Domestic Soldiers (15 page)

The news from the east made for a solemn New Year. Each year, Nella Last always suffered from what she called ‘Hogmanay blues’, but this year was particularly depressing. The stories of young British soldiers desperately retreating in the wake of swift Japanese action dredged up painful memories of Dunkirk, and Nella and her neighbour, Mrs Atkinson, were tearfully reminded of the loss of friends who had perished on the beaches at the beginning of the war. Their friend, Dorothy, whose husband had gone missing and was ‘presumed dead’, had spent the last eighteen months searching out anyone – even fortune-tellers – who could offer any shred of news.

In the sadness that pervaded that dark holiday season, Nella felt her resolve falter. She wondered if the soldiers were suffering the same malaise that seemed to permeate Barrow and descend over the entire country. As midnight approached on 31 December, the New Year ‘blues’ seized hold of her mind and set her thinking. Was it the food situation that made her so gloomy? Or the news in Asia? Was it that her husband Will continued to ‘stop in’ and stare dumbly into the fire? ‘Is it the tension’ of wartime, she wrote in her diary that night, ‘the ceaseless undercurrent of conjecture if not real worry?’ Perhaps her war work was becoming too overwhelming – ‘the constant “keeping on” with no little break?’ – she wondered. Whatever the cause, she confessed that she felt a ‘curious “sapping of vitality”, of stagnation’.

As the bad news kept streaming in, the cold chill of winter gripped the nation: pipes froze and snow and freezing rain snarled traffic. In Sheffield, Edie Rutherford picked her way through iced-over, muddy, ‘black pudding’ streets. Days like these made her long
for the sun and warmth of her native South Africa – the letters she received from family and friends in Durban and Johannesburg hardly helped, since they complained endlessly about the scorching African heat! Amid the falling snow and freezing temperatures, Edie wondered how Russians and Germans could possibly wage war in such conditions. ‘All my instincts are to hibernate when it is like this,’ she told M-O. ‘I can’t summon up enthusiasm for sociable meetings let alone hostile ones!’

Coping with the cold in Barrow-in-Furness, Nella Last’s thoughts were also of Russia. On 22 January, she reported that it was 19 degrees (-7 °C) in Barrow. Milk froze if it was left in the garage for an hour, but the Russians ‘have thirty degrees below freezing [-17 °C]. I cannot imagine it twice as cold,’ Nella admitted. It made her ‘shudder’ when she thought of bombed-out Russians with no shelter in such conditions. The next morning it rained, and Barrow’s streets were nightmarish with rivers of rain and puddles of slush, ‘traffic skidded and slithered and piled up…
What
a day!’

For Helen Mitchell at home in Kent, the snow and cold simply meant more work. Day after day, she ‘lugged coal, coke and anthracite’ from her stores into the house to stoke up the three fires necessary to warm her son and husband. Usually, the house in Kent was fairly empty – her husband, Peter, spent most of his time nearer his work in London and her son, William, was in the army. Except for the servants, Helen spent most of her time alone. But, much to her chagrin, Peter was home more than usual that January. Furthermore, William came home on leave unannounced at the end of the month. On the day he arrived, the pipes had frozen, there was no water and the plumber was
nowhere to be found. But, despite the cold and its attendant problems, events in the east were never far from anyone’s thoughts. Caught up as she was in her domestic drudgery, even Mitchell stopped to joke with an acquaintance that she had no idea how to keep her stockings up now that the Japanese had ‘pinched all the rubber’.

Japanese victories were not only imperial embarrassments; they also meant significant shortages on the home front. With the winter victories of 1941/42, Japan had ‘pinched’ a large proportion of Britain’s source of rice, sugar and tea – not to mention rubber and tin. Added to this, German U-boats were pummelling shipping in the Atlantic. Rations took a hit and food consumption in Britain was at its lowest during this period. Irene Grant complained, ‘Our cupboard is bare.’ To ensure that her husband Tom had enough to eat, Irene went without. ‘No woman can eat less than I,’ she told M-O.

It didn’t seem possible, but the new year, with its food shortages, bitter temperatures and leaden snow clouds, soon became even more bleak. In early February Helen Mitchell noted that the government announced it would begin to ration soap. The news put her on high alert to watch the ‘extravagance’ of her housekeeper, Mrs Cripps, who was a perennial source of aggravation for Helen. She thought Cripps ‘batty’, and constantly found herself in exasperating struggles with her housekeeper.

Cripps always left such an unforgivable mess of the kitchen that, when the Mitchells bought a new cooker, Helen vowed never again to allow her near the saucepans or the cooker and swore to forever banish her to work in the garden. At least in the garden, she
wrote, ‘One hopes she will be less of a menace than in the house.’ One morning, Cripps decided to take down the blackout curtains before the sun came up. Mitchell dashed madly behind her, frantically putting the curtains back in place while yelling at her to desist her crazy and dangerous behaviour. She was too late. ‘The long arm of the law’, an ARP warden, rang the bell to serve Mitchell with a fine. ‘Haven’t recovered from the horror of it,’ she wrote, ‘Cripps quite unable to see the enormity of the offence.’

Natalie Tanner thought the addition of soap to the ration was ‘rather a blow’ and found ‘the news very depressing’. But days later, Britons suffered a calamity far more grave and depressing than this: Singapore had fallen. After the infamous retreat from Penang in December 1941, refugees had flooded to the safety of ‘Fortress Singapore’, but the fortress was an illusion. Air support had been knocked out in one blow when the Japanese air force destroyed every available aircraft in the nearby airfield. Furthermore, all defences had focused on a seaborne attack, not a ground assault: the powerful gun batteries on the island pointed out to sea. When, just one month before Singapore surrendered, British General Archibald Wavell finally imparted this fact to Churchill, who had sincerely believed the myth of the stronghold, the Prime Minister told the chiefs of staff that ‘one of the greatest possible scandals’ had been exposed.

As Japanese forces pushed further south into the city, European refugees flooded the causeway onto the island. On the island, they found 85,000 British, Indian and Australian troops, most of whom were demoralized from the fierce fighting on the mainland. One of
the soldiers in the garrison mockingly echoed Churchill when he wrote of the situation:

On 15 February 1942, Singapore surrendered to a Japanese force one-third the size of the Allied forces left on the island. That night, Churchill addressed the nation and gravely told them about the situation in the east. ‘I speak to you all under the shadow of a heavy and far-reaching military defeat … Singapore has fallen.’ It was a devastating defeat. Indeed, privately, Churchill declared the fall of Singapore the worst disaster in British military history. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister attempted to rally the nation in the face of such demoralizing news. ‘This is one of those moments’, he stressed, ‘when [the British race] can draw from the heart of misfortune the vital impulses of victory.’ He reminded his audience of past victories snatched from the jaws of defeat, as their ancestors had done, so too, Churchill stated, ‘We can meet reverses with dignity and with renewed accessions of strength.’ Finally, he roused them, ‘Let us move forward steadfastly together into the storm and through the storm’.
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The speech was unconvincing. As she was by most setbacks, Helen Mitchell was ‘very depressed’ by Churchill’s address. She thought it ‘weak and illogical’, and ‘wondered if we’re sunk’. Even those who were generally less apt to lose faith had genuine difficulty drawing any comfort from Churchill’s words. Edie Rutherford believed that the government was
covering up incompetence in the matter and found that most people she asked were not ‘enthusiastic’ about the speech. Most importantly, she wrote, ‘The speech showed fear.’ Across the country, it seemed that many agreed with this sentiment. The former canon of Westminster and Bishop of Durham Herbert Hensley Henson noted in his private diary that Churchill’s ‘voice and manner suggested a depression and even dismay, very unlike his accustomed buoyancy of carriage’.
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Irene Grant’s husband predicted that the debacle would bring down Churchill within six months.

The empire was staring into the abyss. Indeed, the Indians and Malays who witnessed the defeat felt sure that, ‘The last days of the British Empire had come’. Edie Rutherford was dismayed. ‘Singapore gone’, she wrote in her diary when she heard the news. ‘Oh, I do hope our men have made a getaway in time. Has it been worthwhile?’ she wondered. Usually a confident and proud supporter of empire, her faith was shaken: ‘I believe in our Empire but God, is it worth the price we are paying now?’ It was difficult to escape the dark cloud descending upon what appeared to be the empire’s imminent demise. She could find only uneasy comfort in day-to-day distractions and a constant faith in ‘the invincibility of all that we hold dear’. ‘There is no other way of keeping an even keel when things look black as they do now’, Edie confessed to M-O.

If Japanese victories demonstrated that the British navy’s control over the waves was slipping, an incident in the English Channel further undermined the nation’s naval prestige. Three days before the Prime Minister’s admission of the loss of Singapore, Britons learned that two German battleships had left port in Brest, on the coast of Brittany, slipped through British
defences in the Channel and steamed, unaccosted, into the North Sea. It was a humiliating prelude that intensified the impact of Singapore’s demise on the British psyche. Indeed, the proximity of this embarrassing episode to British shores exceeded the crippling loss that followed. Fears of invasion once again gripped the nation.

Within weeks of Singapore’s fall, the Burmese capital of Rangoon was evacuated as Japanese troops closed in. British forces escaped north towards eastern India; the enemy was now perilously close to the jewel in the imperial crown. With Japan at the gates of India, no one was entirely sure if the Indians would fight the invader or side with them against the British. In fact, some dissident Indians had already gone over to the Axis, installing a pro-Nazi Hindi radio station, Azad Hind, in Berlin to counter the BBC (which Azad Hind called the ‘Bluff and Bluster Corporation’) and building an army to help oust the British from India.
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In the hope of fostering loyalty against the Japanese at such a precarious time, Sir Stafford Cripps journeyed from London to Delhi on 14 March with the promise of independence.

Sir Stafford was the man of the hour. A teetotal, vegetarian ascetic, who exuded the very essence of austerity, he nonetheless had sparked the popular imagination after he was sent to Moscow as ambassador in 1940. Although it wasn’t true, many believed that Sir Stafford was a confidant of Joseph Stalin, and this myth gained him much popularity. Irene Grant, who always championed the cause of the left, was thoroughly enamoured with Cripps. He was one of the few politicians, she believed, who was truly ‘for
the people’. He was a socialist who had spent some years in the political wilderness for radical views, but now he seemed to be Britain’s greatest hope. Indeed, in 1942, he was the only politician who posed a genuine threat to Churchill’s premiership.

In the spring of 1942, with disaster following disaster, the Prime Minister was in grave danger of losing his post. Twice, in January and July, Churchill fought off votes of no confidence in the House over the direction of the war. Several days after the first opposition, Sir Stafford Cripps delivered a wildly popular
Postscript
broadcast after the 9 o’clock news, summing up the general feeling of discontent with the war. A M-O survey concluded that many felt that the broadcast was ‘sensational’.
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Indeed, the broadcast scored a 93 per cent favourable rating – better than either Churchill or J.B. Priestley at their best.

Helen Mitchell wondered if Sir Stafford’s mission to India was a political manoeuvre by the Prime Minister to dispense with a popular rival. But, despite the potential political benefit to Churchill of having him out of the country, Cripps did indeed seem like the perfect person to broker a deal in India. He was sympathetic to the cause of independence, a socialist like the leader of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, and a vegetarian like Gandhi. He also had previous experience in working with the Muslim League’s Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

When he arrived in Delhi, Cripps offered the Indian National Congress the opportunity to draft a constitution. After the war, he promised, independence would be granted. In a nod to Muslims, the Cripps Offer also allowed those who disagreed with the new constitution to opt out.

Edie Rutherford followed the proceedings anxiously. She expressed some sympathy for the Indian cause, and felt that the Cripps mission to India was the right step towards a fair deal for India. But negotiations began to stall. Rutherford wondered if Japanese bombs dropped on Indian soil might make them see reason and speed up the process. Despite the fact that bombs did in fact begin to fall on India (Calcutta received its first on 6 April), the Indian National Congress was angered by the stipulation that allowed Muslims the right to secede, and the Muslim League was incensed by Congress’ reaction. Furthermore, with British fortunes down, Gandhi considered the deal to be a ‘post-dated cheque on a failing bank’.
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The Offer fell through.

Demoralized by the process, angered at Gandhi and alienated from Nehru, Sir Stafford left India on 12 April 1942. Edie Rutherford’s faith in the righteousness of the Indian cause was in tatters; she thought vindictively that perhaps Britain should abandon India to the Japanese in order to teach the rebellious Indians what tyranny really was. Natalie Tanner remarked simply that if Cripps couldn’t broker a deal, no one could.