The Air Ministry in London had also been concerned about the possible bombing of its own aircraft factories and aerodromes as well as other prominent civil structures. At the end of 1938, it opened a camouflage design section at the ministry offices, Adastral House, on the north-east corner of the Aldwych where it meets Kingsway, opposite the large American-style office block, Bush House. Captain Lancelot Glasson, MC, who had lost a leg as one of Wyatt’s camoufleurs in WW1, was in charge there. Himself a painter, Glasson started gathering visual artists who knew something about flying. Among them was Captain Gilbert Solomon, a former pilot in the RFC who happened to be the nephew of the first British camoufleur Solomon J. Solomon (who had died in 1928). Another was Richard Carline who, with his brother Sydney, had also flown in the RFC and made sketches from the air over the Middle East which they later turned into superb oil paintings for the Imperial War Museum. (Their sister Hilda married the artist Stanley Spencer.) In May 1939, Tom Monnington, a future President of the Royal Academy, joined, and Leon Underwood, first inducted by Solomon J. Solomon at Wimereux, came forward with a sculptor’s three-dimensional ideas. Lieutenant Colonel C. H. R. Chesney, DSO, also formerly of Wimereux, started writing The Art of Camouflage (Robert Hale, 1941) partly to continue his old disagreements with Solomon about the effectiveness of paint in camouflage, and to stress the importance of deception. Remnants of the old team were re-assembled to face the new threat.
Adastral House had a large studio and a viewing room, rather like Wilkinson’s former studios at the Royal Academy, where models of hundreds of ‘key points’ in Britain’s industrial infrastructure – factories, power stations, gasworks, oil tanks, water reservoirs, docks, railways, etc. – could be painted and looked at from various angles. Special matte paints in fourteen prescribed tones were manufactured. In July 1939, ARP Handbook No. 11 recommended two painting techniques that could be combined for large buildings: distortion of form, and imitation of surroundings. Thus, aided by a 50 per cent government grant, a factory roof could have its symmetries disrupted and imitations of neighbouring streets, houses and back gardens painted upon it. Clause 36 of the 1939 Civil Defence Bill gave the Government the power to require factories and public utilities to be camouflaged, so a new industry sprang up to satisfy the need. The Ministry of Supply also started encouraging ‘groups of fishermen and their families’ to braid fishing nets for camouflage purposes: ‘Nets are needed for obscuring guns, ammunition wagons, tanks, buildings, stores, and many other things which it is desirable to conceal from enemy aircraft.’ A Camouflage Advisory Panel including the distinguished artist Paul Nash and the biologist Hugh Cott was set up on 2 August 1939 to identify key areas for emergency camouflage. (Cott’s piece in The Times had been noticed.)
The paint manufacturers were, for their own commercial reasons, obviously keen to encourage everyone to paint everything everywhere, and non-governmental organisations and individuals also stepped forward with ideas for ‘misleading the bomber’. Among the consultancies was the Industrial Camouflage Research Unit, who worked from the architect Ernö Goldfinger’s offices in Bedford Square. Despite the grand name, this was actually just some young painters scuffling about trying to do something after the outbreak of war. Among them was Julian Trevelyan, a British Surrealist and Mass Observer who had taken hallucinogens three times under medical supervision to get a revelation of universal beauty: ‘I had, under Mescalin, fallen in love with a sausage roll and with a piece of crumpled newspaper from out of the pig-bucket.’ He had been at the opening of the Spanish Republic’s pavilion in Paris in June 1937 when Picasso’s Guernica was first shown, and thought it the shining peak of the Spaniard’s genius. He had marched with the Surrealists on May Day 1938 in a top hat and a Neville Chamberlain mask, wearing the sign ‘Chamberlain Must Go’. Trevelyan was on the last peacetime ferry out of St Malo to Southampton, together with the beautiful photographer Lee Miller and her future husband, the Surrealist, artist, writer and collector, Roland Penrose, who had just been staying with Max Ernst in Avignon and Pablo Picasso in Antibes. Their train arrived at Waterloo Station on Sunday morning, 3 September, to the wail of the first air-raid sirens and the sight of ARP wardens in white tin hats carrying wooden football rattles to sound in case of gas. Watching the silver barrage balloons rising into the blue sky, Trevelyan wondered if Surrealism could outdo the oddity of war. In fact, the arcane literary and cultural movement barely survived the outbreak of hostilities.
Trevelyan and Penrose joined the printmaker Bill Hayter and the engraver Buckland Wright in offering their services as camoufleurs. ‘In those early days it was easy to sell any kind of camouflage,’ wrote Trevelyan. Penrose confirmed: ‘It was thought by many people that camouflage was simply a question of painting stripes over an object.’ A rash of squiggly green patterns was breaking out across the country, along with a fanciful realism – palm trees on gasworks – of laughable conspicuousness. Trevelyan saw it as a kind of magical ritual, doing your bit to ward off harm. The apotropaic rites included criss-crossing paper strips across windows to stop glass blasting into splinters, and daubing dung-coloured wiggles and splotches on the house roof or the garden shed or over the car in order to aroint aircraft. Trevelyan admitted that few members of the Industrial Camouflage Research Unit had flown much and they knew little more about the planes they were trying to deceive than most amateurs.
There was no shortage of artists applying to do civil and industrial camouflage. By 5 October 1939 The Times was announcing ‘No More Camouflage Workers Needed’. Sufficient candidates ‘have been examined by a selection committee, with a view to the compilation of a section of the central register which is now being prepared for the national service department of the Ministry of Labour’. In the House of Commons on 25 October, A. P. Herbert asked the Prime Minister to consider setting up a Department of the Arts, to maintain artistic effort and education, and to use artists’ powers fully and effectively ‘for the purposes of war’. Neville Chamberlain did not think that was necessary, but he was pleased to note that a Central Institute of Art and Design had recently been formed to achieve such ends.
The Central Institute of Art and Design was set up by a panel that included Kenneth Clark, who had been director of the National Gallery and surveyor of the King’s pictures since 1934, and Jack Beddington, the Jewish publicity manager of Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, an industrial patron who used artists of the calibre of Edward Bawden, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Rex Whistler in his poster and press campaigns to market oil and petrol, and gave the director Paul Rotha his first leg-up as a documentary film-maker. Jack Beddington had positioned Shell cleverly in the 1930s, choosing not to deface the countryside with fixed advertisements but to decorate Shell’s mobile lorries and tankers with colourful slogans instead, and had been canny enough to take up an idea from John Betjeman and start the popular Shell County Guides in 1934. Shell-Mex and BP thus in effect camouflaged themselves with ‘green’ credentials, good practice for Beddington’s later PR work in the national interest.
The declaration of war meant a cabinet reshuffle, and Sir John Anderson became Minister for Home Security, responsible for civil camouflage. In March 1940, Home Security reorganised it all under a Directorate of Camouflage, headquartered in Leamington Spa, under Wing Commander T. R. Cave-Brown-Cave. In May 1940 the War Office set up a Camouflage Development and Training Centre that eventually ended up at Farnham Castle, near Aldershot, not far from Wyatt’s group of camoufleurs at Farnborough. The man put in charge of the War Office Camouflage Centre was Colonel Frederick Beddington, Jack’s brother, who had been a sniper in the Great War before training at the Slade. From Beaumetz in France, he had been running the British Expeditionary Force’s camouflage, which featured in the first dispatch by the first BBC radio war correspondent, Richard Dimbleby, on 11 October 1939. Everything worked through personal contacts in those days. Frederick Beddington’s chief instructor was Colonel Richard McLean Buckley who had also worke
d with Solomon J. Solomon in the Great War. Another prospective camoufleur, Geoffrey Barkas, had been in the British film industry for years making features (Palaver, Q-Ships, Tell England) and documentaries (Tall Timber Tales, Wings over Everest) in Africa, India and Canada, before getting a job with Jack Beddington touring a Shell promotional show called ‘How Your Motor Car Works’. When Barkas telephoned Beddington to try and get into filming the war, Jack recommended him to his brother Freddie. Thus Geoffrey Barkas and Julian Trevelyan were picked to become Camouflage Officers in the Royal Engineers.
It was all something of a boys’ club and much of the early work was amateurish. The artist who best catches some of the absurdity of British camouflage at this time was the graphic genius William Heath Robinson, whose son Oliver Heath Robinson taught camouflage at Farnham. The outbreak of WW2 had brought 67-year-old Heath Robinson back to The Sketch, for whom he had done drawings in WW1, and his subject matter now became the English defence of the Home Front through ridiculously serious camouflage and seriously ridiculous deception.
16
A Great Blow Between the Eyes
‘The beginnings of any war by the British’, wrote General Archibald Wavell, ‘are always marked by improvidence, improvisations, and too often, alas, impossibilities being asked of the troops.’ The Phoney War turned real and bloody in Norway. While no one could doubt British courage and phlegm in what Churchill called ‘the first main clinch of the war’, the Germans managed to deceive their intelligence, wrong-foot their diplomacy and outmanoeuvre and outgun their armed services. The Norwegian campaign would end in retreat and evacuation.
All Scandinavia was neutral at the start of WW2. In January 1940, Britain began secret planning to violate that neutrality by stopping German ships, mining the waters and seizing the port of Narvik in Norway to prevent the winter export of Swedish iron ore for Germany’s military industries. Britain also planned to send an Anglo-French expeditionary force to help the Finns in their fight against the Russians. But on 9 April 1940, Germany jumped the gun by suddenly invading Denmark and Norway. The Germans seized Narvik by a Trojan-horse deception: German iron-ore ships apparently waiting peacefully in the harbour suddenly disgorged hidden troops. (The British later did the same at Namsos in Norway, disembarking troops at night, hiding all traces from reconnaissance aircraft by day.) In the silky words of Joseph Goebbels, both Denmark and Norway were ‘taken under the protection of the Reich to forestall Allied occupation’. The German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop added, ‘Germany has preserved Scandinavia from destruction and will be responsible for true neutrality in the North until the end of the war.’
In mid-April 1940, after a successful, violent naval action off Narvik, Churchill was urging the British general on the ground, Pat Mackesy, to attack the Germans in Narvik directly. Given his available forces and the local conditions, Mackesy thought he could not mount a direct assault from the sea but would have to take the surrounding fjords first. Under Churchill’s goading he finally snapped and wrote an irate message that included the line ‘Are snows of Narvik to run red as sands of Gallipoli?’ This would have got him sacked had it been sent. But an alert young staff officer read it and held up its transmission by pretending that wireless communications were ‘out’ to Catterick, until tempers had cooled and the message could be moderated. Churchill did sack Mackesy the next month, but at least it was not for this cable. That junior staff officer was Captain J. T. Rankin of the Hallamshire battalion of the York and Lancaster regiment, my father.
In Norway, the Germans were deploying a new kind of mobile infantry – Fallschirmtruppen – dropped by parachute, and the Luftwaffe commanded the air. They used tactics developed in Spain, close air support of attacking infantry, and incendiary bombs, to devastating effect. Yet the two-month Norway campaign turned out to be a long way from the complete fiasco it seemed. The Germans had lost over 5,000 men and 242 aircraft, and the Kriegsmarine proportionately suffered more than the Royal Navy. Meanwhile, King Haakon VII and the Norwegian government, no longer neutral, moved to London, to be joined the Dutch royal family and government. Three million tons of Norwegian merchant shipping (the fourth largest fleet in the world) came over to the Allied side, as did remnants of the Norwegian navy and air forces. Because Major Vidkun Quisling of Norway was believed to have helped the Germans invade, his surname entered the English dictionary as a new and loathsome synonym for ‘traitor’. In 1943, the British-trained Norwegian resistance succeeded in preventing Nazi scientists from getting deuterium oxide or ‘heavy water’ for atomic bomb research from the Norsk Hydroelectric Plant at Vemork in the Telemark region. And the mountainous, fjord-riven kingdom of Norway managed in time to tie the hands and feet of some twelve divisions of German soldiers, nearly half a million men.
Most important of all, the two-day debate in the House of Commons on the conduct of the war in Norway on 7 and 8 May 1940 sealed the fate of Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister. Leo Amery and Lloyd George openly urged Chamberlain to go, and in the division the PM’s Conservative majority shrank from over 200 to 81. Seventy-one-year-old Chamberlain realised that he himself was the main stumbling block to the establishment of a vigorous, all-party coalition, and he resigned two days later. On 10 May 1940, Winston Churchill, the 65-year-old who had started and impelled the whole Norway campaign but miraculously escaped its avalanche of consequences, now acquired ‘the chief power in the State’. He would be Prime Minister for the next five years and three months of world war. Churchill the historian later smoothed his luck into Fate:
I cannot conceal from the reader of this truthful account that as I went to bed at about 3 a.m. I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial. Ten years in the political wilderness had freed me from ordinary party antagonisms. My warnings over the last six years had been so numerous, so detailed, and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. I could not be reproached either for making the war or with want of preparation for it. I thought I knew a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail.
Finale of The Gathering Storm, vol. 1 of The Second World War.
It was a dramatic day in European history. At 3 a.m., Germany launched Fall Gelb (Operation yellow), its offensive in the West, a simultaneous land and air attack on the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Neutrality and obsequious diplomacy were no defence against Nazi contempt for protocol; water and wire offered no protection against blitzkrieg. Neutral Switzerland mobilised fully, and Eire began to panic: ‘The fact that we want to keep out of war’, said Eamon de Valera to a Fianna Fail convention, ‘will not, or may not, be sufficient to save us.’
The onslaught was underway; standing up to it a tremendous task. When Churchill told the House of Commons on 13 May, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ he was almost quoting the opening chapter to volume 5 of The World Crisis, thinking back to what he had described as ‘incomparably the greatest war in history’, the Eastern Front of the First World War, which destroyed three empires and involved ‘the toils, perils, sufferings and passions of millions of men. Their sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain…’
The alarming idea of soldiers dropping from the skies jolted civilian Britain into action. The day after Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, appealed for Local Defence Volunteers – what we think of now as ‘Dad’s Army’ – to guard against enemy parachute landings, a quarter of a million men joined. Eden was still speaking on the BBC after the nine o’clock news on 14 May 1940 (‘You will not be paid, but you will receive uniforms and will be armed…’) when listeners started phoning their local police stations in order to sign up in ‘the parashooters’.
As the United Kingdom pulled itself together in 1940, the working classes were quicker than some of the upper classes – many
of whom loathed and distrusted Churchill – at putting their shoulders to the wheel. On 13 May, the Labour Party conference had backed the new national government, which had Labour ministers in the War Cabinet. The cartoon by the New Zealander David Low in the Evening Standard the next day, ‘All behind you Winston’, showed an army of politicians and people striding in step with Churchill, all rolling up their sleeves. Suddenly, the country was organising for Socialism; the mood was swinging leftwards.
The Minister of Labour and National Service was the formidable Transport and General Workers Union leader and ex-docker Ernest Bevin, who soon had the Trades Union Congress and the British Employer’s Confederation working together. When Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Supply, asked all contractors to ‘work at war speed’, in shifts covering twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, providing ‘more shells, more tanks, more guns’, the TUC sent a message: ‘Men of the fighting forces, we salute your courage and determination. We are unitedly resolved that all our resources shall be used to the full to provide the arms and munitions you need.’ ‘Go to it!’ exhorted the Ministry posters.
In his ‘Grand Coalition’ cabinet, Churchill made himself Minister of Defence. The Air Ministry was separated from a newly created Ministry of Aircraft Production, which was put under the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook. The appointment was contentious. King George VI sent a worried message to Churchill, because on his 1939 Canadian tour he had heard from John Buchan, the governor general, how many Canadians distrusted Beaverbrook. But malevolent or not, Max was energetic. Within a week the Nuffield Aircraft Factory and Vickers Supermarine were under the control of one management and working round the clock. And as a newspaperman, Beaverbrook understood the power of symbolic gestures. When he appealed to the housewives of Britain in July to donate their aluminium cookware to help build aircraft frames, the total amount collected might have only equalled one day’s supply, but every woman who gave a pot or a pan could imagine a bit of her kitchen in that Hurricane or Spitfire zipping through the burning blue.
Churchill's Wizards Page 29
