In the days when the threat came from Napoleon, only the ‘fencibles’ or the volunteer militia near the coast would have rallied. But the advent of the parachutist in Hitler’s war meant that every village in England might be endangered, and every citizen had to be en garde. In June, at General Ironside’s instruction, a massive campaign of deception at a local level began. All direction and road signs across the country were taken down so as not to aid Fallschirm-Infanterie dropping from the sky. Tradesmen’s vans and shop signs were painted over. The names on railway station platforms were reduced to three inches high, which made arrivals and departures on crowded, jerky, smoky train journeys even worse. Lost military drivers learned to nip into red Gilbert Scott telephone boxes, whose address might still be written down inside by the 999 instructions, or to navigate by the corporation names on manhole covers.
By June, church bells could only be rung to warn of enemy landings, and all bank holidays were cancelled. Travel to within twenty miles of the coast from the Wash to Portland was prohibited, while a new evacuation moved thousands of children back away from the shores. For the few who had cars then, petrol was already rationed to essential use. ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’ posters appeared. Even telephoning was discouraged. The country was concealing itself, crouching down.
Britain was locking up, too. From 1 September 1939, German and Austrian males between the ages of 16 and 60 had been required to register with the police as enemy aliens, and most had been put in Category C: sympathetic to Britain, to be left at liberty. But now, between 12 May 1940 and the end of July, some 27,000 ‘friendly aliens’ (including 4,000 Italians after 10 June) were rounded up and interned on the Isle of Man or deported by sea. After the British ship Arandora Star was torpedoed by Günther Prien’s U-47 on 2 July en route to Canada, killing over 700 German and Italian internees, 450 traumatised survivors were brought back and then immediately shipped off again to Australia on the Dunera. The prison camps became mini-universities, centres of art, music and learning, because many internees were anti-Nazi Jewish refugees, including scholars, scientists and intellectuals who had been fleeing Hitler over the last seven years.
All this came from a moral panic about the possibility of enemy deception on a grand scale. Was there a ‘Fifth Column’ of hidden traitors and spies lurking ready to dash out and help enemy parachutists? The term Fifth Column came from early in the Spanish Civil War, when Franco’s Nationalists had four military columns besieging Madrid but also claimed to have a fifth one, operating clandestinely inside the Republican defences. In mid-May, the Daily Express and Daily Telegraph were claiming that such deceptive agents or ‘Quislings’ had opened the gates of Norway and Holland to the invading Nazis. Were there similar people here in the UK – foreign women, refugees, dissidents, blackmailed Jews – perhaps waiting to assist Germans parachuting down dressed as policemen, vicars or air-raid wardens? Heath Robinson was having none of it. His cartoon in the Sketch of 3 July 1940, The Sixth Column at Work: Here they come. Disguised parachutists receive a warm welcome, shows hordes of patient Englishmen in flat caps and hats cycling about with large tubs and baths of hot water ready to catch parachuting beldames and bishops as they float to the ground.
This moment of national alarm and emergency felt rather like 1914 again. Ordinarily sane people became obsessed by carrier pigeons, strange chalk marks on telegraph poles (actually left by ‘bob-a-job’ scouts and guides indicating where they had visited), mysterious lights, buzzing wirelesses, suspicious conversations, funny-looking strangers. General Ironside’s diary of 31 May records ‘Fifth column reports coming in from everywhere. A man with an arm-band on and a swastika pulled up near an important aerodrome in the Southern Command…’ Following these reports, he posted pickets everywhere. ‘Perhaps we shall catch some swine.’ General Ironside was a source of alarmism, but he was also the victim of an alarmist whispering campaign that linked him to the British fascists. The British authorities’ problem became how to separate innocent from guilty amid rising hysteria. ‘Collar the lot’ was the view of Major General Sir Vernon Kell, Director General of the Security Service, MI5, which, while trying to keep tabs on real German spies, was drowning in erroneous information about possible subversion by Communists, Fascists, Indian Nationalists, the IRA and Pacifists.
At the end of the day, the only deception was self-deception. There was no evidence of any plans for espionage, sabotage or ‘Fifth Column’ activities among the foreign internees. If there was an enemy within, it was native, not foreign; noble, not arriviste. Too many highborn Britons were attracted to the ideology of the vigorous if vulgar Nazis; even the abdicated King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, was not immune to the flattering blandishments of Hitlerism – the Windsors had visited Nazi Germany in September 1937 and were photographed, smiling, with the Führer.
Parliament passed a new Treachery Act in May 1940 under which grave cases of espionage and sabotage carried the death penalty, and after the discovery inside the US embassy of a right-wing spy, Tyler Kent, passing secret documents to Italy and Germany, the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, overcame his sceptical liberal scruples to take action. On 23 May, under the hurried amendment 1A (adding mere associates and sympathisers to those criminalised under 18b of the Defence Regulations for ‘execution of acts prejudicial to the security of the State’), the Metropolitan Police raided the London headquarters of the British Union of Fascists and arrested thirty-four members, including the Blackshirts’ leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, who had been insisting this was ‘a Jews’ war’. Two more noted anti-Semites and pro-Nazis, John Beckett of the racialist British People’s Party and Captain Maule Ramsay, president of the Right Club and Conservative MP for Peebles, were also taken into custody in Brixton prison. Around 750 fascists were detained. Aristocratic appeasers like Lord Tavistock, the Duke of Buccleuch and the Duke of Westminster who had once been involved in the Nordic League and the Anglo-German friendship association, The Link, now ducked their ducal heads and went to ground on large estates. On 28 May, Churchill appointed Lord Swinton as head of the Home Defence (Security) Executive ‘to co-ordinate action against the Fifth column’. General Kell, who had founded and led MI5 for thirty years, was retired. In the House of Commons on 4 June Churchill said:
We have found it necessary to take measures of increasing stringency, not only against enemy aliens and suspicious characters of other nationalities, but also against British subjects who may become a danger or a nuisance should the war be transported to the United Kingdom. I know there are a great many people affected by the orders which we have made who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them, but we cannot, at the present time and under the present stress, draw all the distinctions which we shouldliketodo … There is, however, another class, for which I do not feel the slightest sympathy. Parliament has given us the powers to put down Fifth Column activities with a strong hand, and we shall use those powers, subject to the supervision and correction of the House, without the slightest hesitation until we are satisfied … that this malignancy in our midst has been effectively stamped out.
On that day, three Evening Standard journalists, Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard, finished a swiftly written 40,000 word polemical attack on the appeasers, disarmers and Chamberlainites of the 1930s whose folly and sloth had led to the disaster of Dunkirk. It was published a month later by Victor Gollancz under the title of Guilty Men by ‘Cato’. Even though it was not available in W. H. Smith’s chain of shops it became notorious and sold 200,000 copies.
Yet by the middle of August 1940, Churchill was declaring to the House of Commons that he ‘always thought’ the Fifth Column danger ‘was exaggerated in these islands’. If that was true, he had nevertheless put the ‘Fifth Column’ idea to most effective propaganda use.
On 10 June, scenting wounded prey, Fascist Italy boldly declared war on the Republic of France, and promptly captured 200 yards of the Riviera. Paris was declared an ‘open city
’, which was a formal statement that it would not be defended. Now it became a ghost town as shops, offices and hotels closed, traffic vanished and the government slipped away from the advancing Germans. Sefton Delmer was one of the last reporters left in Paris, with Edward Ward of the BBC, Robert Cooper of The Times and Walter Farr of the Daily Mail. By lunchtime on 14 June, the swastika was fluttering from the radio mast on top of the Eiffel Tower and Kavallerie were trotting down the Champs Elysées. Reynaud then resigned, and the new Prime Minister, white-moustached Maréchal Pétain, spoke on 17 June: ‘It is with a heavy heart that I say we must cease the fight,’ adding, in another broadcast three days later, ‘Not so strong as twenty-two years ago, we had also fewer friends, too few children, too few arms, too few allies. This is the cause of our defeat.’ France had fought and lost, with nearly 100,000 dead, 120,000 wounded, and over a million and half soldiers captured.
On 21 June, in the Forest of Compiègne, Hitler in his grey uniform relished the ritual of French abasement. Bill Shirer of CBS watched the Führer strutting among toadies, ‘his face afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph’. Generaloberst Keitel read out the Nazis’ propagandist, self-righteous preamble, clearly written by Hitler:
Trusting to the assurance given to the German Reich by the American President Wilson and confirmed by the Allied Powers, the German Defence Forces in November 1918 laid down their arms. Thus ended a war which the German people and its Government did not want, and in which in spite of vastly superior forces the enemy did not succeed in defeating the German Army, the German Navy or the German Air Force … Broken promises and perjury were used against a nation which after four years of heroic resistance had shown only one weakness – namely, that of believing the promises of democratic statesmen.
On September 3, 1939, twenty-five years after the outbreak of the World War, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany without any reason. Now the war has been decided by arms. France is defeated …
‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over,’ Churchill had said on 18 June. ‘I expect that the Battle of Britain is abouttobegin … Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.’ The mood became even more exalted and grim. Upper-class Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West prepared suicide potions, but ordinary people felt strangely exhilarated, even liberated. The playwright and broadcaster J. B. Priestley felt a new mood in the country, of courage and hope: ‘Our people began to show the world what stuff they’re made of, and the sight was glorious.’ Churchill commanded some of that mood with superb morale-boosting language: ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.” ’ It was great rhetoric. But how was Churchill himself behaving under the strain? At times he was impatient and inconsiderate. There is only one letter extant between Winston and Clementine Churchill in all 1940, dated 27 June, a loving wifely letter telling him something she feels he ought to know, that ‘there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner’. She confessed to noticing ‘a deterioration’ in his manner; ‘you are not so kind as you used to be’. She could not bear
that those who serve the Country & yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you – Besides you won’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality – (Rebellion in War time being out of the question!)
It was time for writers, artists and film-makers to man the propaganda barricades. ‘Arm the people,’ wrote George Orwell pugnaciously to Time and Tide on 22 June, urging the distribution of hand grenades, shotguns and all the weapons in gunsmith’s shops. The author of Homage to Catalonia had just joined the Primrose Hill platoon of the 5th (London) Local Defence Volunteers battalion, but his letter to Time and Tide sounds as if he were still in the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista militia with whom he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Later, Orwell saw June 1940 as a revolutionary moment:
Had any real leadership existed on the Left, there is little doubt that the return of the troops from Dunkirk could have been the beginning of the end of British capitalism. It was a moment at which the willingness for sacrifice and drastic changes extended not only to the working class but to nearly the whole of the middle class, whose patriotism, when it comes to the pinch, is stronger than their self-interest. There was … a feeling of being on the edge of a new society in which much of the greed, apathy, injustice and corruption of the past would have disappeared.
Orwell had had a dream one night back in August 1939 that helped convince him of his true feelings. He dreamed that the war had already started, and this had two lessons for him. The first was that he would be relieved from dread when it did happen, and the second was the sure knowledge that he was patriotic at heart, that he would not sabotage his own side, and that he would support the war and fight in it if possible. The next day he had read in the newspapers about the Nazi–Soviet pact. By March 1940, Orwell had reached George Bernard Shaw’s position:
When war has once started there is no such thing as neutrality. All activities are war activities. Whether you want to or not, you are obliged to help either your own side or the enemy. The Pacifists, Communists, Fascists etc are at this moment helping Hitler.
In April 1940, reviewing Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Thirties, Orwell recognised something more sympathetic to him in its closing chapters than the self-righteousness of the leftwing intelligentsia:
It is the emotion of the middle-class man, brought up in the military tradition, who finds in the moment of crisis that he is a patriot after all. It is all very well to be ‘advanced’ and ‘enlightened’, to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England?
‘George Orwell’ was the nom de plume of a writer who often features in discussions of what Englishness is. The name camouflages the old Etonian and former Burma Police officer Eric A. Blair under the regal Christian name of England’s warrior saint, St George, joined to the name of the river Orwell that winds through Suffolk to the North Sea. Although a democratic Socialist and a man of the Left (with what a Special Branch surveillance report called ‘advanced communist views’), Orwell wrote shrewdly on Kipling and understood the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues among the English people. ‘The English are not intellectual,’ he observed in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’, ‘but they have a certain power of acting without taking thought … Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct’, like cattle facing a wolf. Orwell says that the gentle, hypocritical English can be martial, but hate militarism. The British Army don’t goose-step, he points out, because the people in the street would laugh.
Another war veteran who wanted a better world and had just had his first spell with the Local Defence Volunteers was the novelist J. B. Priestley, keeping watch and ward at night on a high down near his home at Godshill in the Isle of Wight. As he described the experience in his third broadcast talk on Sunday, 16 June, Priestley found himself back in a world not of the Flanders trenches or of Spanish revolutionaries but of Thomas Hardy, out among Wessex country people, ‘ploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk’, talking about ‘what happened to us in the last war, and about the hay and the barley, about beef and milk and cheese and tobacco’. He felt a powerful sense of community and continuity with those gone before, like the men who stood ready for Napoleon’s Grande Armée:
But then the sounds of bombs and gunfire and planes all died away. The ‘All Clear’ went, and then there was nothing but the misty cool night, drowned in silence, and this handful of us on the hilltop. I remember wishing then that we c
ould send all our children out of this island, every boy and girl of them across the sea to the wide Dominions, and turn Britain into the greatest fortress the world has known; so that then, with an easy mind, we could fight and fight these Nazis until we broke their black hearts.
Balding, bespectacled Tom Wintringham, Daily Worker journalist and founder of the International Brigades in Spain, was, like Orwell, a veteran wounded in the Spanish Civil War who thought that 1940 was the moment to make ‘an army of the people’. Born bourgeois in Grimsby, Wintringham was an ardent public-school Communist who went on to be a motor-cycle dispatch rider with the kite balloon section of the RFC in WW1. He had commanded the British battalion of the International Brigades at the Battle of the Jarama in February 1937 when 150 of them got killed. Wintringham, once a loyal Stalinist hack, was expelled from the Communist Party in October 1938 over his affair with the ‘undesirable’ American reporter Kitty Bowler, but his card remained marked by MI5. Orwell likened him to G. A. Henty with Marxist training.
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