Domestic Soldiers (26 page)

While rumours about the invasion were spreading rapidly in early 1944, the most important social reform to be enacted during the war was being piloted through Parliament. The desultory state of education and its deeply classed structure had been an issue for debate since the beginning of the war, especially when evacuation and army recruitment laid bare the problems of the system. In the first year of war, as schools evacuated in droves from the cities, thousands of children found there were not enough classrooms or teachers to educate them; by January 1940, a million children had been out of school for four months. Not only were educational resources obviously lacking, but the realities of the class system came under scrutiny when it was learned that many army recruits had a very limited education, some being illiterate or having extremely low literacy. These recruits were the product of an education system that offered secondary education only to those who could pay the fees. Most working-class children left school at fourteen with only an elementary education.

The Education Act (also known as the Butler Act) sought to redress these issues. With this new act, a minister of education was created, with the power to implement nationwide education policies and to balance out discrepancies in resources and skills in schools across England and Wales. The Act would also raise the school-leaving age to fifteen, and eventually to sixteen (which did not happen in actuality until 1971). More importantly, the Act made access to secondary education free, thus theoretically providing equality
of opportunity. Furthermore, university education was made available to qualified students, regardless of their ability to pay.

Learning of the new Act, Alice Bridges reflected on her own educational experience. She ‘bitterly regretted’ that she had been denied an opportunity to attend university. All her life, she pursued intellectual endeavours – such as the weekly discussion group she attended – but often felt inadequate when she mixed with others who had had access to higher education. With the Butler Act, though disappointed she herself might not benefit, she was happy that the university provision might in future help others like her (and particularly her daughter). Furthermore, she thought that a general raising of academic standards would affect the standard of living positively for all. And she hoped that, with a more educated populace, war might eventually be eradicated. ‘Shall we with education be able to keep our own country from war?’ Alice wondered, ‘Shall we be able to climb high enough to see the futility of wars and that inevitably it is the common man who saves us in dire need?’

The Norwood Report, which informed the new Education Act, proposed three types of learners: academically inclined scholars, the technically or mechanically inclined, and the ‘modern’. Out of this reasoning developed three types of secondary education, or a tripartite system: grammar schools offered a liberal education that was preparatory to university; technical schools provided education for practical occupations such as technicians or engineering; finally, secondary modern schools were to provide a rounded educational experience neither too academic nor too technical. Which of the three paths a student would take was determined by the 11-plus exam.

Former teacher Irene Grant was a keen supporter of the Butler Act, even if it was too late for her or her family to capitalize on. She and her husband Tom were life-long learners who had both inherited the thirst for knowledge from their fathers, despite the fact that their time at school had been so short. ‘How they’d [Tom and Irene’s fathers] love to have stayed on at school,’ she mused. In Grant’s estimation, raising the school-leaving age to fifteen, and eventually sixteen, gave respectable and upwardly mobile working-class individuals (like her) an opportunity to continue to learn before being shoved off to work. Additionally, based on her own experience in the classroom, she hoped that the new system would allow students to ‘pick and choose what subjects they wish to learn’ and, more importantly, ‘
to change their minds
’. After children learned the basics, which to her included basic darning and dressmaking for girls, students should be allowed to ‘get on with the jobs they are interested in’. While some of the flexibility of which Grant dreamed would not come to fruition until the advent of comprehensive schools several decades later, the Butler Act did lay the foundations for a better and more equitable educational experience, a fact Irene seemed to recognize very early on.

While wide-ranging support was given to the Act as a step towards a better future, the passage of the Butler Act also made a statement about the limited extent to which the war affected women’s rights. During the debates, Clause 82, which stipulated that male and female teachers receive equal pay for equal work, was narrowly passed. Edie Rutherford noted this event with glee. She saw the amendment as ‘the thin end of the wedge’; if equal pay was adopted in teaching,
trades and professions would soon have to implement equal pay, she reasoned. After all, Edie told M-O, ‘Sex distinction is entirely artificial and man arranged, and when I say man I mean MAN not mankind!’

But Rutherford’s excitement would not last, for Churchill killed the amendment by forcing a vote of confidence. He moved that Clause 82 be stricken from the bill and, further, stressed that any opposition to such a move would be seen as an act of defiance against the government. Edie was incensed at Churchill’s actions, especially as the Allies prepared to wind up the war with Germany, and called it a ‘low down trick’ to make a domestic issue a matter of international importance simply because ‘He can’t have things his way.’

Amid the buzz over the opening of a new front in Western Europe and the domestic debates over education and equal pay, few noticed the significant turn of events in the east that spring. To Edie Rutherford, it was ‘the Burma scrap’ and it was ‘incredible’. Despite her extreme concern over all matters imperial, however, Rutherford made no other mention, and certainly none of the others felt it worthy of note in their diaries. Nevertheless, the action that began in the north-east corner of India on 17 April 1944 would ultimately prove to be the worst military defeat in Japanese history, and would also illustrate the strength of Indian loyalty – or at least, their commitment to ousting the Japanese from their land. That spring, Indian forces, courageously fighting alongside British soldiers, fought a fierce jungle battle against the Japanese. Over 80,000 Japanese were killed. Days later, Gandhi, who had since recovered from his 1943 hunger strike, was released from prison.

Back home, everyone seemed focused exclusively on the Western Front. Any lull in news was taken as a sign of the impending push. People tried to divine the meanings of mundane military orders. Was it significant that leave had been suspended? Did it matter that soldiers were redirecting their mail?

Edie Rutherford had a bet of 1 shilling with her husband that ‘we jump on to Continent from this side’ on Whitsun weekend. She lost the bet. Conversations Edie overheard in Sheffield suggested that the invasion would happen when Rome fell, which seemed likely to happen any day that May. But her husband, Sid, figured that the military simply needed time to build enough ‘jet propelled aircraft’ to overwhelm the enemy before it could launch the offensive.

In Newcastle that May, the Home Guard waited anxiously for the impending invasion of the Continent. Irene’s husband, Tom, and other members of the Home Guard were issued supplies to thwart possible German retaliation when the Allied second front was opened – Tom believed that German paratroopers would attempt an invasion on the north-east coast. As for Irene, the anticipation was maddening. ‘Waiting, waiting, waiting and yet how terrified that there’ll be hell-let-loose on second front,’ she wrote in her diary. Still, she told M-O, ‘I hope we have news tonight that second front has started and Germany has collapsed.’ By the end of May, regardless of the necessary death and potential retribution, everyone in Britain seemed impatient for the push to begin.

CHAPTER TWELVE

OH! WHAT A LEISURELY WAR

Natalie and Hugh Tanner were up early on the morning of 6 June 1944. Hugh’s regular business trip to firms in the north-east was scheduled for that day and, as usual, Natalie was to accompany him. Every month, Hugh visited clients and suppliers in Darlington, Middlesbrough and Newcastle. As they prepared to leave, Natalie switched on the wireless and caught the 8 o’clock news. The details were unclear, but it ‘sounded as though we were going places at last’. Hugh was positive that the much-anticipated second front was underway, while Natalie, on the other hand, decided to reserve judgement until further news came through.

Later that morning, Natalie and Hugh stopped in at Darlington and had coffee before moving on to Newcastle. As they approached Chester-le-Street, south of Newcastle, Natalie knew that her husband’s instinct was right. Numerous lorries had been stacked along the dual carriageway leading into the city for months, but now, save a few being worked on by female mechanics, they had disappeared.

Preparations for D-Day had been in the works for some time on both sides of the Channel. Everyone
seemed to realize that the impending invasion would be the decisive moment of the war, and overall victory hinged upon its success. General Erwin Rommel, once head of German forces in Northern Africa, was now in charge of building the ‘Atlantic Wall’ to defend against the massive Allied force that was expected to invade the Continent. Labourers, forced or paid by the Germans, beefed up defences along the French and Belgian coasts. Steel and concrete gun nests sprang up along the coast, while obstacles to both ground and air invasion troops were strewn across the beaches and countryside.

Across the English Channel, build-up for invasion was evident nearly everywhere. Thousands had been employed in constructing the specialized support equipment necessary for fighting on the beaches of Normandy. Shrouded under a veil of utmost secrecy, workers built huge floating harbours, code-named ‘Mulberry harbours’, designed to help transform the Norman coastline into usable ports.
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The size of the port of Dover, the Mulberries were built to ride tides over twenty feet high and handle thousands of vehicles and 10,000 tons of supplies for the invading forces daily. As the Mulberries took shape, huge concrete structures began slowly to dominate the skylines of Merseyside, Southampton, Portsmouth and Goole in the spring of 1944. Sixty feet high, over fifty feet wide and two hundred feet long, these massive, hollowed-out, concrete caissons (code-named ‘Phoenix’) were built to float initially, but when in place, doors were opened and the structures sank, creating instant breakwaters to shelter the Mulberries and landing operations.
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Most of the necessary 4,000 landing craft (‘landing ships, tanks’, or LSTs) designed to carry troops onto
the shore were constructed at factories located in the eastern half of the US.

With artificial ports and breakwaters to tame the seas, and landing craft to ferry soldiers ashore, Major General Percy Hobart used his technological savvy to create vehicles designed to overcome the various obstacles troops were expected to encounter on the beaches. Hobart’s ‘funnies’ certainly raised a few eyebrows, especially American ones (US commander Omar Bradley refused to use the silly-looking contraptions at Omaha Beach). But aesthetics did not matter in battle – functionality did, and Hobart’s ‘funnies’ helped to ease British landings on D-Day. The ‘funnies’ included vehicles designed to clear mines, fill in bomb craters and anti-tank trenches, lay canvas across soft terrain to provide footholds for assault troops, blast concrete pillboxes with powerful mortars (nicknamed ‘flying dustbins’) and belch fire from the mouth of the ‘crocodile’ – a flame-throwing tank capable of incinerating anything within 360 feet.
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‘Swimming tanks’, or DD Shermans, and US-designed DUKW (nicknamed ‘ducks’ and used primarily for landing equipment on shore) rounded out the innovations which gave landing troops an edge in their harrowing mission.
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While thousands of workers set about building the necessary equipment for the assault, Allied troops needed to prepare. Troops descended on quiet villages and fertile farmland across England to train on terrain similar to what was expected to face them in France. In April, Helen Mitchell escaped the domestic drudgery and the aerial operations that drove her nearly insane at home in Kent. Searching for solitude and quietude in her beloved Somerset, she instead became caught up in these Allied training manoeuvres. Troops swarmed
the town of Minehead and overran the surrounding hills that Helen so enjoyed rambling. American GIs loitered below her window at night, beaches were cordoned off, and paved roads were cut through the hills (‘the worst bit of vandalism ever’, according to Helen). Locals seemed excited at all the activity – a novelty for them, but a well-worn nuisance for the seasoned Mitchell.

Late that spring, as the wit-shattered Helen Mitchell coped with her own Allied invasion in Minehead, her son was involved in a secret operation to support the invasion. At the same time that troops and workers across Britain prepared to invade the beaches of Normandy under Operation Overlord, William Mitchell and thousands of others were engaged in an elaborate subterfuge designed to throw the Germans off the true invasion scent in Normandy. The deception plan, code-named Operation Fortitude, paralleled Overlord, spinning a multitude of believable lies about the invasion and feeding them to the Germans.

Fortitude operatives led the Germans to believe that a build-up in Scotland, which was in reality little more than radio chatter and double-agent misinformation, signalled an impending attack on Hitler’s U-boat installations in Norway. Other hoaxes pointed to potential diversionary landings in the west and south of France, all the way through the Balkans. Allied secret operations pressed double agents and resistance movements into action in order to distract and pin down Axis troops all across Europe. The Red Army also agreed to hold off offensives in the east until the opening of the second front. The objective of such complicated and widespread machinations was to divert German resources away from the targeted landing beaches in Normandy,
thus increasing the probability of Allied success, and saving lives.

The most important ruse to this end was the one that confirmed what many Germans thought was the most strategically viable invasion site: the Pas-de-Calais. Calais was the sensible choice: close to England and a straight line to the heart of Germany. The reinforcing deception of Fortitude made the German command confident that Allied forces would indeed land on the coast around Calais. Accordingly, Rommel spent most of his time in the area, strengthening defences and awaiting his enemy.

Helen’s son, William, was recruited to assist in the Pas-de-Calais deception. As an architecture student and amateur carpenter, he was well-suited to help pull off a staged build-up of forces in the Thames Estuary and on the Kent and Essex coast closest to Calais. Dummy landing craft, wooden gliders and inflatable tanks sprang up throughout the area. Even a massive wooden model of an oil dock, complete with fighter defence and fog machines to shroud the illusion, was constructed on site according to the specifications of Basil Spence (the architect who would later rebuild Coventry Cathedral and design Sussex University). William and his team built and camouflaged the fake equipment to look realistic, yet the camouflage could not be too effective: the point was for the Germans to see it.

Equipment was important, but to lend even more credence to the deception, armies had to be created. Thus Fortitude operatives conjured American and British army groups out of thin air. With the help of cleverly constructed radio communications, news ‘leaks’, high-level visits to the area and other actions,
the non-existent First United States Army Group (FUSAG), supposedly commanded by General Patton, occupied the area around the Thames Estuary in preparation for the supposed invasion at the Pas-de-Calais. The British Twelfth Army, complete with motorized infantry and armoured divisions, was also deployed and equipped, but only on paper. Allied bombers disabled many of the German radar and listening stations on the French and Belgian coasts, allowing British intelligence to control most of the information flowing to German command. Discreet radio noise was piped out over the east coast, while the ionosphere over the real D-Day port of Southampton remained silent; this silence was assisted by the laying of radio cables directing communications miles away from Southampton. Furthermore, double agents in Britain fed the Germans intelligence that supported the Pas-de-Calais invasion route.

From the air, the elaborate ruse made the area look as if it was bustling with activities associated with an impending invasion. Workers trudged through the long grass to create the illusion of troop activity in the area. Clothes lines and laundry hung on the fake landing vehicles, and disabled and older soldiers loitered on the decks of ships to provide human evidence of the build-up for the benefit of German aerial operations. To add to its authenticity, the King and Queen, as well as Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, made periodic inspections of the site.

But in May and June of 1944, as Natalie and Hugh Tanner had witnessed on their business trip to Newcastle on 6 June, vehicles and convoys began to descend on the south coast. Hampshire turned into a massive military store, military vehicles and
ammunition shrouded from above by the canopy of the New Forest. Schools, homes and businesses in the real embarkation point of Southampton were requisitioned for the military, and the roads leading into the city were choked for miles with war materiel as the day for invasion rapidly approached.

Two days before D-Day, on 4 June, Allied troops captured Rome. ‘Hurrah … and beyond Hurrah’, Edie Rutherford exclaimed when she heard the news. Although relieved, when Natalie Tanner learned that Rome had fallen, she was also quite bitter about the Italians’ ‘easy’ defeat. When so much had been destroyed across Europe, why should Rome get off ‘scot free?’, she wondered. After all, Natalie thought, ‘The Italian fascists are just as bad as the German Nazis only less efficient and I think less sincere.’ Furthermore, she reasoned, they were largely responsible for the devastation loosed upon Europe. ‘Without Mussolini,’ Tanner was convinced, ‘Hitler would never have got where he has, but would have spent his time in a lunatic asylum’.

Regardless of the relative reprieve handed to the Italians and their capital, there was little time for rejoicing over the fall of Rome; all activity rolled inexorably towards the invasion of Western Europe. Helen Mitchell’s first indication that something was afoot was the sound of gliders overhead on the night of 5 June, and stillness in the morning – the guns had gone silent over Minehead. Her instincts were confirmed at noon by the BBC. Still, so few people talked about the invasion around town that she ‘wondered if I had dreamed it’. ‘Six intelligent females talking of this and that but no mention of invasion,’ she told M-O of her D-Day experience in Minehead. ‘Walked about streets and
listened, but only talk among crowds personal affairs or grumbling about supplies. Went to 3 shops – no one mentioned it!’ Helen exclaimed.

Desperate for information, she spent the evening in an ‘orgy of listening’, awaiting news, and was appalled to hear the BBC present the invasion in the ‘usual happy picnic atmosphere’ that she felt inappropriate to the gravity that the death and destruction of war dictated. Mitchell went to bed that night fearing German retribution. ‘But not a plane to be heard.’

All around Britain, everyone was, as Edie Rutherford reported, ‘glued to the radio as at Dunkirk time and as never since’. Alice Bridges listened in at 7 a.m., but had no indication that anything was brewing until later in the morning, when she was dusting. The radio next door seemed to be louder than usual, and ‘the insistence of the radio voice’ floating through the walls encouraged her to ‘switch on’, at which she ‘heard the great news’. ‘Exhilarated and pleased’, she looked out of her window and expected to see everyone rushing out into the streets to ‘make whoopee’ and celebrate together. But not a soul could she see, so she turned back to her work and then took a nap.

Later, it occurred to her that she needed to find out what others were thinking for the benefit of M-O. Alice got dressed, put on her face and went into downtown Birmingham. Everything was ‘bustle and business’ down at the Bull Ring in the centre of town, but, as Helen had experienced, no one talked about the invasion. She walked up New Street and Corporation Street and found everyone was going about as normal. Unsuccessful in judging the tenor of the people, she breezed into the ‘amusement place’, set up specifically, she told M-O, to entertain ‘Yanks’ and take their money.
Finding only a young American airman who didn’t seem too intelligent in Alice’s estimation and worse, had no money, she moved on to the casino nearby. There, she asked a few women their feelings, but got very pat replies. Later, a man asked her to dance; he wasn’t a good dancer, but she spent two and half hours talking to him about his rocky marriage. ‘The human case book, that’s me,’ she said. When she left him at the end of the night, she advised him to be firm with his wife or leave her. There was no talk of D-Day.