[Doug64]

May 12, Sunday

Aliens are interned or put under curfew in eastern Britain

Three thousand enemy aliens are rounded up for internment today throughout the eastern counties of England and Scotland, from the Isle of Wight to Inverness. The Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, applies the order to all German and Austrian men between sixteen and sixty, excluding invalids. No German or Austrian may enter the restricted area without permission.

All other aliens, of whatever nationality, living in the eastern counties must report daily to the police and are forbidden to use cars or bicycles or to go out between 8 pm and 6 am. The restrictions apply to about 11,000 aliens.

At the outbreak of war many aliens were rounded up, but only 486, or fewer than one percent, were detained by the Aliens’ Tribunals. A further 8,000 had their movements restricted. Over 50,000 stayed at liberty. Most of them are refugees from the Nazi regime.

There is no evidence of the existence in Britain of a “fifth column” of Nazi sympathizers. Some were sent to establish a network in Britain in the two years before the war, but the police Special Branch kept them under observation and arrested them as soon as war was declared.

[Doug64]

May 13, Monday

Churchill rallies nation

Today Winston Churchill makes his first speech to the House of Commons following his appointment as Prime Minister three days ago. He tells MPs that he is forming an administration “on the broadest possible basis” in accordance with “the evident wish and will of parliament and the nation.” He says he has formed “a war cabinet ... of five members, representing, with the Opposition Liberals, the unity of the nation.” Further appointments will be made tomorrow.

The Prime Minister goes on to remind the House that “we are in the preliminary stage of one of the greatest battles in history, that we are in action in many points in Norway and in Holland, that we have to be prepared in the Mediterranean, that the air battle is continuous and that many preparations have to be made here at home ... I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’

“We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask what is our policy?

“I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime. That is our policy.

“You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

“Let that be realized; no survival for the British Empire; no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.

“But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, ‘Come, then, let us go forward together with our united strength.’”

[Doug64]

May 14, Tuesday

Germany takes Holland

At dawn today, the Dutch are still hoping to hold on. German airborne troops at The Hague have been captured or driven off, and Rotterdam, the key to the defense of Fortress Holland, still holds out. During the morning, however, a German officer under a white flag warns the Dutch that unless the city surrenders it will be destroyed. While negotiations are going on, bombers diverted from the Belgian front appear and in ninety minutes pulverize the city.

Wild rumor and, some say, Allied propaganda will spread the story that up to 30,000 civilians died in the raid. In fact, about 980 died, but nearly 80,000 have been made homeless, and two-thirds of the city has been destroyed.

With the loss of Rotterdam, General Henri G. Winkelman, the Dutch C-in-C, decides further resistance will lead only to the complete destruction of the country. He broadcasts his surrender on Hilversum radio this evening. “By vast superiority of the most modern arms, the enemy has been able to break our resistance,” he says. “But ultimately the Netherlands will rise again as a free nation. Long live our queen!”

So the fight goes on. Queen Wilhelmina and her cabinet, brought to England by the Royal Navy, have proclaimed London to be the seat of the Netherlands government. Wilhelmina, in a navy blue coat and skirt and with a gas mask slung from her shoulder, arrives at Liverpool Street station with officers of the royal guard and is met by King George, who kisses her on both cheeks. She tells him that the Dutch people in the colonies overseas will continue to fight alongside the Allies.

Panzers break through at Sedan

“Impenetrable” is the word French strategists used for the Ardennes, with its narrow roads winding through wooded hills, so they left the area to be defended by a light screen of cavalry. Now Lieutenant General Heinz Guderian, known as “Father of the Panzers,” has come tearing out of the hills with seven armored divisions, totaling over 2,000 tanks, to give the French cavalry a severe mauling.

Less than three days after French scouts spotted his force, he has reached the Meuse on an 80-mile (128-km) front. The French General Andre Corap, on the left bank, has two divisions there; the rest of his 9th Army is some sixty miles (96 km) distant. “So the Germans have reached the Meuse,” he remarks, for he is confident that the decisive battle is being fought in Belgium; the Meuse is impassable.

But this morning, Guderian has three bridgeheads, backed by an armored brigade, across the Meuse. At last the French counterattack, only to be ripped apart by German tanks swarming across the river. So this afternoon Guderian has smashed a mighty hole in the French defenses. Corap’s 9th Army, its artillery paralyzed, its horses slaughtered by low-flying fighters, its HQ bombed, and its communications in ruins, is in full retreat.

Erstwhile political foes work together in Churchill’s War Cabinet

Winston Churchill has filled most of the major posts in the new coalition government. Political foes—Tory, Labour, and Liberal—sit shoulder to shoulder at the cabinet table. “A crowd of able men,” he is calling them. First, the Prime Minister announces his inner War Cabinet—himself as Minister of Defense; the ex-Premier Chamberlain as Lord President of the Council; Lord Halifax staying as Foreign Secretary; Clement Attlee, who will be Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Prime Minister; and Arthur Greenwood as Minister Without Portfolio. The former Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, Dominions Secretary since war broke out, becomes Secretary for War. Labour’s A.V. Alexander is First Lord of the Admiralty, and the Liberal leader Sir Archibald Sinclair is Secretary for Air. Other important appointments go to two of Labour’s senior men—Herbert Morrison as Minister of Supply and Hugh Dalton as Minister for Economic Warfare. The trade union leader Ernest Bevin becomes Minister of Labour and National Service in charge of the nation's workforce. A new Ministry for Aircraft Production has been created, which goes to the fiery newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, a friend of Mr. Churchill.

[Doug64]

May 15, Wednesday

Britons flock to the local defense force

“We are going to ask you to help us in a manner which I know will be welcome to thousands of you we want large numbers of men of 17 to 65 to come forward and offer their services. The name of the new force will be the Local Defence Volunteers ... ” This is the appeal of Anthony Eden, the Secretary for War, on the radio at 9:15 pm yesterday. By the same time tonight, 250,000 men have rushed to their local police stations to volunteer. They have been promised uniforms and arms, but for the present there is neither—250,000 armbands inscribed LDV have been ordered. The LDV force is called for primarily to deal with Germans parachuted behind the lines, as they were during the invasion of Holland, some reportedly disguised as peasants or clergymen.

[Doug64]

May 16, Thursday

RAF steps up continental bombing raids

Bomber Command was unleashed against the Germans last night with 99 aircraft, the largest force yet employed in one operation, attacking military installations in the Ruhr, and another twelve striking at German communications in Belgium.

Today, a communique issued by the Air Ministry says “Each crew was given specific military objectives and instructions that bombs were not to be dropped indiscriminately. A few aircraft failed to locate their objectives and did not drop their bombs, but the majority found and bombed their targets with great effect causing widespread damage and many explosions.” The pilots claim they hit important road and rail communications and mechanized columns heading for the front. One Wellington is lost. This raid will please Bomber Command, which believes it can bring Germany to its knees by concentrated bombing of strategic targets within Germany.

[Doug64]

May 18, Saturday

How Germany’s crack Panzer divisions outstrip the enemy

Now that the German Panzers have broken out of their bridgeheads over the River Meuse and are advancing rapidly west, the Allied command and control system is becoming increasingly numbed. The Blitzkrieg, which overcame the Poles, is in danger of doing the same to the British and French. What is the secret of their success?

The idea that mechanized armies can radically increase the pace of battle is nothing new. The eminent British military theorists Major General J.F.C. Fuller and Captain Basil Lidell Hart have preached this for the past twenty years. The Germans have recognized that victories are won by thinking and acting more quickly than your enemy. The tank, by virtue of its mobility, firepower, protection, and radio communications, provides this ability.

General Heinz Guderian, who had much to do with the creation of the Panzer force and whose Panzer corps broke through the French defenses at Sedan, believes that once the momentum of an advance has been built up, it must not be allowed to die. To ensure this, he insists that commanders at all levels must be well forward to react quickly to rapidly changing situations. Mention must also be made of the highly responsive fire support provided by the Ju87 Stuka dive bombers and controlled by ground-to-air radio.

Belgian forces are retreating as Nazis conquer Brussels

King Leopold has set up an improvised HQ in a remote chateau at Bruges, a few miles from the coast at Ostend. The atmosphere is somber. The Germans are in Brussels; Antwerp is about to fall; the French, in near panic over the Sedan breakthrough, have begun withdrawing their forces from the Belgian front without informing the British or Belgians; and the roads of Belgium and northern France are choked with refugees.

Lord Gort, the BEF commander, learned of the French decision by chance when a British officer visiting General Gaston Billotte’s 1 Army Group HQ noticed a message awaiting dispatch. The Belgians were told the following day. “It came like a shout out of the blue,” says General Olivier Derouseaux, Leopold’s deputy chief of staff. “We had to shake ourselves back into action.”

The British and Belgian armies begin withdrawing along a 50-mile (80-kilometer) front without interference from the enemy, most of the Panzers having been taken south to the Sedan sector. But the French 7th Army, pulling back from the mouth of the Scheldt, cut through the British and Belgian lines, causing chaos.

British plan attack, but is it too late?

British forces in Belgium and northern France, threatened by the sweep of German Panzers towards the Channel and by the disintegration of the French 1st Army, are planning a counterattack against the 7th Panzer and the motorized SS Totenkopf divisions near Arras.

Major General Erwin Rommel has been surprised by the ease of his troops’ passage into France, meaning their reserves are virtually untapped. The British commanders are confident they will give Rommel a tough battle, but some worry that their attack may be too late.

France recalls war hero

Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, has recalled to his Cabinet Marshal Philippe Petain, the defender of Verdun and, with Marshal Foch, one of France’s two greatest military heroes of the Great War. Marshal Petain comes into the government as vice-premier.

M. Reynaud has taken over the Ministry of War from Edouard Daladier, his predecessor as Premier, and Daladier now becomes Minister of Foreign Affairs. Another veteran of 1914-18, Georges Mandel, becomes the Minister of the Interior, with responsibility for defeating the “5th Column.” Mandel was the “right-hand man” of the French leader Georges Clemenceau in 1917-18.

The choice of Marshal Petain has been well received despite his advanced age—he is 84. Petain was something more than one of the toughest and most successful of France’s generals in the Great War. As the successful organizer of Verdun's defense, he became a symbol of French courage and patriotism. “Ils ne passeront pas!” [They shall not pass!] he said of the Germans, and pass they did not, even though the flower of a nation’s manhood marched up the “sacred way” into the worst “mincing machine” of the Great War.

Then, as the German artillery intensified its bombardments and the casualty lists lengthened, Petain came out with a second slogan that again put fresh heart into his men: “On les aura!” [We’ll get them!]

In 1917, after the casualties of Verdun had led to widespread mutinies, Petain, as the new commander-in-chief, restored morale by his form but restrained authority.

[Doug64]

May 20, Monday

Embattled Allied forces find a new army commander

Paul Reynaud, the French Premier, has finally gotten rid of Gamelin, the general he dislikes and distrusts as an incompetent defeatist. Maxime Weygand, aged 73, who served with Marshal Foch in the Great War, has been tasked with rescuing the Allied fortunes on a battlefield dominated by Panzers and Stuka dive bombers.

Until now, the self-assured General Weygand, a devout Catholic and a royalist contemptuous of republican politicians, has been in virtual exile in Syria. His appointment as supreme commander is now hailed in the press, but he is a staff officer who has never commanded armies in battle.

He has disregarded plans already made for Allied armies in the north and south to attack and cut off the exposed German armored columns, still unprotected by the infantry. He spends his first day making ceremonial visits to the French president and cabinet ministers. Then he says he will visit the front, as his hero Foch had always done. He sets off by air for Ypres to talk to French, British, and Belgian commanders. During the meeting, King Leopold decides that Weygand is completely ignorant of the desperate plight of the Allied armies. Leopold doesn’t know that Weygand has decided that the war is already lost.

[Doug64]

May 22, Wednesday

Bletchley Park breaks Luftwaffe cipher

The codebreakers of Hut Six at Bletchley Park in the English countryside forty miles (64 km) north of London, where scientists, mathematicians, and chess masters are working against time to solve the secrets of the German Enigma enciphering machine, have made a significant breakthrough. They have broken the Luftwaffe’s “Red” key using their first British-built Bombe, an electro-mechanical device that can do hundreds of computations every minute. This means that all the Luftwaffe’s operational and administrative traffic can be read despite the added security devices built into the Enigmas in preparation for the assault on the West.

British government takes emergency powers

Today, Parliament takes less than three hours to rush into law the most drastic legislation known in British history. It gives the government almost unlimited power over the life, liberty, and property of everyone in the land.

Under the Emergency Powers Act, banks, the munitions industry, profits, wages, and working conditions are all now subject to rigorous state control. There is also an unprecedented mobilization of manpower.

In his first speech as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Premier in the new government, Clement Attlee urges the nation to keep calm. “Everyone should continue at their jobs until ordered otherwise,” he says.

At the same time, Ernest Bevin is being given dictatorial power, as Minister of Labour and National Service, to direct anyone to do anything needed in the struggle for national survival.

With the emergency powers settled, MPs now quickly pass a Treachery Act redefining the scope of traitorous acts punishable by death.

[Potemkin]

May 22, Wednesday

Bletchley Park breaks Luftwaffe cipher

The codebreakers of Hut Six at Bletchley Park in the English countryside forty miles (64 km) north of London, where scientists, mathematicians, and chess masters are working against time to solve the secrets of the German Enigma enciphering machine, have made a significant breakthrough. They have broken the Luftwaffe’s “Red” key using their first British-built Bombe, an electro-mechanical device that can do hundreds of computations every minute. This means that all the Luftwaffe’s operational and administrative traffic can be read despite the added security devices built into the Enigmas in preparation for the assault on the West.

British government takes emergency powers

Today, Parliament takes less than three hours to rush into law the most drastic legislation known in British history. It gives the government almost unlimited power over the life, liberty, and property of everyone in the land.

Under the Emergency Powers Act, banks, the munitions industry, profits, wages, and working conditions are all now subject to rigorous state control. There is also an unprecedented mobilization of manpower.

In his first speech as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Premier in the new government, Clement Attlee urges the nation to keep calm. “Everyone should continue at their jobs until ordered otherwise,” he says.

At the same time, Ernest Bevin is being given dictatorial power, as Minister of Labour and National Service, to direct anyone to do anything needed in the struggle for national survival.

With the emergency powers settled, MPs now quickly pass a Treachery Act redefining the scope of traitorous acts punishable by death.

On paper, and to a great extent in practice too, during WWII Britain effectively became a dictatorship with the same sort of power over its citizens as the Soviet government. Given the situation it found itself in, this was both understandable and necessary. And the same goes for the Soviet government too - existential threats have a way of doing that to governments.

[Doug64]

On paper, and to a great extent in practice too, during WWII Britain effectively became a dictatorship with the same sort of power over its citizens as the Soviet government. Given the situation it found itself in, this was both understandable and necessary. And the same goes for the Soviet government too - existential threats have a way of doing that to governments.

Yes, we can thank this period in Britain--and Orwell's experiences working for the government while it was happening--for 1984. In that book, he just took what he observed and experienced and cranked it up to 11.

[Potemkin]

Yes, we can thank this period in Britain--and Orwell's experiences working for the government while it was happening--for 1984. In that book, he just took what he observed and experienced and cranked it up to 11.

Indeed. And it’s no accident that Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 was set in WWII as well. The fundamental absurdity of modern war is what inspired them both to write protest novels to get it out of their system. And I’m not even going to talk about Slaughterhouse-5….

[Doug64]

May 23, Thursday

Fascists detained under defense rules

Sir Oswald Mosley and 33 other Fascists, including a member of Parliament, are arrested today on the orders of Britain’s Home Secretary. Under Defence Regulation 18B, he has powers to detain members of organizations which may be used for purposes prejudicial to national security.

Mosley is arrested on returning to his apartment in Dolphin Square in London. After a lightning raid on the office of the British Union of Fascists in Great Smith Street, eight other leading members are arrested. The MP arrested is Captain A.M. Ramsay, the member for Peebles and president of the anti-Semitic Right Club.

The male detainees are taken to Brixton Prison. Six women detainees were in Holloway Prison last night. An official of the Ministry of Health, a secret Fascist, is also arrested.

[Potemkin]

May 23, Thursday

Fascists detained under defense rules

Sir Oswald Mosley and 33 other Fascists, including a member of Parliament, are arrested today on the orders of Britain’s Home Secretary. Under Defence Regulation 18B, he has powers to detain members of organizations which may be used for purposes prejudicial to national security.

Mosley is arrested on returning to his apartment in Dolphin Square in London. After a lightning raid on the office of the British Union of Fascists in Great Smith Street, eight other leading members are arrested. The MP arrested is Captain A.M. Ramsay, the member for Peebles and president of the anti-Semitic Right Club.

The male detainees are taken to Brixton Prison. Six women detainees were in Holloway Prison last night. An official of the Ministry of Health, a secret Fascist, is also arrested.

Legally dubious, but politically necessary.

[Doug64]

Legally dubious, but politically necessary.

Not legally dubious at all. I suspect there's a good reason this happened the day after the government gave itself dictatorial emergency powers.

[Potemkin]

Not legally dubious at all. I suspect there's a good reason this happened the day after the government gave itself dictatorial emergency powers.

Indeed, but giving itself dictatorial emergency powers was legally dubious. Why was it bad for Hitler to give himself dictatorial emergency powers, but okay for Churchill to do it?