Sir Max Hastings - All Hell Let Loose - The World at War 1939-1945

Hitler did not anticipate the British and French declarations of war. Their acquiescence in his 1938 seizure of Czechoslovakia, together with the impossibility of direct Anglo-French military succour for Poland, argued a lack of both will and means to challenge him. The Führer himself quickly recovered from his initial shock, but some of his acolytes were troubled. Goering, C-in-C of the Luftwaffe, his nerve badly shaken, raged down the telephone to Germany’s foreign minister, Ribbentrop: ‘Now you’ve got your fucking war! You alone are to blame!’ Hitler had striven to forge a German warrior society committed to martial glory, with notable success among the young. But older people displayed far less enthusiasm in 1939 than they had done in 1914, recalling the horrors of the previous conflict, and their own defeat. ‘This war has a ghostly unreality,’ wrote Count Helmuth von Moltke, an Abwehr intelligence officer but an implacable opponent of Hitler. ‘The people don’t support it…[They] are apathetic. It’s like a danse macabre performed on the stage by persons unknown.’

American CBS correspondent William Shirer reported from Hitler’s capital on 3 September: ‘There is no excitement here…no hurrahs, no wild cheering, no throwing of flowers…It is a far grimmer German people that we see here tonight than we saw last night or the day before.’ As Alexander Stahlberg passed through Stettin with his army unit en route to the Polish border, he echoed Shirer’s view: ‘None of the brave mood of August 1914, no cheers, no flowers.’ The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig readily explained this: ‘They did not feel the same because the world in 1939 was not as childishly naïve and gullible as in 1914…This almost religious faith in the honesty or at least the ability of your own government had disappeared throughout the whole of Europe.’

But many Germans echoed the sentiments of Fritz Muehlebach, a Nazi Party official: ‘I regarded England’s and France’s interference…as nothing but a formality…As soon as they realised the utter hopelessness of Polish resistance and the vast superiority of German arms they would begin to see that we had always been in the right and it was quite senseless to meddle…It was only as a result of something that wasn’t their business that the war had ever started. If Poland had been alone she would certainly have given in quietly.’

The Allied nations hoped that the mere gesture of declaring war would ‘call Hitler’s bluff’, precipitating his overthrow by his own people and a peace settlement without a catastrophic clash of arms in western Europe. Selfishness dominated the response of Britain and France to the unfolding Polish tragedy. France’s C-in-C, Gen. Maurice Gamelin, had told his British counterpart back in July: ‘We have every interest in the conflict beginning in the East and only generalising little by little. That way we shall enjoy the time we need to mobilise the totality of the Franco-British forces.’ Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam wrote petulantly in his diary on 2 September that the Poles ‘have only themselves to blame for what is coming to them now’.

In Britain on 3 September, the air-raid alarm which sounded within minutes of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast announcement of war aroused mixed emotions. ‘Mother was very flustered,’ wrote nineteen-year-old London student J.R. Frier. ‘Several women in the neighbourhood fainted, and many ran into the road immediately. Some remarks – “Don’t go into the shelter till you hear the guns fire” – “The balloons aren’t even up yet” – “The swine, he must have sent his planes over before the time limit was up.”’ After the all-clear, ‘within minutes everyone was at their doors, talking quickly to each other in nervous voices. More talk about Hitler and revolutions in Germany…Most peculiar thing experienced today was desire for something to happen – to see aeroplanes coming over, and defences in action. I don’t really want to see bombs dropping and people killed, but somehow, as we are at war, I want it to buck up and start. At this rate, it will carry on for God knows how long.’ Impatience about the likely duration of the struggle proved an abiding popular sentiment.

In remote African colonies, some young men fled into the bush on hearing that a war had started: they feared that their British rulers would repeat First World War practice by conscripting them for compulsory labour service – as indeed later happened. A Kenyan named Josiah Mariuki recorded ‘an ominous rumour that Hitler was coming to kill us all, and many people went fearfully down to the rivers and dug holes in the bank to hide from the troops’. The leaders of Britain’s armed forces recognised their unpreparedness for battle, but some young professional soldiers were sufficiently naïve merely to welcome the prospect of action and promotion. ‘The effect was one of exhilaration and excitement,’ wrote John Lewis of the Cameronians. ‘Hitler was a ludicrous figure, and Pathé newsreels of goose-stepping German soldiers were a cause of hilarious merriment…They were pretty good at dive-bombing defenceless Spanish villages, but that was about all. Most of their tanks were dummies made of cardboard. We had beaten a much more powerful Germany twenty years before. We were the greatest empire in the world.’

Few people were as clear-thinking as Lt. David Fraser of the Grenadier Guards, who observed harshly: ‘The mental approach of the British to hostilities was distinguished by their prime faults – slackness of mind and wishful thinking…The people of democracies need to believe that good is opposed to evil – hence the spirit of crusade. All this, with its attempted arousal of vigorous moral and ideological passions, tends to work against that cool concept of war as [an] extension of policy defined by Clausewitz, an exercise with finite, attainable objectives.’

Many British airmen anticipated their own likely fate. Pilot Officer Donald Davis wrote: ‘It was a marvellous autumn day as I drove up past the Wittenham Clumps and Chiltern Hills I knew so well, and I remember thinking that I should be dead in three weeks. I stopped to view the scene and ponder for a few minutes. [I decided that] were I to be faced by the same decisions I should still have decided to fly and join the RAF if I could.’ To Davis’s generation around the world, the privilege of being granted access to the sky fulfilled a supreme romantic vision, for which many young men were content to make payment by risking their lives.

At Westminster, with monumental condescension a government minister told the Polish ambassador, ‘How lucky you are! Who would have thought, six months ago, that you would have Britain on your side as an ally?’ In Poland, news of the British and French declarations of war prompted a surge of hope, boosted by the new allies’ extravagant rhetoric. Varsovians embraced in the street, danced, cried, hooted car horns. A crowd gathered outside the British Embassy on Aleje Ujadowskie, cheering, singing, stumbling through a version of ‘God Save the King’. The ambassador, Sir Howard Kennard, shouted from the balcony: ‘Long live Poland! We shall fight side by side against aggression and injustice!’

These tumultuous scenes were repeated at the French Embassy, where a crowd sang the Marseillaise. In Warsaw that night, a government bulletin announced triumphantly: ‘Polish cavalry units have thrust through the armoured German lines and are now in East Prussia.’ Across Europe, some enemies of Nazism embraced brief delusions. Mihail Sebastian was a thirty-one-year-old Romanian writer, and a Jew. On 4 September, after hearing news of the British and French declarations of war, he was naïvely astonished that they did not immediately attack in the west. ‘Are they still waiting for something? Is it possible (as some say) that Hitler will immediately fall and be replaced by a military government, which will then settle for peace? Could there be radical changes in Italy? What will Russia do? What’s happening to the Axis, about which there is suddenly silence in both Rome and Berlin? A thousand questions that leave you gasping for breath.’ Amid his own mental turmoil, Sebastian sought relief first in reading Dostoevsky, then Thomas de Quincey in English.