How the war brought Britain together
In the days that followed our declaration of war on Nazi Germany, I sat in my mother’s tenement and heard the King’s speech over the wireless: ‘In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history…’
While he spoke there was silence across the low and high streets of our island. Afterwards on our quiet stoop, I shared a cigarette with my mum. She rarely smoked but thought she needed something to calm her nerves. ‘It’s out of the frying pan and into the fi re for us lot,’ she said wistfully, and then went back inside to make us all a cuppa.
When France fell to Hitler and the battered expeditionary army languished on the beaches of Dunkirk, I was just 17 and still wet behind the ears, at least according to my mother. But like everyone else from my generation I wondered whether we’d be forced to fight on the beaches. Could Britain hold out against the dark forces that had subjugated Europe?
In the beginning of the war, the claxon ring of air-raid warnings was thrilling, surreal and bloody good fun. Then one night the laughter stopped. Death came abruptly, as it had come for Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam. This random murder came from above, and it came to us each and every night – a tempest of explosives and incendiaries thrown from the belly of German bomber planes. Like the endless rain, misery fell on London, Sheffi eld and Hull. The indiscriminately bombed streets of Britain smouldered for five years until peace was declared.
While the war was on, strict rationing was imposed, national security cards issued, a propaganda ministry was created and civil liberties were curtailed. However, in those days there was no panic among the population, only resolve to get on with the job, to keep buggering on until Hitler and his Nazis were dead and buried.
The government promised its people that if our country survived and was victorious in this war, our rights and freedoms would be restored to us. No one doubted the need for vigilance during this war because it was a universal battle between good and evil; it was the last war where one was able to see clear distinctions between right and wrong. We didn’t need government offi cials to mislead us into thinking that we were in danger, like they did with Iraq. We didn’t need an American government to create false threats of WMDs, because our war against Hitler and the Nazis was a true battle between democracy and crass dictatorship. It was not a battle for oil or corporate spoils. It was a struggle between light and darkness.
We knew, when war broke out, that the time for sowing and reaping was over. We had come of age and had to renounce our youth to become soldiers, sailors and airmen. It was our time to defend the state against the darkness of dictatorship. On a damp February day in 1941, I left my mother’s house and began my induction into the RAF. Before I departed my mum implored me to keep my head down, because ‘life even in peacetime is too bloody short, lad’.
I walked away from the cramped tenement house of my teenage years and rode the rails from Halifax to Padgate where I became a man.
During those first few days of square-bashing, excitement and fear danced cheek to cheek in the imaginations of us raw recruits. As I learned to march, salute and obey my sergeant major’s bark to keep my eyes right, I knew that the air force was a damn sight better place to be than Civvy Street. I had a roof over my head, food, skills training and camaraderie with fellow survivors of the Great Depression. It was a deadly serious time, but somehow everyone felt safer by doing their bit for the country.
Most of the people I was introduced to through my national service were working-class or middle-class lads. Some had lived lives worse than mine, while others had experienced a more privileged upbringing. But it didn’t matter because the moment I put on my blue serge uniform my past was history. I had a new family and a new purpose because I was part of the RAF.
Many times my mates who were more educated than me shared their books and their knowledge with me. They encouraged me to write and so I submitted my poems or essays to the air-force newspaper. They were published on occasion. Most of the officers I encountered were decent men who tried to help us when we needed assistance or special leave to attend to family tragedies.
Make no mistake, it was a different time, because duty to one’s community and country was still a virtue alive in the hearts of most British citizens, regardless of the social set you belonged to. Everyone put grievances they had against the state behind them for the duration of the war.
The working class had been savaged by the Great Depression and the ideological pursuit of austerity in a time of famine. We had long been accustomed to seeing death on our streets from hunger and disease. We had known the anguished despair of being unemployed for long terms.
We had endured the shame of poor relief, brutal means testing, inferior schools, slums and the jibes from national governments who blamed our destitution on our fecklessness.
However, when war was declared, it no longer became a question of personal, regional or class survival; it was a matter of national survival. The working class, the middle class and the upper class were united in this battle against evil. The government, like today’s, was a coalition, but unlike now it was a partnership of equals where Conservative and Labour MPs shouldered and understood the burden and consequences of power.
Even I, a lad from the slums, was willing to give Mr Churchill his due and say: ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ I even turned a blind eye to his previous demagoguery against the poor during the Great Depression.
I knew for the duration of the war he was a bulldog who wasn’t going to surrender our democracy to dictators.
However, in our present hour of crisis, the leadership stage is empty, as if everyone has gone out to fetch a drink during a theatre’s intermission.
Extracted from Harry’s Last Stand, by Harry Leslie Smith, published by Icon Books, priced £12.99 hardback; £9.99 eBook.