Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  It was a reasonable and quite rational speech, informing the people of a long, hard road ahead: the Nazis must be defeated, then the Japanese, after which the international landscape needed to be shored up. Furthermore, he warned his listeners, ‘There will be famine to take care of,’ Europe and Asia would have to be rebuilt and attempts at constructing a lasting international peace must be made.22 It was a typical, sobering Churchillian speech and did nothing to excite in the people hope for a promising post-war future. Despite his nod to a nebulous Four Years’ Plan, the Prime Minister fooled few about his agenda. He was a bulldog with a bone – the war, and only the war, was his concern.

  Irene Grant followed the political debates of 1943 closely, but she was also still actively fighting Tom over buying a home. In February of that year, Irene fell in love with a spacious home in a better neighbourhood. At every mention of the new home Tom argued vehemently against it. He tried every line of defence to dissuade Irene, but he could not dampen her enthusiasm. During one argument, her husband told her that she would regret the move once it was made, but she shot back,

  Tom, you hate change. At ninety you’d love your name in the papers as the old duck who lived in one spot for 90 years. I loathe this inconvenient hole.

  The cost of the home was much higher than she had hoped, but Irene finally convinced Tom that they could afford it. However, when she thought all was settled, the deal fell through, and once more she and her daughters began house-hunting. Irene was devastated, but would not swerve from her mission to find a new home.

  Taking time out of her schedule to catch Churchill’s speech, Irene reported to M-O that she was convinced he was solely a war leader and she didn’t trust him in the peace, since ‘He’s not for the People.’ Still, she liked the speech and seemed to grasp at anything positive in it. Remembering her own abridged education, she was probably most attracted to his inclusion of education reform, in which he stated, ‘No one who can take advantage of a higher education should be denied this chance.’ Friends of Irene were less accepting of his speech, however, and thought that the Prime Minister made a poor showing and had even faked his illness because he did not want to face the issue.

  Edie Rutherford made an informal poll of her new workmates for M-O and found that less than fifty per cent had tuned into the Prime Minister’s speech. Those who did listen had ‘expected something sensational’, but were ‘disappointed’ because he said nothing that interested them. ‘Can you believe that?’ she wrote to M-O in disbelief. As for herself, Edie cheered Churchill. A successful outcome to the war was also her priority, and additionally she believed his Four Years’ Plan had gone a good way to undermining communists who, she feared, were gaining support in the wake of the Beveridge Plan.

  For most, however, Churchill’s speech stuck a pin in the debate, deflating the growing hopes for a better peace, and a sorrowful disillusionment seemed to creep into society. Listening to Churchill that night, Nella Last sadly wondered whether talk of reform would have any real results; would it, she wrote in her diary, ‘change people’s minds, give them ideals, a new standard of “living” which will lift them and enable them to “lift others”? Or when the “shouting and the tumult dies” will things be “as they were”?’

  Chapter Eight: Fight Like Hell Until All Are Equal

  1 Priestley, Postscripts, p. 42.

  2 Ibid., p. 21.

  3 Ibid., p. 7.

  4 Ibid., p. 33.

  5 Ibid., p. 45.

  6 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 1980), p. 104.

  7 ‘Beveridge Plan Criticized’, The Times, 8 May 1942 p. 4E; ‘Parliament and the Beveridge Plan’, The Times, 6 October 1942, p. 5E.

  8 Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997; 2nd edn), p. 376.

  9 Calder, The People’s War, p. 527.

  10 Quoted in Harris, William Beveridge, p. 413.

  11 Quoted in ibid., p. 413.

  12 ITMA transcript, 4 December 1942, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park.

  13 Quoted in Michael Bromley, ‘Was it the Mirror Wot Won it? The Development of the Tabloid Press During the Second World War’, in. Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill, eds, ‘Millions Like Us’? British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), p. 114.

  14 Harris, William Beveridge, p. 366.

  15 Ibid., p. 420.

  16 Quoted in Calder, The People’s War, p. 530.

  17 Harris, William Beveridge, p. 429.

  18 William Beveridge, ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services Report – Executive Summary’, Cmd 6404, November 1942, at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1942beveridge.html

  19 Woman’s Own, 5 March 1943, p. 7.

  20 Good Housekeeping, March 1943, p. 1.

  21 Calder, The People’s War, pp. 547–9.

  22 Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963: Vol. 7, 1943–1949, ed. Robert Rhodes James (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), 21 March 1943, pp. 6755–65.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DON’T LET’S BE BEASTLY TO THE HUN

  Edie Rutherford stood in her kitchen preparing tea, ruminating over the recent BBC news reports about RAF raids on Berlin. A number of bombers had been lost the previous evening – 5 September 1943. Echoes of Wynford Vaughan Thomas’ BBC broadcast from a Lancaster bomber under heavy fire two nights earlier (replayed several times, on popular demand) danced relentlessly in and out of the fears she harboured over the lost airmen.

  A knock at the door jolted Edie from her thoughts. As she opened the door, a young woman from a nearby flat thrust a telegram into her hand. Before Edie had a chance to read it, Ethel managed to muster a stammered, ‘Mrs Rutherford, Henry’s missing’. Edie drew Ethel in at once and wrapped her arms around the young woman, who broke down in sobs. Edie held her like this for some time, softly cursing ‘this blasted war’ as Ethel wept.

  ‘He isn’t dead,’ Ethel kept repeating, ‘he was home only last Wednesday.’ Ethel looked at Edie and attempted a rational explanation, ‘I’m sure he isn’t dead … He’s alive somewhere and worrying because he knows I’ll get this telegram to upset me.’ Edie read the telegram. ‘Regret to inform you your husband missing operations night Sept 5/6.’ She felt as if her ‘inside had fallen out’: Henry was one of the missing airmen she had heard about only that morning; she could hardly believe it. Edie did her best to comfort Ethel, but, she confessed, it was difficult to know what to say.

  Two days later, still reeling from the loss of Henry and the grief of Ethel, Edie was cheered by the arrival of a parcel from family in South Africa. The package was full of hard-to-find rationed treats: tea, sugar, chocolate and plump, juicy raisins. She set aside some for herself and Sid, then divided the gift into small packets for friends and neighbours. Soon, the dark cloud of Ethel’s recent loss began to recede to the edges of her heart. The sun shone and the weather was glorious; so was the news.

  Over the six o’clock news that night, Edie learned that Italy had surrendered. Immediately, her mind sped to South Africa, where she knew her countrymen and women would be rejoicing, knowing that the release of South African troops, or ‘Springboks’, captured in fighting in North Africa must now be imminent. The Ethiopians, who had been ruthlessly bombed into submission by the Italians in 1936, also had much to rejoice, she reflected. The British ‘on this island’, however, took the news very ‘soberly’. Indeed, she thought that the BBC made a ‘rather pathetic attempt’ to celebrate the victory. Helen Mitchell, on the other hand, thought the celebrations went a bit overboard. Her take on the BBC’s coverage was ‘cheap as usual’ – she hated premature triumph, and the ceaseless playing of patriotic songs annoyed her. She was especially chafed by what she thought was jingoistic gloating by the BBC, knowing in her bones that something sinister must lurk just around the corner. Bad news had been so much a part of day-to-day life during the war that it took time, Edie explained to M-O, for many to
accept that Italy had actually ‘packed up’.

  The road that led to Italy’s capitulation was built earlier that year, after Allied troops had forced the Germans out of North Africa. Once ensconced in North Africa themselves, the Allies embarked on an invasion of Europe – through Sicily. Churchill believed that Italy was the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Axis in Europe and pushed his plan with the Americans.1 It was not the ‘second front’ in the west for which Stalin had been calling ever since the Germans had attacked the Soviets in the summer of 1941, but it would eventually leach important resources from the Nazi war machine in the east, and it would prove integral in the downfall of Hitler’s ally.

  On 10 July 1943, Allied troops began the largest seaborne assault of the war – larger than the Normandy landings a year later, with much longer distances to overcome. Two weeks later, Mussolini fell from political power and was replaced by the king, who installed a new leader, former Commander-in-Chief in Ethiopia, Marshal Badoglio. Edie listened in and read the news with her usual piqued interest that summer, but the image became ever more vivid as she learned first-hand about conditions on the ground from her nephew who flew sorties for the RAF, ferrying injured soldiers – both Allied and Axis – to treatment in Africa. The rations in Sicily, he complained, were ‘pommy’ rations, not the generous issues he was used to in the Middle East or South Africa. Luckily, he told Edie, the Sicilians were willing to trade bully beef for fresh fruit and eggs.

  By the end of August, Sicily was comfortably in Allied hands, and on 8 September the new Italian government under Badoglio announced an armistice. Helen Mitchell noted in her diary that she was glad Italy was out of the war, for now, ‘It [and its artistic, historic and religious treasures] would not be smashed to pieces.’ But the battle for Italy was hardly over. German troops flooded in to shore up their erstwhile ally’s defences, presenting a shocking and bloody resistance to British and American servicemen, who had expected a friendly reception by cowed Italians, when they attempted landings on mainland Italy on 9 August. Instead it took three weeks for the troops to reach the initial objective of Naples, less than forty miles up the western coast of Italy.

  The Germans fell back in a measured retreat towards Rome, putting up a ferocious defence in the mountains south of the city. The Allies had expected to be in Rome by the end of October, but that triumphal entrance would have to wait another eight months, until the eve of the D-Day landings in June 1944. By November 1943, the usually optimistic Edie Rutherford sighed, ‘I don’t believe we’ll ever reach Rome.’ Churchill summed up the depressing stagnation that autumn and winter on the Italian peninsula as ‘scandalous’.2 Newspapers back home blamed the slow progress on the weather, but that was hardly convincing or comforting, as the Russians were advancing in their theatre.

  While the Allies were establishing a bridgehead to Europe through Italy, and fighting their way north in 1943, Allied air raids on Germany also intensified. At the Casablanca conference in January of that year, British and American leadership decided that Sicily would be the target for an Allied invasion of Europe. The Allies also resolved to bring about the

  … progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.3

  This translated into a large-scale bombing campaign against Germany, with Americans flying daylight raids on significant enemy installations while British flyers hit cities at night, a policy that Churchill referred to in the House of Commons as ‘saturation’.4 The campaign fuelled competition between the British and American air forces to wreak the most devastation on their foe – the competition in which Edie’s neighbour, Henry, was lost over Berlin.

  The RAF proved its aerial ascendancy in this deadly and terrifying war game, especially after the devastation wrought on the German port city of Hamburg in July and August 1943. Every other night in the last week of July, over 750 British bombers attacked the city with horrifying effect. On the night of the 27th, incendiary bombs whipped up hurricane force winds in the city that fed a firestorm, covering over six miles and reaching temperatures of 1,000 °C. Those in the path of the storm were suffocated to death before the fires incinerated them. Between 40,000 and 50,000 people were killed during the RAF’s weeklong bombing campaign (code-named a sickeningly apt Operation Gomorrah) over the city.5 The Times estimated that the operation was nearly 100 times more devastating than the Coventry raid in November 1940. In just four nights of bombing the RAF had exacted retribution for two-thirds of all British air raid fatalities.

  Word of the 1943 bombing campaigns over Germany filtered back to Britain on a regular basis, in newspapers and over the air. Nella Last was horrified by the reports of aerial destruction. Since June 1942, her attention had been focused almost solely on setting up a Red Cross shop to raise funds for prisoners of war. By 1943, the work had become daunting, ‘The shop is taking more time than I thought,’ she confessed to M-O. The morning after a particularly hard day at the shop, Nella lingered in bed for some time, dreaming of her idea of ‘heaven’; lying ‘on a sunny beach’ wallowing in ‘books, oranges, grapes, thinly cut bread and lots of country butter on it, lots of milk for my food’. In her fantasy, she would ‘let peace and quiet soak into me. . . no reminding myself I was a soldier, no hurried scramble round with a duster with an eye on the clock’.

  Although she was ‘dreadfully tired’ most of the time, she fought through it because she believed in the shop’s mission. Every shilling, every pound raised was a triumph, for she knew that ‘10/-means comfort to a poor forgotten man.’ The dreadful tiredness of her efforts were rewarded in the Red Cross packages sent to prisoners of war across Europe and Asia, little packages of hope for a prisoner, of ‘food to eat and the knowledge that someone is still thinking of him although he is shut away like a savage beast’. She thought of the death and destruction wrought in the air raids across Germany and declared that she ‘could never work so hard for “bombs to drop on Berlin”’.

  The Times reported the Hamburg attacks with a characteristic objectivity steeped in statistics that belied the true devastation, citing, for instance, the 2,300 pounds of bombs dropped on the city on 25 July and the pillar of smoke that rose four miles into the sky as a result. Nearly a week later, it was reported that the city was still alight, while bombers continued to hit targets that had so far escaped the wrath of the RAF – ‘dropping bombs at the rate of more than 50 tons a minute’.6 The Times focused overwhelmingly on the tactical significance of the bombings – the docks, the factories, the U-boat installation. Only later was the human tragedy finally revealed, when the paper reported that ‘chaos’ had ensued in the city; refugees were flooding towards Denmark, and panicked inhabitants were ‘senselessly throwing furniture and other possessions through the windows, causing injuries to many persons who were rushing along the streets in search of shelter’.7 For those individuals back in Britain who had experienced similar enemy onslaughts, such news reporting was unnecessary: the reality of the ‘collateral damage’ visited upon the citizens of these important targets could hardly be forgotten. Despite the statistics and attempted objectivity, the inevitable human impact underlying these actions was highly unnerving for Britons who themselves had braved enemy bombings.

  According to a Gallup poll taken near the end of the worst of the Blitz in 1941, many people who never or rarely lived through bombings were the most keen to exact reprisals on the Germans, while those who actually suffered from the Blitz were less likely to do so. Having experienced air raids first-hand and having suffered great psychological trauma from them, Helen Mitchell understood, and felt deeply, the conflicts that the question evoked. As with so much else in her life, the bombing of German cities made her ‘too miserable for words’. As she listened to the planes drone over her Kent home, Helen admitted that she ‘loathed the RAF for what they were going to do’, but she could not help but valo
rize them for their bravery in defending Britain (and thus thwarting German bombs from landing on her house). Still, she concluded that aerial bombing was ‘despicably cowardly as a form of warfare’ because more innocent people were victimized than the guilty were punished.

  There were those, however, who did harbour vindictive feelings of righteous retribution, such as Alice Bridges, who was convinced that the war had demonstrated that all Germans were incapable of living peaceably, and therefore, ‘It’s time they were wiped out sufficiently to stop them becoming a menace.’ Others, like Mitchell, were not so willing to tar all Germans with the same brush. Many considered there to be a difference between Nazis – who started the war, spread hatred and inflicted suffering and death – and the ordinary Germans who were apathetic victims of the Nazi regime and did not actively seek wholesale destruction. Irene Grant was happy to have ‘Hitler and Company … torn limb to limb’ for their war crimes, but she had difficulty assigning such a fate to the rest of Germany.

  Nella Last believed that Germans were just like Britons – some were good and others evil. Wholesale punishment for all Germans could not be the answer, and Nella worried that bombs did not discriminate. ‘If we could kill Nazi SS and Gestapo, I’d glory in the bombing and think it just retribution,’ she reasoned. At the same time, she was deeply concerned for the ‘innocent little children and frightened people who are as sick of war as we are’, and who would necessarily become collateral victims of such reprisals.