By and large in my days as a Sapper I lived among workers – overwhelmingly English workers – and in doing so acquired a permanent, if often exasperated, admiration for their uprightness, their distrust of bullshit, their sense of class, comradeship and mutual help. They were good people. I know that communists are supposed to believe in the virtues of the proletariat, but I was relieved to find myself doing so in practice as well as in theory.
Then Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark and the war really began. As soon as the Germans – we could hardly believe it – began to overrun the Low Countries, the 560th Field Company had something real to do. For anything up to fourteen hours a day, virtually isolated from the civilian life of Norfolk which went on around us, we improvised defences for East Anglia against a potential invasion. We shifted sandbags, revetted the walls of giant anti-tank trenches round the town that were being dug ahead of us by a civilian excavator, inexperienced, clumsy and above all utterly unconvinced that the ditch would stop any tanks, especially since there were no anti-tank guns or anything else, but our main work was mine-laying and attaching explosive charges to bridges, ready to blow them in case of need. As spring turned into summer, we had absolutely miraculous weather for this work. I can still feel the wonderful elation of climbing (a bit nervously) up the sides of the girders of the great bridge across Breydon Water, just outside Great Yarmouth, to work on the high span between blue sky and salt water, the (deceptive) sense of power that comes from the routine handling of explosives, fuses and detonators. I can remember the holiday idleness of lazing in small detachments of three or four posted to some remote lock or bridge with a tent and 200 lb of explosives, waiting for the invaders. What would we have done, had they come? We were raw, without military experience or even arms: in addition to our clumsy Lee-Enfield rifles the company had exactly six Lewis guns with which to keep enemy aircraft at bay. We would not have made an impressive first line of defence against the Wehrmacht.
The lads’ reaction to the German invasion of Denmark and Norway was a confident indignation. Gloom, depression and even defeatism had been the mood by the time they invaded the Low Countries, in the middle of the political crisis that finally threw out Neville Chamberlain. ‘What kind of English soldiers are you?’ said the company Irishman, Mick Flanigan, surrounded by barrack-room talk about how much better the German army obviously was than ours, and what things might be like under a German government. Chamberlain’s fall cheered them up again, for he had obviously been a major cause of the general depression. Patently the new Churchill government was welcomed by our company. (I noted at the time how strange it was that the heroes of the British workers were Churchill, Duff Cooper and Eden, ‘aristocrats, not even demagogues’.)
Discouragement grew again in the next few weeks of backbreaking physical work and virtually complete isolation in our camps. Whatever the effect on civilians of Churchill’s famous radio addresses, the one on ‘We shall fight on the beaches’, including presumably those of Norfolk, was given at a time when we could not have heard it. Indeed, at the time I described the mood of the lads as ‘terrible’. We were working all hours of day and night, virtually confined to barracks and workplace (‘our biggest entertainment,’ I wrote, ‘is going to have the weekly shower’), without explanation, recognition or appreciation and, above all, ordered about, anonymous and inferior. Middle-class recruits dreamed of getting to the front where ‘they’d forget about blanco and polishing cap-badges and we’d all be in it together’. Most of my mates simply concluded: ‘This is no life for a human being. If the war finishes, OK. I want to get out of this and back into civvy street.’ Did they mean it? Plainly they did not, as their reaction to the fall of France on 17 June was witness.
I heard the news on a trip to a nearby pub from our post by the small bridge we were guarding on the table-flat road to Great Yarmouth. None of us had any doubt about what it meant. Britain was now alone. Let me transcribe what I wrote a few hours later in my diary:
‘Who was responsible?’ Half an hour after the radio announcement the English are already asking the question. In the pub where I heard the news, in the car that gave me a lift back to the bridge, in the tent with the two mates. Only one answer: it was old Chamberlain. The unanimous view: whoever is guilty must pay for it somehow. It’s something, even if it should turn out to be just a passing impulse …
A car stops at our bridge. I’d guess the driver, specs and false teeth, is a commercial traveller. ‘Have you heard the news on the radio?’ I say, ‘Yes, we have.’ ‘Bad, bad,’ says the man shaking his head. ‘Bloody bad, terrible.’ Then he drives on. We call after him, ‘Thanks, anyroad’ and go back to lying on the bank in the long grass and talking things over, slowly and in dismay.
The other two cannot believe it.
Not only could my mates not grasp what had happened. They could neither take in nor even imagine that this might mean the end of the war or making peace with Hitler. (Actually, reading my own immediate reactions to the fall of France, and in spite of the official Party line since September 1939, neither could I. A victory for Hitler was not what we had had in mind.) They could envisage defeat at the end of a fighting war – nothing was easier in June 1940. It was also clear to anyone near the East Anglian coast that, if Hitler invaded, as everyone expected him to, there was nothing much to stop him. What they could not envisage was not going on with the war, even though it was plain to anyone with a sense of political realities (even one reduced to an occasional sight of the Daily Telegraph on the East Anglian marsh), that Britain’s situation was desperate. This feeling that Britain was not defeated yet, that it was natural to go on with the war, was what Winston Churchill put into words for them, though with a tone of heroic defiance which, pretty certainly, none of my mates felt. He spoke for a British people of ordinary folk, such as those of the 560th Field Company, who (unlike many of the better-informed) simply could not imagine that Britain might give up.
As we now know, in the words of Hitler’s Chief of General Staff, General Halder, ‘the Fuhrer is greatly puzzled by England’s persistent unwillingness to make peace’, since he believed himself to be offering ‘reasonable’ terms. 1 At this point he saw no advantage in invading and occupying Britain which (to quote Halder again) ‘would not be of any benefit to Germany. German blood would be shed to accomplish something that would benefit only Japan, the United States and others.’ In effect, Hitler offered to let Britain keep her empire as what Churchill, writing to Roosevelt, correctly described as ‘a vassal state of the Hitler empire’.2 In the 1990s a school of young Conservative historians argued that Britain should have accepted these terms. If Lord Halifax and the powerful peace party in the 1940 Conservative Party had prevailed it is not impossible – indeed, it is not unlikely – that the bulk of Britons would have gone along with them, as the bulk of Frenchmen went along with Marshal Petain. Yet nobody who now remembers that extraordinary moment in our history could believe that the defeatists had a real chance of prevailing. They were seen not as the peace-bringers but as the ‘guilty men’ who had brought the country to this pass. Confident in this massive popular backing, Churchill and the Labour ministers were able to hold their own.
We knew none of this – neither of the peace party in Churchill’s government (though the left suspected there was one), nor of Hitler’s offers and hesitations. Luckily in August 1940 Hitler began the mass aerial attack on Britain, which became the nightly bombing of London in early September. From being a people that went on with the war because we could not think of anything else to do, we became a people conscious of our own heroism. All of us, even the ones not directly affected, could identify with the men and women who continued with everyday life under the bombs. We would not have put it in Churchill’s bombastic terms ourselves (‘This was their finest hour’), but there was considerable satisfaction in standing up to Hitler alone.