"Not Yet Published"

You’re being chased out of town. There are riots in the streets. You’re not allowed to go to the cinema, the theatre, to public swimming-pools, restaurants or libraries. You can’t use public transport. Your movements are restricted by a nightly curfew. Every single day brings more challenges, more uncertainty, and even more danger.

But then you hear of this scheme, this program, this initiative. If you take part in it, in a few days’ time, you can escape all this unhappiness. You can be safe and happy and welcomed, in a land where nobody can hurt you. And you can leave right now.

But only you.

Your parents can’t come. Your grandparents have to stay behind. Your uncle and aunt won’t be there to see you leave.

You’re five…six…seven years old. You’re going to a country that you’ve probably never been to before. In all likelihood, you don’t even speak the language. Once in this new country, you cannot leave. You stay there for nearly ten years before you can return to a home that might not exist anymore, to find a family that has been wiped off the face of the earth.

This is the story of the Kindertransports.

What were the Kindertransports?

The Kindertransports was a refugee program established by the British Government in November, 1938. It was designed to evacuate persecuted Jewish children from Germany, Austria and Czechslovakia in the months leading up to the outbreak of World War Two, and to give them shelter and refuge in the relative safety of the British Isles. The program lasted from shortly after Kristallnacht in Germany, to shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in early September, 1939. About 10,000 Jewish German, Austrian and Czech boys and girls were evacuated from their homelands to England, to protect them from rising Nazi antisemitism on the European continent. It is one of the forgotten stories of the Second World War.

What was Kristallnacht?

“Kristallnacht”, a German phrase commonly translated into English as ‘The Night of Broken Glass’, was a nationwide pogrom (essentially a race-riot) of Germany’s Jewish population in November of 1938. In the space of a few hours, thousands of Jewish shops were smashed, burned and ransacked. Windows were broken, shops looted and over two hundred synagogues were burnt down. Many Jews were either shot or arrested and thrown in jail. More were tortured or sent to concentration-camps. It was the most extreme anti-Jewish measure taken by the German Nazi-Party before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The Effect of Kristallnacht

Jews had been fleeing from Germany ever since 1933. In 1935, various ‘Nuremberg Laws’ (a collection of anti-Jewish laws) made life increasingly more intolerable for Germany’s Jewish population. It was during this time that many forward-thinking Jews tried to escape from Germany. A few lucky thousand managed to get ships to England or the United States. Some went to the Dominican Republic. About 30,000 Jews fled to the International Settlement of Shanghai between 1933-1941.

But life for Jews who were stuck in Germany, and who weren’t able to escape, became more and more desperate and difficult with each passing day. Kristallnacht terrified the Jews and appalled the British Government. More than ever, letters pleading for the British Government to issue visas to Jews desperate to escape Germany, came flooding in.

The problem was that the British Government was unwilling to act. The year is 1938. The Depression is only just beginning to ease. The British Government did not want to allow Jews into the British Isles, who might steal jobs that were badly needed for British workers. Above all, the British Government did not see the situation in Germany as being one of refuge, but rather as one of immigration. To the eyes of the British Government, the German Jews wanted to come to Britain to work, not to escape the persecution of the Nazis. On top of this, fears of war with Germany have been growing for months now. British families are evacuating their own children to the countryside, or to towns and villages out of the expected operational radius of German fighter and bomber-planes. How could the government also take in thousands of German Jewish refugees? There wouldn’t be anywhere to house them! Orphanages, schools and foster-families were having enough issues coping with British children, let alone all these continental refugees!

But public pressure forced the government’s hand. In the end, a compromise was reached – Jewish children, unaccompanied by their parents, would be allowed passage from Germany to England. The British Government could be seen to be doing its part in trying to help Jews evacuate from Germany, but at the same time, British jobs wouldn’t be threatened since the refugees wouldn’t be old enough to work. It wouldn’t be easy, what with British children also being evacuated from all the big cities in southern England, but the government was determined to make some sort of effort.

How did the Kindertransports Work?

You are a Jewish child living in Germany in 1939. You want to be a part of these ‘Kindertransports’ that you’ve heard about. How do you join in?

Jewish children were rounded up. They were assembled in places like schools or orphanages, and then taken to the nearest train-station. Entire classes or orphanages of Jewish children, would be packed up and sent by train from Berlin, Vienna or Prague, to cities in Holland and Belgium (if you didn’t live in Berlin, Vienna or Prague, then you would have to travel there to get on the trains). Once in Holland or Belgium, you would be loaded onto a ship bound for England. Once the ship docked on the coast of England, you would be sent by train to cities or towns in southern England where you would be placed with a foster family, or housed in an orphanage. Perhaps, if you were exceptionally lucky, you might get to stay with relatives already living in England.

But once you reached England, there you had to stay. The outbreak of war meant that you wouldn’t be able to go back to Germany, or German-occupied Europe until May, 1945.

The British government was pressured by Jewish aid agencies, humanitarian groups and refugee advocates for weeks. It eventually set into motion a scheme for evacuating children from Europe.

How Long did the Transports Last?

The kindertransports lasted for approximately a year. The first transport docked in England on the 2nd of December, 1938. The ship left Europe and sailed for the coastal town of Harwich, carrying 196 German Jewish children, who had been evacuated from their orphanage in Berlin (which had been destroyed by the Nazis).

Some of the children in the first Kindertransport, photographed here in Holland, awaiting their ship to England. December 1st, 1938

Every child that was evacuated from Europe was given a bond of fifty pounds sterling, and was issued with a temporary travel permit or visa, that allowed him or her to leave Europe and travel to England. But this was only available to children who were below the age of 17. The expectation of the British government was that once the crisis and anti-Jewish fervor had died down, all the children would be sent back to Germany to be reunited with their families. If they’d know what would happen in just a few months, they might’ve tried even harder with their evacuation-plans…

In Europe, the kindertransports were handled by religious leaders and humanitarian workers who sent trainloads of children from schools and orphanages to the Belgian and Dutch coastlines where they could be sent to England. In groups of a thousand, or a few hundred each time, it’s estimated that about 10,000 children in total, were evacuated before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Life in England

You have escaped Germany. You reached Berlin, you got on a train, you arrived in Belgium and got safely across the English Channel to a British port.

Now what?

As I said earlier, most children were taken in by foster-families or private sponsers. If you were one of these children, then it meant a further train-ride from your port of arrival to the British capital, London, where you would be collected at the station, or at a designated collection-point, by your sponser or foster-family. Other children were taken in by local families living near the arrival port. Leftover children were kept in transit-camps until such a time when they could be sent to specially-prepared orphanages. About half the transported children were taken in by foster families or sponsers, while the rest ended up in boarding schools, orphanages, youth hostels or on farms as farmhands.

Monument to the Kindertransports, Liverpool Street Station, London, England

For most children, life was pretty good. They received gifts and they were mostly well-treated by their host-families, although of course, there were a few which weren’t. Most of the older children found work as farmhands, general labourers or as domestic servants. The oldest of the older children even signed up to join the British Army when they reached the age of 18, determined to fight the people who had driven them out of their homeland in the first place.

The Effect of War on the Kindertransports

The start of the Second World War effectively ended the Kindertransports. In England, a wave of anti-German feeling swept through the country. Thousands of Germans and Austrians were rounded up, arrested and thrown in prison. Among these were abut a thousand kindertransport refugees who looked old enough to be young adults. It was feared by the British Government that these “enemy aliens” might try and sabotage the British war-effort. To try and render them a negligable force, they were packed onto ships and sent to Canada and Australia.

The purpose of the internments was to seperate legitimate refugees of Nazism, from German and Austrian expatriates, who the British government saw as a threat. But in the chaos following the fall of France, everything got mixed up.

The most famous case was that of the HMT Dunera. HMT stands for “His Majesty’s Transport”; the Dunera was a military troopship. Crammed onto it were 2,542 prisoners, double the ship’s actual capacity. They included a smattering of German and Italian P.O.Ws, Nazi-sympathisers, and in one of the biggest blunders ever – about two thousand mostly German or Austrian Jewish refugees, including kindertransport children. The inclusion of the Jewish refugees on the prison-ship was a shameful disaster, one which Churchill himself called a deplorable and regrettable incident.

Where was the ship going?

It left Liverpool on the 10th of July, 1940. It sailed without incident, all the way to the other side of the world! It docked in Sydney, Australia, two months later. The desperately overcrowded ship (which was only supposed to hold 1,600 people) bcame notorious for the cramped, crowded and unsanitary conditions onboard. Australian customs and medical officials, who boarded the ship when it docked in Sydney, were appalled by the conditions in which two thousand Jewish refugees, and about 540 P.O.Ws, were forced to spend two months at sea in!

The Dunera docked in Port Melbourne, Australia, 1940

The prisoners onboard ship, including the Jewish refugees, were herded into prisoner-of-war camps in Australia. Eventually, letters sent to England by the refugees made the government realise that they’d made a horrific mistake! Changes were implemented and the Jews were automatically segregated from the German and Italian P.O.Ws and Nazi-sympathisers, and given their own camp. Here, they received medical treatment and whatever food and water the Australian government could spare. They were classified as “friendly aliens”, who posed no threat to the war-effort of the British Empire.

Of the Jewish refugees who somehow ended up in Australia on the Dunera, about a thousand of them stayed in Australia where they were offered permanent residency by the Australian government. Several hundred of the younger refugees enlisted in the Australian Army to fight the Japanese and the Germans. The remainder of the refugees booked passages back to England on the next available ship.

The Last Transports

The Kindertransports ended officially on the 1st of September, 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland. On this day, the borders were closed and trains were no-longer allowed to pass freely between the countries of Europe.

The Winton Trains

The Winton trains were a small number of trains that ran from Czechslovakia to safe ports in Western Europe, transporting Czech Jewish children to safety in England. They are named after Sir Nicholas Winton, the young British businessman who initiated the scheme. Sir Nicholas and his trains managed to save nearly 700 Jewish children from death.

The number would’ve been 950 children, but the start of the war ended Sir Nicholas’s humanitarian efforts. When war broke out in early September of 1939, the ninth (and final) Winton train was stopped at the Czech border. Nearly all the 250 Jewish children onboard were eventually killed.

In 2009, a commemorative “Winton Train” ran from Czechslovakia to England to commemorate Sir Nicholas’s efforts. Onboard the train were Jewish survivors who escaped the Holocaust on the original Winton trains back in 1939, and their descendants. The commemoration was also a celebration of Sir Nicholas’s 100th birthday! As of the time of this post, Sir Nicholas is 102 years old.

The very last Kindertransport left Europe on the 14th of May, 1940. It was the steamship Bodegraven, which left the Dutch port city of Ijmuiden (“Ei-mouden”) during the fall of Holland. It carried eighty incredibly lucky children to safety in England.

Of the 10,000 Jewish children and teenagers who escaped the Nazis during the Holocaust thanks to the kindertransports, nearly none of them ever saw their parents ever again.

More Information?

The Kindertransport Association

“The Kindertransports: A Childhood in Hamburg”, by Paul M. Cohn, a Kindertransport survivor.

The names Hitler, Goering and Heydrich will forever be drenched in blood. Forever mocked. Teased. Spat on. Have songs sung about them regarding various states of testicular development…or underdevelopment.

The actions and inactions carried or not carried out by three of the most reviled men in history have been condemned an infinity of times by survivors, soldiers, historians, ordinary people, politicians, students, teachers, professors, freedom-fighters…and even…their own families.

This is the story of the members of the Families Hitler, Himmler and Goering, who turned their back on the black sheep of their name, who would forever tarnish whatever good reputation they might once have had, or might possibly have had in the future. This is the story of how members from the families of the three most hated men in history worked against their relatives’ revolting actions to try and attone for the sins and misdeeds that would forever be linked to their names.

Just in case you don’t know who these men are (unlikely), here’s a brief rundown:

Adolf Hitler – Chancellor or ‘Fuehrer’ of Germany. Leader of the Nazi Party which ruled Germany from 1933-1945.

Hermann Goering – One of Hitler’s right-hand men. Head of the German ‘Luftwaffe’ (airforce).

Reinhard Heydrich – Senior S.S. general. He chaired the infamous “Wannsee Conference” where high-ranking German officials gathered to discuss the details of the “Final Solution”.

The Good Germans

This is a legitimate article about actual historical events and persons. All the people mentioned in this posting are real and they really did what they did. None of this is made up. Members from the families of Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering and Reinhard Heydrich, really did conspire against them and worked against the Nazi war-machine during the Second World War. Their stories have been drowned by nearly seven decades of blood, but they are remarkable…and true.

So, let us begin.

William Patrick Hitler (1911-1987)

Related to: Adolf Hitler

Familial Connection: Nephew

William Patrick Hitler was born in Liverpool, England, in 1911. His father was Alois Hitler, half-brother to Adolf Hitler. His mother was an Irishwoman named Bridget Dowling.

The Hitler family is hardly conventional. It’s full of failed marriages, deaths, half-siblings and bastards (literally and figuratively).

William Patrick Hitler grew up in England. His father abandoned him at a young age and went back to Germany; William was raised by his mother, and he wouldn’t see his father again for nearly twenty years. When the First World War ended, William went to the new German ‘Weimar Republic’, the new Germany that had sprung up out of the dust and smoke of the end of the Great War. By now, it was 1929. In a few years, William’s uncle Adolf would seize power, in 1933.

William initially tried to take advantage of ‘Uncle Adolf’s new and powerful position as the new leader of Germany, but he became more and more dissatisfied with what he saw. He wanted Uncle Adolf to give him more to do, perhaps feeling that someone as influential as Adolf Hitler would have more influence. William even tried to blackmail his uncle. When this backfired on him, William fled to the United Kingdom in January of 1939. It was during this time that he wrote an article for a popular magazine, entitled “Why I Hate My Uncle”. Shortly afterwards, William and his mother moved to the United States of America.

When the Second World War started a few months later, William and his mother were trapped in the U.S.A. With German U-boats prowling the Atlantic Ocean looking to attack Allied shipping, it was too dangerous to sail back to England. Eventually (and understandably, after quite a bit of fuss), William managed to join the U.S. Navy, where he worked as a hospital corpsman.

After the War, William changed his name from the German ‘Hitler’ to the more English-sounding ‘Stuart-Houston’. He married and had four sons.

He died in the United States in 1987. He was 76 years old.

William P. Hitler had a sibling – A half-brother named Heinz Hitler (born to his father’s second wife, in Germany). Unlike William, Heinz joined the Nazis. He was captured by the Russians and tortured to death in 1942. He was 21 years old.

Albert Goering (1895-1966)

Related to: Hermann Goering (Nazi officer)

Familial Connection: Brother

Unlike his older brother Hermann, Albert Goering was a rather quiet, gentle sort of fellow. He hated the Nazis and the brutal tactics that they employed. He wanted to live the quiet life of a wealthy, German aristocratic gentleman, living somewhere in the countryside. Of course, having someone like Hermann Goering for a brother made these beautiful dreams rather harder to attain than usual.

Albert was so upset by what the Nazis were doing that he began to actively defy them…probably one of the few people who could do so, and get away with it. He helped Jews and political prisoners escape from Germany to countries of safety by getting them out of jail or by getting them essential travel-documents and money. He used to forge his brother’s signature regularly on important papers to help Jews escape.

So as not to be seen doing things that were suspicious, Albert would occasionally “help” the Nazis…in quite possibly the most unhelpful ways possible! He might sometimes be put in charge of Jewish transports. Only, trucks transporting Jews might never reach their work-assignments, prisons or labour-camps. Instead, they’d drive off a side-road, park in some quiet spot, and then Albert would turn a blind eye while all the prisoners hopped off the trucks and ran away into hiding, or tried to escape.

On occasions when Albert was arrested, he always managed to use his brother’s position as a top Nazi to get himself off the hook.

When the war ended, Albert was picked up by the Allies and interrogated extensively. But when all his supporters (mostly Jews) came to his defence, charges of Nazism were finally dropped.

Albert made a modest living as a writer after the war. He died in Germany in 1966. He was 71 years old.

Heinz Heydrich (1905-1944)

Related to: Reinhard Heydrich (S.S. General)

Familial Connection: Brother

Heinz Heydrich was the younger brother of Reinhard Heydrich, a respected general in the German S.S., the paramilitary organisation that was so heavily involved in the carrying out of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”; nothing less than the complete anihilation of the entire Jewish population of Europe.

Heinz Heydrich was a lieutenant in the S.S. Originally, he was very proud of his Nazi association and his older brother’s position within this unique organisation. He was a journalist by trade, and published the party newspaper. He continued his active association with the S.S. until June of 1942.

Early in June, Heinz’s older brother Reinhard died, asassinated by resistence-members in Czechosolvakia. His car was ambushed at a blind corner in a road and he was mortally wounded, dying a few days later in hospital.

It was this event that changed everything. Almost overnight, Heinz received a bundle of Reinhard’s personal papers and files…included in these were detailed plans about the “Final Solution”, in which Reinhard had been heavily involved.

Realising fully for the first time what he’d signed up for when he joined the S.S., Heinz was horrified. He burnt most of the papers in disgust.

Soon after this event, Heinz began to realise that he was in a truly unique position. Being the brother of a prominent S.S. general (albeit, a dead one), and being the editor of the party newspaper meant that he had a lot of influence. He used this to help as many Jews as possible escape from Germany. As a writer and editor of the party newspaper, Heinz had access to a commercial printing-press. He used this to print fake travel-documents which he signed and forged and stamped, and gave to Jewish families, so that they could escape from occupied Europe to countries of safety.

Heinz continued this work for two years, and might have lived out the war and be acquitted at the Nuremberg trials, if not for an event in November of 1944.

An investigation was launched into the goings-on at the S.S.’s newspaper offices. It was a pretty mundane thing – They just wanted to know why there was such a shortage of paper (in 1944 Germany, a lot of things were in short supply). Heinz, terrified that he’d be found out, committed suicide, shooting himself in the head.

He was 39 years old, and left a wife and five children behind.

Want to know more? Or perhaps you don’t believe me that all this is possible?

“Why I Hate My Uncle” – by William Patrick Hitler

“The Good Brother: Albert Goering”

 

Back in December of 2009, I wrote a two-part article about the British home-front of the Second World War. Although I covered a lot of things, upon reviewing that posting, it’s become apparent to me that I didn’t really write that much about the Blitz, the concentrated aerial bombardment of British cities by the German Luftwaffe from 1940-1941.

This posting will concentrate on the purpose, aims and effects of the Blitz on London during the Second World War.

What was the Blitz?

The Blitz is probably the most famous event of the Second World War. Although it was by no means the first time that civilians were exposed to civilian aerial attacks, it is certainly the most memorable.

The Blitz was the deliberate and concentrated bombing of British cities and towns (although the main target was London), by the German Luftwaffe in the period between the 7th of September, 1940 to the 10th of May, 1941.

The Blitz gets its name from the German word “Blitzkrieg“, ‘Lightning War’. This new, mobile form of warfare brought the war to the enemy, instead of waiting for the enemy to make the first move. The whole point was to strike first and strike fast. Just like lightning does, hence the name.

The Purpose of the Blitz

After the fall of France in mid-1940, the German war machine turned its attention to the British Isles. It was the German intention to invade Britain, but they realised that an invasion would be impossible if they didn’t manage to knock out at least one of the Britain’s two most formidable fighting forces.

Great Britain was defended by the Royal Air Force (the RAF), and the Royal Navy, then the most powerful blue-water navy in the world (and had been for the past 200 years).

The Germans knew that they couldn’t hope to fight and win against the Royal Navy, but they hoped that they would be able to attack and destroy the Royal Air Force. So began the Battle of Britain.

The Battle of Britain was supposed to knock out British air-superiority and allow the Germans to launch their invasion of Britain with unchallenged air-support. Unfortunately for the Germans, the British were made of tougher stuff than they’d supposed, and after several weeks of vicious aerial combat, the Germans were forced to surrender. It was the first battle in the war that the Germans had lost.

Unable to beat the RAF, the Luftwaffe decided instead to try and destroy British cities and towns to demoralise the British people. The Nazis thought that, by doing this, they could force the British to surrender to the might of the Aryans and cease their hopeless and useless attempts to struggle onwards in vain. So began the Blitz.

Preparing for the Blitz

The British Government planned for months for the coming of the Blitz. They never expected the Germans to play nice, so they had plans for every eventuality and scenario, including large-scale aerial bombardment of heavily populated cities.

Amongst these preparations were…

- Evacuation of children, babies, toddlers, expectant mothers, the ill and the elderly from towns along the south coast and major cities, to country towns further north, out of the effective range of German bomber-planes. This mass evacuation, which started on the 1st of September, 1939, was called Operation Pied Piper. It was the first of several evacuations from large British cities throughout the war.

- Issuing everyone, man, woman, child and even babies, with gas-masks. The British fully expected the Germans to bomb them with mustard gas, chlorine gas and other nasty and potentially deadly gases. No such gas-bombings ever took place, but nevertheless, civilians were urged to carry their gas-masks with them everywhere they went, and were reminded to keep them in a place at night where they would be instantly accessible.

- Enforcing a blackout throughout England. Street-lights were turned off. Car-lights were covered. Bicycle-lamps shielded. Thick, heavy blackout curtains were distributed to every single home and business and every night, these curtains had to be put up over a building’s windows so that not a single streak of light could be seen. The blackout was enforced with amazing strictness. You could be fined for showing even the smallest amount of light!…Even the glowing tip of a cigarette!

- Issuing the public with personal air-raid shelters. Anderson Shelters and Morrison Shelters (more about those later).

- Inflating enormous barrage-balloons. Barrage-balloons were huge, gas-filled floating balloons that were shaped like blimps. They floated above the cities and towns of England (and other allied countries) to protect people from low-flying enemy aircraft. If a low-flying German plane appeared, it would have to fly around, or over the barrage balloon, or risk crashing into it and having the balloon’s tethering-cables wrap around its propellers, causing it to stall and crash. Some balloons had explosive charges on them, so that any plane that crashed into them set off the charges and the balloon exploded, taking the plane down with it.

Barrage balloons floating over central London during the War. The building at the bottom of the photograph is Buckingham Palace

Surviving the Blitz

So…what happened during an air-raid?

Fortunately for the British, they were equipped with a new wonder-technology. It was called Radar. Or correctly, R.A.D.A.R, which stands for “RAdio Detection And Ranging”. Although it was in its relative infancy at the start of the war, RADAR allowed the British to monitor enemy airplanes. Where they were, how many there were, how high they were and where they were going. The Germans never figured out what RADAR was until after the war. They never equated the huge radio towers on the south coast of England with aircraft detection.

RADAR allowed the British to keep an eye on enemy planes. And most importantly, it allowed the British to warn large cities of incoming enemy air-raids. RADAR posts would be contacted by radio and telephone and then the warnings went out in the form of air-raid sirens.

There were two types of air-raid sirens in the war. The smaller, hand-cranked ones which could be operated by one man, or larger, electromechanical ones which were powered by electricity. There were a number of warnings that these sirens could give out, but the two most common ones were “Red Danger” or “Red Alert” (continuous high-low tone), and “All Clear”, (continuous high-pitched tone).

Even with radar. Even with sirens. Even moving as fast as you could, the chances of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time during a raid could be pretty high. From the moment that the sirens went off, you had between 10-15 minutes to make it to an air-raid shelter before the bombs started to fall.

To give you an idea of just how terrifying a raid was, imagine the following scenario:

You finish work early and go home. During the war, businesses closed shop early so that people could get home in time for air-raid preparations. Perhaps you have to walk, tripping over rubble, broken glass, wood, masonary, blown up cars, around cordoned off streets…in the dark, because there’s no street-lights burning…and the Underground is out of action from power-shortages and bombing.

Imagine getting home to a small, rationed dinner, putting up the blackout curtains and going upstairs to bed in your cold bedroom. It’s cold because like everything else, coal is rationed, so you can’t keep your furnace burning all the time like you used to.

You fall asleep. Exhausted. You’re woken up at one o’clock in the morning by the steady, wailing, high-low tones of the nearest air-raid siren. You’re groggy, dizzy, tired. You can’t see straight in the half-light, and you’re only dressed in your night-clothes…and you have ten minutes to run out of your house with all the things you hold dear…and make it to a bomb-shelter before your house is blown to pieces and you become another statistic. If you live with your family, imagine having to round up the kids…your wife, your husband, your brothers, sisters, your parents, grandparents…and getting them all up and moving and out of the house in the middle of the night when they’re all asleep..in ten minutes. In fact make that five minutes. Because after ten minutes, you’re dead.

Imagine staying in your shelter during the raid. You can’t sleep because of the sirens, the fires, the explosions, the rattling of the flak-guns and the reports of anti-aircraft cannons going off, mixing with the sound of aircraft engines overhead.

You stay up all night, wondering if the next bomb has your name on it. When the raid is over, you leave the shelter and wonder if your house is still standing. Whether your friends are still alive, whether that one person who didn’t make it into the shelter on time is dead or not, or whether they managed to hide somewhere and survive. Imagine having to clear away rubble and pick through the remains of your destroyed house. Imagine not being allowed to go back home because there was an unexploded bomb in the middle of your street.

Newsreel footage of the Blitz

Imagine having to do this for seven months. That was how long the Blitz lasted.

Imagine having to do this every single night, after night, after night, after night, for two and a half months without pause. That was how long the Blitz concentrated on London alone.

That was the reality of the Blitz.

Air Raid Precautions

Now that you have a mental picture of the panic of an air-raid, you can imagine the sheer terror that gripped people when those sirens went off every single night.

So how did they cope with it?

Well, enter the A.R.P.

A.R.P. stands for “Air Raid Precautions”.

The ARP was responsible for the safety of civilians during air-raids in Britain during the Second World War. They evacuated people from their houses, they did head-counts, they directed people to shelters, they assisted with raid-related emergencies such as fires, rescues, unexploded bombs (or UXBs as they were called) and collapsed buildings.

The men on the ground doing the work for the ARP were the ARP wardens, with their metal Bodie-style helmets and dark blue uniforms.

Apart from the above-mentioned duties, ARP wardens also enforced the blackout. “Put that light out!” was a common thing to say if a light was visible from the street. Wardens also issued gas-masks, personal air-raid shelters, patrolling the streets at night, and handling bomb-damage. ARP wardens and fire-watchers would carry buckets of sand with them during an air-raid to put out incendiary bombs that had exploded and set things on fire. Incendiary bombs were firebombs filled with nasty liquids that would fizzle, burn and explode if you tried to put the bomb out with water, so sand was thrown on them instead to prevent the fire from spreading. ARP wardens also gave raid-victims first-aid and would help the police and firemen recover dead bodies from destroyed buildings and shelters. Apart from their helmets, ARP wardens were also given handbells and specially-manufactured Metropolitan police-whistles with “A.R.P” stamped onto them, to use as alarm and attention-attracting devices during a raid.

An ARP helmet, bell and metropolitan-style ‘ARP’ police whistle

Amazingly, the ARP existed long before the War ever started. It was formed back in 1924!

Why?

Well, during the First World War, London was bombed by German zepplins and bomber-planes. During these early raids, there was no prescribed way of handling the situation, since it was completely new in the history of warfare. Determined to be prepared if it happened again, the ARP was established to assist people during an air-raid if London was ever bombed again in the future.

The ARP wardens had among the most dangerous jobs in England during the War. Imagine having to run from your house in a raid to find a shelter in the pitch black when the sirens went off. Imagine having to roam around the streets directing human traffic, having to order people around, having to calm hysterical women, screaming children and panicking men while sirens scream and bombs explode around you, knowing that at any second, a bomb could go off, a building could collapse or catch fire, and you’d be dead. Imagine having to try and herd dozens, hundreds, of panicking people into an air-raid shelter in the height of the chaos, with only your hands and your police-whistle to direct people and get attention – Don’t bother shouting out orders – nobody would hear you over the sound of the explosions and sirens.

Such was the reality of being an air-raid warden.

Air-Raid Shelters

So what exactly were you supposed to do when the air-raid sirens went off?

Well, in the five or ten precious minutes of warning that RADAR and sirens were able to give you, you had to snatch all your worldly belongings, gather the people of your household, get your gas-mask (you HAD to take it. No exceptions. Even the Queen Mum carried hers with her everywhere she went) and run for the nearest shelter.

What kinds of shelters were available to people during the War?

In Britain, air-raid shelters varied significantly. They might be railroad bridges, church crypts, the cellars and basements of big buildings, or most famously – Underground Tube stations. Seventy nine of them were converted into air-raid shelters and underground workshops during the War.

But what if you couldn’t make it to a public air-raid shelter or gathering-point in time? What did you do then? Perhaps the nearest shelter was four blocks away.

Can you run four blocks in two minutes?

If you couldn’t, then you had to rely on the government-issued air-raid shelters. They came in two styles. The Anderson Shelter and the Morrison Shelter.

Anderson Shelter

Designed in 1938, a year before the war even started, this crude air-raid shelter was named for Sir John Anderson, the chap in charge of air-raid precuations.

The Anderson Shelter was a cheap, D.I.Y. shelter. It came delivered to your house (or you could go out and buy one) in fourteen prefabricated parts: Six roof-panels, six side panels, and two end-panels (one with a door, to create an entrance).

When properly assembled, the Anderson shelter was designed to hold six people. The shelters were six feet high, four and a half feet wide, and six and a half feet long. And it wasn’t just a matter of bolting them together in the garden as a children’s cubbyhouse. You had to dig a hole in the back yard! Six and a half feet long, four and a half feet wide (for the length and breadth of the shelter), and four feet deep! You assembled the shelter in the hole, with additional space for the door, and then you covered the entire thing with earth to provide shock-protection.

Despite how flimsy the whole construction sounded…these things did save lives.

But what if you didn’t have a garden, and you lived miles from the nearest public shelter?

Then you used the…

Morrison Shelter

The Morrison Shelter was named for Herbert Morrison, then Minister of Home Security. The Morrison shelter was a heavy, steel table with wire sides between the legs and base. It was designed to hold two to three people and protect them in the event of a raid. Because of their design, Morrison shelters often doubled as coffee-tables or dining-tables in people’s living-rooms during the War. In a pinch, you could open the side of the shelter, crawl in and slam it shut behind you.

The Purpose of the Shelters

Duuuh. To protect you against bombs!

Ehm…no.

Anderson Shelters and Morrison Shelters were not, and never were, designed to protect you against bombs.

Be serious. Is a metal table or a few sheets of corrugated steel, going to protect you against a bomb weighing thounds of pounds?

Of course not.

Well then what was the point of having them?

The point of these shelters was not to protect you from bombs. They were never designed to take a direct hit. Instead, they were designed to protect you from shrapnel.

When a bomb drops and explodes, it sends out heaps of shrapnel. The metal shell-casing, bricks, glass, wood, mortar, chunks of concrete and all other kinds of flying debris. Every single one of these things is a potentially lethal missile. If they hit the sides of the Anderson Shelter, you would be safe. This was why the shelters were dug into the ground and covered with soil. To protect against shrapnel.

Morrison shelters protected you from above. They were designed to withstand the force of the house collapsing on top of you if it was bombed. The table-shelter would give you a ‘safe-zone’ in which to hide, protected from the rubble, until ARP wardens and fire-watchers could extinguish the flames and get you out alive.

Public Shelters

If you didn’t have a garden or space for a Morrison Shelter in your apartment, then in an air-raid, you could use a public air-raid shelter. The most famous public air-raid shelters were the seventy nine Tube stations that were converted into bomb-shelters and underground workshops during the War. Some stations which were no-longer used might be converted into storage-areas or workshops. But other stations which still received regular traffic were used as air-raid shelters.

Ducking down in the Tube was hardly pleasant. How would you like to spend the night in a cold, draughty, piss-soaked subway station with dozens of other people, with blankets and cold food and no toilets and rats and water and the wailing of the sirens, the blasting of anti-aircraft cannons and the explosions of bombs up above you all night?

The British Government initially dissuaded people from using the Tube as an air-raid shelter. They were scared that, once everyone went underground, they’d never want to come out again.

When these fears were proved groundless, the government picked out the nearly eighty stations across London that could be used to house people in air-raids. They were fitted with extra toilets, lights, running water, bunk-beds and even special trains that came by with hot food! At night, Tube workers would cut the power so that Londoners could sleep on the railway tracks without getting electrocuted by the current that ran along the third rail which powered the subway trains.

Of course…you had to be able to wake up on time in the morning, otherwise you might get run over by the morning rush-hour!

People kept their spirits up down in the Tube with songs and games. Many people would actually arrive early! They’d show up in the station after work with their wives and husbands and kids, tea and sandwiches, blankets, coats and pillows, and pick out the best spots in the station to bunk down for the night.

Other public air-raid gathering points included basements, cellars, church-crypts and bridges. While none of these provided complete safety from aerial attack (almost nothing could protect you from a direct hit), they were made available for those people who had nowhere else to run.

Despite the provision of private shelters and the setting-up of public ones, a significant number of Londoners actually chose to sleep in their own homes during the air-raids. Since sleeping in the shelters didn’t guarantee safety, some Londoners decided that if they were going to die anyway, they’d prefer to die in their own homes.

The Baedeker Blitz

The main body of the Blitz on the United Kingdom was over by mid-1941. However, that didn’t mean that the danger had completely passed, and throughout the war, the Germans continued to conduct air-raids on British cities and towns. The next most famous set of raids were collectively called the Baedeker Blitz.

These air-raids were named after the famous Baedeker (pronounced ‘Bay-Decker’) guidebooks. The Baedeker Co. (ironically, a German company!), was famous for printing in-depth guidebooks of famous countries and cities for the travelling public, covering everything from England to France, Italy to China. They were the Lonely Planet of their day.

These raids, which took place between April-June of 1942, targeted the famous tourist and cultural centers of the British Isles, such places as would be mentioned in the famous Baedeker Guidebooks (hence the name).

Cities targeted included York, Bath, Norwich, Exeter and Canterbury. The famous Canterbury Cathedral was one of the targets during the Baedeker Blitz. Fortunately for the British, the bomber missed the Cathedral (although not by much). Unfortunately for the British, the bomb struck the cathedral’s archives building, destroying it in a direct hit.

V1s and V2s

By the last year or so of the war, the Germans were in deep trouble. The Allies were closing in from the East and West. From France, British, Canadian, French, Polish and American forces were charging towards Berlin. In the East, the Russians were steamrolling the Germans back, taking bloody revenge for their fallen comrades, whom the Germans had previously captured…and killed…in their hundreds of thousands.

But that didn’t stop the Germans from trying to strike at England. In 1944 and 1945, they developed and launched first the V1, and then the V2 rockets. These crude weapons were the predecessors to today’s guided missiles.

Launched starting shortly after D-Day, the V1s were nicknamed ‘Doodlebugs’ because of the buzzing noise they made when they flew overhead. Although probably a powerful psychological weapon, in reality they were not as effective as the Germans had hoped. Doodlebugs were slow and cumbersome. British anti-aircraft cannons could take them out with relative ease. And even when the Germans launched doodlebugs en-masse, only one in four ever made it past the anti-aircraft guns.

The V-1 ‘Doodlebug’

The V2s, much faster and more accurate, were so advanced for the day that they were beyond the capabilities of anti-aircraft gunners to shoot down. Deciding that it was impossible to destroy the rockets once they were in the air, and unable to destroy the launching areas (hidden and well-protected), the British instead relied on disinformation and espionage to defeat the Germans and their fearsome new Weapon of Mass Destruction.

For the duration of the war, the British had been training a large number of spies. Some spies were British. Other spies were Germans who spied for Germany, but who were captured by the British and turned into double-agents, spying for both countries, but only supplying useful information to the British. Some German spies actually hated the Nazis. They would sign up for spy-duties, get sent to England, and the moment they could, they would hand themselves into British authorities, divulge their mission-details and any handy bits of information, and then switch sides and spy for the British.

This complex network of spies and misinformation was called the Double Cross System. And the British used their extensive network of agents and spies to screw up the Germans and their V1s and V2s.

Because of the crudeness of these early missiles, the Germans had to rely on their agents in England to tell them how successful the weapons were. Egged on the British, the German double-agents would send back misleading reports.

If a missile missed London (or another prominent target), information sent back to Berlin was that the missile was on target and that nothing should be changed.

If a missile hit its target, then a message sent back to Berlin would say that the missile had been ranged too long (or short) and that corrections would have to be made. These ‘corrections’ would in fact result in the previously-accurate missiles going off-target and striking smaller communities or exploding harmlessly in the countryside.

Using these tactics, the British were able to redirect the majority of German V-2 rockets into less-populated (or completely unpopulated) parts of the country, where a bomb-explosion was less likely to kill someone.

By early 1945, with the Allies closing in on Germany on all fronts, and the Germans running short on everything from food, to water, fuel, ammunition and more essential things like lederhosen, their campaigns of terror against Britain finally ceased.

Cities all over the British Isles were devasted by the bombing. Streets were cordoned off, buildings were demolished, entire families might be wiped out. Apart from London, probably the hardest-hit city was that of Coventry, where almost the entire city was flattened by German bombing in one night. So intense was the bombing that the Germans invented a new word to describe the sheer level of destruction – Koventrieren – to Coventrate – or to destroy something completely.

Few people today can imagine the terror of exploding bombs, the scream of air-raid sirens and living in constant, daily fear. For many people, it’s something they read about in history-books, see in movies or in episodes of ‘Foyle’s War’…But it did happen.

Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Hitler?
If you think we’re on the run?
We are the boys who will stop your little game,
We are the boys who will make you think again!

‘Cause who do you think you are kidding Mr. Hitler?
If you think old England’s done?

Mr. Brown goes off to town on the 8:21,
But he comes home each evenin’ and he’s ready with his gun!

So watch out Mr Hitler, you have met your match in us,
If you think you can crush us,
We’re afraid you’ve missed the bus

‘Cause who do you think you are kidding Mr. Hitler?
If you think we’re on the run,
We are the boys who will stop your little game,
We are the boys who will make you think again,

‘Cause who do you think are kidding Mr. Hitler?
If you think old England’s done!

Behold the original 1940s theme-song of the British Home Guard!

Okay, no, not really.

‘Who Do You Think You are Kidding Mr. Hitler‘ was the theme-song to the popular 1970s TV show “Dad’s Army”, that chronicled the activities of a fictional Home Guard unit during the Second World War. The song was actually written in 1968 and sung by famous music-hall veteran Bud Flanagan. Flanagan came out of retirement to record the theme-song as a special favour to the show’s creators, who were avid fans. They wanted the show’s theme-song to be sung by a real wartime singer (which Flanagan was), and they got lucky when he agreed. Really lucky! Flanagan died less than a year later!

“Dad’s Army” was one of the great television comedies of the 70s. But it’s scary to think that fiction mirrored reality in so many ways! A lot of the jokes in the show (weapons-shortages, no uniforms, poor training, old codgers thinking they could fight off the Luftwaffe) were actually real problems faced by the real Home Guard back in the 1940s! This is the true story of Britain’s citizen army – The Home Guard.

Local Defence Volunteers

With the fall of France, the British were terrified that the Germans might turn their sights on England and attempt to invade them sometime in 1940 or 1941. Fearing that they might not have enough fulltime soldiers to defend the British Isles, on the 14th of May, 1940, the British Government established the Local Defence Volunteers, a ‘citizen army’ who could fight off the Germans and secure the Isles until soldiers from other parts of the Empire could arrive to provide backup.

The L.D.V was expected to be made up of about 150,000 carefully-chosen men who would be Britain’s first line of defence against a German invasion. Within 24 hours of the original radio broadcast made by Anthony Eden, 250,000 men had signed up! To give you an idea of how many that is, the entire British Army was 250,000 men before the war started! By 1943, the Local Defence Volunteers numbered nearly two million (1.8 mil, precisely), and never fell below 1,000,000 for the rest of the war.

Dad’s Army – The Home Guard

The L.D.V. was renamed the “Home Guard” by order of Winston Churchill in August of 1940. It sounded better and was easier to write down. This proud fighting force of patriotic British men would stave off impending doom from a Nazi invasion of their treasured homeland!…or not. We’ll never know, because Britain was never invaded, but the British Government and Army were determined to be ready for any eventuality.

Signing up for Duty

The Home Guard officially recruited men and boys ranging from 17-65 years in age. Recruits were men who were too young to fight in the regular army, too old to fight in the regular army, who were excused from regular combat due to medical issues or who were excused from enlistment due to being in a ‘reserved occupation’ (having a job that was essential to the war-effort…like baking bread…and no, I’m not kidding. Bakers were exempt from joining the army).

In the flurry of activity to join the newly formed Home Guard, the rules were only loosely followed. Children as young as fifteen and sixteen joined the Home Guard and grown men as old as seventy joined up! The oldest guardsman was Alexander Taylor. He first bore arms for king and country back during the Mahdist War of 1881! When he signed up for the Home Guard, he was well over eighty years old!

Approximately 40% of the Home Guard were made up of former soldiers, most of them veterans of the Great War of 1914 (ahem, the First World War to you and me).

Because the majority of the guardsmen were of advanced age, the Home Guard was given the popular nickname: “Dad’s Army”.

Training the Guard

Training for the Home Guard was rudimentary. Because such a sizeable number of the men (as well as their commanding officers), were all veterans of former wars (the Great War, the Boer War, the Second Afghan War of the 1880s and so-on), they felt that they didn’t need any training. They were soldiers already! Or they were…once upon a time…and they were ready to do it again!

As noble and patriotic and romantic and well-meaning as all these sentiments were, they all overlooked the fact that many of these men fought back in the days of cannons, horse-cavalry charges, bayonets and single-shot rifles! Their training didn’t prepare them for a modern, 20th century war! So like it or not, they all had to be trained from the ground up…all over again. Some officers were allowed to keep the ranks that they’d earned during previous conflicts, however.

Arming the Guards! (The Bullet is not for firing!)

It’s just as well for the people of Britain that their homeland was never invaded. The Home Guard had nothing to fight with!

See, during the war, all the best weapons were required by the regular army. They got all the up-to-date machine-guns, mortars, knives, daggers, small-arms and rifles. The Home Guard had to make-do with whatever crap they could find that was left over! The wartime mantra of “Make do and Mend” was never more true!

The Home Guard was woefully under-equipped. They didn’t even have proper uniforms until halfway through the war! Just armbands that they wore on their sleeves. And weapons…oh boy.

To give you an idea of how ill-equipped the guardsmen were, they used to do rifle-drills with almost anything BUT a rifle. They used billiard-cues, broomsticks, walking-sticks, crutches, umbrellas, cricket-bats, pitchforks, hoes…anything!

What firearms they could find were usually what they brought from home. Their revolvers, their heirloom duelling-pistols, Uncle Jack’s hunting-rifle, double-barreled sawn-off shotguns, break-open long-barrel shotguns, handguns…they didn’t have a single rifle between them!

The shortage of arms for the Home Guard was so severe that they even broke into museums to find them! Cannons, muskets, blunderbusses, musketoons…even old cavalry swords! Everything was requisitioned by the Home Guard for the defence of the realm. And I don’t mean that they knocked on a museum door, spoke the curator, got him to sign a piece of paper and then helped themselves to the guns…I mean they literally broke in! Smashing glass display-cases and making off with the guns!

Winston Churchill recognised this shortage of firearms and he wrote a letter to the War Office in June of 1941 which read:

“Every man must have a weapon of some kind, be it only a mace or a pike!“

You can guess what happened next.

What Churchill REALLY meant was that the Home Guard should be equipped with whatever weapons were available and that every effort should be made to give them the best firearms that the British Army could spare!

Unfortunately for Churchill, the War Office took his message a little too literally. In 1942, they finally finished producing 250,000 pikes.

Yes.

Pikes.

Long, pointy sticks that go stabby-poke.

Exactly what Churchill said when the War Office told him that his order of pikes was ready for dispersement, isn’t recorded. But it was probably an impressive array of profanities.

Needless to say, the ludicrous pikes were never used. Most of them were never even unpacked and removed from storage! The guardsmen refused to use them, anyway.

Eventually, the Home Guard did get proper rifles. They were the old Lee-Enfield rifles used during the Great War. This was probably beneficial to a certain extent. Nearly half the guardsmen were Great War veterans and would’ve been familiar with the rifles. The only problem was, these rifles were now over twenty years old!

Americans and Canadians tried to help out their British friends. They collected and donated all their old rifles that they didn’t use anymore, and sent them to England. So at least the Home Guard had proper rifles now…even if they were outdated vintage ones!

While they might have had rifles (and might have also had ammunition), the guardsmen didn’t have much else. They had to improvise most of their weapons, such as grenades. They learned how to make rudimentary firebomb-grenades out of old bottles, flammable liquids and old rags. These homemade grenades were copied from the originals invented by the Finnish in 1939. They were called “Molotov Cocktails”, and were named for Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister.

Grenades weren’t the only things that the guardsmen had to make for themselves. They even produced their own mortars! A particular model (called the Northover Projector) was essentially a rudimentary grenade-launcher/mortar that fired grenades into the air. Blackpowder (not used since the American Civil War of the 1860s!) was poured down the barrel, then a grenade was forced down the barrel after it.

The powder was ignited using a toy precussion-cap (those little things that you stick in children’s play-guns that go ‘Bang!’) and was operated by a two-man crew. The Northover Projector was cheap, easy to use…but hardly effective. Half the time it could misfire, or even worse, explode in the breech, blowing the thing apart and injuring the crew.

Although the Northover Projector was manufactured commercially, many people made their own, homemade versions. It was often called the “Drainpipe Mortar” because of its long, slim shape.

The Duties of the Guard

Because Britain was never invaded, it’s widely believed that the Home Guard didn’t do anything. This wasn’t exactly true.

The Guard was employed in various activities throughout the war. They patrolled harbours and ports, they guarded ammo-dumps and important military installations and storage facilities, and they manned anti-aircraft cannons during the Blitz. Over a thousand guardsmen died in combat during the war.

The guardsmen also arrested and rounded up downed German pilots, they helped the wounded, cleared rubble from air-raids and rescued the trapped who were stuck in their collapsed houses. In 1941, the Guard was even allowed to guard Buckingham Palace! Churchill proudly declared that if London was invaded, the Home Guard would fight a bloody war with the Germans for every single city block.

The End of the Home Guard

The Home Guard was stood down in late 1944, when it was pretty certain that the Germans wouldn’t be doing any fighting against the British on their home soil anytime soon. It was formally disbanded on the 31st of December, 1945.

Dad’s Army

70th Anniversary of the Home Guard

Home-Guard.org.uk

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. One of the most famous people in history. You might know that…

- He was the leader of the United Kingdom for most of the Second World War.

- He was a great orator famous for his morale-boosting speeches.

- He was famous for popularising the “V for Victory” sign.

- He lived in a country house with his family. It was called ‘Chartwell’.

But here are some things about Churchill you probably didn’t know. The things that the history books in school don’t tell you about, because these things ‘aren’t important’. But things which are nonetheless interesting to know. For example. Did you know that…

- Churchill once appeared naked in front of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

It’s true.

During a trip to the United States shortly after the Attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Churchill was finishing his bath while talking to Roosevelt at the same time. During their conversation, Churchill’s towel accidently fell off, leaving him in a state of total undress while in the president’s company. Without skipping a beat, Churchill promptly declared: “You see, Mr. President? I have nothing to hide!”

- Churchill suffered a heart-attack during the War.

During the same trip to America, Churchill suffered a mild heart-attack. Due to the serious complications that would arise if the whole world knew that Churchill had a heart-attack, the issue was hushed up. Except by Churchill’s bodyguard and doctor, who recorded the incident privately in their records.

- Churchill liked playing Bezique.

Never heard of Bezique? Neither have I. Bezique is a card-game which is probably totally forgotten today, surpassed by Poker, Gin-Rummy, Blackjack, Snap, Bullshit and other more popular games. It was invented in France in the 1600s and was a popular card-game up until the late Victorian period. It died off quickly during the 20th century. But Churchill loved playing it with his wife whenever they had a spare moment alone.

- Churchill had a pet cat.

Yes he did! Or to be more precise, he had SEVERAL cats. The PM’s fondness of moggies isn’t widely known, but it’s true. Churchill’s most famous pet cat was called Nelson (as in Admiral Nelson). Churchill once declared that Nelson was doing his own bit for the war effort. Yes he was! Nelson saved on heating-costs and valuable coal by sleeping with Churchill and doubling as his hot-water bottle on cold nights! Despite the strict rationing that was enforced throughout Britain during the War, Churchill used to sneak Nelson slices of salmon when he thought Mrs. C. wasn’t looking. The last cat that he owned was given to him as a birthday present on his 88th birthday. The cat’s name was ‘Jock’.

A cat named Jock has been at permanent residence at Churchill’s country house of Chartwell ever since 1975 (when the original Jock died). The current cat of the household is Jock IV.

- In case any ship he was sailing in was attacked and captured or sunk, Churchill never used his own name while on a journey during the War. Instead, he was called ‘Colonel Warden’ to protect his identity.

- Churchill was a prolific drinker and smoker, consuming up to two bottles of champagne a day.

- Churchill’s nakedness wasn’t just limited to the bathroom where it might be expected. While he dictated speeches, or was busy sounding out new ones, he would sometimes get so distracted by his work that it wasn’t unknown for him to wander around Chartwell completely naked and forget that he wasn’t wearing any clothes! This fact was gleamed from the director’s commentary of ‘The Gathering Storm’, if anyone wants to know. 

- Churchill was a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan.

- When Nazi leader Rudolph Hess landed in England in an attempt to broker a peace-deal with the British, upon being told of Hess’s arrival, Churchill famously declared: “Hess or no Hess, I’m off to see the Marx Brothers!”

- Churchill suffered from Depression.

Probably not surprising, considering what he went through in life! Churchill and his doctor called his melancholia his ‘Black Dog’. The Black Dog Institute (an organisation that deals with people suffering from Depression) is named after Churchill.

- Churchill didn’t die until he was 90 years old! He died on the 24th of January, 1965. His father also died on the 24th of january…1895! And his father died at the age of 45. Churchill lived to twice his father’s age and died on the same day!

- Churchill was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom TWICE. Once from 1940-1945 (his most famous term), and again from 1951-1955.

 

The Second World War is full of “Where were you when…?” moments. Lots of us have asked our grandparents those questions. Where were you when war was declared? Where were you on V.E. Day? Where were you on V.J. Day? Where were you when Churchill became Prime Minister or when Italy surrendered or when the A. bombs were dropped on Japan? Today is the 7th of December, 2011. It’s 70 years to the day since the events of the date which would live in infamy, took place at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. So, what happened on that day? What caused it? Why did it happen? What was life like before it happened? What was life like after it happened? This was a world-shaking event that shocked almost everyone in the world, but what made the 7th of December such a date of infamy?

Let’s find out together.

What is ‘Pearl Harbor’?

Pearl Harbor is a naval base belonging to the United States Navy. It gets the name ‘Pearl Harbor’ from the Hawaiian words ‘Wai Momi‘, or ‘Pearl Water’, which was the name of the area where the base was eventually built in the late 1800s. ‘Pearl Harbor’ originally went by a number of less poetic names. Among them were “Naval Station, Honolulu”, and “Naval Station, Hawaii”. Originally little more than a coaling-station (the seafaring equivalent of a pit-stop or a roadside diner), serious military interest in the area of the harbor started at the turn of the last century around 1899. By 1903, the base’s name was officially called ‘Pearl Harbor’. A new community to serve the growing naval base (‘Pearl City’) was established nearby in 1911. The naval base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was, and remains, the United States’ main naval base off its western coast.

The United States, 1941

The contention that America joined the Second World War merely to show off, flex its muscles, beat the Axis, take all the credit for the victory and stiff everyone else is a popular one on internet discussion-forums and YouTube video comments-lists.

But it’s not true.

The United States never had any intention of trying to outperform any other of the allied countries. It never attempted to try and win total victory. It never entered the war at its own convenience just ‘because’. What most people tend to forget, over seventy years after the start of the Second World War, was that the United States actually wanted nothing to do with the European conflict.

In the eyes of American politicians and the American public, and as evidenced by popular opinion polls in the “Why We Fight” 1940s series of documentary films produced by the United States Army, America wanted no part in any future wars. A fact that might amuse, confuse and surprise many people today.

The United States in the 1930s and 40s was initially at least, extremely isolationist. It didn’t join the Great War (now more commonly called World War One) until 1917. And that was a disaster. After surviving the bloody trenches of France, American doughboys were determined not to get themselves mixed up in another European war. As far as they were concerned, the English, the French, the Germans, the Italians and the Russians could play fisticuffs until the cows came home and America was going to pay absolutely no attention at all.

Or at least, that was the plan.

One of the biggest anti-war, anti-involvement and pro-isolationism supporters was a prominent American celebrity of the 1930s, a famous aviator called Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Famous for flying across the Atlantic Ocean nonstop in his airplane ‘The Spirit of St. Louis’, Lindbergh became even more famous as an outspoken supporter of American isolationism. So famous and so outspoken in fact, that when war finally was declared, Lindbergh’s previously almost legendary reputation was severely damaged.

Despite the official stance of neutrality, it’s often said that nobody is ever truly neutral, and the United States supported Great Britain in almost any way that it could apart from giving outright military support. And up until 1941, this remained the fullest extent of American involvement in World War Two.

Southeast Asia, 1941

The Far East was in turmoil in 1941. The Second Sino-Japanese War between the Chinese and the Japanese had been raging since 1937. By now, Japan controlled vast swathes of Chinese land and the Chinese National Revolutionary Army was in full retreat with little hope of foreign aid. Feeling invincible, the Japanese Imperial Army, Navy and Air Force wanted to conquer all of Asia. It would take everything that wasn’t nailed down or defended to the death, but those two small inconveniences wouldn’t stop them, either.

But, to take such enormous amounts of land in the Southwest Pacific, the Japanese required naval superiority. The powerful Royal Navy of Great Britain, which had dominated the seas since the early Georgian era in the 1700s, was elsewhere engaged in 1941, but there was still one force to be reckoned with. The United States Navy. No Japanese actions in the Pacific could go ahead with the United States Navy protecting American holdings in the Pacific. If the Japanese intended to dominate Asia, they first had to neutralise the American threat. They had to destroy Pearl Harbor.

American Reactions

America was under no illusions about the threat of the Japanese. It was one of the fastest growing countries in the world at the time, changing rapidly from a backwards society of feudalism and agriculture, to a powerful modern force that adopted Western teachings and technology with surprising swiftness. With Japanese actions in China in the 1930s, the United States began to fear quite rightly for its own safety. In the years and months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, American-Japanese relations began a serious deterioration. In 1940, America, which had previously supplied Japan with raw resources and military hardware, stopped all such shipments to Japan. It was hoped that, without American aid, the Japanese war-effort in the Pacific would die out and fizzle away. But it didn’t.

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. October, 1941

In a show of force, then-president of the U.S.A., the famous Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ordered the United States fleet then at-anchor in San Diego, to relocate to Pearl Harbor. The purpose of this was to scare and intimidate the Japanese into calling off their attacks. America was now within striking-distance of Japan and if Japan didn’t play nice, the country with a former president who said that one should talk softly and carry a big stick, was going to bring that stick smack-down on Japanese heads. But Japan didn’t listen.

In July, 1941, the Americans stopped exporting oil to Japan in another attempt to starve and coerce the Japanese into ending their conflict, but this too, failed to intimidate the Japanese. The Americans were running out of options.

The Attack on Pearl Harbor

By mid-1941, American patience with the Japanese was wearing out, and Japanese aggression was heating up. The Japanese wanted more and the Americans weren’t giving it. The Japanese would have to take the resources that they needed for their war by force, and for that to happen, America had to be dealt with in the most direct way possible: An open military attack on its naval base at Pearl Harbor.

The Naval base at Taranto on the Italian coast, in the 1930s

By this time, the Japanese were planning the attack on Pearl Harbor. To learn about strategic aerial bombardment, the Japanese studied the recent Battle of Taranto, in which the British attacked the Italian naval base of Taranto in the Mediterranean back in November of 1940. The attack was a success for the British, who wreaked significant damaged on the Italian base with only minimal losses.

The Japanese practiced their raids on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor relentlessly. They ‘bombed’ a model of the harbor repeatedly in the months and weeks leading up to the attack until their hit-rate had reached an accuracy of 80%. On the 26th of November, 1941, the Japanese set sail from their home ports. To totally annihilate the Americans, their task-force was equipped with:

Six aircraft-carriers, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, nine destroyers, eight tankers for refuelling, twenty-eight submarines (five of which were midgets) and 414 airplanes.

During the journey to Hawaii, the Japanese maintained radio-silence (abstaining from the use of radio in case their signals might be detected by the Americans) to hide their position from the enemy.

December 7th, 1941

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a complete and total surprise.

Although the Japanese had intended to formally declare war on the United States prior to the attack, the declaration never reached the U.S. Government in time and by the time it had, the attack had already started. It commenced at 7:53am on the morning of December 7th, 1941.

Because of radio silence, the Japanese were able to get extremely close to Hawaii and Pearl Harbor before unleashing their attack. The first wave of Japanese airplanes, comprising of ninety bombers armed with torpedoes and bombs, fifty-four dive-bombers, each equipped with 500lb general-purpose bombs, and forty-five of Japan’s famous Mitsubishi ‘Zero’ fighter-planes. Their targets were battleships, airfields, airplanes and aircraft-carriers.

The purpose of the first wave was to attack and destroy as much of the important infrastructure and military equipment as they could which was stationed at Pearl Harbor. Ships. Planes. Airfields. Hangars. Fuel and ammunition-dumps. Shortly after, the second wave took off. Their task was to destroy anything that the first wave had missed.

The second wave comprised of bombers, dive-bombers and fighters. 171 in total. Their targets included aircraft carriers, hangars, cruisers and aircraft, with the fighter-planes (again, Japanese Zeros) providing air-superiority.

U.S.S. Shaw explodes after her forward magazine is hit

The third wave of Japanese planes, which were designed to finish off Pearl Harbor, never took flight. By this time, it was feared that the Americans would have ammassed some sort of defense to intercept the third wave and that the element of surprise had been lost. Indeed, the growing American defense was wreaking havoc on the second wave and sending in additional Japanese reinforcements would’ve proven a waste of manpower and machinery.

The American Response

To say that America was caught off-guard by the Japanese attack is an understatement. They had absolutely no idea that any such attack was imminent. While American radar-stations on Hawaii had picked up on Japanese airplanes (scouts which had been sent ahead of the main attack-force), they were presumed to be American fighter-planes returning from a scheduled training-exercise. No significance was attached to their presence in the area.

At the time, American sailors and airmen were asleep in their barracks and bunks, blissfully unaware of everything that was going on. It wasn’t until the first bombs dropped and the sounding of a general alarm that the base realised it was under attack. And in the meantime, Pearl Harbor was a sitting duck.

Warships in Pearl Harbor were set up in neat rows alongside the docks. The famous “Battleship Row”. Clustering ships together like this made them a big, fat red target to the Japanese. It was impossible to miss them. In addition, few of the artillery pieces and machine-guns on Pearl Harbor were loaded or manned at the time of the attack. Ammunition was stored in locked ammunition-cages and lockers which the defending Americans had trouble accessing during the raid, delaying the speed of any counter-attack.

For fears of sabotage if their airplanes were kept locked in their hangars (“out of sight, out of mind”), American airplanes were instead parked on the tarmacs, outside their hangars in rows, where they would be easily visible (to deter tampering by enemy agents). This clustering of airplanes, just like with the ships, merely presented a big fat target to the Japanese, who decimated American airfields.

American battleships were woefully unprepared for any enemy attack. With guns unloaded and ammunition stored in locked bunkers and lockers far from their guns, much time was wasted in attempting to load guns with the correct ammunition to launch a successful response to the Japanese.

At the time, the Americans had 402 aircraft stationed on Hawaii. Of those, nearly half (188) were destroyed outright by the Japanese. Another 159 were damaged beyond immediate use. This left a mere 55 planes available to fight off a Japanese airborn force of 353 out of a total of 414 airplanes. Of those, only eight managed to get into the air.

The Aftermath

The attack was surprisingly swift. From when it started at 7:53am, it was all over in about two hours, ending at 9:55. The damage wrought by the Japanese was significant.

Eight battleships (Arizona, Oklahoma, California, West Virginia, Nevada, Tennessee, Maryland and Pennsylvania) were targeted. Three were sunk, one capsized, one beached. The rest sustained relatively minor damage. The biggest disaster was the U.S.S. Arizona. When it sank, it took 1,177 men with it. Today, it is the Arizona Memorial. Along with the eight battleships, one training ship was struck along with three destroyers and three cruisers, which received relatively minor damage. A minelayer, a repair-ship and a seaplane tender were also hit during the attack but also received only minor damage.

The attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,402 Americans, against 64 Japanese killed. Nearly half of the 2,402 Americans who died (1,177) were killed when the U.S.S. Arizona was hit, exploded and sunk.

December 7th, 1941 is a big date in history. Not just because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but because of the huge Japanese offensive that happened soon afterwards. Within hours of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked almost every other country in the southeast Asia region. The countries that the Japanese attacked included British Malaya, Hong Kong, Wake Island, the Philippines, Guam and the International Settlement in Shanghai, China.

However, the biggest impact of December 7th was, undoubtedly, the entry of the United States of America into the Second World War, a conflict which it had previously attempted to remain out of, and only supporting its ally, Great Britain through economic aid. Overnight, public feeling in the United States swung the other way and by the next afternoon, America was at war with Japan, Germany and Italy.

The Infamy Speech

On the afternoon of December 8th, 1941, one of the most historic and important speeches of the 20th century was broadcast across the United States, live. It was the address to the United States Congress given by then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Today, it’s best known as the “Infamy Speech”. The name of the speech (and the title of this posting) comes from the speech’s opening lines.

The speech was delivered at 12:30pm (a half-hour after midday) on the 8th of December, 1941 by the President of the United States. Within a half-hour of the speech being given, the U.S. Congress voted ‘YES’ to going to war with Japan.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Declaration of War against Japan

The text of the Infamy Speech is transcribed below, from the original broadcast:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And, while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.
As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense, that always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.

I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

The Second World War has several famous battles and engagements. In the early years of the war, the Axis was beating back the Allies and gaining ground at a rapid pace. One by one, Allied countries fell to the Germans and the Japanese. China. Hong Kong. Poland. France. Denmark. Greece and The Netherlands. The Axis seemed unstoppable. Between 1939 and 1942, Europe and Asia were choked by the oppression of German and Japanese military might which was determined to strangle them to death.

The British were confident, however, that they could fight off their aggressors and keep them at bay. The might of the British Empire would keep the Nazis and the Japanese at bay and would hold them off alone until reinforcements eventually arrived from America. That was what they would do and that was what they were sure they could do! But for all their planning and scheming and thoughts of colonial and imperial strength and power, the British armed forces suffered blow after blow at the hands of the Japanese, who conquered Hong Kong and the Malay Peninsula. The biggest blow to British morale and to the ego of British military leaders, however, was the loss of what they saw as their greatest and most powerful, their impregnable and indestructable fortress…The island of Singapore.

The fall of Singapore is something that, when you think about it, should never have happened. It’s something that you think would never have happened. But the British army, airforce and navy, unprepared for the Japanese plan of attack, did not provide contigency plans for what might happen if their first lines of defence were breeched, or indeed, if they were bypassed altogether. With the fall of Singapore came the biggest British military disaster since the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Singapore in the 1930s

Singapore is a tiny island nation off the southern coast of the Malay peninsula, seperated from it by the Strait of Johor. Modern Singapore was established in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles, a British statesman who saw Singapore as a wonderful place to establish a British colony and trading-port. Over the next one hundred years, Singapore grew and prospered. Its position in the middle of the Southeast Pacific made it a convenient port for ships to stop at during long voyages between Europe and Asia. The island flourished thanks to international trade and by the early 20th century, boasted a large population of immigrant Chinese and a significant number of British expatriates. Due to its status as a free trading port where almost anything was loaded, offloaded, traded, bought and sold, Singapore became known as the ‘Crossroads of the Orient’; the port city where ships from all over the world could dock.

Singapore’s Chinatown as it appeared in the 1930s

In the 1930s, Japan was on the march. Starting in 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War between the Chinese and the Japanese threatened to sweep across Asia and crush everything. The Chinese were already weakened from political in-fighting between the Communists and the Capitalists and in its weakened state, China was steamrollered by the Japanese. The British, who had built up Singapore as a prosperous trading-post and naval base, were fearful of a Japanese invasion. Singapore had to be protected. In the years leading up to the Second World War and during the opening years of that conflict, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula were bolstered with more troops and better defences. The British thought that it would be easy to defend Malaya and Singapore because the British would outsmart their enemy. And if the Japanese came by sea, the batteries of coastal-defence cannons would blast their ships out of the sea.

British Defences

The British Empire would defend its prized colony of Singapore down to the last man. To do this, it would build up Singapore as an impregnable fortress, which gave the island the nickname the ‘Gibraltar of the East’. To defend Singapore, the Royal Navy sent two warships: The Prince of Wales and the Repulse, to guard the island and to be the Royal Navy’s first-response team to any enemy naval activity in the area. The Prince of Wales was up-to-date and modern: Built in 1939, it was brand-new, the perfect naval-response weapon to fight off the Japanese. The Repulse on the other hand, left something to be desired. A relic of the Great War of 1914, it was already over twenty years old by the time it was sent to Singapore. If the Prince of Wales was put out of action, the Repulse would become an easy target. Apart from naval preparations, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula would also be defended by the British Army and Empire troops from Australia, New Zealand and India. By 1941-1942, the British and Empire forces numbered 85,000 strong, facing off against just 35,000 Japanese, more than enough to stop the slow-moving land-based Japanese. And if they came by sea, the might of the British Navy would blast the stinking Nips right out of the water!…Or at least, that was the plan.

British Malaya; 1941

“…Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam, Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Phillipine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island and this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area…”

- Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt; radio address, December 8th, 1941

1941; a year which will live in infamy. Between December 7th and December 8th of that year, the Japanese Empire launched a surprise offensive against many countries in the South Pacific region. It wasn’t just the American naval base at Pearl Harbor that was hit, but many other places in the same region, including British holdings in Hong Kong and the Malay Peninsula. Hong Kong’s defensive forces, severely outnumbered by the Japanese, surrendered in a little over three and a half weeks after the Japanese launched their assault, surrendering to them on the 25th of December…Christmas Day, 1941. Some Christmas.

In Malaya, the fighting lasted much longer. The Japanese were very interested in Malaya; it had a lot of natural resources that they wanted, like tin mines and rubber-plantations. At the time, a significant portion of the world’s rubber came from Malaya, and the Japanese wanted in. The fighting was fierce, with British, Indian and Australian troops on one side, and the forces of the Imperial Japanese Army on the other. Despite everything, the Japanese were steamrolling the Empire forces further and further back, further and further south. It seemed like every week, a town or city on the Peninsula would fall to the Japanese.

On the 8th of December, the Japanese landed on the west coast of Malaya. On the 11th of December, the city of Jitra fell. Then the garrison at Penang, which fell on the 17th of December. A few weeks later, the Malayan capital of Kuala Lumpur also fell, on the 11th of January, 1942. The Japanese were surging south and the British could do nothing to stop them.

The Japanese Sweep

How was it that the Japanese, supposedly backward, slanty-eyed, yellow, cowardly, second-class people, which the British certainly saw them as, could defeat the might, power and imperial strength and know-how of the invincible British Empire? Even in Singapore, when British forces were more than double the strength of the Japanese?

The key to the British defeat in Malaya and Singapore lay in close-mindedness, a lack of foresight and I suppose to a small extent, a belief in racial intellectual superiority. The British believed that the Japanese would invade Singapore by sea. They were so convinced of this that they even set up coastal defences and cannons to blast the Japanese Navy out of the water. The idea of the Japanese invading by land from the north was absolutely preposterous. To begin with, they’d have to get through all those jungles and dirt tracks and the rain and the flooding…impossible with trucks and heavily-loaded tanks. Although the British did concede that defence of the Peninsula should be taken into account, the defences set up were inadequate to deal with the rapid movements of the Japanese…who invaded on bicycles.

That’s right.

Bicycles.

Like the one you ride around the park.

The Japanese mobilised their troops on bicycles. Light, fast and easy to carry, bicycles could move quickly through the jungles and over flooded roads and could go places that larger, motorised vehicles could not. They exchanged their heavier tanks for lighter and more mobile tanks that could move faster and not get bogged down in the mud. The speed at which the Japanese could move meant that the British couldn’t hold their defences and despite dynamiting every bridge, road and crossing-point across every river, gorge and valley that they could find, they were unable to slow down the Japanese advance significantly enough to set up a proper defence and hold off their attackers.

The Invasion of Singapore; 1942

By early 1942, Singapore was in deep trouble. Hong Kong had fallen just a few days before and the British lines were breaking over and over again as the Japanese came charging southwards. The city of Singapore was being bombed extensively by the Japanese Air Force and the island did not have enough airplanes or anti-aircraft guns to fight off or even engage in an air-battle. Terrified civilians were being evacuated from the Port of Singapore by merchant-ships and military vessels which had been ordered to pull out. British and Empire forces set up defensive positions on the northwest side of the island where the Strait of Johor was narrowest – the likeliest spot for the Japanese amphibious landing on the island. Military engineers had destroyed the causeway bridge between Singapore and Malaya, which would delay the Japanese, but only for a little over a week. Once the Japanese got a toehold on Singaporean soil, they were unstoppable. The Japanese found weak spots in British defences and exploited them. At the same time, British offensives failed time and time again. The Japanese invaded Singapore on the 8th of February, 1942. In six days, they had pushed the British back until they controlled less than half the island.

On the 14th of February, Japanese forces committed one of their worst attacks against civilians, since the Rape of Nanjing, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women and children were murdered and raped by Japanese soldiers invading the Chinese city of Nanjing in December of 1937. It was on this day, the 14th of February, that the Japanese reached one of Singapore’s main medical institutions: Alexandra Hospital. Built in 1938, the hospital was one of the most advanced medical institutions in Southeast Asia at the time.

British Military Hospital, Alexandra Hospital, Singapore; 1938

The Japanese soldiers stormed the hospital that afternoon, bayonetting doctors, nurses, patients and orderlies. Anyone not bayonetted was rounded up and locked up. They were then taken out into the hospital grounds and bayonetted or decapitated. Anyone left was sent to Changi Prison. The commanding officer of Japanese forces in Singapore, General Yamashita, was appalled and infuriated by the attack on non-combatant, unarmed and surrendering medical staff and civilian and military patients at the hospital. He had as many of the soldiers responsible as could be found executed for the crime and personally apologised to surviving staff and patients.

While Hong Kong held out for nearly one month, Singapore fell in a week. Japanese forces landed in Singapore on the 8th of February and forced Australian and British troops further and further back until on the 15th of February, the Allies were defending a tiny area in the southern part of Singapore where the Civic District is today. Just a few miles behind the Allied lines was the mouth of the Singapore River and the Pacific Ocean.

The Fullerton Building at the mouth of the Singapore River. The British signed their surrender here to the Japanese in 1942 and the structure remained the Japanese HQ in Singapore throughout their occupation. Today, the same building is the Fullerton Hotel

Singapore was now being shelled relentlessly by Japanese artillery and bombed by the Japanese Air Force. Water and fuel supplies were almost non-existent; ammunition, weapons and other military hardware was either destroyed or in short supply. On the evening of the 15th of February, 1942, the British forces surrendered to the Japanese. It was, and remains, the largest surrender of British military forces in history.

The Occupation of Singapore; 1942-1945

Japanese soldiers marching through Fullerton Square in southern Singapore

For the next three and a half years, Singapore was under Japanese occupation. Basic foodstuffs and daily necessities such as rice, vegetables, meat, water and clothing became extremely rare and people struggled to make ends meet. The shelling of Singapore had damaged and destroyed buildings, knocked out powerlines and ruptured water-mains. The chronic shortages of food led many people to grow their own vegetables and fruits to survive. The Japanese continued to attack Singapore’s Chinese population, rounding men up and shooting them in the jungles.

During the occupation, the British, knowing that they could not yet hope to retake Singapore, did carry out espionage and sabotage missions against the Japanese in Singapore. Operations carried out against the Japanese included Operation Jaywick, in which a small group of Australian soldiers infiltrated the Port of Singapore. They successfully destroyed seven Japanese ships without losing any of their own men. In August 1945, the British launched another attack against the Japanese, sneaking into Singapore Harbour with midget submarines. They mined a Japanese warship, hoping to sink it. Although the mines detonated successfully and the midget submarines made successful escapes from Singapore, the target ship, the cruiser Takao, was not damaged enough for it to sink (it was eventually destroyed in 1946 as a target-ship during naval exercises).

The Allies continued to attack Singapore throughout the occupation, sometimes in more open ways than others. While the British and Empire armed forces limited their activities to sabotage and spying, the Americans attacked Singapore from the air. Between November 1944 and May 1945, the RAF and the USAAF carried out eleven air-raids on Singapore, attacking fuel-dumps, naval facilities and docks around Singapore that were essential to the Japanese war effort. Mines were also laid around Singapore to disrupt Japanese naval movements in the area.

The Liberation of Singapore; September, 1945

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in May of 1945, the Allies turned their attention fully towards Japan. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the Americans were planning to invade the Japanese mainland (this plan was later scrapped in favour of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). After the dropping of the bombs in August, 1945, the British made plans to recapture Singapore. They sailed for Malaya and successfully captured Penang. With their presence in Malaya established, they made for the island nation of Singapore on the 2nd of September. Although reluctant and wanting to fight to the death, the Japanese eventually surrendered peacefully when the British landed in Singapore on the 4th of September. The commanding officer of the Japanese forces in Singapore, General Seishiro Itagaki signed the terms for British reoccupation of Singapore when the cruiser HMS Sussex docked off the coast of Singapore. Eight days later, the Instrument of Surrender was signed at the Municipal Building (today Singapore’s City Hall) on the 12th of September.

City Hall, Singapore

Unable to cope with the humiliation of defeat, when General Itagaki told his officers of their surrender to the British, up to three hundred of them committed suicide using grenades, in their rooms at Singapore’s famous Raffles Hotel (which had been used as a base by the Japanese during the occupation).

Raffles Hotel, Singapore, in the 1930s. Japanese army officers committed mass suicide here in 1945 after their surrender to the British

With the successful ousting of the Japanese, even if it was three and a half years too late, the returning British forces were given a hero’s welcome by Singaporean civilians. In February, 1942, the Japanese had ordered the British to march through Singapore carrying a Union Jack flag and a white flag of surrender as a final humiliation after having lost their colonial stronghold to a superior military force. The Japanese had been told that no Union Jack flags existed on the whole of Singapore, as they had all been burned prior to the Japanese invasion, a statement that was probably a lie. A British officer held captive in Singapore’s Changi Prison retained his personal Union Jack flag and kept it hidden from the Japanese. The flag was used in the prison during the funerals of British and Empire soldiers who died as a result of Japanese brutality. When Singapore was liberated, this flag was handed to Lord Louis Mountbatten, who signed the British acceptance of the Japanese surrender, and who raised this flag over the island to signal the return of peace and stability to Singapore. A newsreel of the liberation of Singapore and the raising of the Union Jack may be viewed here.

September, 1945. Singaporeans hold a parade to celebrate the end of the Japanese occupation and the return of British forces