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At first things in the war were a bit quiet. Indeed the first eight months of the war were called the phoney war, phoney meaning false. The British sent what they called an expeditionary force to France and settled in on the French-Belgium border. This force was initially about 150,000 strong with 25,000 vehicles. Over the next few months more troops were sent.
On 9 May 1940 German troops entered and conquered Luxembourg. A month earlier they had entered Norway and Denmark. On May 10 the British PM Neville Chamberlain resigned and was replaced by Winston Churchill. The Germans then entered Belgium and the Netherlands. A few days later and German troops were rushing through France. The BEF retreated and eventually, they were trapped, along with some of the French Army on the beaches around Dunkirk. The only way for them to survive was to take them off those beaches. Large ships could not get in close enough so a call went out for all small ships, boats, paddle steamers to go across to Dunkirk. Over the course of eight days, starting on 26 May, 338,226 soldiers were rescued by over 800 boats. All the time, during the day, the German planes fired on the beaches. During their battles in France, the BEF lost 68,000 soldiers and all their tanks, vehicles and equipment.
On June 4, in the House of Commons, Churchill made one of his famous speeches in which he said “We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”. He succeeded in turning the defeat of the BEF into a victory of survival.
The next campaign became known as the Battle of Britain and this time it was fought in the skies. Germany had plans to invade Britain in September 1940 and to do this they needed to crush the RAF. During August and early September 1940 the pilots of the RAF and the German Luftwaffe fought hundreds of battles. The German fighters aimed to destroy British airfields and planes on the ground, the British took off to shoot down German planes before they could do this. By September, it was too late to invade, the weather would be poor, so the plan was called off. The British pilots had stopped an invasion and, once again, Churchill had a phrase which is still remembered. He said “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
To give you some idea of how big the threat of invasion was, the crown jewels were hidden away under Windsor Castle during the war. People really thought that the German army could land and move inland. Many street signs and signposts were removed or even turned round so that the Germans would be confused as to which way to go.
Having failed in his invasion plans, Hitler next set out to force the British to surrender. On 7 September 1940 there was a massive bombing raid on London and these raids, on cities throughout the UK, went on for eight months. In one spell, London was bombed for 76 nights in a row without a break. Over 40,000 civilians were killed but, incredibly, life went on. The raids continued throughout the war and many major cities in Britain were targets but the number reduced considerably in May 1941.
The British tried some cunning tactics to fool the Nazi bombers. Sites were created where fires would be lit to look like burning towns from the air in the hope the Germans would bomb these instead of the city they were aiming for. It was called operation Starfish. By the end of the war there were 237 Starfish sites protecting 81 cities, factories and other potential targets. Official figures reveal that 730 bombing raids were diverted to these dummy targets.
Once the blitz started 3 million people, mainly children, were evacuated out of big cities and went to stay with families in the country. It was far safer there. One of the things I always say about history, even recent history like this, is that you need to use your imagination to think what it was like. Imagine being sent away from home to live with strangers and not seeing your parents for, perhaps, 2 years. Of course, they could write and you could write but it must have been a bit frightening and weird. The children began to return in 1942.
If you did stay in the cities then bombing raids could happen anytime although usually at night. Air raid shelters were built. Some were just a frame, some concrete structures. When I was young we had an air raid shelter in our back garden. It was simply a concrete tunnel with an opening at both ends. If a bomb fell on it then you would be killed but you would be protected against glass or other splinters if the bomb exploded near by. Other people would go down and sleep in the underground stations in London.
Sometimes there would be 600 bombers in a raid and they might carry up to 2,500kg of bombs each. Some planes also carried incendiary bombs which didn't explode on landing but burst into flames. They were quite small, could go through a roof and set fire to a house.
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