The World at War

September 1 , 1939.

Germany attacks Poland.

Adolf Hitler ignores Britain and France which had promised to fight for Poland.

Sunday September 3. The British prime minister Neville Chamberlain broadcasts.

This morning the British ambassador in Berlin

handed the German government a final note

stating that unless we heard from them by 1 1 o'clock

that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,

a state of war would exist between us.

l have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received

and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

Danzig, taken from Germany affer the First World War,

welcomed its liberators.

To many good Germans the city's capture symbolised the end

of the humiliating Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler swept forward to congratulate his victorious troops.

He said they'd rescued his people from Polish barbarism.

The Germans thrust into Poland from the west and north.

ln two weeks the Polish army had virtually ceased to exist.

Warsaw was one of the few places to hold out.

The Russians, by agreement with Germany,

seized parts of Poland they claimed as theirs by right.

The two conquerors met at Brest-Litovsk.

lt was the scene of the Russian surrender to Germany in 1918.

The official German greeting in Russian

said German soldiers had always respected Russian soldiers.

The clash of Nazi and Communist was, for the moment, conveniently forgotten.

The final bombardment of Warsaw began on September 23.

For nearly three weeks Warsaw Radio

had defiantly played the Polish national anthem.

On September 27 the anthem stopped.

- (announcement in Polish) - (air-raid siren)

Warsaw was reduced to rubble.

The capital's commander surrendered.

Poland, swallowed by Germany and Russia,

disappeared into a new dark age.

Arrests, deportations, executions began.

Britain's war started with a false alarm.

September 3.

l remember when the outbreak of war came.

We were in the cabinet room

at the moment that the ultimatum expired.

Lord Butler was a junior minister.

And we were just beginning to congratulate the prime minister

on his broadcast when we heard a terrible wailing,

which of course was the first air-raid siren.

Chamberlain took it very seriously

and his wife appeared with an enormous basket full of things for the night

and Thermos flasks and things to read and so on.

And so we all went and sheltered.

l went and sheltered affer some delay in the Foreign Office.

The whole of the Horse Guards Parade was empty of people

and there was nobody in sight anywhere.

When l got there, there was no furniture so l had to sit on the floor.

And an air-raid warden said that there would be no gas.

But of course there wasn't really any war for some time,

quite apart from being no gas.

So, no war that day, or for many months.

People settled down to enjoy the unexpected reprieve.

lt was perfect weather for a late holiday - or invading Poland.

People had braced themselves for a grimmer war.

Hospitals were cleared to take air-raid casualties.

The experts predicted over a million injured in two months.

Children and their mothers evacuated from the cities - 1 .5 million of them.

For some, a nightmare. For others, an adventure.

We assembled in a playground rather like this.

The kids were there and the parents.

Children had the gas mask over their shoulder and labels tied to them.

The women had to decide whether to keep their children with them

or whether to allow them to go out.

Now, one would think that this was an easy decision.

Why not keep your children with you - the natural thing to do?

But against this was the terrible thought

that there was going to be gas,

that there was going to be terrible bombing and death

and that children would be maimed.

Everyone was crying - the parents and children -

and as we moved off especially, people burst into tears.

My mother was more unhappy about the wrench of us going

rather than the war itself.

My sister was crying. l personally wasn't.

l was rather excited at the prospect of leaving this part of London.

We thought we'd travelled to the other side of the world,

but in fact, we came to Denham, here, only 20 miles from London.

l promised my mother l wouldn't be separated from my sister,

so we went to the village hall with all the other kids,

and because we wouldn't be separated, we were the last ones to find a billet.

lt was like being auctioned off at the time.

But when we finally got a house to take us in, it was fantastic.

lt was a new world that opened out to us.

l mean, we had toothbrushes and sheets on the bed and hot water.

lmagine hot water! We just couldn't get over it.

And we didn't know what eiderdowns were for.

ln the morning we went blackberry picking.

Then we heard the sirens, so we rushed back to our billet.

The woman there reassured us and said not to worry, and we sat down to lunch.

lt was the first fully laid-out table l'd ever seen in my life.

And war was declared, l think, that same lunchtime.

She said not to worry and passed us the horseradish sauce.

But l think a number of children suffered really deeply

being away from their families.

They suffered a sense of rejection.

They exhibited their senses of rejection and sorrow and suffering

very offen by strange behaviour problems,

by bedwetting, perhaps not eating.

31 arrived, with two junior nurses, l think.

They were pretty dirty and two of them got impetigo.

l had young children at the time.

And l put them into a large room.

You've no idea... l had no idea that such things existed in England.

They relieved themselves all over the carpet

and the place was a shambles.

There was no heroic rush to volunteer for the forces.

You waited your turn to be called up

for processing in the military sausage machine.

All rather leisurely.

But a rush to get married.

ln August and September, the highest number of weddings ever recorded.

White the only wear.

White for the blackout too, to make sure car drivers can see you in the dark.

At first the blackout was a bit of a joke.

Then road casualties shot up and the blackout wasn't funny any more.

There were no air raids,

but thousands of people were killed or injured in accidents in the blackout.

Depressing, too. Without it, you could almost forget there was a war on.

Every night, every home had to be blacked out.

The air-raid warden looking for chinks of light

became more hated than Hitler.

The government closed cinemas and entertainments

at the beginning of the war.

A fortnight later they were allowed to open again.

ln spite of total war, there were nearly a million and a half unemployed.

Sir John Simon, the chancellor of the exchequer,

introduced an emergency budget.

ln three hours' time

all budget secrets will be revealed.

l am confident that, whatever may be the burdens

which have to be carried by the British taxpayer,

my fellow countrymen will bear them

with the same resolution and courage

as our fighting men will show

when they discharge their grimmer task on the field of battle.

The blackout budget. lncome tax up to 7s 6d.

A 60% tax on excess profit.

ln retrospect, mild enough,

but a ConserVative MP, Chips Channon,

thought it demolished the edifice of capitalism.

Another Tory, Leo Amery, wanted a tougher war. Why not bomb Germany?

The air minister Kingsley Wood said no.

German munition works were private property

and the Germans would retaliate.

The opening phase of the war

was one of the most extraordinary periods through which l've lived,

because it was a period of euphoria

on the part of the people of this country.

For a long time there were quite a lot of unemployed,

while the Germans were manufacturing arms at full stretch,

particularly in the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia,

which they had by that time occupied.

Now, all this time the Germans were a beehive of activity.

We were doing absolutely nothing.

We'd gone to war for the defence of Poland.

ln the event, we did nothing to help Poland at all.

We never liffed a finger.

For the first three months of the war,

the greatest number of casualties were in the blackout.

We confined our war effort to dropping leaflets on the German people

telling them that it was a bad idea to go to war

and that it was a pity that they'd done it

and perhaps we might make peace.

The Phoney War.

When a German plane crashed in Scotland in November,

people came from miles around to see it.

And the Luffwaffe's dead were buried with full military honours.

Three British divisions went off to France at the beginning of the war.

More followed. "Nearly 200,000 men," said the war minister proudly.

The French had mobilised six million men.

They grumbled that the British weren't taking the war seriously.

ln France, training for a war that ended in 1918.

The newsreel reporter tried hard to make it sound impressive.

The force, instead of being thrown into the line,

is able to perfect its training in conditions similar to those at home.

This bayonet drill in gas masks is our reply to transparent Nazi propaganda

which seems to indicate that Germany is preparing to employ poison gas.

lnfantry battalions exercise with their weapons,

awaiting the moment for their use in actual warfare.

The mortar platoon goes into action

with a rapidity acquired by constant practice.

Steel helmets assume a fashionable appearance with camouflage.

French and British generals too

prepared for their part in the battle to come.

The British dug in on the Belgian frontier.

ln December it was decided that when fighting began

they'd leave their defences and advance into Belgium.

Anything helped to keep their minds off the war.