Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  German bombers darkened Kentish skies during Operation Steinbock, which lasted from January to April 1944. While this period certainly tried Mitchell’s nerves and, indeed, got the better of her, the ‘baby blitz’ of 1944 was only a spike in the horrifying air traffic that continually buzzed overhead throughout the war. Indeed, in the months leading up to the concerted effort of Steinbock, Helen marked numerous air raids in her village.

  Although the 1940–1 blitz is the best known, and most intense, of the bombings over Britain, many – especially those in the south-east – endured an almost continual prospect of death and destruction from the air throughout the war. In the relatively quiet month of January 1943, for instance, thirty-eight children and six teachers were killed when a bomb hit their school during a raid on south-east London. And those living on the coastline were never safe from the so-called ‘tip ’n’ run raids’, where one or several planes materialized out of nowhere, rained bombs down and evaporated as quickly as they came. In May 1943, twenty-three young women working ack-ack in Great Yarmouth were killed when a tip ’n’ run raid dropped bombs on their hostel.

  In mid-October 1943, the local air raid damage assessor came to look over the damage done to the Mitchells’ carpentry shed. Helen often retreated to the shed to read, as, compared to her dark dungeon of a home, it had good natural light. Despite the fact that she essentially lived in the shed during the day, the assessor informed her that there were no available funds to patch up damaged outbuildings, much to Helen’s chagrin. He also reported that thirty-two bombs had dropped around the village during the previous week. Although windows were blown out across the district and ‘filth’ shaken from the rafters of Helen’s ‘dear olde place’ – requiring extra elbow grease to clean up – luckily there were no casualties.

  In February 1942, the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, had decided to strike at workers’ morale in Germany, selecting Lübeck, a beautiful and historic city on the Baltic. Harris didn’t think the town ‘a vital target’, but it was better, in his estimation, to decimate an ‘industrial town of moderate importance than to fail to destroy a large industrial city’.1 On 28/29 March, British bombers destroyed half the city.

  The Lübeck raids initiated another phase of the blitz on Britain. In retaliation for the bombing, Hitler ordered raids on tourist towns chosen from Baedeker’s Great Britain: A Handbook for Travellers. It was Hitler’s desire to attack civilians and centres of cultural and historical importance aggressively and thus exact the most severe damage on home front morale. ‘Terror attacks of a retaliatory nature are to be carried out against towns other than London,’ the order stated.2 Goebbels noted in his diary that,

  There was no other way of bringing the English to their senses. They belong to a class of human beings with whom you can talk only after you have first knocked out their teeth.3

  From April to June 1942, Exeter, Bath, Norwich, Canterbury and York were all targeted and suffered damage to medieval and Georgian buildings, as well as loss of life.

  It was during these so-called Baedeker raids that Natalie Tanner and her family came the closest to experiencing the blitz first hand. She awoke in the small hours of 29 April 1942 to sirens and distant thuds that rumbled the foundations of her home just outside Leeds. In the morning, she gathered that York had been hit. When she went with Hugh to collect his belongings from the mental hospital, where he’d spent the previous eight months because of his breakdown, she was shocked at the damage done to the train station. Other than that, nothing else seemed particularly out of place to her. She never mentioned the nearly 10,000 homes and businesses damaged, the destruction of the mid-fifteenth-century Guildhall, or the two hundred wounded and ninety-three left dead by the bombers.

  Sporadically between 31 May and 3 June 1942, approximately eighty bombers visited Canterbury, damaging buildings in the cathedral precincts, but causing little damage to the cathedral itself: some bombs fell on the roof, but failed to explode. Though she was not far from the cathedral town, the damage to Canterbury was not in the forefront of Helen’s thoughts. Tired of being cooped up inside, Margaret knocked on the door when the sirens went on 2 June, pleading with Helen to roam the village lanes with her. Helen bluntly refused and ‘got rid of her at the all clear’.

  That night, Helen’s thoughts strayed not to Canterbury, but across the Channel. ‘Can’t sleep for misery of thinking what it must be like in Germany with these raids,’ she noted in her diary. The night before the raids on Canterbury were carried out, 1,000 RAF bombers visited the historic city of Cologne in Germany, dropping 1,500 tons of bombs and causing significant damage. The so-called ‘Millennium’ bombing rendered over 40,000 people homeless, killed nearly 500 (on a par with the recent Baedeker raids carried out on Bath) and destroyed Cologne’s public transport, numerous factories and many buildings of historical importance.4

  Several months later, in July 1942, raiders visited Birmingham once again. For the first time in months, Alice Bridges and her family rushed down to the Anderson shelter in her garden. The sirens woke the family at 2 a.m.; Bridges scooped up her daughter and, laden with clothes, gas masks and her key to the shelter, she dashed through the backyard. Once Jacqueline was safe, Alice realized, ‘I had nothing to keep my reputation up.’ Back to the house she ran, returning to the shelter with her hair tidied and stockings on. By this time, the bombers came, ‘pouring across hell for leather’ on their way to the Rover works.

  Though Helen escaped to Oxfordshire during the ‘baby blitz’ of 1944, the war was never very far away. She had met her first Americans in Oxford and thought them quiet and a little too loose with their money. When she finally settled in Minehead after her stay with Francine, she saw more of them, training on the hills outside the town by day, and loudly socializing below her window at night.

  The ‘friendly invasion’ of Americans started in early 1942, but began to build rapidly in late 1943 and early 1944.5 Just prior to D-Day in June 1944, American soldiers and support staff in Britain numbered over 1.5 million. Americans brought with them money, cigarettes, gum and easy smiles. Much to the dismay of British soldiers and moralists alike, they wooed giddy girls and, despite the fact that many ordinary Britons, like Alice Bridges and Helen Mitchell, had seen more bloodshed and destruction than the Americans had, they acted as if they were heroes and saviours. It wasn’t long before American arrogance, affluence and ebullience touched a raw nerve. ‘What’s wrong with the Yank Army?’ a friend asked Natalie. The answer was the oft-heard sentiment, ‘They are overpaid, overdressed, oversexed and over here.’

  As the gradual build-up of American troops suggests, talk of a possible invasion of Western Europe had been in the news and bandied about in pubs for some time. After Hitler reneged on the Nazi–Soviet Pact and ordered troops into Russia in the summer of 1941, Stalin implored the Western Allies to open up a front in the west to take some of the heat off the German onslaught. Many at home agreed, and a great cry of ‘Second Front Now!’ erupted from communists and Conservatives alike in Britain. The slogan was scrawled on walls around the country, and mass demonstrations gathered to call for action on the part of the government. In the event, the opening of another front came not in France, as Stalin had hoped, but rather in Africa in 1942, in the action that eventually allowed for the invasion of Europe through Italy in 1943. While this did alleviate some of the pressure on Russia, it was generally accepted that occupied France must be invaded and liberated to knock Germany out of the war.

  In the summers of 1942 and 1943, M-O questioned their diarists about their feelings regarding the possibility of invading the French coast. The overall tenor of the response was one of anxious fear surrounding the inevitability of impending, but necessary, doom. This fear was especially palpable at the nadir of British fortunes in 1942, while the country was still reeling from the losses of Singapore and Tobruk. The fall of Tobruk in Libya to the Germans – and the capture of the 33,000 British
soldiers garrisoned there – was, as Churchill admitted, a disgrace that nearly cost him the premiership. In the wake of such stunning defeats, Nella Last was frightened by the very words ‘second front’, but her mind told her ‘timorous heart we must go sooner or later’. Helen Mitchell felt that ‘We should only make a mess of it,’ and thought it was better to do nothing and let the Germans tire themselves out. Edie Rutherford tried not to think about it. ‘I just can’t bear … it,’ she admitted. ‘My blood runs cold because I feel that if we do it we shall have to do it in such force that the slaughter will be worse than anything yet seen.’

  After a raid on Dieppe in August 1942 decimated a trial invasion force of 6,000 troops, mostly Canadian, the women’s fears seemed validated and the ‘Second Front Now!’ movement lost some of its exuberance. For the diarists, Dieppe was a ‘confusing’ and impotent jab at a seemingly impervious foe. ‘The Germans seem so dreadfully strong,’ Nella Last worried. Helen Mitchell was simply ‘depressed’ by the raid, and they all wondered why the military would attempt such an ill-planned and costly adventure.

  There was more confidence in 1943, especially after the victory at El Alamein in November 1942, the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in January 1943 and Rommel’s surrender in the sands of North Africa in May, the very month that M-O put the question once again to its writers. But still, everyone dreaded the massive loss of life that they knew in their hearts – and for which the government braced them – was coming. The novelist and a fellow Mass-Observation diarist Naomi Mitchison perhaps struck the tone best when, anticipating D-Day in May 1944, she wrote,

  It’s at the back of one’s thoughts all the time, like a wave, a tidal wave coming in from the horizon blotting out everything. In ten years’ time, nobody will know … what the word [second front] meant emotionally to all of us.6

  In the spring of 1944, rumours percolated and bets were placed as to when the much-talked about second front would begin. Churchill himself fuelled speculation when, in March, he alluded to the impending invasion and beseeched the people to prepare for the ‘hour of our greatest effort’, when the Allies would ‘hurl themselves upon the foe and batter out the life of the cruellest tyranny which has ever sought to bar the progress of mankind’.7 Around Minehead, American training operations intensified as guns blazed continuously that spring. Everyone anxiously awaited the much-anticipated, but dreaded, opening of the second front. On a beautiful summer-like day in late April, Helen Mitchell sat by the sea and tried to rest. Though everyone around her seemed happy, she nonetheless felt as though ‘We’re on edge of volcano.’

  While rumours about the invasion were spreading rapidly in early 1944, the most important social reform to be enacted during the war was being piloted through Parliament. The desultory state of education and its deeply classed structure had been an issue for debate since the beginning of the war, especially when evacuation and army recruitment laid bare the problems of the system. In the first year of war, as schools evacuated in droves from the cities, thousands of children found there were not enough classrooms or teachers to educate them; by January 1940, a million children had been out of school for four months. Not only were educational resources obviously lacking, but the realities of the class system came under scrutiny when it was learned that many army recruits had a very limited education, some being illiterate or having extremely low literacy. These recruits were the product of an education system that offered secondary education only to those who could pay the fees. Most working-class children left school at fourteen with only an elementary education.

  The Education Act (also known as the Butler Act) sought to redress these issues. With this new act, a minister of education was created, with the power to implement nationwide education policies and to balance out discrepancies in resources and skills in schools across England and Wales. The Act would also raise the school-leaving age to fifteen, and eventually to sixteen (which did not happen in actuality until 1971). More importantly, the Act made access to secondary education free, thus theoretically providing equality of opportunity. Furthermore, university education was made available to qualified students, regardless of their ability to pay.

  Learning of the new Act, Alice Bridges reflected on her own educational experience. She ‘bitterly regretted’ that she had been denied an opportunity to attend university. All her life, she pursued intellectual endeavours – such as the weekly discussion group she attended – but often felt inadequate when she mixed with others who had had access to higher education. With the Butler Act, though disappointed she herself might not benefit, she was happy that the university provision might in future help others like her (and particularly her daughter). Furthermore, she thought that a general raising of academic standards would affect the standard of living positively for all. And she hoped that, with a more educated populace, war might eventually be eradicated. ‘Shall we with education be able to keep our own country from war?’ Alice wondered, ‘Shall we be able to climb high enough to see the futility of wars and that inevitably it is the common man who saves us in dire need?’

  The Norwood Report, which informed the new Education Act, proposed three types of learners: academically inclined scholars, the technically or mechanically inclined, and the ‘modern’. Out of this reasoning developed three types of secondary education, or a tripartite system: grammar schools offered a liberal education that was preparatory to university; technical schools provided education for practical occupations such as technicians or engineering; finally, secondary modern schools were to provide a rounded educational experience neither too academic nor too technical. Which of the three paths a student would take was determined by the 11-plus exam.

  Former teacher Irene Grant was a keen supporter of the Butler Act, even if it was too late for her or her family to capitalize on. She and her husband Tom were life-long learners who had both inherited the thirst for knowledge from their fathers, despite the fact that their time at school had been so short. ‘How they’d [Tom and Irene’s fathers] love to have stayed on at school,’ she mused. In Grant’s estimation, raising the school-leaving age to fifteen, and eventually sixteen, gave respectable and upwardly mobile working-class individuals (like her) an opportunity to continue to learn before being shoved off to work. Additionally, based on her own experience in the classroom, she hoped that the new system would allow students to ‘pick and choose what subjects they wish to learn’ and, more importantly, ‘to change their minds’. After children learned the basics, which to her included basic darning and dressmaking for girls, students should be allowed to ‘get on with the jobs they are interested in’. While some of the flexibility of which Grant dreamed would not come to fruition until the advent of comprehensive schools several decades later, the Butler Act did lay the foundations for a better and more equitable educational experience, a fact Irene seemed to recognize very early on.

  While wide-ranging support was given to the Act as a step towards a better future, the passage of the Butler Act also made a statement about the limited extent to which the war affected women’s rights. During the debates, Clause 82, which stipulated that male and female teachers receive equal pay for equal work, was narrowly passed. Edie Rutherford noted this event with glee. She saw the amendment as ‘the thin end of the wedge’; if equal pay was adopted in teaching, trades and professions would soon have to implement equal pay, she reasoned. After all, Edie told M-O, ‘Sex distinction is entirely artificial and man arranged, and when I say man I mean MAN not mankind!’

  But Rutherford’s excitement would not last, for Churchill killed the amendment by forcing a vote of confidence. He moved that Clause 82 be stricken from the bill and, further, stressed that any opposition to such a move would be seen as an act of defiance against the government. Edie was incensed at Churchill’s actions, especially as the Allies prepared to wind up the war with Germany, and called it a ‘low down trick’ to make a domestic issue a matter of international importance simply because ‘He can’t have things his way.�
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  Amid the buzz over the opening of a new front in Western Europe and the domestic debates over education and equal pay, few noticed the significant turn of events in the east that spring. To Edie Rutherford, it was ‘the Burma scrap’ and it was ‘incredible’. Despite her extreme concern over all matters imperial, however, Rutherford made no other mention, and certainly none of the others felt it worthy of note in their diaries. Nevertheless, the action that began in the north-east corner of India on 17 April 1944 would ultimately prove to be the worst military defeat in Japanese history, and would also illustrate the strength of Indian loyalty – or at least, their commitment to ousting the Japanese from their land. That spring, Indian forces, courageously fighting alongside British soldiers, fought a fierce jungle battle against the Japanese. Over 80,000 Japanese were killed. Days later, Gandhi, who had since recovered from his 1943 hunger strike, was released from prison.

  Back home, everyone seemed focused exclusively on the Western Front. Any lull in news was taken as a sign of the impending push. People tried to divine the meanings of mundane military orders. Was it significant that leave had been suspended? Did it matter that soldiers were redirecting their mail?

  Edie Rutherford had a bet of 1 shilling with her husband that ‘we jump on to Continent from this side’ on Whitsun weekend. She lost the bet. Conversations Edie overheard in Sheffield suggested that the invasion would happen when Rome fell, which seemed likely to happen any day that May. But her husband, Sid, figured that the military simply needed time to build enough ‘jet propelled aircraft’ to overwhelm the enemy before it could launch the offensive.