SECONDWORLDWAR
THE SECOND WORLD
WAR
See Also: THE APPEASERS & THEIR FATES; BATHS & WASHING King George VI;
BOMBER COMMAND; WINSTON CHURCHILL; THE DEAD DECEIVE; DOLLIS HILL's FINEST; FIRESTORMS FROM
THUNDERSTORMS; FOREIGN RELATIONS; MONEY Bank Notes, Nazi Notes; TESTED TO
DESTRUCTION
The Bombing of London
On 7
September 1940 a sheet of 1000 Luftwaffe aircraft, covering 800 square miles of
air space, attacked London. This marked
the start of the Blitz.
In
London the Blitz was focused upon the East End.
The West End was bombed far less.
It is reputed that this was because Adolf Hitler had plans for how he
was going to treat the district after the Nazis had conquered Britain.
29th
December 1940 was the most devastating night of the Blitz. St Paul's was almost
destroyed. A bomb landed on the dome, it
did not explode. It rolled down to the
gallery, where fire wardens were able to deal with it. The Blitz ended on 10 May 1941. (On 22 June
Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union's western conquests.) St Mary Woolnoth was the only City of London church
that was undamaged by it.
When
bomb-damaged roofs in East London were re-tiled the roofers would include a 'V'
design. The letter stood for 'Victory'.
Elizabeth
Bowen's novel (1899-1973) The Heat of The Day (1948) was a notable
evocation of the Blitz.
See
Also: ARTS VENUES The Barbican Centre; DEVELOPMENTS Smithson Plaza; THE
EAST END; FIRE The London Fire Brigade, The Second World War; THE HOUSE OF
COMMONS The Commons Chamber; ST PAUL's CATHEDRAL The Cathedral and The Second
World War
The
North West Suburbs Scheme
The
North West Suburbs Scheme was a project that involved the construction of a
series of bomb-proof facilities in the suburbs of north-west London. This was because the area was regarded as
being the portion of London that was least susceptible to being aerially
bombed.
The
Underground
Initially,
London Underground refused to allow the metropolis's civilian population to use
its Tube stations as air-raid shelters.
On 10 September 1940 a school in Canning Town that was serving as an
above ground shelter received a direct hit.
The number of people who died was never ascertained Several of the
principal London hotels had steel frames and were therefore virtually
bomb-proof. The Savoy Hotel had
its own basement shelter. On the 14th
- the eighth night of the Blitz - Max Levitas (1915-2018), a Jewish Communist
activist, who had been working as a fire warden in the East End, led a group
that mounted a protest outside of the establishment to protest at the social
inequity of rich people being able to secure safety in a way that the poor
could not. With the help of some
sympathetic waiters the group were able to occupy the shelter. There, they were served sandwiches from
silvers trains.
A
second attempt to do the same was turned back the police News of the event
sparked similar actions. The government
responded to the situation by allowing the stations to be used. Within a few a weeks over 175,000 people were
using them.
The
Labour M.P. Ellen Wilkinson (1891-1947) was appointed to be the minister in
charge of air-raid shelters. She
declined to use her own official one.
Location:
The Savoy, Savoy Court, Strand, WC2R 0EZ (red, blue)
Brady
Street Mansions, Brady Street, c.E1 5DJ.
Levitas's home. (purple, yellow)
The
Bethnal Green Tube Disaster
The
people who were queueing had been unsettled by the sound of an unfamiliar type
of explosion. It was a new type of
anti-aircraft gun being tested in Victoria Park, which lay half-a-mile to the
north-east of the station.
There
was no warden on duty. The stairway was
narrow and its steps were slippery from people's shoes having walked along
rain-soaked streets. Close to its foot,
a mother, who carrying a child, missed a step and fell. She pulled an old man down after her. People rushed forward into the small space
that had been created. Others tumbled on
top of them in a fore of wave that spread to its top. 173 people died. Most of them were women and children.
The
police and medics who attended the disaster were instructed to tell no one of
what they had seen.
Buses
were used to transport the corpses to mortuaries.
The
Stairway To Heaven Memorial Trust campaigns for the creation of a memorial to
the people who died in the Bethnal Green Tube disaster.
Location:
Bethnal Green Underground Station, Cambridge Heath Road, E2 0ET (red, yellow)
H.G.
Wells
In his
novel Things To Come (1933) H.G. Wells predicted a nightmarish scenario
of London being subjected to aerial bombing.
The first two-thirds of the movie depicts the destruction of
civilisation. The final third was set in
a strange, technocratic, subterranean utopia was that not altogether
utopian. The movie was most expensive to
be made in Britain up until that time.
It did not recoup its budget.
He
refused to leave the metropolis while it was being bombed.
Wells
had a long antipathy towards Roman Catholicism.
During the war he wrote in The Times newspaper that the Allies
should subject Rome to aerial bombing.
Location:
Chiltern Court, Baker Street, NW1 5SR.
Wells lived in the building from 1930 to 1936. (red, blue)
Naval Intelligence
See
Also: IAN FLEMING; M.I.5
Rudolf
Hess
Rudolf
Hess, Hitler's deputy, was obsessed by astrology and the occult. Ian Fleming, who served in M.I.5's naval
intelligence section during the Second World War, knew of this trait. In a deeply murky episode, he concocted a
plan in which he hoped that the satanist Aleister Crowley might be able to lure
the Nazi to Britain. The proposal was
not sanctioned by the future Bond novelist's superiors. However, in 1941, in one the conflict s
oddest episodes, Hess flew to Britain.
Fleming was eager that Crowley should have an opportunity to interrogate
the German. Permission for such was
withheld.
Rudolph
Hess was the last person to be imprisoned in the Tower of London.
See
Also: BELIEF GROUPS & CULTS Aleister Crowley; THE TOWER OF LONDON
Prisoners
The Scientists
See
Also: BOFFIN vs. BOFFIN; MAUD & TUBE ALLOYS; THE MIRACULOUS
MOULD; AN 'OLE IN 'OLBORN; THE SANDMAN & THE ZUCKERMAN
The Special Operations Executive
The
Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) sent agents into Occupied European
countries to carry out acts of sabotage.
The organisations first dozen agents included the travel writer Peter
Fleming.1 The elevated social
connections of senior member of's.O.E. meant that the organisation acquired the
use of numerous stately homes around London.2
It is
questionable whether's.O.E.'s achievements outweighed the price that local
populations were made to pay in reprisal actions. Only in Yugoslavia did the Nazis adjust their
strategy to combat partisan activity.
Elsewhere, the Executive was drawn into local quarrels between rival
resistance groups that had different political affiliations from one
another. Following the German withdrawal
Communist partisans used British-supplied weapons to try to establish their own
totalitarian regimes. In Greece British
regular troops were deployed and the Communists were defeated.
In
January 1944 the resistance fighter Kas de Graaf arrived in London. He revealed that the Gestapo's Das
Englandspiel operation had turned the's.O.E.'s network of Dutch agents.
At the
war's end's.O.E. was formally disbanded.
In 2008 documents were released that revealed that in fact Executive had
been merged into what became M.I.6.
See
Also: M.I.6
1. Peter Fleming was the elder brother of Ian Fleming, the creator of
James Bond. The latter felt overshadowed
by the achievements of his sib.
2. Just before the war's outbreak, Miss Bright had been recruited to
M.I.(R). Prior to her joining she was
told anonymously to stand outside St James's Park underground station wearing a
pink carnation. In late 1940 War
Office's Military Intelligence Unit was incorporated into's.O.E..
Archibald Wavell
Field
Marshall Wavell held commands in North Africa and the Far East. He was unusual for a British general in being
a shy intellectual by temperament. On
one occasion he had a meeting with General de Gaulle. The two men stood in front of one another for
several minutes without either of them saying a word. Eventually, one of the A.D.C.s present
broke the ice by placing a map in front of the two commanders.
The
Ways of Colonel Clarke
Colonel
Dudley Clarke was a South African bachelor who had a well-developed taste for
the theatre. He organised the gunners
display at the Royal Tournament. During
the 1930s he had served in Palestine, where he had come to the attention of
Field Marshall Archibald Wavell. During
the summer of 1940 Clarke set up the Commandoes. Within a few weeks of the unit's formation,
it had started conducting raids on Occupied Europe.
Wavell
was commanding the Allied desert campaign in North Africa. He summoned Clarke and appointed him to
devise and execute strategies that were intended to deceive German military
intelligence.1 The major set
up A Force. This created non-existent
airfields and tank units, as well as carrying out signals and intelligence
deceptions. He devised the Cooperhead
Operation. In this, an Australian actor
impersonated General Bernard Montgomery, thereby giving a false impression of
what the commander was up to.
Clarke s
work had a compound effect of creating an impression that the Allied forces in
the Middle East were at least 200,000-men stronger than they in fact were. As a result, the Axis powers committed more
soldiers to the theatre than they probably would have done otherwise. This meant that in turn they depleted their
strength elsewhere.
The
colonel became carried away with his capacity to pass himself off in different
semblances. In 1941 the Spanish police
arrested him while he was in disguise - as a woman. What upset his superiors about the incident
was his attention to detail - he had chosen to wear women's underwear.
Location:
12 Stratton Street, WIJ 8LT. Clarke had
a flat in the building. (orange, grey)
See
Also: THE CHEVALIER D’ÉON
1. Wavell's social circle included a number of homosexuals who had
public profiles, the likes of Cecil Beaton, 'Chips' Channon, and Noël Coward.
David
Backhouse 2024