on the coast of England, turbulent seas crashing all around, chin out, defiantly shaking his fist at the Continent, ‘Very well, Alone’.6

  Chapter Three: Very Well, Alone

  1 J.B. Priestley, Postscripts (London: W. Heinemann, 1940), p. 2.

  2 Quoted in Arthur Marwick, A History of the Modern British Isles, 1914–1999: Circumstances, Events and Outcomes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 139.

  3 Quoted in Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Vol. 2, Their Finest Hour (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), p. 187.

  4 Winston Churchill, Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches, ed. Winston S. Churchill (New York: Hyperion, 2003), p. 218.

  5 Ibid., p. 229.

  6 David Low, Europe at War: A History in Sixty Cartoons with Narrative Text (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1941), p. 81.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  OH GOD, WHAT A NIGHT

  As Alice Bridges put the final touches on her salad, the air-raid sirens went. Quickly she dashed up the stairs of her terraced home on the outskirts of Birmingham, scooped up her seven-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, and headed for the Anderson shelter in her back garden. There was no time to get the gas masks or any personal belongings – the planes were already overhead. Once she safely settled her daughter in the shelter, the ‘het-up’ feeling of terror and anxiety began to evaporate. It was her greatest fear that a bomb would fall on her house before she could get Jacq to safety. Alice relaxed a bit and listened to the bombs falling near them, all the while trying to wrap her mind around the fact that by the time the planes passed overhead, the bombs had already been released. It made her feel utterly helpless. There was little to do but to run for cover and hope that the bombs were not meant for you. Alice whispered a heartfelt ‘thanks to the Almighty’ that they’d been spared. Only a week before, at least ten people had died and twenty had been wounded in a raid only a few minutes’ walk from her house.

  Somehow, in that shelter of corrugated metal with the earth and sod of her garden covering it, Alice felt invincible. ‘I felt as though a magic ring had been drawn round our shelter,’ she wrote in her diary. Nervous pangs pierced her heart like a ‘sharp arrow’ every time she felt a bomb’s impact, but the arrows were not so much concern for herself and her family, Alice explained, as for the others she knew who suffered nearby.

  At midnight, the All Clear went and Alice and her husband jumped at the opportunity to get the essentials they had left in the rush caused by the siren a few hours before. She put the water on for tea, grabbed the masks and coats, took them down to the shelter and went back up for the tea. Another wave of planes sounded ominously in the distance. With the searchlights above illuminating the way, she ran through the garden, a boiling pot of tea under her arm and a ‘tray full of crocks and a bottle of milk’ wobbling precariously with each hurried step. Nearby, one shelter suffered a direct hit and four people were killed, but Alice and the tea made it. Once she put the tray down, she had a good laugh, ‘I must have looked daft … I breathed out, whew. It was a nice cup of tea though.’

  The night before the tea dash, 23 August 1940, the waves upon waves of bombers overhead sounded to her like a ‘layer pudding’: ‘Bless me another wave came over, then the warning, then more gun fire, more waves and so on … the gunfire were like the sprinkled currants.’ That night she dreamed she and Jacq were machine-gunned. Later, Alice reported that few were killed that night, but one woman she knew went to hospital because she had ‘smashed her face in’ falling down the stairs in the rush to get to safety.

  Two weeks had passed since the first siren awoke Alice from her sleep on the night of 8/9 August. Since then, she had recorded sirens about every three nights, waves of planes passing overhead, anti-aircraft fire (or ‘ack-ack’), and bombs falling. The enemy aircraft that released their bombs over Birmingham that August had drawn Alice and her fellow Brummies into the Battle of Britain.

  Soon after the fall of France in June 1940, Hitler and his commanders began drawing up plans for a full-scale invasion of Britain. At the same time, Hitler hoped to persuade the British government to agree to a peace settlement – the Führer insisted he ‘did not wish to destroy the British Empire’, but he would if his hand was forced.1 Furthermore, Hitler wanted to knock Britain out of the war quickly and thus neutralize any threat on the Western Front that might impede his planned move east against the Soviets. Considering the rapidity with which most of Western Europe had fallen to Nazi forces, an offer of peace may have seemed attractive to some Britons. But, aside from a few British diplomats and the former King Edward VIII (now the Duke of Windsor), German attempts at peacemaking were met with a defiant cold shoulder.

  According to the German invasion plan, code-named Sea Lion, German forces were to be in place by 15 September. Those forces would land at three sites on the 75-mile stretch of coastline between Brighton and Folkestone. Within the first two hours of invasion, the Nazis planned to put 80,000 soldiers ashore, 125,000 over the first three days. Parachutists would then land just inland, near Folkestone, block the Canterbury– Folkestone road and secure crossings over the Royal Military Canal, a 28-mile defensive canal stretching from Seabrook, Kent, to Cliff End, East Sussex, originally created to thwart a Napoleonic invasion. Other airborne troops were expected to hold the Downs behind Brighton. The German plan called for another ten infantry divisions (roughly 130,000 men) to be on British soil a week and a half after the initial invasion, followed by a second invasion force of Panzers and motorized divisions. Another nine divisions were to follow in the next two weeks, with eight divisions waiting in reserve.

  It was an ambitious plan, and, considering the strength of the Royal Navy defending its home waters, the German Naval Command was not optimistic. Air support was crucial for the invasion to succeed. Before invasion could commence, the RAF had to be neutralized, thus leaving the Luftwaffe with a free hand to harry and distract the Royal Navy in the Channel.

  The Germans bombed the Channel Islands on 28 June, killing over forty islanders. The military and about a third of the population had evacuated the islands on orders from Churchill’s War Cabinet just eight days before, and, finding the islands undefended, the Nazis quickly occupied Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney and Sark in the early days of July. At the same time, in preparation for the invasion and eventual occupation of mainland Britain, the Luftwaffe began a concerted attack on shipping in the Channel. Intermittent air raids over the mainland also commenced that July and August, as German bombers flew missions over the south and Midlands to gain experience and to test their navigational systems. The air raids that Bridges experienced in August were part of this prelude to invasion. The first of these was in the early hours of 9 August, when Alice Bridges was first woken by air-raid sirens. About forty German planes had flown over the Channel from Cherbourg on missions meant primarily to harass civilians. Bombs fell on Birmingham for the first time that night, while Dover, Norwich and Birkenhead were also hit.

  When the sirens went that night, Alice could hear her neighbour banging on the wall to get the Bridges’ attention; Alice knocked back in acknowledgement and then extended the favour to her other neighbour, banging on the wall and awaiting a response to ensure everyone was awake. Anxious commotion followed this neighbourly exchange as Bridges endeavoured to wake her daughter, mobilize her husband, get dressed, find shoes and gather together refreshment for the shelter. Luckily, Bridges�
�� neighbourhood was not targeted that night: it took ‘an age’ for everyone to assemble in the safety of the Anderson shelter. Instead, a lone bomber released his load of bombs over a suburban area in Erdington, several miles north of Bridges, before he headed home.

  Alice’s first encounter with the Luftwaffe resulted in a ‘good night’s sleep busted up’. Although nearly 200 civilians lost their lives in the intermittent air raids of July and early August, many had similar experiences to Alice’s. Since sleep seemed to be the largest casualty at this time, George Orwell called them ‘nuisance raids’.2

  On 13 August, dubbed ‘Eagle Day’ or Adlertag by the German High Command, the Luftwaffe shifted its attention towards knocking out the RAF and Britain’s aircraft production.3 All three Luftwaffe squadrons were thrown at airfields and air factories, flying both daytime and night-time sorties across Britain. The night of Adlertag, German planes dropped numerous empty parachutes across the Midlands and in the lowlands of Scotland to unnerve the population. The New British Broadcasting Station – a rogue radio station set up by the Germans and allegedly run by British ‘patriots’ in a secret English location – then announced that parachutists had landed near Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. The troops, purportedly dressed in civilian clothes or British uniforms, were said to be harboured by fifth columnists and were ready to neutralize anyone who got in their way with a secret ‘electro-magnetic death ray’.4 Rumours abounded, but those who bothered to check the facts would learn that no footprints were discovered near the abandoned parachutes. There were no hidden invaders waiting to massacre civilians with secret weapons.