So Naked, So Alone
As prisoners-of-war, Alan Milburn and Patrick Campbell-Preston were to endure much through the next five years. The women who loved them, and countless others, had to display endurance of a different kind. Mrs Milburn used her diaries to rally her spirits: ‘Today I have just heard of someone who has been waiting longer than we have and had news of her prisoner son yesterday. Hope is a great thing and patience a real virtue in these times, but difficult for me,’ she wrote sorrowfully.
The nation now entered the most dangerous phase of the war. The raids began to be stepped up, and some military targets were bombed, though these were pinpricks, compared with what was to come. Seventy years on, we know that the German leadership made mistakes which would eventually cost them victory. But in summer 1940 nobody in Britain could ignore the extreme threat of invasion, which, after France’s surrender, now moved up several notches.
The ‘it couldn’t happen to us’ feeling had evaporated. The reality of fear is very evident in contemporary accounts, many of which suggest women reacting to events with a sense of utter impotence. ‘Is it any good fighting? Is it any good living at all?’ reflected one young diarist. On the day that France surrendered an office worker recounted hearing the news, and how one of the typists became hysterical, uncontrollably shrieking, ‘Whatever will we do now?’ On that day Nella Last was listening to the radio too, in Barrow-in-Furness; the announcement left her close to breakdown as she felt all her courage and faith in the future ebb away. ‘I felt if I could only cry – or better still scream and scream – it would have taken the sharp pain away … Never have I felt so naked, never so alone.’ The racking anguish left Nella hardly able to stand. She dragged herself to the medicine cupboard, got out some smelling salts, doused her neck and shoulders with cold water and howled like a child. In Essex, a woman with a four-year-old daughter was gripped with the need to save her child from the German soldiers. Her home was by the coast, within easy reach of the occupied Channel ports – ‘I used to get up on those lovely summer mornings and … wonder whether hordes of Germans would come in. It seemed so very, very possible.’ After much thought she decided to put aside a bottle containing a hundred aspirins. ‘If the Germans came, we’d have dissolved them in some milk and given them to her to drink … That’s how real it was.’ Up in Kintyre and away from the proximity of danger, Naomi Mitchison had given birth to a girl; the baby, so wanted and loved, who among so much death and destruction had come to symbolise life and creativity, lived for one day and then died. In the following days the horrible irrelevance of her ‘little’ distress taunted Naomi. ‘I realise perfectly that much worse things are happening at this moment to thousands of people … but one cannot generalise as simply as that … All the little things hurt, hurt, hurt, and there is nothing to be done.’
Personal hopes and plans were shelved in the knowledge that the future was entirely without certainty. Shirley Hook, a diarist for Mass Observation, had been happily engaged to marry her boyfriend Jack Goodhart, a doctor. That June, with ‘our world toppling round our shoulders’, she began to think that it might have been better if the two of them had met their end the previous year, when they had both had a narrow escape in a climbing accident. Where did her hopes stand in relation to the awful prospect of a German invasion? Shirley felt demoralised, and utterly insignificant. ‘We’re so scared that something may happen to prevent [our marriage] … The war has succeeded in shattering our real hopes for the future very successfully.’ In summer 1940 it seemed that the war had, with biblical impartiality, robbed many women even of the little self-worth that they already had, leaving them destitute of hope, of ambition, even of the will to live.
Adding insult to injury, the Ministry of Information now issued advice aimed at householders telling them what to do if Germans arrived by parachute. Since thousands of women were now the sole householders, it was readily understood that the advice was aimed at them. ‘Do not believe rumours,’ it said. ‘Be calm, quick, exact … Do not give any German anything … Hide your food, your bicycles, your maps. See that the enemy get no petrol.’ The recommendations, and the publicity picture showing a smiling mum in a housecoat secreting a biscuit tin at the back of her coal cellar, were met with ridicule. Did the Ministry really believe that a sweetly smiling lady politely protesting that she was not allowed to give him any biscuits would deter a tough Nazi paratrooper with a rifle? Frances Faviell tacked the pamphlet to the wall of her FAP. ‘It never failed to amuse me when I was depressed.’
But on the whole Britain was still a nation which held authority in respect. ‘The old beast’, as Barbara Pym’s sister had called Churchill, broadcast to the nation on 18 June:
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin …
The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands …
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.’
Few were impervious to his words. One London woman would never cease being grateful to Churchill: ‘When people have decried [him], I’ve always said, “Yes, but he stopped me being afraid.” ’ Another woman remembered: ‘We would really have all gone down on to the beaches with broken bottles. We would have done anything – anything – to stop them.’ The Trades Union Congress called on all British workers: ‘Every man and woman in our movement is now a soldier in this war for the liberation of humanity.’
Such stirring sentiments might have echoed with a certain hollowness for the many women who would have liked to get down on to the beaches and hurl broken bottles at the Germans. For them, the chance of real combat was never on offer. Soldiering, for women, took other forms. In the case of twenty-two-year-old WAAF Aileen Morris, an educated, spirited and trenchant young woman, fluent in German, the first nine months of the war had been spent tied to a typewriter in the RAF Casualties Office at Ruislip. But that was about to change.
To her family, Aileen was always known as ‘Mike’. Before the war Mike, the daughter of a civil servant, had studied in Germany for two years, finishing up at Halle-an-der-Saale near Leipzig. There she enjoyed the attentions of the smart German Luftwaffe officers who were in training at the Air Wireless School. But although she enjoyed their flattering company, she remained deeply disgusted by the political regime they espoused. Back in England in September 1939, Mike joined the WAAFs. ‘I had seen the evils of Hitler’s regime and, if there was to be a war against the Nazis, I wanted to have a hand in it.’ At Ruislip her main function was sending letters of condolence to the families of killed or missing airmen. Though disciplined and courageous, Mike was also young, and highly strung; streaming with tears, she often worked late into the night typing out the fateful messages destined to break the hearts of the mothers and wives who read them: ‘It is my painful duty to inform you that your son (or husband), Sergeant X, has been reported Missing (or Missing, believed killed) as the result of operations.’ The girls were told that no typing errors were admissible. These were letters that the families would keep for ever.
Mike’s distressing but menial employment in the Casualties Section might have continued like this throughout the war – there would be many more such letters to write – had it not been for her ability to speak German.
By the time of the Second World War the governments of most European countries were pouring resources into intelligence; it was clear that electronic eavesdropping on the enemy was going to play a vital part in complementing military might. Key to these operations in Britain was the section known as the ‘Y’ Service, responsible for the interception of communications. In spring 1940, as the German army across the Channel moved nea
rer, an important breakthrough was made: it was found that voice transmissions (as opposed to Morse) from the Luftwaffe could be picked up on VHF. The ‘Y’ Service officers celebrated – until they realised with dismay that there had been an oversight: nobody in the unit could understand German. Action was prompt, however; a message duly arrived at Ruislip asking them to locate German-speaking WAAFs. Mike, luckily, was there ‘on the doorstep’.
After undergoing an interview to test her linguistic ability, followed by security clearance, Mike was told only that her new employment was ‘hush-hush’, before being presented with a sealed envelope containing a railway warrant for her new destination, Hastings, and sent on her way:
Under normal peacetime circumstances, as a happy young daughter of middle-class parents, I would most probably have been thinking about the next tennis party or perhaps planning a weekend picnic by the sea. Now it was June 1940, and although on that fine summer’s day I did indeed find myself going to the seaside, I was very apprehensive.
But Mike Morris’s arrival at Fairlight station above Hastings was a case of perfect timing. There was a pressing need for her linguistic talents, and it only remained to train her to operate radio receivers before she could be put to work. Soon she was on terms of easy familiarity with the knobs and dials and could twiddle them with the best. Installed in a humble caravan close to the towering Fairlight cliff-edge (so placed as to get the best cross-Channel reception), Mike and her fellow WAAF operators did six-hour shifts listening in to the messages transmitted between Luftwaffe pilots and control stations, earphones clamped to their heads, ears straining to catch coherent words. Everything she heard had to be logged, then translated into English. She had to become familiar with a range of German regional accents and found after a while that she could even distinguish the voices of individuals, any of whom, she reflected, could have been one of her dancing partners from the Air Wireless School at Halle-an-der-Saale. Cracking the simpler aspects of the pilots’ code was a matter of time. For example, Indianer meant Indians – or enemy aircraft; Kirchturm meant church tower – or height. The girls’ logged interceptions were all sent via the Air Ministry to ‘Station X’, the code-breaking headquarters at Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, where their ‘raw material’ was meticulously analysed and compared with other intelligence material.
Hitler planned to annihilate the RAF and mount attacks on Allied shipping. The WAAF operators could overhear German pilots communicating with their bases about shipping movements in the Channel. From Fairlight, the overheard message would go through warning the Navy and No. 11 Fighter Command at Uxbridge, who would immediately despatch air cover to protect the convoy. Mike and her colleagues knew that these convoys, containing fuel and food for the nation, had to get through, and that every message they intercepted could be vital. The operators were also gradually building up a fuller picture of the workings of the Luftwaffe. As German attacks increased in intensity, Mike’s ‘Y’ Service unit moved to Hawkinge near Folkestone – a corner of Kent which was to become known as ‘Hellfire Corner’. In their quarters, the WAAFs had no peace, with ceaseless fighter planes landing and taking off, and the nearby harbours constantly under attack.
Aircraft zoomed and twirled overhead like some ghastly aerial ballet dancing to the fiendish rhythm of machine-gun and anti-aircraft fire … I shall never forget the screaming whine of an aircraft crashing to earth out of control, followed by the dull crump as it hit the ground … each time I heard it I felt physically sick.
As the Battle of Britain reached fever pitch Folkestone and Hawkinge were repeatedly shelled from across the Channel. If they weren’t at their posts, tracking the choreography of that danse macabre, the girls were dashing in and out of air-raid shelters. But despite the ceaseless bombing and shelling – under which some nearly cracked – they never left their sets while they were on watch.
Mike was one of those who, on the whole, managed to keep control under the severe strain of these conditions – more so than the men in the unit. On one occasion a man broke down completely. Mike, by now promoted to Corporal Morris, was the senior WAAF on duty, and she sensed that his hysteria, alongside exhaustion, was beginning to infect her unit. ‘I had to act quickly, and so for the first time in my life I slapped a man across the face hard, and several times. It had the desired effect.’ The man was senior to her, and she feared she might be court-martialled. But no more was heard about the affair.
She was not always so composed. Reconnaissance flights operated under an internationally agreed immunity. By now the German reconnaissance pilots’ voices had become so familiar that the girls looked forward to hearing them come on air. One in particular, known to them as ‘Amsel Eins’ (from his callsign), was quite a character. He knew perfectly well that the WAAFs were listening in to him and would banter away to them flirtatiously in English:
‘I know, you English listening station, can you hear me?’ he would cheerfully declare. ‘Would you like me to drop a bomb on you? Listen – whee! – boomp!’ and he would chuckle into his microphone.
Anselm’s witticisms ended in grief. His operations were suspected of breaching the immunity agreements, and the WAAFs were under orders to inform Fighter Group 11 when they heard him operating. His plane was shot down in flames by a flight of Spitfires.
He was unable to get out and we listened to him as he screamed and screamed for his mother and cursed the Fuehrer. I found myself praying: ‘Get out, bale out – oh, please dear God, get him out.’ But it was no use, he could not make it. We heard him the whole way down until he fell below reception range. I went outside and was sick.
Only then did I realise that I was in part his executioner; only then did I realise what I had done to that young pilot. I thought of the sad letters I had written when I was in the Casualties Section … and I knew that tomorrow a German mother’s heart would break. It was then I made a vow to end the carnage as soon as possible. ‘Amsel Eins’ was just as brave as our pilots, for the demands of duty spell the same meaning in any language. We missed him sadly, for we had known him as such a happy young man.
On this occasion, and others, Mike Morris could not stifle her almost debilitating feelings of empathy; nevertheless during her time in the ‘Y’ Service she acted with consummate professionalism. This was no tennis party or seaside picnic. In 1940 many women like Mike Morris were being thrown into situations of the greatest urgency, demanding the coolest of heads. The rigours of the ‘Y’ Service required them to deny everything that, as women, they had hitherto been expected to embrace. They must not give life, they must kill. They must hate, not love; spurn, not pity. Their atavistic nature was being challenged by the circumstances of war; sex differences that had once seemed immutable now seemed precarious. Not surprisingly, Mike’s bred-in sensitivity could not be extinguished so easily; her vow to ‘end the carnage as soon as possible’ was not the choice a soldier would have made.
She herself observed that men and women responded differently to battle conditions. Her cool view was that, at the outset, women tended to be braver than men under bombardment, but that demoralisation set in over time. Men, however, tended to panic at the beginning. Their morale emerged more slowly.
In the end, there is little to choose between men and women.
Would war prove a catalyst for some new kind of androgynous being? As Britain braced itself for the Blitz, Mike’s assertion was very soon to be put to the most extreme of tests.
3 Wreckage
The Love of Her Life
Britain now stood isolated. Surviving on this island depended on importing foodstuffs – the role of the Merchant Navy. But from summer 1940 the U-boat threat to naval vessels in the Atlantic began to grow.
From the moment she first met the merchant seaman Harry O’Dwyer, Helen Forrester was under no illusions regarding the danger of his occupation. She knew that the submarines were out in the bay, ‘like cats waiting at a mousehole’. Merchant shipping had to be protected by convoys of freighters.
But sinkings were frequent, and there was huge loss of life. ‘Allow five weeks, OK?’ Harry had said to her when they parted. During his absence she was consumed with anxiety. Through her job, Helen knew at first hand what it was like for the women mourning their lost menfolk. She also had access to more information than most girls had about their sailor boyfriends. At that time there was a news embargo on British losses at sea, but next of kin were informed. If Harry’s ship had gone to the bottom, Helen would have heard about it when the relatives came to her Bootle office to claim a pension. So when six weeks passed without a word from Harry, Helen became increasingly moody and despondent. Whatever had possessed her to trust a sailor?
And then, at last, he called. ‘We’ve just berthed … wait for me if I’m late.’ Helen took the call in her office, rapidly agreed to meet in Ma Ambleton’s café at 7.30, then rushed downstairs to the cobwebby basement and burst into huge sobs of relief.
At 8 he finally appeared. ‘I was all curled up inside with pure joy. I wanted to hug him.’ Harry was exhausted and hungry. Over ravenous mouthfuls of steak and kidney pie, Harry let her know that his ship had got separated from the escorting convoy – ‘Been chasing all over the bloody Atlantic, if you’ll pardon the language.’ Listening to him, Helen had a horrible premonition:
Suddenly I felt the icy Atlantic waters with its surface mist drifting over struggling men.
‘Do you have to do another voyage? Can’t you stay ashore – do something else?’ …
I was in love.
After Harry had eaten, they walked down to the Mersey and boarded the ferry. Helen tucked herself under the curve of his arm, and they talked, crossing and recrossing the stretch of dark water in the blackout. Harry told her about his family. His mother had never forgiven him for quitting the seminary, and now he never went home. But he had been saving money and had put enough by for a house – would she come and help him look at some small properties in Allerton? ‘My mind leaped ahead with all kinds of wild hopes.’
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