On a cheerier note, here’s a news reel of some valiant pigeons who did make it home. It shows pigeons Gustav and Paddy being presented with the Dickin Medal, the animal version of the Victoria Cross.
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- Thanks for the link, Zoe. ↩
Category: WWII
Miscellaneous Montmaravian Memoranda
– The FitzOsbornes at War has been getting some nice reviews in North America, including a starred review in Kirkus and reviews at The Book Smugglers and Tea Cozy.
– I also loved this post about the British Ministry of Food at The Children’s War, which was inspired by Sophie FitzOsborne’s wartime job. There’s an inspirational advertising poster (“HELP WIN THE WAR ON THE KITCHEN FRONT”), a photo of a Victory garden, a video discussing the Ministry of Food, and best of all, some examples of the Food Facts that were published in The Times (“Good News About Carrots”). The Children’s War is also a terrific resource if you’re looking for children’s and YA books about the Second World War.
– Meanwhile, over at My Book, The Movie, I’ve been talking about the (hypothetical) casting of the (hypothetical) movie of The FitzOsbornes at War.
– And I’ve now set up a Montmaray Q & A page for anyone who wants to ask me questions about the series (beware, it contains plot spoilers for all three books, especially the last book).
My Favourite Novels About Britain At War
1. Small Island by Andrea Levy
Jamaican airmen stationed in England during the Second World War find that the ‘Mother Country’ is less welcoming than they’d expected.
2. The Charioteer by Mary Renault
A soldier wounded at Dunkirk and recovering in an English hospital falls in love with a conscientious objector working as a hospital wardsman.
3. Marking Time and Confusion from the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Cazalet family’s privileged lives are changed forever when England goes to war.
4. Westwood by Stella Gibbons
Plain, bookish Margaret and her beautiful friend Hilda are drawn into the orbit of a pompous playwright in Blitz-battered London – but who is exploiting whom?
5. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
Four Londoners – all on the outskirts of society because they’ve fallen in love with the wrong people, all terribly damaged by the war – have their interlinking stories gradually revealed in a clever narrative that travels backwards through the 1940s.
Britain at War: Bletchley Park
The code-breaking work done at Bletchley Park during WWII is said to shortened the war by several years. It told the British where German U-boats were during the Battle of the Atlantic, helped them defeat Rommel’s forces in North Africa, and allowed the Allied strategists to plan the 1944 D-Day landings.
To encode their messages, the German military used rotor machines, the most famous of which was Enigma. The Enigma codes should have been unbreakable, but luckily, Polish intelligence had managed to work out Enigma before the war and had passed on all their information to the Allies. Then the British managed to capture a German U-boat in 1941, complete with an Enigma machine and code book. A large electromechanical device called the Bombe was used at Bletchley to work out which daily settings the Germans were using on their Enigma machines, and the deciphered messages were translated into English and sent off to high-ranking British military leaders.
Bletchley was staffed by thousands of ‘boffins and debs’, who took their vows of secrecy so seriously that it wasn’t until the 1970s that the general public began to learn about their remarkable achievements. Many of the ‘debs’ who worked there had been recruited because of their social connections (“they were really frightfully snobbish about the girls who worked there”1). Other workers were recruited due to their linguistic or mathematical skills, with several of them identified after winning a national crossword competition. Among the ‘boffins’ was the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, who was greatly admired by one of the debs, Sarah Norton:
“I once offered him a cup of tea but he shrank back in fear. He seemed terrified of girls and on the rare occasions when he was spotted, like a protected species, he would be shambling down to the canteen in a curious sideways step, his eyes fixed on the ground. It was explained to me that if you had spent most of your adult life closeted away in a study in Cambridge, you too would be scared of women and not know how to handle them.”2
Or, you know, you might be gay, which was then illegal. Sadly, Alan Turing was arrested after the war for consensual sex with another man, lost his high-security job, was given a choice of imprisonment or chemical castration, and killed himself. The laws against homosexuality were applied very selectively in those days. It was much easier to get away with being same-sex-attracted if you were rich and royal, like Prince George, Duke of Kent.
Tomorrow: My favourite novels about Britain at war.
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Britain at War: The Home Guard
Today, I’m going to be talking about Dad’s Army . . . I mean, the Home Guard, a defence organisation made up of British men who were too old, too young or otherwise ineligible to join the regular British Army. The Home Guard (initially called the ‘Local Defence Volunteers’, or LDV) was formed in 1940, when there was a real fear that Britain was about to be invaded by Germany. By that time, the Nazis had overrun Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, while most of the rest of Europe was ruled by dictators who supported Hitler. The British government called for volunteers to ‘defend our island’ and was overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response.
The Home Guard set up watch posts in coastal towns and erected roadblocks, but some of them were a little too enthusiastic in carrying out their duties:
“. . . on the night of 2/3 June 1940, LDVs shot and killed four motorists at separate locations; on 22nd June it was reported that two motorcyclists and their passengers had been killed and wounded in the north of England and in Scotland; on 26 June an ARP [Air Raid Precautions] warden was shot dead when he ignored (or maybe didn’t hear) an LDV challenge; and in Romford in Essex a car exhaust backfiring prevented the driver hearing the command to stop: four passengers were shot dead and a fifth seriously wounded.”1
The Home Guard did even more damage to themselves, as can be seen here. Although the Germans never invaded Britain, over 1,600 Home Guardsmen were killed on duty, often by self-inflicted injuries.
Officially, women weren’t allowed to join the Home Guard because it would be “abhorrent” for a female to bear arms. “What about Boadicea?” pointed out Labour MP Edith Summerskill, but she was ignored. Eventually a Women’s Home Guard Auxiliary was formed, but women who joined were only allowed to perform traditional womanly duties such as cooking, cleaning and taking telephone messages. This did not deter Marjorie Foster and her fellow female patriots, who set up the Amazon Defence Corps and trained women in the arts of musketry, bombing and unarmed combat. Henry FitzOsborne would have approved.
Tomorrow: Bletchley Park
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- Juliet Gardiner, Wartime Britain 1939-1945 ↩