Domestic Soldiers (28 page)

Those with less money who ventured out to restaurants might also find good deals on such delicacies, as Alice Bridges learned bargain hunting after Christmas during the Blitz. Taking a rest at a soda fountain, Alice savoured a 5d Horlicks, which was so rich it ‘tasted like a milk shake’, and indulged in a fresh salmon sandwich for only 2d. It was a rare delight for someone who made do to feed herself and her family on the rationing scheme.

Many others resented people such as Tanner, who enjoyed themselves regularly at restaurants and cafes. When Nella Last went for a short holiday to the seaside town of Morecambe in 1943, she was shocked to find diners wasting the lavish plates of food served to them. Mentally she reckoned the wastage left by the couple next to them in a restaurant:

Edie Rutherford believed that a scheme that allowed such wastage to occur without rationing was patently unfair. Restaurants, she argued, bought up most of the food, leaving the ordinary housewife to feed her family on what was left over. Furthermore, since rationing only guaranteed that certain necessities were available and one still needed to purchase rations, the poor were at a distinct disadvantage. While the rich feasted on game and salmon off-ration, Edie’s sister struggled simply to purchase the rations allotted to her family. Indeed, though the government spent millions yearly in subsidies to keep food prices low, the cost of living had risen by 35 per cent by the end of the war. The rise left Rutherford with little expendable income beyond what went into her larder. The problem was acute for city dwellers, like Edie, who lived in flats without allotments. Unlike Last and Grant, who also felt the pinch of increasing costs, Rutherford could not supplement her diet with home-grown vegetables. Grant had a small back garden that produced some greens for salads, while Last grew various vegetables and kept chickens to ensure a steady supply of eggs.

Natalie Tanner rarely felt squeezed by rationing. She tended a garden that produced an abundant supply of vegetables and fruit, and nearby farmers provided the Tanners with plenty of eggs and the occasional holiday goose. The only economizing she had to endure
was as a result of shortages in the supply chain. Since her husband made out very well from government orders during the war, she had plenty to buy whatever was available, which, she complained, was not much. Therefore, she could afford to spend more on restaurant dining, movies, books, stockings, suits for James, or whatever she found in the stores.

On the second day of the invasion, 7 June, Edie Rutherford noted that things continued to go well. She went to hospital and found a queue waiting to give blood. The wait was long, but, ‘It is little we do compared to the men who fight.’ On the way home, she stopped in her favourite shoe shop and enquired about lined boots for the winter. They had two pairs of Glastonburys left for £4.8s. She balked at the price, which reflected the 100 per cent purchase tax tacked onto luxuries. ‘I never heard such rubbish,’ she exclaimed. ‘A lined boot is a wise purchase in this foul climate.’ At the greengrocer’s, Edie complained of the exorbitant prices and left the broad beans and new potatoes ‘till they get within reason’.

Later that week, the military operation across the Channel continued to go well, ‘If one can forget all the men who die and fall hurt.’ As Edie waited for her tram home, a convoy of tanks passed, and tears welled in her eyes as she watched the ‘lads’. By 10 June, over 300,000 troops were on French soil, all beaches had been linked and the first Mulberry harbour installed offshore at Arromanches. The Allies now commanded fifty miles of French coastline. Slowly, inexorably the Allies fought their way inland.

In Natalie Tanner’s circle, conversation revolved around the ongoing action in Normandy. The bookstore
owner in Leeds, who had already lost one son two years before when his transport sank, had one son ‘in it’ and another awaiting deployment in England. An acquaintance at the Gambit was waiting for his papers, and another woman spent all night driving casualties from Dover to Huddersfield. Only the young, it seemed to Natalie, could enjoy the excitement of the invasion. James wrote from boarding school saying, ‘It is very good about the second front. It is the eighth wonder of the world.’ ‘It must be nice to be 11½ years old,’ Natalie remarked.

After D-Day, news of Allied successes came fast and furious. Edie Rutherford complained that all the information was enough to give one ‘mental indigestion’. On 20 July, an assassination attempt nearly took Hitler’s life. ‘What a pity that bomb didn’t get Hitler,’ Rutherford lamented in her diary. The bomb had been placed in the presence of Hitler and other high-ranking officers at their headquarters, Wolfsschanze (the Wolf’s Lair), deep in the East Prussian woods at Rastenburg by the leader of the German opposition, known as the Schwarze Kapelle
(Black Orchestra), Colonel Count von Stauffenberg.

The roots of the assassination attempt against Hitler went deep. As early as 1938, when Hitler announced his intention to go to war for territorial expansion, those in the army who did not agree with Hitler’s policies were prepared to remove the Führer from power. As for young, thirty-three-year-old Count von Stauffenberg, his dislike of the Nazi leader reached even further back, to the Night of Long Knives in 1934, when Hitler orchestrated the deaths of the leadership of the SA (Stormtroopers), including Ernst Rohm. His hate deepened with Kristallnacht in 1938, when a concerted
attack on Jews erupted across Germany. Stauffenberg expressed his assessment of Hitler on the eve of the Führer’s triumphal entry into a prostrate Paris in June 1940, when he told fellow conspirators that Hitler was neither a great war leader nor a great law maker. Instead, the Count asserted, the man only desired destructive and all-consuming power. Hitler’s lust for power could only destroy Germany, the conspirators reasoned.

After several failed plans to assassinate Hitler in the past, the recent success of the Allies in Normandy convinced the Schwarze Kapelle that the time had come to try once again. Operations in the east also signalled the right moment, too: Russians were quickly moving towards Berlin, and the conspirators wanted most of all to stave off utter defeat at the hands of the Soviets. So, Stauffenberg, summoned to headquarters to give a report to German High Command, armed the Britishmade bomb and placed it in the conference room. After the meeting started, the Count excused himself. Outside, Stauffenberg waited for the fireworks to start. Not long afterwards, a massive explosion ripped through the building. Convinced that Hitler had been killed, the Count quickly left the base to avoid detection and made his way to Berlin, where the Schwarze Kapelle were to complete their coup d’etat
by blaming the murder on the SS and taking over the reins of government.

Although the explosion brought down the roof of the building, destroyed the hulking conference table and blew out windows, and though several highranking officers were killed, Stauffenberg’s belief that he’d killed Hitler was incorrect. Fire from the blast singed Hitler’s hair, his right arm was temporarily paralysed, a huge gash cut across his face and he suffered severe shrapnel wounds to his back, buttocks
and legs; even the force from the explosion ripped off one of the Führer’s trouser legs, but he escaped with his life.

Reading the news a few days later, Edie Rutherford thought it rather comical that Hitler had had his ‘pants blown off him’. The Germans had no sense of humour, ‘not as we understand it anyway’, she told M-O. No self-respecting Briton would ever admit to having their pants blown off, Edie reasoned, ‘as he would be ragged for the rest of his life’.

Hitler certainly did not take the attempt as a joke. He expected retribution. Despite their failure to kill the German leader, in the hours after the blast, the Schwarze Kapelle still had a good chance of successfully completing their coup. By midnight, however, the game was up; the leaders of the movement, including Stauffenberg, had been apprehended, shot and dumped in an unmarked grave. Over the coming weeks, hundreds, if not thousands, fell under the veil of suspicion and were summarily dealt with.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Hitler’s raving retribution after the attempt, some people were convinced that the plot, successful or not, signalled the beginning of the end for Germany. At a RAF base in Normandy on 23 July, Churchill declared that recent events were ‘grave signs of weakness in Germany. They are in a great turmoil inside. Opposite you is an enemy whose central power is crumbling.’
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Many perceived in the assassination attempt an end to Nazi domination over the German people and the end of the war. Irene Grant was one of the optimistic. Germany was in chaos, the Russians were advancing in the east and the troops in France were pushing on. ‘War! Soon be over!’ Irene exclaimed.

While the Allies forced their way from the beaches of Normandy into the interior of France that summer, Mitchell went on holiday with her husband in Devon, walking on the hills around Lynton and bathing by the sea. Her son’s leave had been scheduled to correspond with their holiday, but he spent the summer in hospital due to a minor bicycle accident. After Peter had gone back to work, Mitchell moved back to Minehead, where the main topic of conversation and worry was not the invasion, but a new and menacing German weapon.

A week after the Allied landing in Normandy, residents of London and the south coast of England encountered a new form of airborne destruction. The Germans called it
Vergeltungswaffe Eins
or Revenge Weapon Number One; to the British, it was a flying bomb, doodlebug, or V-1. The V-1 made a high-pitched whining noise, similar to the humming of a ‘model T Ford going up hill’.
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But it wasn’t the noise that people feared; it was the silence between the time the engine of the bomb cut out and the explosion. The explosion was devastating: since the bombs did not penetrate the ground, and therefore did not absorb at least some of the impact, the blast was worse than conventional bombs.

Four V-1s landed in and around London on the first day (one very close to Mitchell’s home in Kent) – of these, only the bomb that fell on Bethnal Green produced casualties: six people killed and thirteen seriously wounded. Within days of the first V-1 attack, however, almost 500 people had been killed and more than 2,000 seriously injured. The bombs came over day and night – 100 to 150 a day were aimed at London during the summer and autumn of 1944. The indiscriminate pattern and constant menace of the V-1s
disrupted people’s routines, and morale plunged as quickly as the bombs themselves fell to the ground. Aside from taking shelter round the clock, there was little one could do against the bombs. Ack-ack guns, for instance, were of little use in populated areas, since shooting down a V-1 didn’t stop the destruction.

After the attempt on Hitler’s life in July, V-1 attacks were stepped up. Even though the bomb planted by the conspirators was British-made, MI-6 had little to do with the plot. The bomb was actually captured from Secret Operations Executive (SOE) stores in France; nonetheless, the discovery of the bomb convinced Hitler that the British had had a hand in the assassination attempt. In retaliation, he ordered a massive V-1 attack on the capital. Almost twice the usual number of bombs hurtled towards London that night, and the next night, 21/22 July, another 200 found their way to the capital.

Safely ensconced in Somerset, Helen Mitchell received letters from friends in Kent and London declaring that the doodlebugs were even more serious than before. As the V-1s pounded the south-east, more anxiety than usual crept into Helen’s heart. Her husband, Peter, was in the centre of the storm and her son, William, was in hospital near London after a minor biking accident. She confided to M-O,

To Mitchell, the mere thought of the new weapon was unnerving. Her friends in London and in the southeast wrote and told her of the fear and devastation the
bombs wrought, and she learned that her home in Kent was right in the middle of the fray. The house had been ‘knocked about’, ceilings were down and windows were broken in outbuildings round the house, but luckily, no one was hurt.

Characteristically, Mitchell felt the government did not handle the new threat well. She believed they should concentrate on boosting the morale of those in the path of the bombs, or at least move businesses and factories out of London. When she listened to Churchill’s speech about the bombings, Helen scoffed, ‘All very well, but no soldier is asked to be incessantly in the front line.’ She knew all too well that she would soon be back in that front line herself.

In August, the Tanners spent three leisurely weeks in Scotland. Hugh’s business afforded Natalie the opportunity to travel more than the average person in wartime. Throughout much of the war, the family took yearly holidays to Scotland or Wales. Hugh visited nearby factories while Natalie and James enjoyed the scenery; when Hugh was involved in meetings in Inverness, James and Natalie explored Loch Ness and the mountains from their hotel near Urquhart. They hiked the peaks or ‘messed about’ in a boat on the lake, soaking in the fine August weather. Some days, Hugh joined them or went off on longer hikes alone. On 6 August, Hugh headed off for a 20-mile hike while James and Natalie spent a quiet domestic day at the hotel, he making maps of the area and she washing shirts and darning socks. Without a radio and only the Scottish
Daily Express
– ‘a foul paper’, according to Natalie – to remind her of the war, the peace and idyll of the holiday made the conflict, she admitted, ‘fairly remote’.