10

TO WAR

“This time you have action and heroism to report instead of betrayal and infamy.”

– MATTHEW HALTON, Toronto Star, February 17, 1940

ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1939, two days after blitzkrieg was unleashed on Poland, the war that Matt had predicted for most of the decade was declared by Britain and France. He had little time to reflect on it. That same evening, the Montreal-bound passenger ship Athenia was torpedoed by a German submarine off the northwest coast of Ireland. Of the 1,418 passengers and crew aboard, 117 drowned, including a ten-year-old girl from Hamilton who became the first Canadian to die in World War Two. Banner headlines about the sunken ship vied with others proclaiming EMPIRE AT WAR!¹

Matt rushed to Glasgow, where rescue ships brought back about six hundred survivors, many suffering from hypothermia and shock. Among the hundred or so Canadians who were saved, Matt came across two friends, actress Judith Evelyn and her fiancé, radio announcer Andrew Allan (later head of CBC Drama). Their stories resembled those from the Titanic. The couple had begun an elegant dinner when the torpedo struck, forcing the ship to list heavily. They managed to get down a ladder to a lifeboat but were thrown into the sea when the boat hit the propeller of a rescue ship in high waves. They drifted for some time among drowned bodies before being rescued. A Montreal woman recounted how a mother who lost her child started screaming “My baby” and sprang into the sea. An Alberta survivor told Matt her cabin flooded when the torpedo struck, forcing her to swim out through swirling water.²

Forty years later, another survivor of the Athenia recalled opening her hotel room door in Glasgow to a young man in a tan raincoat with a hat worn at a rakish angle. Mrs. Jess Bigelow was with her husband and two children. She recognized Matt’s name from his Star articles and agreed to talk to him about their ordeal. “He had that homespun quality that made one comfortable and at ease,” she said. When he was told how her husband had rescued the children from rising water in the ship’s hold, Bigelow said Matt put his arms around the kids and told them how brave they were. She remembered him as quiet and intense, someone who “spoke feelingly of Canada and the part she would have to play in the war.” Matt persuaded the couple to appear on the BBC next morning and tell their story to a wider audience.³

The drama of the Athenia was the last war action Matt would cover until the new year. The “Phony War” had begun – the nine-month stretch in which there was no major bombing or land battles between Germany and the Western Allies. “We had expected an immediate avalanche of fire and steel from the skies,”⁴ Matt wrote. Instead, London was so peaceful that he bought a bicycle to benefit from an unusually warm autumn. At night, the blackouts seemed an unnecessary inconvenience in getting to pubs and nightclubs that were as busy as ever. There were complaints about a much bigger disruption: the evacuation of a million and a half women and children from the cities. In Matt’s view, the exodus, and the compulsory billeting of city residents in villages and farms, was breaching the ramparts of the British class system. “Today a kind of social revolution is taking place in the villages of Britain,” he wrote. “The dock worker’s daughter from Limehouse is now billeted with the vicar in Stow-on-the-Wold, and has to learn not to use her table napkin as a handkerchief. The postman’s son from Tooting Broadway now has school lessons with the squire’s children in the remote village of Nether Wallop and is learning that ‘today’ is not pronounced ‘todye.”⁵ Matt mentioned that he, too, had sent his wife and daughter to safety away from London, and that his little Kathleen was playing with city children who had never seen cows before. His article, under the headline “CHILDREN OF THE STORM,” was overdrawn. In fact, the evacuation caused considerable friction between city and rural people and many (including Jean and Kathleen) returned to their homes soon after the Phony War began. But Matt was perceptive in developing a theme he would return to often – that the war would usher in a much more egalitarian post-war Britain.

By mid-November, Matt was tired of writing about war preparations. He briefly reverted to the mock-serious style that had first established his reputation. One target was the government’s strict ban on any kind of weather forecasts that might facilitate Nazi bombing raids:

If there were no weather there would be no conversation among Anglo-Saxon people. But we can’t talk about it in the papers any more … the thing has become a secret. So I got on my bicycle and hurtled down Oxford Street today and had tea with a meteorological expert and asked him why.

“Don’t the Germans have weather?” I asked. “Don’t they have meteorologists? Have they no old men with rheumatism? Why should weather be a secret?” …

“Because most of Germany’s weather comes from the British Isles,” explained the meteorologist. Which explains why the Nazis hate us.…

It is a fact that our pre-knowledge of the weather will be an important factor in helping us win the war. I thought about the line from Rule Britannia about “the nations not so blest as thee.” I began to see why England always wins her wars. Even the weather is on her side. I suggested that if the Germans worked on the assumption that there would be rain in Britain every day in summer and fog every day in winter, they couldn’t go far wrong. My friend passed this off as frivolous and went on with his talk.

“By the way,” I said suddenly, “suppose there is an east wind. Suppose it’s one of those days when the weather is coming from Germany.” There was anxiety in my voice.

My friend calmed me. “We know there is going to be an east wind before it ever arrives,” he explained. “You see east winds are merely the backwaters of west winds. A stiff west wind blowing across France to Germany almost always means that we will have afresh east wind.” …

I felt enormously bucked. The weather being what it is, I don’t see how we can lose the war.⁶

That sally into humour was his last of the war years. Matt’s tone was becoming more solemn and more patriotic, yet he was still prepared to take unpopular, contrarian stands. He questioned Neville Chamberlain’s qualities as a wartime leader at a time when some Canadians would have regarded it as almost treasonous. Even before Chamberlain became prime minister and the voice of appeasement, Matt was scathing about his record as Chancellor of the Exchequer: “If he becomes Premier, Britain will have the most uninspired leadership she has had since Lord North”⁷ – the eighteenth-century prime minister often remembered for losing the American colonies. Now he felt that Chamberlain lacked energy, imagination, and even the will to fight the war. He pointedly wrote, “We shall eventually need a man who has not only cool determination but also some high strategic vision.”⁸

In his view, that man was Winston Churchill. “There is little doubt,” Matt wrote in December 1939, that “Churchill will be called to the supreme leadership of the British Empire.”⁹ His prediction was far from obvious at the time. Despite being appointed to the cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty in September, Churchill had many critics who felt his judgments were impulsive and erratic. Mackenzie King described him as “one of the most dangerous men I have ever known.”¹⁰ For Matt, though, Churchill’s early denunciation of Hitler and appeasement made him a hero. Now he was destined to become “Britain’s man of the hour … endowed with supreme strategic genius, courageous as a lion and shrewd as a fox, and with that gift of high eloquence which stirs men’s imaginations and inspires them with hope even in the darkest times.… His greatest days are still to come.”¹¹

Matt also predicted great days ahead for the young Canadians in uniform who began arriving in Britain in the last months of 1939. Stories about the Canadians flying Spitfires and preparing to defend the south coast of England became staples of his reporting. He was at dockside in Greenock, Scotland, when units of the 1st Canadian Division disembarked. “Seldom have I been more moved and thrilled than when, in last Sunday’s gray mists, I saw the vanguard of the Canadian army – sons and brothers of the men of Vimy Ridge – land on British soil.” Censorship was already so tight that he couldn’t name the regiments or even say where the event was happening. But he described the flag-waving, emotional response of spectators as the troops marched away and proudly quoted The Times: “The first of freedom’s fighters from the empire overseas are here.”¹²

At year’s end, Matt was preparing to go to France to report on the British Expeditionary Force when a cable from Hindmarsh told him to change course. He was to hurry to Finland, where thirty Soviet divisions had stormed across the border. Instead of reporting army exercises along France’s Maginot defence line, Matt was drawn into a war that he would find both ghastly and thrilling.

The Winter War, as it was known, is now something of a forgotten sideshow. Because it did not directly involve Germany, it has largely disappeared from the narrative of World War Two. Yet at a time when no other major fighting was happening, the David-and-Goliath aspect of the Russo-Finnish war gripped the attention of an admiring world. Here was a tiny country of three and a half million people that for several months not only held the Soviet colossus at bay but inflicted huge losses on it. Here was “Finland, superb – nay sublime – in the jaws of peril”¹³ – in Churchill’s magic words. And here was a conflict perfectly fitted for Matt’s tendency to portray war in epic terms.

The Red Army had expected to crush Finland in two weeks. It invaded with more than three times as many soldiers, thirty times as many aircraft, and a hundred times as many tanks as the Finns. Yet it was ill-prepared for fighting in sub-Arctic forests where there were almost no roads and where harsh temperatures often dropped to 40 below. Its leadership was weakened by Stalin’s purges and by inept political commissars who undermined the authority of senior officers. By mid-January, the Soviets were outfought and outmanoeuvred by the skill and courage of a mere 175,000 Finnish soldiers. Exploiting the terrain and weather, small bands of ski troopers on the central and northern fronts adopted guerilla tactics against the invaders. They staged lightning attacks at night then retreated into the forest before the Russians could counterattack. With few anti-tank weapons, petrol bombs were used with devastating effect. The Finns gave the world the phrase “Molotov cocktail” and lessons in guerilla warfare.¹⁴

After a tiring journey from Stockholm to the border, Matt slung his rucksack over his shoulder and with typewriter in hand crossed a long, narrow bridge into northern Finland. With Geoffrey Cox, a friend from London’s Daily Express, he drove through a blizzard to the headquarters of the Finnish North Command in Rovaniemi on the edge of the Arctic Circle. From the start, his reporting was infused with excitement and a rich sense of place. He described his arrival at night when the skies had cleared and the northern lights provided an awe-inspiring spectacle: “great shafts of blue, green, orange and incandescent white light dancing and flashing down the sky.”¹⁵ The only hotel in town had been converted into a combined command centre and hospital. A press room had also been set up on an open gallery overlooking the foyer where wounded soldiers were being treated. It was a strange setting – reporters typing their stories as nurses below them ministered to groaning, bloodied victims of the war.¹⁶

Next day Matt and three other correspondents were driven three hundred kilometres to the village of Suomussalmi. It was a name that was about to become a legend. Shortly after the invasion, the Red Army captured the town and advanced west in the hope of cutting the country in two at its narrow “waist.” Fourteen thousand Soviet troops, strung out along a narrow snowbound road, entered a trap. They were repeatedly ambushed by “ghost patrols” – small units of Finnish soldiers so-called because of the white camouflage they wore. The patrols would attack at night, often machine-gunning Russians as they ate or slept, then disappear into the wilderness. Finally, two Finnish regiments ambushed a supply convoy in what became a massacre. At least 6,000 Soviet soldiers were killed or wounded at Suomussalmi compared to fewer than 1,000 Finnish casualties.

The battle was tapering off when Matt arrived and saw “what I think Dante would have hesitated to include in the Inferno.”¹⁷ The village seemed to him to resemble a strange necropolis. Only its white porcelain fireplaces and chimneys were left standing while its wooden buildings were burned to the ground. The more appalling sights lay along a four-mile stretch of frozen road outside the village. The ice was strewn with discarded weapons, shattered tanks, dead horses, and hundreds of Russian corpses, their eyelashes white with frost and faces yellowed. “I saw the horses with their feet in the air and the snow-covered mounds of dead Russians.… Blissfully they slept in their white winding sheets, the madness and the agony finished with forever.… I saw a dead Russian with his knees folded under him and his face in the snow as if he were a Moslem at prayer. When he was lifted up I saw that his face, unlike some others, had a benign waxen dignity like dead men I had seen in Spain.… ”¹⁸ Adding to the macabre scene, horses with chunks of flesh carved from their rumps by hungry Soviet soldiers wandered along the road.

The prisoners seemed to Matt as pitiable as the dead. “Some had frozen hands or feet, some had wounds roughly bandaged. Almost all had the memory of hell in their eyes.”¹⁹ The Finns allowed Matt and several colleagues into a large barn to interview dozens of prisoners. Under the Geneva conventions, there were restrictions on press interviews with POWS but Matt ignored the rules. He gave the prisoners cigarettes and asked them what they had been told about the invasion. Several replied that they thought Finns would welcome them as liberators. Another confirmed that many Russians were shot by NKVD troops if they retreated or hesitated to attack. One prisoner was laughing weirdly and another put his head in his hands and shook uncontrollably.²⁰ It was Matt’s first exposure to a sickness he came to know well in World War Two: chronic battle fatigue or what is now classified as PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

Other visits to the front lines were more uplifting. Matt requested permission to report on the ghost patrols harrying Russian forces on the Salla front north of the Arctic Circle. At a command post, he was fed a reindeer stew, then a guide took him forward on one of the light sleighs used so effectively by the Finnish army. He recounted an exhilarating night journey through pine-clad hills with ski patrols gliding out of the woods and soldiers occasionally galloping by on horseback. At an infantry dugout he was shrouded in lumipuku, the white hood, cape, and trousers that made Finnish soldiers almost invisible against the snow. He accompanied a foot patrol that moved to within half a kilometre of a Russian camp and spent the night in a camouflaged tent with twenty Finnish soldiers.²¹ All was silent outside apart from the occasional crack of rifle shots and boom of shellfire.

The experience appealed to Matt’s boyish sense of adventure. “On this night,” he wrote, “I wouldn’t have traded my profession for anyone’s. I was intoxicated with the stunning beauty, with the thrill of excitement and the spice of danger.… I felt immensely alive.”²² It was the first hint of an attraction to being on battle fronts that, in later years, became perilously close to an addiction.

Part of the appeal was the camaraderie with other correspondents. In Rovaniemi, between visits to the front, Matt spent time with old and new friends: Cox of the Express, Leland Stowe of the Chicago Daily News, Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune, and Carl Mydans, the famous Life photographer. They went skiing together, basked in the local sauna, and flirted with the Lottas, young women from Lotta Svärd, the paramilitary organization that enlisted women as nurses, couriers, and lookouts. The good times were occasionally broken up by the wail of warning sirens. Correspondents then joined Finns in rushing to primitive shelters before Russian bombers flew over, dropping bombs and machine-gunning indiscriminately. “The sickening evil of war comes home,” Matt wrote, “when you see men, women and children huddle in holes in the ground and see their set faces in the lantern light as the first bombs explode, and hear the nervous laughter when they realize they are still alive.”²³

The Star exploited Matt’s presence to the full. His name would often be splashed over the front page, sometimes in banner headlines: “HALTON WITH FINN TROOPS IN ARCTIC,” “HALTON IN FRONT LINE OF FINNS.” Sometimes the headline would bear little relation to his report, as in “ENCIRCLED BY RUSSIANS HALTON NEARLY TAKEN.”²⁴ The publicity helped give him a profile that eclipsed that of the paper’s other big names, Gordon Sinclair and Greg Clark. It was the birth of celebrity journalism, and the Star was one of its midwives. The trend may have flattered Matt at the time, although later he objected strongly to war correspondents being lionized over the front-line soldiers.

In February, Finland’s heroic stand in the Winter War began to collapse. Its troops were exhausted and short of weapons and ammunition. The Red Army, still willing to accept huge losses, poured in more troops. It breached the key Mannerheim Line, a chain of Finnish bunkers and trenches across the Karelian Isthmus between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland. Promised aid from Britain and France never came, and without that aid, Matt wrote, a Russian victory was inevitable. Surprisingly, the censor allowed that statement to pass, perhaps because Matt also compared the bravery of the Finns to the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae.²⁵

Moving south to cover the battles along the Mannerheim Line, Matt witnessed intense Soviet bombing and shelling. For the first time, he was close enough to see bombs actually dropping from low-flying aircraft. “The bomb falls and explodes 30 or 40 yards away. The world roars in your ears. You see branches and frozen earth cascade into the sky.”²⁶ Wearing the standard snow camouflage, Matt was taken by an army guide to a dugout only a hundred yards behind the front. A badly wounded sergeant was lying on a bed of straw waiting to be evacuated in darkness. From the dugout, Matt and his guide were partly in view of Soviet positions as they crawled from tree to tree to get to the front. He admitted in print that it was silly to risk his life just to say that he had been to the real front line.²⁷ But if bravado was involved, he was also frank in confessing that at times he shook with fear.

Matt’s war reporting was beginning to take on a recognizable style. It was graphic, sentimental, and personalized. If at times he glamorized soldiers, he never glamorized the anguish of war. His description of a train ride from Helsinki to Viipuri (Vyborg) near the front illustrated his ability to turn simple, even banal events into a compelling picture:

It takes 14 hours to get to Viipuri and we sit like sardines all night in the packed train, with just enough light to see who is sitting across the aisle, and no air except when I go out on the platform, when I freeze.

There is war-time prohibition of liquor all over Finland except in Helsingfors (Helsinki), and the soldiers have brought bottles of cognac and wine to take to the front, but none of those bottles ever get to the front. They are consumed on the Viipuri train.…

The Viipuri train, the Viipuri train. The fine soldiers going to hold the Mannerheim line against 20 to one odds or more. The Lotta girl going to the front to nurse and carry supplies and become look-outs for bombers.… The singing of Tipperary in Finnish. The wayside stations where more men board the train. The rushing out for fresh air and coffee and a sandwich, and finding the way back in the dark. The Russian bombers coming over in the starlight and scaring us into the trees.… The officer who was a schoolteacher and shows me his wife’s picture. And the women at the little stations saying good-bye.

Good-bye to the Viipuri train. Good-bye indeed.… The tears.… the last embrace, “Hyvaesti, hyvaesti” – “good-bye, goodbye” … The Russians are thundering at the gates of Viipuri only a few miles away.… Good-bye to the Viipuri train, and hope, and summer; for the line must be held.

The train is painfully slow. Less than 200 miles but it takes 14 hours.… “Do you hate the Russians?” I ask. “No,” comes the familiar reply, “but we hate Russia.”

Ten o’clock in the morning and journey’s end for the Viipuri train.

Outside the station we see the partly wrecked town, and hear like rolling thunder the distant rumbling of the guns.…

The soldiers don their packs and sling their rifles and walk quite gaily away. To the Mannerheim line. We shout good-bye to our friends of the night. Hyvaesti, hyvaesti! …

I meet some of them later in dugouts at the front. In the Mannerheim line I learn what it is to be bombed and shelled all day. But I don’t learn what it is to have thousands of men coming at you in wave after wave. That is happening now. The Finns on the Karelian Isthmus are fighting one of the great defensive battles.…²⁸

But Finland could not hold out much longer. In mid-March, a peace treaty was signed in Moscow that ceded 11 per cent of the country’s territory to the Russians. Matt had been disillusioned with Soviet Communism long before the Winter War. Like many on the left, he had been shocked by Stalin’s decision to forge a non-aggression pact with the Nazis in August 1939. Now he wrote of the betrayal of Lenin’s dream and the transformation of Soviet Russia into yet another expansionist power.²⁹

Russia’s pyrrhic victory in Finland led many in Europe to conclude that the Red Army’s strength was grossly overrated. Hitler was encouraged to think that a German invasion of the Soviet Union would be as easy as cutting through soft cheese. Matt was not convinced, noting that “despite this war, it’s just a bit too early to say the Red Army has feet of clay.”³⁰ In fact, the Russians quickly applied some of the lessons of the Finnish war, re-equipping many of their soldiers with winter clothing and reforming their military tactics.³¹ The Red Army that the Wehrmacht faced later in Operation Barbarossa would be formidable.

Despite his anger over the Soviet aggression in Finland, Matt still saw Communist Russia as a lesser threat than Nazi Germany. For five years, Matt had argued for a strong defence alliance between Britain, France, and Russia as a sure way to deter Hitler or crush him on the battlefield. Such an alliance seemed a real possibility after Moscow offered the French and British a mutual assistance pact against Germany in the spring of 1939. But Chamberlain and Daladier dithered, no doubt influenced by right wingers for whom a deal with the Communists was unacceptable. Negotiations dragged on until Stalin ran out of patience and sprang his Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler. One of the great “what if’s” of history is whether a triple alliance at that time could have prevented the Second World War. Churchill felt that it might have. In his post-war memoirs he wrote: “There can be no doubt even in the afterlight that Britain and France should have accepted the Soviet offer.… The alliance of Britain, France and Russia would have struck deep alarm in the heart of Germany in 1939, and no one can prove that war might not even then have been averted.”³² To which Matt would have added, “Amen.”

In London, Matt returned to routine coverage of the Phony War: interviewing Canadian generals and covering training exercises with the 23,000 Canadian troops now in Britain. Already he was emerging as a cheerleader for the Allied war effort, a role in which he felt comfortable given his fervent belief in the cause. At times, however, his boosterism was excessive. “For pride, confidence and efficiency I have never seen troops to surpass them, not even the Finns,”³³ he wrote, after watching Canadian soldiers digging trenches and lugging Bren gun carriers over rough countryside. It was unlikely they merited such praise at that point since half the recruits had no military training prior to serving overseas.³⁴ Matt also wrote glowing profiles of General Andrew McNaughton, commander of the 1st Canadian Division, and other senior officers. Several used the phrase “No more Passchendaeles” to pledge to him there would be no reckless squandering of Canadian lives.³⁵ The commitment may have haunted them two years later when more than three thousand Canadians were killed or wounded in the disastrous raid on Dieppe.

For Matt, the tedium of the Phony War ended with brutal suddenness on May 10, 1940. At dawn that morning, Hitler’s Panzer divisions cascaded over the borders of Holland and Belgium and advanced toward France. The Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway earlier but somehow it seemed that the “real” war began only when the British and French armies were fully engaged on the Western Front. In Germany four years earlier, Matt had written knowledgeably about German blitzkrieg tactics, stressing their emphasis on fast-moving armoured columns backed up by air power. “The core of this policy,” he wrote at the time, “is that war must be launched on such a scale and with such speed that the enemy will be crushed in two weeks.”³⁶ As it happened, that was more or less exactly how the catastrophe for the Allies unfolded. Yet, as the German offensive began, Matt echoed the false optimism that prevailed almost uniformly in British and Commonwealth media: “At long last, the cruel bullies of Europe are meeting forces as good as their own.”³⁷ A headline in the Star shouted, “NAZIS STOPPED IN THEIR TRACKS” as Wehrmacht columns broke through Allied defences and surged westward.

The same optimism, much more justifiable, surrounded Churchill’s appointment as prime minister. In several dispatches, Matt celebrated the replacement of the feckless Chamberlain by a man he described as probably the greatest leader in British history. He was in the House of Commons when Churchill declared that he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Matt wrote that “no more thrilling declaration has ever been made by a leader of a free people.… Today there is no thought but of resistance and then victory. And then vengeance.”³⁸ In reality, British opinion could not be so neatly categorized. While the press and the public quickly came to see Churchill as their champion, King George VI, the Whitehall Establishment, and most of the Conservative party were initially unenthusiastic, if not opposed to Churchill’s appointment. Even Matt’s former hero, Lloyd George, turned down an offer to join the coalition, believing that resistance to the Germans was a lost cause.³⁹

British confidence in victory was certainly not as ironclad as Matt suggested. As the British Expeditionary Force fled Belgium and France at the end of May, the spectre of defeatism reappeared. Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, proposed to Churchill’s war cabinet that Italy mediate a peace settlement that would recognize Hitler’s domination of Europe while giving autonomy to Britain and its empire. Churchill argued that the deal would make Britain a Nazi satellite and amount to a second Munich.⁴⁰ But his view prevailed only after four days of intense cabinet debate. Churchill himself was less sure of victory than in his bold public statements. Serious consideration was given to the possibility of embarking the British army to Canada in the event of a successful German invasion. Secretary of War Anthony Eden was even instructed to sound out how British troops would react to such an order. He was told by senior officers that in the event of imminent defeat, most conscripts and married men would prefer to give in rather than face a long exile in Canada.⁴¹ But few of these facts were known at the time, and Matt’s portrayal of a dauntless British people was the norm in the Anglo-Saxon media.

It was an unsettling time for Matt. For the first time in six years, some of his dispatches were relegated to the inside pages of the Star. He now had to share coverage of the top stories from Europe with three other Star correspondents sent abroad at the outbreak of fighting. His friend and rival, Greg Clark, was assigned to the continent, where he covered the evacuation of Dunkirk and the fall of France. Senior correspondent Frederick Griffin was sent to British military headquarters, and Claude Pascoe to live with Canadian troops. The closest Matt got to the fighting was Dover, where he interviewed Royal Air Force pilots and stood on the famed white cliffs, watching the distant flames from the French channel ports and listening to the far-off reverberations of bombs and shellfire.⁴² It was not his idea of being a war correspondent.

Staying at home had one consolation. Jean and three-year-old Kathleen were now living safely in Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, an easy commute for Matt from London. It was one of the loveliest springs in memory. Rhododendrons and roses flowered early, larks and blackbirds were in full throat, and a nightingale could be heard at dusk near their cottage. Matt wrote in his memoir that nature was giving England one last gift before dreadful days ahead.⁴³ He took his wife and daughter on short walks into the Chiltern Hills – short because Jean was in the last month of pregnancy. I was born on May 28 in a country hospital that would soon be treating wounded evacuees from Dunkirk. On that same day, 17,000 British soldiers made their escape from France, Belgium surrendered to the Nazis, and Churchill secured his crucial cabinet victory over the last supporters of appeasement: Britain would never negotiate with Hitler.

Earlier that month, Matt and Jean were listening to the BBC when a news bulletin announced that “the Germans have broken through at Sedan.”⁴⁴ Matt knew instantly what that meant. The Germans had breached France’s supposedly impregnable Maginot defence line, enabling them to move westward and encircle the Allies’ armies in Belgium and northern France. The French troops at Sedan were badly equipped, badly trained reservists who broke and fled under devastating Luftwaffe bombing and Panzer assault. But Matt, the constant Francophile, was angered by subsequent British sneers about the cowardice of the French army. He acknowledged the poor generalship and antiquated tactics of the French military but noted that some units fought with great skill and courage. He singled out the relatively unknown Brigadier Charles de Gaulle, whose armoured division inflicted heavy losses on the Germans and whom he would later compare to Churchill.⁴⁵

Matt soon found himself defending France again. This time he was angered by criticism that France was “rotten to the core” because of its armistice with the Germans and the emergence of Marshal Pétain’s Fascist-tinged Vichy regime. Matt argued passionately that France’s problem was that it was rotten at the top rather than at the core. He wrote that the country was betrayed by a right-wing oligarchy that preferred collaboration with the Nazis to democracy. “Who were the quislings when France was falling?” he asked. “The Pétains, who had never in their hearts accepted the Revolution, the clerico-authoritarians who still smarted at the disestablishment of the Church.”⁴⁶ Matt acknowledged that the French public was profoundly averse to another blood-letting so soon after World War One. But he stopped short of recognizing another reality: the lack of will to resist; the popularity of the armistice with the Germans; and, at least initially, the widespread support for Pétain’s regime of collaboration. His love of France led him to ask a provocative question: Would there have been a British Vichy-style government if there was no English Channel to deter a Nazi invasion? “What would have happened if she [Britain] had not had that precious little strip of water? The world would probably have been saying today that Britain was ‘rotten to the core’.”⁴⁷

By mid-June 1940, Nazi soldiers had goose-stepped down the Champs-Elysées and the first bombs had fallen on London. As if Matt’s world wasn’t already in turmoil, a cable from Toronto sent him into near-despair. The Star’s management ordered all its correspondents home. With so much fast-breaking news from the war fronts, Atkinson and Hindmarsh decided it was foolish to risk their correspondents’ lives to duplicate stories the wire services were providing.⁴⁸ Matt was told that he would be sent to Washington to cover the presidential election that year and stay on to set up the Star’s first bureau in the U.S. capital. Most reporters would have regarded it as a dream assignment, but not Matt. Europe had become the centre of his universe and now he felt he was being dragged away from the biggest story of the war: Britain standing alone against tyranny.

A dozen or so close friends gathered at London’s Euston station to say goodbye to Matt, Jean, three-year-old Kathleen, and five-week-old David as they boarded the boat train to Liverpool. On that day, Matt wrote, the grimy old station was the hardest place in the world to leave. He wondered if he would ever return to the London he loved and envied his friends who were staying for its hour of trial.⁴⁹

There was little time for nostalgia after their heavily protected convoy began the Atlantic crossing. Jean was very sick with an abscess of the breast and was told by the ship’s doctor to stay in bed. Changing and washing nappies, feeding his children, and getting them to sleep was something Matt could just about manage. His problem was that there were fourteen hundred other women and children aboard seeking sanctuary in Canada. As one of the very few male passengers, he was frequently asked to help out other mums, some of them seasick, and many of them without the nannies they were used to at home. He did bottle feeds and various chores for other children, realizing that an engaging feature story could be salvaged from what he jokingly called the “hell-ship.” From 6 a.m. to bedtime, he was on his feet, dealing with challenges that included “finding assuagements for upset little tummies and inspirations for little bowels that won’t upset.” He claimed that “being a nurse on that ship … made me expert in many aspects of motherhood.”⁵⁰

At the end of the day, though, he still had a few minutes to reflect that he was journeying away from the place he most wanted to be.