1942; The end of the beginning

The aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour

Seventy years ago, the dawning of 1942 saw British fortunes during the Second World War at their lowest ebb but it was also a year when the tide began to turn, at first almost imperceptibly but by the year’s end, a tide which was flowing inexorably in the Allies’ favour.

Sunday 7th December 1941 had seen the Japanese attack on the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbour, which was quickly followed by attacks on British and Dutch possessions in the Far East. The British Crown Colony of Hong Kong had surrendered on Christmas Day 1941 and the Japanese were moving steadily through Malaya towards Singapore, which was to surrender ignominiously on 15th February 1942.

The attack on Pearl Harbour (pictured) did however, ensure the ultimate entry of the United States into the war, thus ending Britain’s lone stance against the Nazis. President Roosevelt initially held back from declaring war on Germany as well as Japan but Hitler and Mussolini pre-empted him by declaring war on the USA on 11th December, which was reciprocated immediately; so Britain was no longer alone but in almost every theatre of war, the British had their backs to the wall.

At sea, the Battle of the Atlantic was raging fiercely. The German U-Boats were enjoying their second ‘Happy Time’ attacking Allied shipping in the Caribbean and off America’s east coast, as well as taking a heavy toll of the convoys bringing much needed supplies to Great Britain. In the Far East, as we have seen above, the Japanese had begun their attacks on Allied possessions and in addition to Pearl Harbour had also sunk the British capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse which had been sailing without air cover to intercept a Japanese invasion force but which themselves had become the hunted when they were destroyed by Japanese aircraft. In the Mediterranean, Malta was besieged and could only be re-supplied at heavy cost by battling through naval convoys. The Royal Navy had lost the modern carrier HMS Ark Royal and the battleship HMS Barham to torpedo attacks and had all of its heavy units in that theatre put out of action by the end of the year. For a moment, it looked as if the Royal Navy might lose their superiority in one of their traditional strongholds for the first time in the proud history of the Senior Service. It was not to happen but it was a close run thing.

On land, the Nazis were masters of Europe, whilst in the Mediterranean and North African campaign, Crete had fallen earlier in 1941 and although Rommel had been temporarily repulsed in the Western Desert, worse was to follow in 1942. The British Eighth Army was to be depleted by the need to send urgent reinforcements to fight the Japanese in the Far East and despite the warnings of the Commanding Officer, General Claude Auchinleck that his command was dangerously weakened, these warnings were not heeded and in May 1942, Rommel was to attack again, which was to ultimately lead to another British military disaster; the fall of Tobruk with the capture of 33,000 British and South African troops. A headlong retreat was to follow, with the British falling back to El Alamein, a then little known railway halt only 66 miles west of Alexandria, by July 1942.

In the air, the Royal Air Force, shared with it’s sister services the problem of having too few resources to share around too many theatres of war. Fighter Command, following the successes of the Battle of Britain had followed a disastrous policy of ‘leaning towards the enemy’ during 1941 and had seemingly learned nothing from the experiences of the Germans in 1940. The tried and tested defensive team of Sir Hugh Dowding and Keith Park had been replaced after the Battle of Britain; victims as much as anything of in-service petty jealousies and in-fighting, they had been replaced as Head of Fighter Command and in command of the all-important No. 11 Group by Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas and Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory respectively. The fighter sweeps favoured by these two had frittered away much of Fighter Command’s strength and although it was still a formidable defensive unit, many good men and fine aircraft had been lost needlessly. Within Bomber Command, the first steps had been taken to form a winning team; Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris was appointed in February 1942. At first, his command too was constrained by having too few aircraft and those that there were being outdated. He immediately set about re-evaluating Bomber Command’s tactics and energetically ensured the procurement of suitable modern aircraft, most notably the four engine Lancaster and Halifax heavy bombers as well as the superbly versatile Mosquito light bomber. Armed with these new weapons, Harris began to put his theories into practice; on 28th March 1942, the historic city of Lubeck was laid waste by a fire-storm started by the massed incendiary bombs dropped by Bomber Command and by 30th May 1942, the city of Cologne was overwhelmed, becoming the victim of the first thousand-bomber raid in history.

At home in Britain, the civilian population had seen no serious bombing since the bombing of Hull and Southampton in July 1941; London and Liverpool, though gravely damaged, had not been ‘Blitzed’ since May 1941 and although there had been ‘tip and run’ raids by lone raiders since this time, the feeling was that perhaps the worst really was over, although the news filtering back from overseas of what was seemingly one British setback after another could only give cause for concern.

However, the bombing of Lubeck was to ensure a resumption of the Blitz; although not on the same scale as what had gone before, this phase was to bring death and destruction to British towns and cities not hitherto affected by the German bombing. Lubeck, although it had some submarine building yards located reasonably close to it, was not a target of real industrial significance. It had been chosen as part of Harris’s new policy of affected the morale of the civil population and as he said himself – “it seemed better to me to destroy an industrial town of moderate importance than to fail to destroy a large industrial city.”

Lubeck was a historic Hanseatic city and in retaliation for it’s destruction, Hitler ordered the resumption of large-scale bombing against Great Britain. Because of Lubeck’s historic significance, the British targets were reputedly selected using the Baedecker’s Tourist Guide. Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, an official at Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry was heard to remark “We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedecker Guide."

Thus the Baedecker Raids came to pass; Exeter (pictured), Bath, Norwich and York were all bombed by Luftflotte 3 between the 23rd and 28th April 1942 and following the thousand bomber raid on Cologne, the City of Canterbury was bombed three times on 31st May, 2nd and 6th June. Deal, Bury St Edmunds, Cambridge, Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth and Ipswich were also bombed in this period but on a much smaller scale to the Cathedral cities mentioned previously. Some 1,637 civilians were killed, with a similar number injured; some 50,000 houses were destroyed as were some historic buildings, notably the Guildhall in York and the Assembly Rooms in Bath, but the Cathedrals in all of these cities remained unharmed. The Baedecker Raids were smaller in scale than the First Blitz; the Luftwaffe’s squadrons had been dissipated by their needs on the Russian and North African theatres of war, thus proving that it was not only the British who were suffering from thinly spread resources. The Baedecker Raids petered out after the final raid on Canterbury and the Luftwaffe returned to the tip and run tactics of smaller raids by individual or small groups of aircraft. They were not to return to British shores in significant numbers until the ill-fated Operation Steinbock or as it was known to the British public, Little Blitz or Baby Blitz in late 1943.

For the remainder of 1942, the tide was turning; the British, together with their American allies, set about building a team to win the war. The first American troops arrived in Britain in early 1942, the vanguard of what was to become a vast army based on what was to become the ‘Springboard for invasion’ as these islands were to become known. The first elements of what was to become known as the U.S. Eighth Air Force – “The Mighty Eighth” – which along with RAF Bomber Command would ensure that Germany would be bombed around the clock arrived in England. In the Far East, the Americans began to fight back; first the Doolittle Raid, where a small force of B-25 Bombers were launched from the carrier Hornet to bomb Tokyo, a target thought by the Japanese to be hitherto unreachable by the Americans. Then at Midway, when the Japanese carriers that had bombed Pearl Harbour were themselves destroyed. In the Atlantic, the U-Boats were relentlessly hunted down by the Royal, Royal Canadian and US Navies and although they were to remain a threat for the remainder of the war, never again threatened to cut the supply lines.

The biggest victory of 1942 was one that has remained in the British annals of victory ever since. As related earlier, the British Eighth Army had fallen back onto an unknown railway halt in the Western Desert called El Alamein. In August 1942, Winston Churchill, on a visit to the North African theatre had dismissed the Eighth Army commander, Auchinleck and had replaced him with a figure little known outside the British Army, one Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery. In three short months, ‘Monty’ as he was to become known, transformed the morale of the Eighth Army to such a point where they believed themselves invincible and won an ultimately crushing victory against an Afrika Korps, which had been weakened by lack of supplies and over extended supply lines. The battle had started on 23rd October 1942 and by 11th November, victory was certain; the Germans were in full retreat and by May 1943, the Eighth Army advancing westwards had linked up with an Anglo-American force advancing eastwards from the ‘Torch’ Landings under an equally then little known American general, a certain Dwight D Eisenhower and had swept the Axis out of North Africa for good.

At home, Churchill ordered that the church bells be rung; until then they had been reserved as an alarm call for an impending German invasion but now they were rung in celebration of a great victory. Speaking at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, Churchill was to say “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

With American help in the form of manpower and their vast industrial strength and vitally with the Russians now sweeping in from the east to squeeze the life out of the Axis, he knew that victory, although not to be gained without more pain, was ultimately assured.


Published Sources:

Alamein - Stephen Bungay, Aurum Press 2002
Alamein: War without hate - John Bierman & Colin Smith, Viking 2002
Bomber Harris: His Life and Times - Henry Probert, Greenhill Books 2003
The Battle of The Atlantic - John Costello & Terry Hughes, Collins 1977
The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts, Allen Lane 2009
War Diaries 1939-1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke - eds. Alex Danchev & Daniel Todman, Wiedenfeld & Nicolson 2001

1939: The first wartime Christmas, The Phoney War and a victory at sea

The Graf Spee (Bundesarchiv)

The winter of 1939 was to prove one of the coldest for many years. In Germany there was thick ice in the Baltic, the Kiel Canal and the Rivers Elbe and Jade which hampered trade almost as much as the British naval blockade, which was beginning to affect the supply of food and essential products into the Reich. In France, the soldiers of the newly arrived British Expeditionary Force found the ferocity of the winter had frozen the ground so hard that they were unable to make much progress in digging the trenches and defensive systems that were seen as essential to the sort of war they were expecting to have to fight. In December 1939, the BEF introduced a forces’ leave service so that at least some of the men who had been in France since the previous September were able to spend Christmas at home with their families.

At home in Britain in December 1939, people were beginning to come to terms with the blackout. In September 1939, the casualty figures for road traffic accidents had increased by almost 100 percent over peacetime figures. This didn’t include people who suffered from other blackout-related mishaps, such as falling from railway platforms, walking into canals or falling down steps. By December, the imposition of more severe petrol rationing forced most private cars from the road, so traffic accidents began to decrease almost by default. A slight relaxation in the blackout also permitted civilians to carry hand torches, albeit masked but sufficient to help in finding one’s way around more safely. The dance halls, cinemas and theatres were packed out once again but the cold weather was beginning to play havoc with the public transport system; some main line express trains from Scotland and the north of England ran over a day late!

Although there had been no actual air raids over British cities by December 1939, there was no shortage of alerts, which showed up the many flaws and deficiencies in the ARP system, some of which were still apparent when the shooting war started in the spring and summer of 1940. This then, was the "Phoney War."

At sea however, this phrase was an anathema to the men of the Royal and Merchant Navies. The first ship to be sunk was the liner Athenia, torpedoed by Fritz Julius Lemp in the U-30 with heavy loss of life on 3rd September, just hours after the declaration of war. The Royal Navy had also suffered an early loss when the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous had been torpedoed by U-29 with the loss of 519 officers and men, including her captain. The Royal Navy had begun to sink U-Boats and was beginning the long and painful battle to overcome this menace but in December 1939, despite these and other high profile sinkings, the U-Boat was not a major threat. There were insufficient numbers of ocean-going submarines and without the French Atlantic coast bases that the Germans were later to capture, those submarines that were in commission did not yet have the direct access to the Atlantic convoys that was later to cause such carnage to Britain’s life lines.

In December 1939, the main threat to Britain’s merchant fleet came from the surface raider. Apart from the converted merchant vessels that tended to prey on vessels sailing alone, the Kriegsmarine had three specialised Panzerschiffen, known to the rest of the World as ‘pocket battleships’, so called because they were not armed quite to the same level as the conventional battleship but still powerfully equipped with six 11 inch guns and a heavy secondary armament. They were powered by diesel engines which gave a speed in excess of most British heavy units and more importantly gave these vessels a tremendous level of endurance, especially when operating in tandem with a supply tanker, meeting at pre-arranged rendezvous points in the open ocean.

One such vessel, the Graf Spee (pictured at top), under the command of Kapitan Hans Langsdorff (pictured below), had sailed from Wilhelmshaven shortly before the outbreak of war, on the 20th August 1939 and had been undetected as she sailed via the Norwegian coast and through the Denmark Strait into the Atlantic and her war station in the South Atlantic. The British only realised that she had sailed on the 31st August, some eleven days after she had departed. By then it was too late; units of the British Home Fleet patrolled the area around Norway and the Shetlands but Graf Spee was long gone and especially in these pre-radar days, finding a ship in the Atlantic that did not want to be discovered was like the proverbial needle in the haystack story.

Hans Langsdorff (Bundesarchiv)

It was only when British merchant ships began to disappear in the South Atlantic, around the Cape, off the coast of Lourenco Marques and finally off the coast of South America that British suspicions of a raider at large were confirmed. Graf Spee was operating in tandem with her supply vessel, the tanker Altmark and proved to be a formidable and elusive enemy. The Royal Navy immediately mobilised hunting groups of warships to track down the enemy and one of those hunting groups was the South Atlantic Squadron under Commodore (later Admiral Sir Henry) Harwood, flying his broad pennant in the cruiser HMS Ajax with two further cruisers Exeter and the New Zealand manned Achilles. These vessels more than matched the Graf Spee for speed but were vastly outgunned by the German vessel. Nominally Harwood had a fourth cruiser, the Cumberland but she was at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands undergoing a self-refit, so already Harwood’s force was somewhat depleted. However, Henry Harwood was a shrewd operator and he had been using the intelligence available to him to try and calculate where he could intercept the raider. Many of the British ships sunk by the Graf Spee had bravely transmitted an ‘RRR’ signal together with a position, which indicated that the vessel had been attacked by a surface raider. It was doubly brave to send these warning signals as the Germans threatened dire consequences for any radio officers sending these messages. Fortunately for the British, Kapitan Langsdorff was an honourable man who did not take reprisals against his captives and was scrupulous in his fair and humane treatment of prisoners. The same could not be said of his counterpart, Kapitan Dau of the supply ship Altmark and the British merchant seaman held on board this vessel, whilst not physically harmed, were kept in squalid conditions in one of the ship’s holds. A number of British Merchant Navy officers were transferred to the Graf Spee for her anticipated voyage back to Germany and the difference in the treatment they received on the pocket battleship was notable.

Not all of the vessels intercepted by Graf Spee managed to send an ‘RRR’ report but enough did to allow Harwood to undertake some inspired detective work. Piecing together the reported positions of the sunken vessels, he was convinced that Graf Spee would return to the South Atlantic for one final tilt at the constant stream of British merchantmen heading from the River Plate with much needed meat for the home market.

Having made his dispositions accordingly, Harwood concentrated his three cruisers off the River Plate and waited for Graf Spee to appear. On December 13th 1939, the German pocket battleship obligingly sailed over the horizon. Harwood’s plan for this contingency was to split the enemy’s fire by dividing his own force; the two smaller cruisers Achilles and Ajax formed one division, whilst the more heavily armed Exeter was to fight alone. It was at this early point in the battle that Langsdorff made his first and ultimately fatal error. On approaching the British vessels, Langsdorff wrongly assumed that Exeter was the sole cruiser and that the two smaller vessels were escorting destroyers and closed accordingly to make a quick kill. Once he closed the range and had realised his mistake, it was too late. The three cruisers tore into the pocket battleship and harried her relentlessly. At first Exeter bore the brunt of the raider’s counter attacks and was soon turned into a blazing, sinking shambles with all of her main armament knocked out. At first Captain Bell of the Exeter considered ramming Graf Spee, but he was ordered by Harwood to retire from the battle and was soon heading towards the Falkland Islands which she eventually reached in order to lick her wounds. The remaining two lightly armed cruisers kept up the pressure, closing the range and hitting Graf Spee and hitting hard. Fearing that the two British vessels were leading him onto superior heavy forces, Langsdorff inexplicably turned and ran; heading towards the River Plate, he eventually reached the sanctuary of the River Plate within the territorial waters of the neutral country of Uruguay. She had suffered thirty seven men dead and fifty seven wounded and whilst the ship was in no way mortally wounded, she had been hit over fifty times and had suffered extensive damage. Unknown to the pursuing British forces, there were sixty one British Merchant Navy officers aboard who had fortunately been unhurt in the battle. Once the fighting was over, a different kind of battle was about to begin, involving diplomacy, bluff and counterbluff that was ultimately to cost Langsdorff his life.

Despite the strain he must have been under, Langsdorff once again proved his humanity and sense of honour by releasing his erstwhile prisoners according to international law. Afterwards, these officers to a man had nothing but praise and respect for their former captor.

It was estimated that Graf Spee’s battle damage would take fourteen days and during this time, Langsdorff knew that the British would be mustering reinforcements but what he was not to know was how long it would take for these reinforcements to arrive. It was now the 14th December and the nearest heavy British unit, the battlecruiser Renown and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal could not reach the River Plate until the 19th December but Langsdorff was not to know this. The British ambassador to Uruguary, Eugen Millington-Drake (pictured below with Harwood) and his naval attaché, Captain (later Admiral Sir Henry) McCall, used every trick in the book to conjure up an imaginary British fleet massing just over the horizon. German requests to charter light aircraft to survey this fleet were always rebuffed; no aircraft were ever available. The British also tried their hardest to get Graf Spee interned; Langsdorff must have been in mental turmoil.

Sir Henry Harwood

Faced with an impossible situation, he decided to scuttle his ship and on the 17th December moved his ship into the shallower waters of the River Plate and after evacuating the remainder of his crew, shortly before 20:00 she blew up; demolition charges had been set by the crew and the Graf Spee was no more.

The watching British on the two remaining cruisers, by now reinforced by the Cumberland, which had made a helter-skelter dash from the Falklands watched with incredulity and relief; they had expected another bloody battle and could not have been certain of the outcome. As it was they had won a great victory, partially through hard fighting and partially through bluff but the Royal Navy had won the first major engagement of the war.

For the crew of the Graf Spee, internment in Argentina was on the agenda but for Langsdorff, and honourable man to the end, there was to be no such escape. On the evening of the 19th December, after addressing his officers and men for one last time, he retired to his hotel room, wrote three letters to his wife, his parents and one to the German Ambassador to Argentina. He then shot himself whilst wrapped in the ensign of the old Imperial Navy, rather than the Nazi flag.

Back home, the victorious ships’ companies marched through London and Winston Churchill, not yet Prime Minister but still at that time First Lord of the Admiralty proclaimed that the victory “in a dark cold winter, it warmed the cockles of the British heart.”

For those at sea, there was no Phoney War; for those at home, the war was still distant but 1940 would see a change that would bring the conflict home to everyone.

Published Sources

BEF Ships before, at and after Dunkirk – John de S Winser, World Ship Society, 1999
London at War 1939-1945 – Philip Ziegler, Sinclair Stevenson, 1995
The Battle of the River Plate – Dudley Pope, Secker & Warburg, 1987
The People’s War; Britain 1939-1945 – Angus Calder, Jonathan Cape, 1969
War in a Stringbag – Charles Lamb – Cassell, 1977

It wasn't just London

Since this blog started some 18 months ago, we make no apologies for the majority of the writing being somewhat biased towards events in London. After all, the Blitzwalkers do concentrate on walks around various areas of our capital that were affected by the events of 70 years and longer ago. However, although London was the place that the Luftwaffe always returned to, we are the first to recognise that there were plenty of other places outside the capital that drew the attention of Hitler's finest.

Liverpool, Manchester, Belfast, Glasgow, Coventry, Portsmouth, Southampton, Belfast, Birmingham, Sheffield, Hull, Plymouth and Exeter amongst other places all suffered at the hands of the Luftwaffe and having just returned from a short holiday in Devon, it is this county upon which we shall concentrate today.

The county of Devon, with its rich agricultural traditions, at first choice seems an odd choice of target for Goering's bombers but with a little thought, the logic of this choice of target becomes apparent. The City of Plymouth is the home to Devonport Dockyard, the largest naval base in Western Europe and then as now, one of the homes of the Royal Navy. Hitler and his cronies were quick to recognise that if Devonport could be crippled, then the capabilities of the Royal Navy could be similarly hampered. The photograph shows the city centre the morning after a heavy raid in March 1941.

The first bombs fell on the city as early as 6th July 1940, when the suburb of Swilly was attacked with the death of three people. Much worse was to follow in early to mid 1941, when five heavy raids reduced large parts of the city to rubble. As elsewhere, the Plymouth Blitz brought tales of tragedy, heroism and defiance. Amongst the former, March 21st 1941 saw the Childrens' Ward at the City Hospital take a direct hit, when four nurses and nineteen children, the youngest barely a week old, were killed. Tragedy came again on 22nd April 1941, when a public air raid shelter located in Portland Square received a direct hit which resulted in the deaths of 72 shelterers. As always, the heroes were the firefighters, rescue workers and wardens, who toiled without a thought for their own safety. The defiance came in many simple ways; people continued to go to work, the Western Morning News, the local newspaper continued to appear every day despite the damage to their own offices and perhaps most poignantly of all was a wooden sign fixed over the door of the ruined parish church of St Andrew by a local headmistress, which read simply "Resurgam" which translated means "I shall rise again."

Neither was Plymouth the only part of Devon to be bombed; in 1940 and later during the so called Baedecker Raids of early to mid 1942 saw Exeter bombed with much of the historic City Centre being flattened. Newton Abbot railway station was bombed on 20th August 1940 when three enemy aircraft deliberately attacked the large railway station and yards resulting in the deaths of fourteen people and extensive damage and disruption to the main line to and from London.

Even seemingly sleepy backwaters such as the Regency seaside town of Sidmouth were not immune; in November 1941 a German bomber, probably on it's way back from a raid on Exeter shed it's load over the town, fortunately without loss of life but causing some material damage to properties and also causing the attention of a large number of curious locals who came to see the bomb craters the next day!

Devon, of course was the destination of large numbers of evacuees from the big cities, particulary from London. This writer knows of one friend who was evacuated from Greenford in Middlesex to Newton Abbot as a small boy. The reaction of his parents when they heard of the bombing of this part of Devon must have been one of extreme consternation, although for the most part, the evacuees sent to this part of the world must have found rural Devon a world apart from London and the other big cities.

Devon, in common with pretty well the whole of the south of England, was the home to many thousands of Allied servicemen in the build up to D-Day and many friendships were forged between American servicemen in particular and the local populace, whom they grew to like and to admire. In 1944, these servicemen were to leave for what General Eisenhower described as "The Great Crusade" to rid Europe and the World of Nazi tyranny. Many of these young men would never return, but they left behind a Devon, which like the remainder of the country, would never be quite the same again, so deep were the scars left behind.

Published Sources:

The Newton Abbot Blitz - AR Kingdom, Oxford Publishing Company 1979
Sidmouth, The War Years 1939-45 - John Ankins, privately published 2001
The Blitz of Plymouth - Arthur C Clamp - PDS Printers 1981