The story of Dunkirk amounts to more than a frenzied month of soldiers and sailors, tanks and beaches, ambitious politicians and quivering generals. It is more, even, than an intense drama of personal and national survival. It is the story of the men and women involved, their backgrounds, and the experiences that formed them. It is a story of the approaches used by different nations to overcome the misery of the 1930s, and how these led to the evacuation of an army as another strained to destroy it. And it is a story of the rising importance of youth, politically, economically and militarily.
We begin the story in Britain. We will move to Germany, and finish in the United States. We will observe similarities and the contrasts. And we will wonder who we might have been, and how we would have coped.
The United Kingdom
Nineteen-year-old Thomas Myers was evacuated from the Dunkirk beaches on 31 May 1940. Recalling the event, years later, the Durham Light Infantryman remembers behaving like an ostrich, trying to bury his head (and other parts) in the sand, as bombs, bullets and shells flew down. He managed to stay calm, unlike the unlucky few whom he saw panicking and running about aimlessly.
But despite his coolness under fire, Thomas was not an experienced soldier. Five years earlier, aged fourteen, he had left school in County Durham on a Friday afternoon and walked up the pit road to meet the manager of the Dean and Chapter Colliery. At three o’clock on the following Monday morning he started work as a coal miner.
Thomas’s father and his two older brothers were miners. ‘In this area you were bred for the mines,’ he says. Asked whether he was happy doing it, he says, ‘You were born to it. You were a miner. You go in the mine. There’s nothing else.’
Thomas started work just as his father had before him. He was given no training; he was simply told to collect a pit pony and go and find an older boy. Thomas’s job, it turned out, was to collect tubs of coal, recently filled at the coalface, attach them to the pony by harness, and pull them several hundred yards to a spot where they were mechanically hauled to the surface. He would then collect empty tubs and drive them back to be filled. This cycle would repeat itself over his seven-and-a-half-hour shift.
Thomas remembers his first night in the mine: ‘Timber supports were holding the roof which was trying to come down, cracks would show, and I was frightened to death. The noises! When I was on my own! It was very frightening for a boy of fourteen to go in the mine under those conditions.’
A short while later, Thomas’s fears about safety were confirmed when a boy was killed doing the very same job. The boy had been asked by a hewer to carry a drill in his empty tub. As his pony galloped along, the tub slid off the road and the drill shot up in the air, driving itself through the boy’s body. Thomas was horrified when he heard the news. ‘I’m going there no more,’ he told his brother that evening. ‘You’re going back again tomorrow!’ he was told. ‘You’ve got to get over this!’ Shortly afterwards, when yet another boy was killed, Thomas was the first person there. ‘What a scene!’ he says. ‘There wasn’t a body. He had been pulled to bits.’
In the year that Thomas started work, an average of four miners were killed every day in Britain. Coal mining was the nation’s most dangerous peacetime occupation. And even when a miner had worked his way up to hewer, the work was no safer. Hewers had to work in tiny seams, sometimes as narrow as twelve inches wide, lying on their sides, hacking at coal with an elbow tucked inside a knee. ‘You get the coals out the bloody best you can,’ a Durham miner told BBC interviewer Joan Littlewood in 1938. ‘If you hear the ceiling coming down, you have to get out of the way. But the only way to be really safe is to let the flaming coal stay there . . .’
Life was difficult as well as dangerous. Miners returned, caked in coal and sweat, to small homes without bathrooms. Most washed in little tubs in the kitchen. The author W. F. Lestrange spent some time in a house, like Thomas’s, lived in by a family that included three miners. The woman of the house, he wrote, ‘spent most of her time fighting vainly against coal-dust-smeared walls and furniture and floors in the intervals of boiling water for the three successive bath-times’.
Life was no easier across the Irish Sea. Politically, Northern Ireland was (and still is) a part of the United Kingdom; geographically, it is a part of Ireland. Harry Murray started work at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast in 1937. ‘People used to earn their pay or they didn’t get it,’ he says, ‘and if they didn’t earn it, they were sacked and that was it.’ Harry worked out in the open, in all weathers, drinking tea from a can, with a half-hour break to eat, play dice or pray. And his future was dependent on the goodwill of the foreman. ‘He used to get brought in butter, eggs, money, just so people could keep their job,’ Harry says. ‘If the foreman didn’t like your face, that was good enough to put you out . . . and if you were unemployed, it was ten times worse to survive.’
Yet as odd as it may sound, Harry Murray was a fortunate man. The Northern Ireland government was intended, in the words of its first Prime Minister, to be ‘a Protestant government for a Protestant people’. And as a Protestant, Harry was guaranteed access to basic housing and a lowly paid job in industry. An Ulster Catholic had no such security. Harland and Wolff had not employed Catholics since the early twentieth century, and they no longer bothered applying for shipyard jobs. These had become the natural preserve of Protestants, passed from father to son, from uncle to nephew.
So although Ulster Protestants received lower wages than their English counterparts, and often lived in houses without mains water and gas lighting, they could be considered – in relative terms – privileged. It was, after all, better to be second than third class.
Even in London, the beating heart of the British Empire, ordinary life was hard. In 1939, the average Londoner lived to the age of sixty-two, compared with eighty-two today. Two per cent of Londoners attended university in 1939; today, the figure is 43 per cent. In 1934 Sister Patricia O’Sullivan arrived in east London, where she lived among the families of sailors. One of her chief memories is of the importance of pawn shops to local people. When a man went to sea, he would not be needing his suit for a while, so he would take it to the pawn shop. On his return, he would redeem it, and pawn items brought back from distant parts of the world. Sister Patricia would often furnish poor homes with the things sailors had brought home and pawned.
One of those homes belonged to Doris Salt. Doris’s husband had been killed by a drunk driver in a stolen car. The circumstances meant that she received no insurance money. ‘It was just make-do with me for years,’ she says. ‘I had to learn to make a good meal out of more or less nothing. People pooh-pooh sheep’s head, oh no, they wouldn’t eat that, but we used to thoroughly enjoy it.’ Florence Muggridge, from Poplar, knew a woman whose husband was killed working in the docks. ‘Miserable bugger, we were going out tonight,’ said the woman on hearing that she was now a widow. But, says Florence: ‘You didn’t expect anything, you see? That’s the whole point. People had to fend for themselves in ways that are unheard of now.’
It is possible to view modern life – from a western perspective, at least – as a succession of choices. But for most young Britons living in the first decades of the twentieth century, fewer choices existed. They followed their father’s trade, lived near their birthplace, and married for convenience as often as for love. Yet in Britain in the 1930s – as in Germany and the United States – economic tremors would begin to shake social foundations. Young people’s attitudes and expectations started to change, and a generational gulf would emerge.
But for change to occur, a catalyst had to appear – and that catalyst was, as elsewhere, the depression. As author Ronald Blythe points out, Britain’s inter-war years took place against a huge, dingy, boring and inescapable backcloth – unemployment. All sorts of people suffered as a result.
Trevor, a seventeen-year-old from south Wales, had wanted to become an engineer, but when his father lost his job, he was forced to leave school to become an errand boy. This was intended to be a temporary arrangement, but Trevor’s father had failed to find another job, and now Trevor too was out of work. He spent his days playing table tennis in an unemployment centre.
In 1933, the number of unemployed in Britain reached three million, and it remained high until the outbreak of war. Alfred Smith, from south London, lost his job in 1935. Three years later, despite being in his mid-thirties, he was described in Picture Post magazine as having a lined face, sunken cheeks, and looking down as he walked – ‘the typical walk of the unemployed man’.
Alfred lived with his wife and three young children in a two-room flat, of which one of the rooms was partitioned. On a typical day, the family ate bread and margarine for breakfast, stew or boiled fish with potatoes and bread for dinner (the midday meal), and more bread and margarine in the evening. The Smiths rarely ate fresh fruit or vegetables – not because they were too expensive, but because they were less filling than bread and potatoes. Unemployed people in Britain were more likely to be malnourished than underfed.
In 1935, 45 per cent of British army recruits were considered unfit to serve. Five years later, when American journalist William Shirer was working as a special correspondent with the German armed forces, he was introduced to a group of British soldiers taken prisoner shortly before the Dunkirk evacuation. Describing them as a cheery lot (one said, ‘You know, you’re the first American I’ve ever seen in the flesh. Funny place to meet one, ain’t it?’), Shirer writes that what struck him most was ‘their poor physique’. The depression affected Germany and the United States with equal (if not greater) severity, but the young British male seems to have showed the effects most visibly. Military training had not, believed Shirer, made up for bad diet, and lack of fresh air and exercise.
George Orwell, that unsurpassed chronicler of British working-class life, noted that almost the worst evil of unemployment, beyond even financial hardship, was ‘the frightful feeling of impotence and despair’. Trevor, the seventeen-year-old from Wales who now spent his days playing table tennis, was a case in point. ‘I’m here every day at ten and play till dinner-time,’ he told W. F. Lestrange, ‘and there’s nothing to do in the afternoon, either, so I come up here and play whenever the table’s free. Ping-pong. Knocking little celluloid balls about. That’s my life! All I’ll ever do is play ping-pong. When I was a kid I thought I’d be . . . wanted to be . . .’ At that point, tears welling up, Trevor ran from the room.
Life was made harder still for the unemployed with the introduction of the Means Test, ensuring that the jobless would have regularly to justify themselves to a stranger, a government employee, who would stand in a family’s front room asking questions about a suspiciously new-looking overcoat. The unemployed man could afford neither secrets nor pride.
People sometimes tried to evade the Means Test; a young person living with parents might give a false address in an attempt to claim a separate allowance. On the other hand, assistance was sometimes mistakenly withdrawn. Orwell tells of a man seen feeding his neighbour’s chickens while the neighbour was away. It was reported that the man now had a job, and his money was withheld. And there was little official sympathy for those who slipped through the net. When a man travelling the country looking for work was caught stealing two loaves of bread, he told the bench that temptation was difficult to avoid. ‘That is what you say,’ said the magistrate. ‘I will teach you something different. You will go to prison for two months with hard labour.’
Arguably, though, it was the women who suffered most. The wife of an unemployed man still had to try to maintain a home. She often ate too little so that the children had enough, she dealt with the debt and rent collectors, and she had to manage her husband’s diminished sense of self-worth. And as Orwell noted, the average working-class man never did a stroke of housework – even when at home all day. Yet such women were not above being patronised; Sir F. G. Hopkins, president of the Royal Society, delivered a speech to fellow members in 1935, declaring that ‘what the English housewife in the poorer classes needs most is to be taught the art of simple but good cooking’.
With the dearth of any workable system of welfare, and the lack of understanding between society’s classes, it was to be expected that extreme political parties began to attract support. The British Union of Fascists, led by the opportunistic Oswald Mosley, consisted overwhelmingly of young working-class men under thirty. Its members marched through areas where they were sure to provoke local people. In October 1936, a huge mob, headed by Mosley, marched through the East End of London, where they were predictably confronted on Cable Street by a young mob of anti-fascists, enraged at the invasion. The ensuing fight led to the arrest of more anti-fascists than fascists, allowing Mosley to present his men as victims of aggression. The result was an increase in new members.
At the end of the march, Mosley spoke to his followers. ‘The government surrenders to Red violence and Jewish corruption,’ he said. But the fascists would never surrender. ‘Within us is the flame that shall light this country and later the world!’
Interviewed on BBC radio in 1989, Mosley’s widow, Diana (one of the eccentric, entitled Mitford sisters), claimed that her husband had not really been anti-semitic at all. Rather, by preventing him and his followers from marching, the Jews had provoked him. (In the same interview Diana remembered Hitler – ‘He was extremely interesting to talk to . . . he had so much to say . . .’)
Shortly before Cable Street, Diana’s father, Lord Redesdale, had given a speech to the House of Lords, protesting at ignorant British attitudes towards the Nazis. The most common mistake, he claimed, related to the Nazi treatment of Jews. The reality was that no Germans interfered with the Jews so long as they behaved themselves. And if the Germans felt that the Jews were a problem, Redesdale said, they should be allowed to deal with that problem as they thought best. Had the Nazis arrived in Britain, they would clearly have had ready-made support among the upper ranks, as well as the lower orders.
Another extreme – communism – was gaining support among young Britons. One of these, Winston Churchill’s nephew, Giles Romilly, wrote, ‘Youth has a clear choice. Either they must side with the parasites and exploiters . . . or with the working class to smash the capitalist system and lay the foundations of the classless society.’
In 1936 and 1937, thousands travelled to Spain to fight against Franco with the International Brigades. Once again, the vast majority were young working-class men – though not all. Penny Fiewel was a nurse working in Hertfordshire. A colleague asked her if she would volunteer for Spain: ‘I said I knew nothing about Spain – I didn’t know anything. She said I wanted educating, so she told me all about Spain, how the nuns were taking Franco’s side, and of course, it grabbed my heart – I was young and very emotional.’
Penny soon found herself in a field hospital on the front line, treating terrible injuries and teaching Spanish nurses to do the same. When bombs first fell near her operating theatre, it was invaded by civilians desperate for shelter. One man collided with her in the dark, and as she pushed him away, her fingers became sticky. When the lights were back on, she saw that half of the flesh on the man’s face had been blown away. Long before Hermann Goering launched the Luftwaffe’s raids against London in September 1940, Penny Fiewel was experiencing the brutality of area bombing. The Spanish Civil War – as illustrated by Pablo Picasso – was teaching the world to dread the bomber.
Months later, Penny was badly wounded during a raid. Waking up in a barn, naked except for bandages wound tightly around her chest and abdomen, she was in terrible pain. And as she lay recovering in hospital, the raids continued. ‘These were nightmare days,’ she says.
The war was ultimately won by Franco’s nationalists, with help from the Germans. This was a clear violation of a non-intervention agreement signed by Germany – and a warning of the dangers of trusting Hitler. But just as Britain’s leaders were tentative in their handling of the economy, so they were tentative in their handling of the Führer.
This was understandable. Britain had won the First World War – but her economy had been badly damaged. (As of 2017, astonishingly, the country still owed a large amount of First World War bond debt.) The greatest loss, however, was human. Much of Britain’s young male generation had been killed, wounded or traumatised, and the nation’s leaders were desperate to consign the war to history. They wanted to believe in a new peaceful world order based on the League of Nations – and were reluctant to focus too closely on events in Germany. Equally, they did not want to impose the high taxes that would be needed to rearm. Overall, therefore, it was easier for collective heads to remain in the sand where they could ignore the war cries of men such as Winston Churchill.
And although Britain’s politicians disapproved of Hitler’s methods, they did not initially identify him as an existential threat. As future United States President John F. Kennedy explained in his 1940 book, Why England Slept, ‘It is only fear, violent fear, for one’s own security . . . that results in a nation-wide demand for armaments.’ Such fear did not exist in Britain until it was almost too late.
Germany, by contrast, could hardly rearm quickly enough. And the two nations’ respective pre-war attitudes, one conservative and placatory, the other radical and ruthless, would come to a head in the events of May and June 1940.
But for all the difficulties Britain and her people faced in the years leading up to war, there was another – more positive – story emerging. Just as in America, and, in its own dark way, Germany, a distinct youth culture was forming. ‘Youth has broken out like a rash,’ stated a Picture Post leader in early 1939. Everybody, it claimed, was talking about ‘youth’, from journalists to politicians to church leaders: ‘What causes all this present chatter about “youth”? It is partly that we are in an age of transition, and older people are stamped by the institutions in which we have lost faith. We hope that youth will do better!’
Here is a striking similarity between our three nations. The depression and the apparent failure of the previous generation were allowing the young to forge a new identity. But in Britain, this new identity was being exercised by single wage-earners, aged fourteen to twenty-four, who had more expendable income than any other sector of society. The nation’s burgeoning youth culture would not have grown so quickly had it not offered such a boost to the economy.
A survey conducted in 1937 in a deprived area of Manchester concluded that working children from even the poorest families ‘would have holidays and outings and new clothes, while probably the parents, the mother certainly, stayed at home and wore old clothes’. We are witnessing the birth of the teenager – before the word was even coined. For, by keeping a considerable amount of their earnings to themselves, these young people had a far superior standard of living to the older members of their family.
Much of their money was spent watching (mainly American) films. Most young people watched at least one film a week, some watched many more. And not only did they watch films, they learned from them. They copied fashions and hairstyles, accents and attitudes. Boys wore slouched fedoras, girls delivered Scarlett O’Hara-style putdowns. According to the diary of a girl from a working-class Manchester suburb, an average 1938 Monday evening was spent watching a George Formby film with a friend, discussing the film (as well as boys and clothes), and then returning home to listen to dance music and talk to her family – about films.
Plenty of teen money was spent in dance halls. George Wagner (a sapper who would be evacuated from La Panne in May 1940) was sixteen in 1936, when he became a regular dance hall attendee. Despite being a shy boy, dancing was his chief hobby. ‘It was a place where you met all the girls,’ George says, ‘that was the main thing.’
Wearing suit, tie and waistcoat, bought by his mother (he had only graduated to long trousers at fourteen), George would walk a few miles to the Palace Ballroom in Erdington with three of his closest friends. The dances were run by Harry Phillips, who would walk around the floor, partnering boys and girls. No alcohol was served, so any of George’s friends who wanted a drink would have to go to a local pub and lie about their age. A five-piece dance band played popular American music – George’s favourite song was ‘Deep Purple’ – as young men plucked up their courage to approach young women. George says:
You used to chat them up, see if you could take them home. I didn’t have a particular girlfriend, not in them days, I was too young. I would walk them home and probably have a little snog when you got up to the gate. But they were very looked after in them days. Sometimes parents would be watching out of the window in the lamplight. ‘Come on! You’re late!’
So what were the differences between young wage-earners of this period and those of previous generations? Their instincts had not changed, but their behaviour had. They were now keeping far more of their wages to spend on themselves, and they had their own interests and pursuits. Before the First World War, there were very few – if any – pursuits that appealed only to the young. The music halls and cheap theatres were equally popular with all ages. It is hard to overestimate the growing independence and importance of youth at this period – and without the depression, it is hard to imagine how such developments could have taken place.
But at the same time, we should be careful not to ascribe our own modern attitudes to 1930s teens. We may want to imagine that they were ‘just like us’, but the truth is more nuanced. At the same time as he was learning about girls, George was very much a boy of his own time. He and his friends loved nothing more than pitching a tent in a field, pinching a bit of coal from the railway to start a fire, and cooking whatever they found in the fields. George would find an acorn, poke a straw into it, fill it with cigarette ends, and use it as a pipe. ‘If my mother had known,’ he says, ‘I would have got a thick ear.’ Youth attitudes may have been changing, but most young people remained innocent by today’s standards.
And we should also remember that young people were not alone in experiencing new pleasures and entertainments. Entirely British in flavour, accessible to all ages, a popular culture was also developing. It took the form of cheap luxuries and diversions available to people who could not afford the essentials. This, according to Orwell, was the logical result of the depression, as the manufacturer’s need for a market coincided with the half-starved populace’s need for cheap distractions:
A luxury nowadays is almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can’t get much meat for threepence but you can get a lot of fish and chips . . . And above all, there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days’ hope by having a penny on a sweepstake.
These trends are still with us today – although many of the specific diversions have now disappeared. Two British dances, enjoyed by all ages, in the late 1930s, were the Lambeth Walk and the Chestnut Tree. One was a pastiche of cockney culture, the other was based on a nursery rhyme. Compared with the primal danger of Swing, that edgy American import, these dances were cosily British in their eccentricity.
In Blackpool, the country’s favourite seaside resort, the diversions were equally British. One involved a woman named Valerie Arkell-Smith. Masculine in appearance, Arkell-Smith had spent years passing herself off as a retired army colonel – and had married an unsuspecting woman in the process. Following Arkell-Smith’s release from prison for making a false statement on her marriage certificate, an impresario signed her up to feature in a Blackpool sideshow. Billed as a woman who had recently had a sex-change operation, Arkell-Smith lay in a single bed, while a young woman lay alongside her in another bed, the two beds separated by flashing Belisha beacons. The conceit was that the pair had recently married but Arkell-Smith had placed a £250 bet that, for twenty-one weeks, they would not touch one another. Spectators paid twopence to view the odd, sexless bedshow, shouting obscenities at the ‘couple’.
Another sideshow was stranger still. Harold Davidson had been the rector of the parish of Stiffkey in Norfolk. He had been defrocked after an ecclesiastical court found him guilty of immoral conduct with a variety of women. Outraged at the verdict, Davidson had first embarked on a hunger strike (in an attempt to prove that God would not allow him to starve) before sitting for months in a barrel on Blackpool Promenade, trying to raise enough money to launch an appeal. The following year, he abandoned the barrel, and chose to appear inside a lion’s den at Skegness Amusement Park. This would be the end of the ecclesiastical road for the ex-Vicar of Stiffkey; the lion turned on him, and ate him in front of a paying audience.
It is often repeated that the 1950s gave rise to American-inspired youth culture, as well as a popular culture of cheap luxuries – but the pre-war period was clearly there first. And just as the American and German economies recovered as the 1930s wore on, so the general standard of living in Britain improved considerably.
One measure of this was the growing vibrancy of particular areas – such as Soho in London’s West End. The traditional French and Italian cafés and restaurants were joined by Chinese, Spanish and Hungarian restaurants. Considering that in 1939, less than 3 per cent of Londoners had been born abroad (compared with 37 per cent today), Soho was a genuine hub of cosmopolitan activity. A Picture Post feature noted expanses of cheese, garlands of sausages, rows of straw-covered Chianti bottles, tins of anchovies, olives and fruits, dishes of sweets and coloured beans, and glittering espresso machines. ‘The shop windows of Soho,’ it observes, ‘are crammed, gay, glowing and vivid.’ Even more surprisingly, Denmark Street, on the other side of Charing Cross Road, housed a Japanese community, where the truly intrepid could eat Japanese food. This is not a picture one readily associates with the 1930s.
Similarly, at this time, recognisably modern jobs emerged. Bill Taylor could neither read nor write – yet he worked as a long-distance lorry driver. When his firm gave him a delivery note, he would study a map for the place name that most resembled the one on the note. Then he would draw a straight line between his start point and end point, and circle every large town on the way. When he arrived in each town, he would stop and ask the way to the next. ‘None of the guv’nors I worked for ever knew I couldn’t read,’ he says, although he admits that ‘it had been easier when I’d started on the horses because some of the horses knew where they were going.’
One perk of Bill’s job was the existence of ‘lorry girls’ who hung around the cafés. ‘You’d take them from one town to another,’ he says. ‘Sometimes they’d stop with you a whole week, sleep with you and keep you company.’ In return the driver bought the girls food and cigarettes. ‘When the wives found out,’ says Bill, ‘a lot of marriages broke up.’
Sam Tobin, meanwhile, was a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman in north London. On Monday mornings, before setting off on the road, he would join fellow salesmen in a motivational singsong:
All the dirt, all the grit,
Hoover gets it every bit,
For it beats as it sweeps as it cleans . . .
Sam’s day then became a struggle to be allowed into suburban homes, where he would demonstrate his vacuum cleaner on samples of sand that he carried with him. ‘It was pretty soul destroying,’ he says, ‘and if it was bad weather, or if Electrolux salesmen had done your territory, it was very difficult to get a demonstration anywhere.’
But perhaps the most modern job under way in Britain was being carried out by a recent Jewish immigrant from Poland. Joseph Rotblat was a physicist working in the field of radioactivity who arrived in Britain in April 1939. Earlier in the year, he had read about Frisch and Leitner’s discovery of nuclear fission, and it had occurred to him that a staggering release of energy might be possible if a chain reaction could be triggered in a very short time. Initially, he pushed this idea – for an atomic bomb – out of his mind, so concerned was he by the horrifying prospect of creating what would now be called a weapon of mass destruction. But by the time he arrived in Britain, Rotblat had figured that the Nazis might be working on a bomb, making it his duty to share his thoughts with British scientists. ‘Perhaps, in my own mind,’ he says, ‘I was the first person to develop the concept of the nuclear deterrent.’ As a result, Rotblat approached Sir James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron. Chadwick approved of the idea, and granted Rotblat two assistants. The dark march of atomic progress had begun.
But for all the period’s changes, the most anticipated and dreaded was the outbreak of war. Many young men began volunteering to join the British army, while limited conscription was introduced for twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds in April 1939. In the last war, volunteers had joined up enthusiastically, keen to fight for King and Country, eager to put the Kaiser in his place. A quarter of a century on, emotions were more muted. Nevertheless, the 1939 generation showed itself, on balance, to be quietly dutiful and aware of the need to confront Germany.
But there were many who joined up oblivious to the political situation, unconcerned with any sense of duty. Thomas Myers, the young Durham coal miner with whom we began this chapter, joined the Territorial Army in early 1939, because, he says, it was the fashionable thing to do. ‘Everybody wanted to be in the Territorials, it was chaotic there were that many joining.’ Yet he had no interest in politics. ‘I didn’t know war was coming,’ Thomas says, ‘I didn’t know anything about Hitler.’
When pressed, he adds that he joined in order to get the occasional weekend away, and evening out. To young men trapped by work and community, the army offered a break from monotony and social restrictions. It offered adventure. George Wagner, the keen dancer from Erdington, says, ‘We joined and it was something to do. On top of that, you got paid a bounty, and on top of that, once a year, you used to go away for a fortnight training. It was great.’
Anthony Rhodes, a young Royal Engineers officer, was given a long-serving army batman (a servant). Rhodes describes this man as seeking a niche, a quiet place where he could rest in indefinite seclusion. There were peacetime soldiers, in other words, who were attracted to the army by its lack of adventure.
And to some, the army provided a solution. Thomas Lister, a young man from Durham, had not been able to settle down to anything. At the age of fourteen, he had been sent by his father for an interview with an electrical engineer. He had taken one look at the workshop floor – ‘it looked like the jaws of hell’ – before walking away. He became an errand boy for Burton’s Tailors before becoming ‘a bit fed up with it’. After that, he had a spell as a wholesale fish salesman. But without a calling, or any particular direction, he would find the enforced discipline and comradeship of the army attractive. And it solved the problem of what he would do with his life – temporarily, at least.
Germany
To be young – and racially pure – in Adolf Hitler’s Germany was to be important. In Hitler’s eyes, the country’s future greatness depended on its young people – but it wasn’t their intelligence or initiative that he looked to encourage. Clever weaklings were not going to improve the country’s situation. Tough, healthy and strong-willed boys and girls were needed. ‘The weak must be chiselled away,’ he said in 1938, ‘I want young men and women who can suffer pain. A young German must be swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp’s steel.’ And though it would never be publicly admitted, they must also be brainwashed to adopt his ideology. Pure by blood, stripped of free will, they were going to make Germany great again.
In 1938, over 80 per cent of young Germans were members of the Hitler Youth organisation. Childhood ended for this generation at the age of ten with admission to the organisation’s junior branch. From that moment on, children became the political soldiers of the Fatherland. Boys and girls had separate sections, preparing them for lives as soldiers, housewives and bearers of the Nazi worldview.
The Hitler Youth even had an internal secret police – an infant Gestapo – responsible for rooting out disloyalty and denouncing members. In one case, Walter Hess reported his own father for calling Hitler a crazed maniac. The father ended up in a concentration camp while Walter was promoted for showing admirable vigilance. Hitler, meanwhile, was being worshipped as a secular god by boys and girls who would recite an incantation based on the Lord’s Prayer:
Adolf Hitler, you are our great Führer. Thy name makes the enemy tremble. Thy Third Reich comes, thy will alone is law upon the earth. Let us hear daily thy voice and order us by thy leadership, for we will obey to the end and even with our lives. We praise thee! Heil Hitler!
Melita Maschmann was a member of the League of German Girls, the female branch of the Hitler Youth. Aged eighteen in 1938, she began working as a press officer for the organisation. In November, after attending a rally in Frankfurt, the head of the local SS asked her if she wanted to come with him. Something exciting, he said, was going to happen that evening. Tired, she decided against it. The next morning, she could see broken glass and smashed furniture strewn everywhere. Finding a policeman, Melita asked what had happened. He told her that this was a Jewish area, and that ‘the National Soul had boiled over’.
Melita was witnessing the aftermath of Kristallnacht – Crystal Night – named for the glittering glass shards strewn across the streets. Instigated by the Nazi leadership, mobs of stormtroopers and Hitler Youth set out to vandalise synagogues and Jewish-owned properties throughout Germany and German-controlled areas. Michael Bruce was an English newspaper correspondent in Berlin. He followed a mob as it moved towards a synagogue. Before long, the building was on fire, and people cheered as they ripped wood from the façade to feed the flames inside. The crowd continued to a nearby Jewish shop. Men and women, howling with exhilaration, started hurling concrete blocks through the doors and windows, fighting to get inside to loot the stock. Bruce noticed an old Jewish woman being dragged from her house, and ran to help another reporter pull her free. The mob then moved off towards a hospital for sick Jewish children, where the leaders – many of them women – attacked hospital staff as the young patients were forced to run barefoot over broken glass. Bruce described the spectacle as ‘one of the foulest exhibitions of bestiality I have ever witnessed’.
Riots and attacks erupted on an astonishing scale. Bernt Engelmann was a seventeen-year-old living in Düsseldorf, about to join the Luftwaffe. As young thugs smashed up an apartment owned by a Jewish family in his building, he stood outside wondering whether to confront them. The police were nearby but were refusing to interfere. Eventually, Bernt ran inside the apartment and tried to sound authoritative.
‘You’re in charge here?’ he barked at the ringleader. ‘You’re through here, right?’
‘That’s correct, we’re finished here.’
To Bernt’s relief, the youths left. But throughout the attack a little girl – the daughter of the family – had been hiding inside the apartment. Relieved that the youths hadn’t seen her, Bernt went looking for her parents while his mother put her to bed with a sleeping pill. Finding the parents on the street, he reassured them that their daughter was safe, and persuaded them to spend the night with non-Jewish friends – who embraced them wordlessly as they hurried into their apartment.
As Bernt returned to his building, he watched the body of a Jewish doctor being brought out of a house. ‘He put up a good fight,’ said a bystander. As he crunched his way over broken glass and discarded belongings, Bernt saw people with full bags, hiding in alleyways. He couldn’t tell whether they were fleeing Jews or cringing looters.
On Steinstrasse, he met a cowering couple – a woman and a child. Telling them not to be afraid, he led them to the house of a notable Nazi who was secretly harbouring Jews before smuggling them abroad. Bernt left them there and went home, where along with sympathetic neighbours he began to clear up the mess in the Jewish family’s apartment.
Walking through Düsseldorf in the midst of this state-led anarchy, he noted people’s reactions: ‘It’s a disgrace! The police just stand by and do nothing!’ ‘We Germans will pay dearly for what was done to the Jews last night!’ And one reaction that lands awkwardly on modern ears, but was common at the time: ‘They shouldn’t have done that! I’m sure the Führer doesn’t approve!’ But there were many more bystanders who said nothing, concealing their fear or apathy or support for the system.
Throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, hundreds of synagogues were destroyed, thousands of shops were smashed and looted, houses were torn apart, Jews were attacked, and tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. It is probable that several hundred Jews were murdered, although we will never know for certain.
The government quickly announced that these had been spontaneous riots – the ‘boiling over of the National Soul’ observed by the Frankfurt policeman – and that the Jewish community was entirely to blame. It would therefore be fined the equivalent of $400 million, while all insurance payments would be confiscated.
Kristallnacht marked the start of concerted violence aimed at ridding Germany of Jews. It paved the way for mass exterminations. And the overwhelmingly passive reaction of citizens reassured the government that they could take further – and more extreme – action in the future. To take the example of Melita Maschmann, as she stepped gingerly over broken glass in Frankfurt, she was perfectly aware that something terrible had happened. But she quickly rationalised it. The Jews, she knew, were enemies of the German people. Perhaps this event – whatever it had been – would teach them a much-needed lesson. And then she put it completely out of her mind.
Almost six years earlier, on the January day in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power, Melita had been an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl without political opinions or racial prejudices. Germany itself was quite unlike the fanatical country it would become. On that day, Melita sat with a dressmaker – whom she liked very much – as the woman altered one of Melita’s mother’s dresses to fit her. The dressmaker was working class and interesting and different. She had a hunched back and walked with a limp. She wore a metal swastika on her coat. She talked about this man Hitler, how he was going to make Germany fairer, how class differences wouldn’t matter any more, how servants would be able to eat at the same table as their rich employers. The dressmaker’s eyes came alive as she spoke of the ‘National Community’.
Melita was struck emotionally by what she was hearing, moved by the idea of a future in which ‘people of all classes would live together like brothers and sisters’. However odd it may seem that Nazism – the most wicked and hateful political ideology of the twentieth century – could once have been thought to represent social justice and protection for the weak, this was how it was portrayed in 1933.
Later that evening, Melita and her brother went into the centre of Berlin where they watched the Nazi Party’s victory celebrations. For the second time in a day she was enthralled, but this time it was the torchlit procession that gripped her. The flickering flames, the red and black flags, the feet marching as one, the prominence of boys and girls like herself, the aggressively sentimental music, all of these played their part. Almost overcome by a wave of hope and solidarity, she felt euphoric. And when a young man suddenly leapt from his marching column to punch somebody standing next to her, her instinctive horror was laced with rapture. As she explains:
‘For the flag we are ready to die’ the torch-bearers had sung. It was not a matter of clothing or food or school essays, but of life and death . . . I was overcome with a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was a matter of life and death.
In the end, though, it was neither the politics nor the spectacle that converted Melita to Nazism – though they were the chief contributing factors. The deciding feature was teenage rebellion.
Melita’s parents were conservative. They supported the old social order, and they had little interest in young people or the rights of workers. They had raised their daughter strictly, expecting her obedience just as they expected it from their servants. Even before her political conversion, Melita had come to resent their attitudes. Nazism was a timely antidote. With its emphasis on youth and working people, and the radical certainty of its message, it stood for everything that her parents did not. For Melita’s generation in Germany, rebellion was not Elvis Presley, the Beatles, David Bowie or Public Enemy. It was Adolf Hitler.
But there were other, more prosaic reasons why young people became enthusiastic Nazis. They had, for example, little faith in existing institutions and forms of government. Democracy – which had no great tradition in Germany – had presided over successive crises. In 1922, a loaf of bread cost three Reichsmarks; the following November it cost eighty billion Reichsmarks. Workers began to receive their salary twice a day so they could afford to eat both lunch and dinner. And the depression of the early 1930s left six million people unemployed and a government so toothless that its people lacked the most basic services.
The National Socialists, with their charismatic leader, their understanding of propaganda and their racial mysticism, cleverly communicated their offer of work, bread and political stability. It was a straightforward offer, and in the circumstances an attractive one. But by accepting it, the people allowed the Nazis to trample over previously established boundaries. And the further the Nazis trampled, the more implicated the people became, to the point where any behaviour at all could be justified, or had to be ignored.
At school, Melita Maschmann’s closest friend, who entered her class in the spring of 1933, was Jewish. She became close to the girl – despite knowing her religion. They came to share an interest in literature and philosophy. And while they didn’t discuss religion, they shared stories of their respective youth groups. But Melita’s brainwashing soon began.
Rather than analysing Germany’s experience of the First World War for its military and economic failings, German children were taught to blame defeat on being ‘stabbed in the back’ by Jews. ‘International Jewry’ was blamed for both capitalism and communism, and thus for all the world’s problems. Melita sat through a series of lectures on Jewish religious teachings, in which a supposed expert taught that Jews were responsible for the ritual murder of Christians. And though she claims that she saw through the lecturer’s nonsense, she could not – or would not – step back sufficiently to acknowledge her own brainwashing. She laughed at the man and his words, but failed to question their purpose.
The relentless indoctrination ultimately worked. Melita came to believe in the bogeyman Jew, the Jew as a concept. He was indeed to blame for capitalism, communism and everything besides. His blood was corrupting, his spirit was seditious. And Adolf Hitler was sure that the indoctrination would work. In 1933, he said, ‘When an opponent says, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already . . .”’
But because she felt comfortable with her Jewish friend, Melita could not accept that she would come to any harm. When she learned that Jews were being dismissed from their professions and confined to ghettos, she rationalised that it was only ‘the Jew’, the bogeyman, who was being persecuted. And despite being an intelligent young woman, the rationalisation worked for her.
Denial of reality was a common defence mechanism among Germans. Bernt Engelmann knew a Jewish doctor who was visited by a young German stormtrooper. ‘There was nothing wrong with him really,’ the doctor explained. ‘His throat was a little inflamed, probably from shouting “Heil” so much.’ In fact, the stormtrooper just wanted to talk. Perhaps he wanted to ease his guilt. He told the doctor what he had been doing recently, which included helping to rig an election by filling in over five hundred ballot papers. As he left, the stormtrooper spoke seriously. ‘I have nothing against you. I want you to know that.’ And then he gave a Nazi salute, said ‘Heil Hitler!’ and walked out. As Heinrich Himmler once said in a speech to concentration camp guards, ‘Every German has his favourite Jew.’
Once the Nazis were in power, it was a matter of days before freedoms began to disappear from every sector of life. The Enabling Act allowed Hitler to make laws without recourse to the Reichstag, freedom of speech was abolished, concentration camps were introduced, political parties were banned, trade unions were destroyed, beatings were administered, and books reflecting an ‘un-German spirit’ were burned. In a speech to Berlin students at a book-burning, Joseph Goebbels said:
The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death – this is the task of the young generation.
Here is the key to Nazi intentions. Young people faced a future of action, sacrifice, certainty and obedience – with no room for individuality. As head of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley, declared, ‘such a thing as a private individual does not exist.’ Hitler went further, privately describing how, from the age of ten until adulthood, a German youth would be sent from one militaristic organisation to another, until he or she was a ‘complete National Socialist’. Once this had been achieved, he said, ‘they will never be free again as long as they live.’
Hitler’s ambition could be seen taking shape. Christabel Bielenberg, a British woman living in Hamburg, was a committed anti-Nazi. After two years of National Socialist rule, she observed how the youngsters she saw hiking the country roads were now dressed in dreary Hitler Youth uniforms, with identical haircuts: short hair for the boys and plaits for the girls. Individualism, she noted, seemed to have evaporated. But she was also forced to admit that people seemed more cheerful, and were behaving more politely. Fear of a financial crisis seemed to have passed, and a sense of national self-respect was returning.
Optimism was not visible everywhere, of course. In April 1936, Bernt Engelmann was sitting in a train carriage as it passed through Duisberg. At the time, the long-distance ‘Adolf Hitler roads’ were being built, and two construction workers were sitting opposite him, moaning to each other about the project. Into this mix came a young female member of the National Socialist Women’s League. ‘Heil Hitler!’ she said cheerfully to everybody, and sat down. For a while, she read her newspaper while the men continued moaning. ‘Is this whining really necessary?’ the woman said suddenly. ‘You should be grateful that you have work and thank the Führer for getting rid of unemployment!’
The men stared at her, before one of them spoke. He explained that they were on compulsory service with just ten days’ holiday a year, their accommodation was a straw mattress in a wooden barracks, their food was abysmal and their pay was low and regularly falling lower. In fact, the man said, he was earning less than he had before the Nazis came to power, and was no longer even allowed to carry out his own trade.
The young woman was silent for a while. Finally she spoke, protesting that Germany had regained its strength, that Hitler had achieved miracles, and that the people now had hope. ‘You must have faith in the Führer!’ she said.
We have already noted the quasi-religious quality of the Dunkirk evacuation, but this pales beside the secular sanctity of the Third Reich, where Hitler and the Fatherland stood for God and Heaven. The young woman was invoking Hitler just as a Christian invokes Jesus or a Muslim invokes Allah. And two years later, shortly before Kristallnacht, Melita Maschmann was having another of her euphoric, quasi-religious experiences, this time at a meeting of leaders of the League of German Girls. The sense of being young, of belonging, of loving each other, of sharing a common task – making Germany great again – filled her with overwhelming joy.
But Melita’s greatest joy and intoxication were to come once the war had begun on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland. Depicted in Germany as a legitimate action to liberate Germans living in occupied territories, the invasion saw Melita being sent in an official capacity to a town on the Polish border. Arriving by train, she was seized by a feeling of invulnerability. All sense of fear dropped away as she felt an identification with something greater than herself. Fulfilling Robert Ley’s ideal, she was no longer an individual. She had become Germany.
But it was not just fear that Melita lost when the war began. She was sent, in 1940, to Wartheland, an annexed area containing a large number of Jews and Poles and only a small minority of Germans. Together with a Hitler Youth leader, she was driving across the Warta river when they became stuck. Stranded, with the waters rising, their car was eventually towed to safety by a team of gaunt, bearded men who lived locally. These, it turned out, were Jews forced to live together in ghetto fashion. Once ashore, the Jews worked busily to clean the car of mud and slime. And just as Melita was about to climb in again, one of the men stopped her; he had found one more tiny piece of dirt that he wanted to remove.
When the man had finished, Melita and the Hitler Youth leader drove away without saying a word to the Jews who had gone out of their way to help them. She had not even looked them in the face. She despised them for being Jews and for wanting to help those who despised them. But she was also ashamed of her attitude. She knew she should have thanked these people.
But how could she acknowledge their humanity? They were not individuals. And nor was she. She had become Germany.
The United States
The Germans, of course, were not the only western people to suffer economic difficulties between the wars. The United States had undergone a great stock market crash in 1929, and suffered a grinding depression for years afterwards. Nearly all levels of society were affected. But as wages dropped and work became harder to come by, it was the poorest who experienced the greatest suffering.
With Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘new deal for the American people’, and specifically the introduction of the National Youth Administration, members of the struggling generation were finally offered hope. They were provided with grants in return for part-time work, allowing them to remain in high school and college. And they were placed in job training programmes or full-time work by local Youth Administration offices.
This was a large-scale federal programme which, to some, seemed un-American in its focus on collective welfare. Indeed, with his youth organisations and work camps for young people, his conservation projects stressing the importance of physical fitness and the outdoor life, and his myriad new agencies and regulations, Roosevelt’s initiatives could seem remarkably similar to Adolf Hitler’s.
Certainly, both leaders inherited ravaged economies. They were both trying to restore their nations’ self-respect as well as their finances. And they were both placing huge importance on their young people. The young were the bearers of national resurgence, and they were set aside for special treatment.
But that is where the similarities end. In Hitler’s Germany, the state set about stripping away the individuality of its young people. A young German faced a future of service and obedience to the Fatherland, its needs eclipsing his or her own. Roosevelt’s initiatives may have been collective, but he had no desire to brainwash America’s youth. His New Deal offered individual growth alongside the nation’s. And how could it have offered anything else in America – a country built on self-reliance and self-expression?
We are very used, nowadays, to youth culture coming out of America before spreading around the world. And it was in the late 1930s, as Roosevelt’s measures had their impact and the depression started to ease, that genuine youth culture was first seen. While jazz music had been popular for some time, this was the period when it exploded into Swing and spread among all levels of society. And while the word ‘teen-ager’ would not be used for a few more years, and rock and roll was still a decade and a half away, the right music, the right clothes and the right attitudes took on a new importance among American ‘teens’ (a word that was in use).
In large part this was thanks to the New Deal. Three-quarters of those aged between fourteen and eighteen were now staying in high school, a far higher proportion than ever before. No longer so influenced by their parents, or at all by their senior workmates, they began to create a distinct identity inside their teen bubble. When sociologist August Hollingshead conducted a study of the young people in a midwestern town (called Elmtown to disguise its identity) he was able to look inside the bubble. One girl, a misunderstood teenager years before the breed was identified, said about her parents, ‘Sometimes they just don’t understand what kids want to do, and they think we ought to act like they acted twenty years ago.’
Other subjects referred to clothes and style. ‘Janet’s a big girl,’ said one, ‘and she doesn’t dress right; so she just isn’t accepted.’ Peer pressure was intense, and dressing right was possible because high school students had a disposable income. They lived at home, usually received money from their parents, and often had part-time jobs. Without rent or bills to pay, there was no excuse for not dressing ‘slick’, as one Elmtown girl put it. And even young people without money, living on the small amounts paid by the National Youth Administration, were keen to spend what they had to look good. American materialism, after all, has a proud history.
The Elmtown study is interesting in relation to sex and marriage, revealing that it was a badge of honour among many boys to be sexually active. ‘A boy who is known or believed to be a virgin is not respected,’ writes Hollingshead, and he describes a clique of lower-class boys calling themselves ‘The Five Fs’. This near-acronym stood for ‘Find ’em, feed ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em’.
A girl, on the other hand, had to tread a dangerously thin line between ‘having some fun’ and becoming ‘free and easy’. ‘Mary’ told Hollingshead about going to a dance with a young man. At the dance, she decided that the boy ‘could have it’ but she would have to get drunk to go through with it. So the couple drove to a bar where Mary drank a double bourbon and three double whiskies, before driving to an isolated spot. ‘Oh, it was wonderful!’ said Mary. Over the next few months, she had affairs with five other men, going on at least four dates with each before ‘becoming intimate’. She was adamant that none of the boys had known in advance that ‘she knew what it was all about’. And then, at the age of eighteen, she married a twenty-year-old mill worker. Mary’s brief but intense adventures were over.
Yet for any social changes, it was the music that really marked out the new youth culture. Swing music had a terrifically fast tempo, and sounded terrifying to older white listeners. It encouraged wild, out of control dancing, even solo dancing without a partner. Numbers like Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing Sing Sing’ had a brutal, thumping drumbeat. Hep cats (aficionados) used jive (slang) when beating up the chops (talking). They wore wild drapes (clothes) and spent hard (enjoyable) blacks (nights) in the Apple (Harlem). But despite – and because of – its edgy street culture background, Swing became hugely popular with young white audiences.
On the evening of 16 January 1938, Swing crossed over into the mainstream, when Benny Goodman’s orchestra played Carnegie Hall, New York City’s most prestigious concert venue. Asked how long an intermission he wanted, Goodman said, ‘I don’t know. How long does Toscanini have?’ And when, several months later, a hundred thousand people of all races attended a Swing Jamboree in Chicago, music seemed to be lifting the nation. ‘Swing,’ reported the New York Times, ‘is the voice of youth striving to be heard in this fast-moving world of ours.’ It was the voice of hope as America finally emerged from the depression.
But it would be a mistake to think that the young had moved beyond their elders. A poll conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1940 asked young people across the country, ‘Would you favor changing to a different form of government if it would promise you more in the way of a job?’ Eighty-eight per cent of the sample answered ‘No’. ‘Ours is the only sound form of government,’ said one respondent, speaking for most.
Young Americans may have grown more optimistic over the 1930s, they may have developed their own culture, but they were happy to remain American. And to a real degree, they were the benchmark by which the new Europe measured itself. Their culture was worshipped and copied in Britain, reviled and banned in Germany. But as detached as they were making themselves, they would not ultimately be able to escape the tensions brewing in Europe. The new world had not yet outgrown the old.