CHAPTER 1
The
Gathering Storm
IMMEDIATELY AFTER TAKING POWER HITLER SET ABOUT
REBUILDING GERMANY’S WAR MACHINE WITH THE AIM OF OVER
TURNING THE GERMAN DEFEAT IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR.
HITLER WAS DETERMINED THAT GERMANY WOULD NOT BE ON
THE LOSING SIDE A SECOND TIME.
SURRENDER AT MUNICH
The storm clouds of war seemed to be gathering over Europe when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned from Munich on 30 September 1938, after completing tense diplomatic negotiations with the dictator of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler.
Chamberlain’s quest had been peace, but the British public were so fearful of failure that there had been a run on the gas masks already pouring off the production lines. Fear of gas attack, inspired by its use in the First World War of 1914–18, was a potent one, but then so was fear of German air raids.
HITLER TAKES CENTRE STAGE AT ONE OF THE NAZI PARTY’S FAMOUS NUREMBERG RALLIES. HELD EVERY YEAR, THE RALLIES WERE THE FOCAL POINT OF THE NAZI POLITICAL CALENDAR. THE PARTY FAITHFUL AND THOUSANDS OF ORDINARY GERMANS WOULD FLOCK TO NUREMBERG EACH YEAR TO HEAR THEIR FUHRER’S SPECTACULAR AND MESMERISING SET PIECE SPEECHES.
An air raid warning system was prepared in case German bombers attempted to attack British cities, and plans were laid for the evacuation of children from the major towns to the safety of the countryside. Half a million men and women, in a mood of defiance and trepidation, volunteered to serve in the ARP – Air Raid Precautions. The catchphrase of the time was ‘the bombers will always get through’, and both civilians and the military believed it. So did former prime minister Stanley Baldwin, whom Chamberlain had replaced in 1937.
Chamberlain had not hidden the grim nature of the crisis from the public. Before he left for Munich, he broadcast on BBC radio, and told listeners: ‘How horrible, how fantastic, how incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’
The people ‘of whom we know nothing’ were the Czechs, whose republic had been created only 20 years before, after the end of the First World War in 1918, and the Germans, the enemy defeated the same year by Britain, France and their allies. The quarrel concerned the Sudetenland, which was part of Czechoslovakia, but was claimed by Hitler on the grounds that its mainly German-speaking population was, he said, being persecuted.
On his return, Chamberlain emerged slowly from his plane to tell reporters waiting at Heston aerodrome that his negotiations with Hitler had been successful. Britain and Germany, he said, had agreed ‘neve
