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At the highest level, the history books read: “The Allies defeated Germany in May 1945.” Yet the most ferocious conflict in world history is, quite literally, a bottomless pit of facts, information and incredible stories.

I refer to these as the tentacles of war. For every military action, there was an army of civilians working in factories, engineers sitting at drawing boards, or pilots flying Royal Air Force aircraft from the factories to front line squadrons. There were, of course, the Bevin Boys, men like my grandfather who helped to keep Britain running by mining coal.

Chain Home

Chain Home, or CH, was an ingenious system and the world’s first military radar system. CH was crucial to Britain’s war effort. Without it, Britain would not have been able to detect Luftwaffe planes across the English Channel. In 1935, Robert Watson Watt and his team detected an aircraft flying nearby. By 1937, Watson Watt was able to read an aircraft’s height, and so began the appearance of the Chain Home system along Britain’s south and east coastlines.

I served as an Air Defender in the Royal Artillery from 2009 to 2017, yet it’s hard to imagine the scale of Britain’s air defence throughout the war. You can still visit one of the CH towers in Canewdon, Essex.

Hitler believed that if Germany controlled the air, he could launch an invasion of Britain, effectively forcing an Allied surrender. Remember, the United States of America was still neutral in 1940. On 27 July 1940, Bob Higgins and co., working at Warner Brothers Studios, created Bugs Bunny.

The Army, local RAF ground crews and the Home Guard were expected to defend Britain’s airfields. The RAF Regiment had not been raised and would not appear until 1942.

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Recently, I visited the Battle of Britain Memorial in Capel-le-Ferne, Kent. During the visit, I stood on the cliffs looking out to sea, but I didn’t see much that day. A bank of rolling fog reduced visibility.

Just imagine being on sentry duty, scanning the horizon for an armada of Junkers 88s escorted by Messerschmitt Bf 109s. It must have been terrifying, yet gratifying to hear the amazing sound of the Spitfire’s Rolls Royce Merlin engine.

On 29 July 1940, a few miles down the road from Capel-le-Ferne, the Port of Dover came under attack from the Luftwaffe, as did the Bristol Aircraft Factory in the West Country.

Thankfully, CH gave an early warning, allowing the RAF to launch its squadrons of Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes. It was the latter RAF fighter, designed by Sir Sydney Camm, that inflicted more damage on the Luftwaffe than its famous cousin. We’ll discuss those numbers later this year.

“I tend to give an example of the bulldog and the greyhound, the Hurricane being the bulldog and the greyhound being the Spitfire. One’s a sort of tough working animal and the other one’s a sleek, fast dog.” Pilot Geoffrey Page

On this day in 1940, 30 July, low cloud and inclement weather hampered Luftwaffe attacks. As a result, civilians came under machine gun fire in the south west boroughs of Richmond and Balham.

The Luftwaffe continued its attacks on Britain’s airfields from the end of July 1940 and throughout August. Those tactics would soon change, as we shall discover.

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The LDV is arguably better known through the 1970s BBC sitcom, Dad’s Army. The organisation was founded on 10th May 1940 by Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War. Eden made a radio broadcast asking for men aged between 17 and 65 to volunteer to protect their local communities.

The LDV started life poorly equipped. Men enrolled via local police stations, and numbers swelled to just under 1.5 million. Those numbers tell you a lot about a nation’s unity.

The Home Guard is Born

On 23 July 1940, Eden announced to the House of Commons that the government intended to give the Local Defence Volunteers the new title Home Guard. Volunteers would carry the initials HG.

The Home Guard had several duties:

• Guarding towns, factories, collieries, communications and other vulnerable locations.

• Watching for German parachutists and airborne troops.

• Reporting enemy movements to regular military formations. Operating roadblocks and checking suspicious vehicles.

• Supporting the regular Army during an invasion.

• Providing static defence within local areas.

A local Home Guard Story

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Elsecar is a small village on the outskirts of Barnsley, South Yorkshire. It’s the village where I was born and bred. For over 100 years Elsecar produced coal, dug by local miners. Located half a mile west of where Elsecar Colliery once stood is Elsecar Reservoir.

My eldest uncle told me a story about how his grandfather was a Platoon Sergeant based in nearby Hoyland, at the Town Hall. Hoyland’s Home Guard formed part of the wider network of West Riding battalions defending the Barnsley and Staincross district. The closest identified formation was the 72nd West Riding Battalion, based at Ward Green and affiliated to the York and Lancaster Regiment.

Hoyland Platoon were responsible for patrolling around Elsecar Reservoir. I can imagine the platoon’s volunteers stood on the banks of the reservoir, rifles slung over their shoulders, eyes and ears wide open, wondering if a German invasion would come. Thankfully, that day didn’t come.

Geoff Steer, from St Helens, Elsecar, told his story, which was published on the Second World War Experience website (source).

September 3rd 1939, Sunday morning war was declared. How long would it last, some said 12 months, most people did not comment. They had been through the First World War. On that Sunday night the sirens went. Everybody was alerted and most people stayed up all night but afterwards we found out it was only a practice.

At work things changed. Mates went off to join up or were called up. Along with other workmates I was deferred ’til our two years were up in the Engineering Foundry. We did try to join but were sent back on two occasions. Coming home from work one night in the summer of 1940 on my pushbike, coming to the bottom of our street by the Clothiers Arms, about one hundred men were sat down on the pavement, without packs or rifles, some with just their khaki trousers on. They were absolutely shattered. These soldiers had escaped from Dunkirk. This was my first glimpse of war and the army brought to our doorstep. The soldiers were billeted in and around Elsecar, and next-door to us, so I had hours listening to their stories of the war in France. Eventually they were all recalled to their units and life settled down once again.

At work I moved from the Foundry to the Stove and Grate department making steam ovens and KH cookers for the army. The hours were long – 7 days a week and overtime every night. Meanwhile I joined the Home Guard, our LDV, while others joined the firewatchers either at work or at home. The training in the Home Guard stood me in good stead for later on in the army.

A Radio Call to Bolster Britain’s Last Line of Defence

Britain's last line of defence began not with tanks but with a radio appeal. In May 1940, as invasion loomed, well over a million ordinary men answered Anthony Eden's call and enrolled in the Local Defence Volunteers, later renamed the Home Guard. This is their story, from Eden's broadcast to a platoon of Barnsley miners watching the banks of Elsecar Reservoir, rifles slung, waiting for an invasion that never came.

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Welcome back to Project World War 2. When we think of war, we might think of military hardware, soldiers in trenches, or airplanes on bombing runs, and that got me thinking. What about civilians? I have been on the receiving end of artillery and mortar fire.

It was frightening. The sound of incoming rounds, the uncertainty of where they would land, really spikes your anxiety, and it can produce a fear that is very hard to control.

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But I was a soldier. I was in uniform, with adequat body armour, surrounded by other soldiers. Military ops is a place where danger is expected. In contrast to what the civilians of 1940 went through, I was not sitting in my own front room in East London or Sheffield. I was not lying awake listening to engines overhead and wondering whether the next bomb (or downed plane) would come down on the house where my family was sleeping.

Through the summer of 1940, families across southern England lived underneath a battle that would help decide the future of the country. The Imperial War Museum date the Battle of Britain from 10 July to 31 October 1940. For the pilots the Battle of Britain was fought in cockpits and operations rooms. For everyone on the ground it was sirens, aircraft engines, explosions, shortages and long stretches of waiting.

So far in this series we have watched the battle mostly from above. This time I want to stay on the ground, because the diaries and published notes people left behind give us something the operational records never can. They tell us what it felt like to live beneath it.

When the war reached the village

On 6 July 1940, only days before the official start of the battle, the writer Mollie Panter Downes described life in an English village that sat just behind a coastal defence area.

The village still looked peaceful. Roses, honeysuckle and clematis covered the houses. Yet bombs had already fallen nearby, and gunfire had become part of ordinary life. As she put it: “Now, in July, it’s right here, a part of the everyday communal life.”

The first air raid warning had brought everyone out of bed. Parents dressed, carried their children downstairs and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. When the warning sounded again the next night, some people simply stayed where they were. They had already started to judge the danger for themselves, waiting for the guns before deciding whether it was worth getting up.

Then a German bomber arrived with no warning at all and dropped three bombs on common land a few miles away. It came back later and dropped five more. Another bomb tore a crater in a road and blew in the windows of a hardware shop.

One woman’s response was simply: “It fair made me jump.”

There is something very British in those five words.

When fear became ordinary

The striking thing about civilian accounts from that July is how quickly the extraordinary turned ordinary.

People still went to work. They queued in shops, cooked meals, minded children and listened to Winston Churchill’s radio broadcasts. The war did not sweep away the small concerns of daily life. It sat down right beside them.

On 16 July, the London welfare worker Vere Hodgson noted the shortage of eggs in the capital and concluded, with a shrug you can almost hear: “I shall have to switch over to baked beans.”

It is a tiny remark, and that is exactly why it matters. We remember the Battle of Britain through aircraft, pilots and dogfights. Hodgson reminds us that ordinary people still had to decide what to put on the table. Her answer was practical. Eggs were hard to find, so she would eat beans.

A great deal of resilience looked like that, just a an ordinary person adjusting breakfast and getting on with the day. The line comes from her published wartime diary, Few Eggs and No Oranges.

A city that might become a battlefield

For George Orwell, the threat of invasion changed his outlook in familiar environments.

Walking through London at the end of July 1940, he found himself, as he wrote, “looking up at the windows.” He was working out which of them would make good machine gun positions if German troops ever reached the capital.

You get the sense of what civilians were thinking. A window was no longer just part of a building. It might become a firing point. A road might become a front line. A quiet neighbourhood might have to be defended house by house. Britain had already watched Poland defeated, Norway invaded, the Low Countries overrun and France collapse. By late July, a German invasion was not a plot from a novel. It was something the government, the military and the public were actively preparing for.

Let’s not forget about the Local Defence Volunteers. Despite their lack of weapons and uniforms, over 1.5 million men stepped foward to defend local communities.

And yet Orwell did not spend every waking moment on invasion. A few days later he recorded seeing a heron flying over Baker Street, and wondered whether the drop in traffic was drawing more birds into the middle of London.

That contrast rings true. Fear did not swallow every minute. People still noticed the birds, the weather, the food, the neighbours and the thousand small things that carried on regardless.

The same storm, unequal shelter

The artist Stella Bowen felt the crisis had created a new sense of shared danger. Writing in the summer of 1940, she suggested that “we are all swimming for our lives in the same stormy waters.”

There was real truth in it. Air raids did throw neighbours together. People shared shelters, checked on damaged houses, joined civil defence units and watched for fires. Old distinctions could suddenly feel very small.

But Britain in 1940 was not a country without divisions. Wealthier families had more room to leave a threatened area. Some had a house in the country, a car of their own, or the money to rent somewhere comfortable and safe. The whole country may have been in the same storm. Not everyone had the same protection from it.

Bowen still caught something real about that summer. The survival of the country had become a shared concern, even when the risks and the sacrifices were shared very unequally.

Living beside RAF Biggin Hill

It is hard to imagine the strain on families living close to RAF Biggin Hill in Kent.

Biggin Hill was a vital Fighter Command station guarding London and the south east. That importance kept it safe in one sense and put it in terrible danger in another, because it made the airfield and everything around it a target. Historic England records that Biggin Hill shared with RAF Hornchurch the grim distinction of being the most heavily bombed aerodrome in Fighter Command.

I am not going to reach for a dramatic bomb tally to make the point land harder. The precise number dropped on Biggin Hill during the battle is not something I can stand behind from a reliable source, and the verified record is powerful enough on its own. A map in the RAF Biggin Hill musuem depicts the whole are peppered with German bomb strikes.

On the evening of 30 August 1940, nine Junkers Ju 88 bombers came in low and fast in a surprise attack on the station. A bomb went straight into a shelter trench. Thirty nine people were killed and dozens more were injured. Workshops, stores, barracks, the living quarters used by the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and a hangar were wrecked.

For the families living nearby, there was no guarantee that a bomb meant for a runway or a hangar would stay inside the airfield boundary. Bombs did not always land where they were aimed. Why? Precision bombing just wasn’t a thing for either the Luftwaffe or the Royal Air Force. Junkers 88s could fly at over 300 mph, their, crews were under fire, smoke hid the ground, all adding to the confusion. A small error could put a bomb load meant for the RAF station straight onto homes and shops.

Those residents needed Biggin Hill. Its pilots were defending them and the capital beyond them. Yet the airfield was also the reason the Luftwaffe kept coming to their doorstep. Their protection and their danger sat on the very same ground.

Why This Matters

My own time under incoming fire gives me a small way in to the physical part of this. You hear the sound. You wait for the impact. You wonder where the next one will fall. On that much, the soldier and the civilian are not so far apart.

But there is a line between the two that I keep coming back to.

A soldier has training, kit and comrades. There is at least something you can do. You can take cover and follow a well rehearsed drill. The danger is part of the job you were sent to do. A civilian sitting in a house near Biggin Hill had none of that. They might have had an Anderson shelter, a cellar, a reinforced room, a sense of where the nearest public shelter was. But they could not touch the battle happening above their heads. They could not turn the bombers away, patch up a damaged fighter or defend the airfield. They could only gather their family, listen, and wait.

That is why these diaries matter to me. The civilian story of 1940 often gets flattened into tea, brave smiles and cheerful defiance. The people who actually lived it left us something more honest. They were frightened, and the fear lived right alongside irritation, humour and the plain business of getting through the day. They worried about invasion, then complained about lost sleep.

The pilots fought the battle in the sky. The ground crews kept the aircraft flying. The observers tracked the raids and the emergency services cleared up what was left. Beneath all of them were millions of people who could do very little except keep living their lives while a battle went on overhead.

For a family near Biggin Hill, every engine carried two possibilities. It might be RAF fighters climbing to defend them. Or it might be the Luftwaffe coming back.

What comes next

Through the rest of the summer the weight of the attack would begin to shift. The airfields would take a terrible pounding into early September, and then the Luftwaffe would turn towards the cities. The experience set down here by a handful of diarists, the sirens, the shortages, the waiting, was about to become the daily experience of millions.

We will follow them there.

Out!

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Those who have been reading my work for some time will know that I served in the British Army. Over the course of 25 years I served all over the world, including on multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan.

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During my first tour of Iraq I stumbled across some Royal Air Force war graves. Even as a serving soldier it was hard to comprehend how large Britain’s military had once been. During my career I was fortunate enough to serve alongside most branches of the military, from working with fast jets in an air defence role, to providing operational support to a minesweeper dock in Bangor, Northern Ireland. I even acted as support staff for Special Forces. But there was one branch I never got to experience.

The Submarine Service.

And that got me thinking.

If you had to fight in the Second World War, which branch would you choose?

That is a difficult question, and because I know what I know, I would stick with the army.

The Films and the Books

To understand what life was like below the surface of the sea, I would urge you to watch Das Boot, the 1981 film directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Nearly four decades later, in 2018, came a television series of the same name, which reached British audiences on Sky Atlantic. Both the film and TV series are excellent, with the latter depticing what life was like for young sailors on shore leave. There was lots of fighting, drinking and prostitution (a theme we will return to in a future edition).

I have read James Holland’s Brothers in Arms three times. The book follows the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, a regiment with roots in the last days of horsed cavalry that was remade as an armoured unit in 1942. By D-Day, 6 June 1944, the Rangers were ready to take on the best the German army could send against them in Normandy. From there they fought through the bocage, on into the Netherlands during Operation Market Garden, across the Rhine and beyond, and became the first British troops to cross into Germany.

Holland tells their story through the wartime diaries of their commanding officer, Stanley Christopherson, and the recollections of the men themselves. Many of the accounts are hard to imagine.

One of them was David Render, a nineteen year old troop leader fresh from Sandhurst who joined the Rangers within days of the landings and was handed command of battle hardened men who did not expect him to last. He survived, fought all the way into Germany, and later set his own war down in a memoir, Tank Action.

David also witnessed a Sherman tank plummeting to the sea bed a few days after D-Day. To my horror, I learned that the two unfortunate souls were just left to drown in their steel coffin. War is horrible.

The Smell of World War 2 Service

Having said all that, I could not imagine the fear of being trapped in a submarine while depth charges hunted for their target.

During my service with 7th Armoured Brigade, I worked on tracked vehicles. It is hard work maintaining them, and everybody carries that smell of sweat, grime, diesel and the general stench of living in the field.

But I cannot imagine the stench of life on a British or German submarine. If you have watched the Das Boot series you will have noticed the tonnes of food supplies crammed into every corner, including all that beef and pork.

So here are two first hand accounts that capture the reality of life beneath the sea during the Second World War.

Two Voices From Below The Atlantic

A British submarine

Well, the H class submarines were not built for creature comforts at all. You ate wherever you could. You ate whatever was available. Accommodation itself is very, very primitive. The lucky blokes slept on the deck. The problem was finding space in which to sleep. That’s what I call rough living, bloody rough living.

Francis Selby, a British born Royal Navy submariner who served in the North Sea and the Mediterranean, recalling life aboard an H class boat. His oral testimony is held in the Australians at War Film Archive and was retold by History Guild in its article “Life aboard a submarine in the Med during WW2.”

A German U-boat

The stench of 51 sweating seamen, diesel oil, rotting food, and moldy bread mingled with the noisome odors that emanated from the galley and the two tiny washrooms.

Herbert A. Werner, former U-boat officer, describing life aboard a Type VII boat.

Reference: Herbert A. Werner, Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-boat Battles of World War II (first published 1969). Werner survived the war as one of only a handful of U-boat commanders to do so, and his account remains one of the best known descriptions of conditions inside a German boat.

A Useful Comparison

Both British submarines and German U-boats were extraordinarily cramped, humid and exhausting places to serve. British submariners often complained of primitive accommodation, damp conditions and constant rolling, especially in the smaller boats. German crews endured similar hardships but on far longer Atlantic patrols, where diesel fumes, mould, stale air and the lack of washing facilities became the defining features of daily life.

Despite serving on opposite sides, veterans from both navies often described their boats as little more than steel tubes in which survival depended as much on mental resilience as on seamanship.

Why This Matters

I have carried the smell of the field. Sweat, diesel, cold rations, weeks without a proper wash. On a tracked vehicle you learn to stop noticing it, and you learn that the discomfort is never really the point. The point is getting through each day as best you can.

But even after 25 years, I read Selby’s words and Werner’s words and I know I am reading about something I never had to face. My discomfort had a horizon. I could get out, walk on solid ground, breathe clean air. These men could not. When the depth charges started, there was no ground to walk on and nowhere to go. You sat in the dark, in the stink, and you waited to find out whether the sea would let you back up. Sailors on both sides of the war had to endure extreme anxiety.

Just imagine life aboard a submarine. The moldy bread. The two tiny washrooms. The lucky ones who got to sleep on the deck. Strip away the flags and the sides, and you are left with young men in a metal box under the sea, trusting each other to keep them alive. Remember that, and the numbers stop being numbers.

Coming Up

I am reasearching how the Wolf Packs hunted the endless supplies of Allied convoys shipping food, raw materials and military hardware from North America to the shores of Britain, and from Britain to the Soviet Union. The Battle of the Atlantic was a deadly game of cat and mouse. Stay tuned.

Out!

But look down. Look west, past Land’s End, out into the vast cold reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. Because while the fighter pilots duel in the sunlight, another battle has been raging almost unseen. It did not begin this month. It did not begin with the fall of France. It began on the very first day of the war, and it has not stopped since.

This is the Battle of the Atlantic. And in July 1940, it is about to get much, much worse.

The War That Started on Day One

Cast your mind back to 3 September 1939. Britain declared war on Germany that morning. By evening, the war at sea had already claimed its first victims.

The SS Athenia, a passenger liner of the Donaldson Atlantic Line, had sailed from Glasgow bound for Montreal, calling at Liverpool and Belfast before turning west into the Atlantic. She was unarmed. She was carrying over a thousand passengers, among them women, children and refugees fleeing the coming storm in Europe.

At around 7.40pm, some two hundred miles off the northwest coast of Ireland, a torpedo from the German submarine U-30 slammed into her engine room. The Athenia sank the following morning. More than a hundred passengers and crew died. She was the first British ship lost in the Second World War, sunk within hours of the declaration, and the outcry was international. Germany denied responsibility entirely, and would go on denying it for years.

The Battle of the Atlantic had begun before most people in Britain had finished absorbing the news that they were at war at all.

Blood in the Water: Courageous and Royal Oak

The U-boats did not stop with merchant ships and liners. In the opening weeks of the war, they went after the Royal Navy itself, and they drew blood twice in quick succession.

On 17 September 1939, exactly two weeks into the war, the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous was on patrol off the coast of Ireland when U-29 put two torpedoes into her port side. She capsized and went down in around twenty minutes. According to the Imperial War Museum, 518 men were lost with her, along with every aircraft of 811 and 822 Naval Air Squadrons. She was the first British warship sunk by the enemy in this war.

Then came Scapa Flow.

Scapa Flow, the great natural anchorage in Orkney, was the home of the Home Fleet. It was supposed to be impregnable. In the early hours of 14 October 1939, the German submarine U-47, commanded by Günther Prien, threaded its way through the defences and into the anchorage itself. There, Prien torpedoed the battleship HMS Royal Oak at her moorings. She rolled over and sank in minutes. Eight hundred and thirty five men and boys died, and over a hundred of them were boy sailors in their teens.

A German U-boat had penetrated the most sacred harbour of the Royal Navy and sunk a battleship in what should have been the safest water in Britain. The shock ran through the country like a current. In Germany, Prien came home a national hero.

The Grim Arithmetic

Since those opening months, the pattern has been relentless. Britain is an island that cannot feed itself or fuel itself from its own resources. Everything, from food to oil to steel to the raw materials of war, must come in by sea. The Admiralty gathered merchant ships into escorted convoys from the earliest days of the war, just as it had learned to do in the last one, but the escorts are stretched thin and the ocean is enormous.

The Imperial War Museum records that between September 1939 and May 1940, over 300 Allied ships were sunk in the Atlantic, against just 24 U-boats lost. Read that again. Three hundred ships for twenty four submarines. That is the exchange rate of this battle so far, and it is an arithmetic that Britain cannot sustain forever.

And now, in the summer of 1940, the arithmetic is about to tilt further in Germany’s favour.

The Fall of France Changes Everything at Sea

We covered the fall of France as it happened: the collapse in May and June, the armistice signed at Compiègne. But the consequences of that surrender do not end at the French coastline. They extend far out into the Atlantic.

Until now, German U-boats have had to sail from bases in Germany itself, making a long and dangerous passage around the British Isles before they could even begin hunting in the Atlantic. No longer. With the French Atlantic coast in German hands, Admiral Karl Dönitz, the commander of the U-boat arm, moved with remarkable speed. He arrived at the Breton port of Lorient on 23 June 1940, barely a day after the armistice was signed, and selected it as one of a string of new U-boat bases along the French coast, alongside Brest, Saint Nazaire, La Pallice and Bordeaux.

On 7 July 1940, just days before the Luftwaffe opened its assault on the Channel convoys, the first U-boat sailed into Lorient to take on fuel and torpedoes from a French port. Her number is worth pausing on. She was U-30. The same submarine that sank the Athenia on the first day of the war has now become the first to operate from conquered France.

The French bases place the U-boats hundreds of miles closer to Britain’s Atlantic lifelines. Patrols that once burned days in transit can now begin almost immediately. More boats can spend more time in the hunting grounds. For the merchant seamen crossing the Atlantic, the ocean just became a far more dangerous place.

Why This Matters

I keep coming back to a simple truth as I write this series, and it is this: the Battle of Britain will decide whether Britain can be invaded, but the Battle of the Atlantic will decide whether Britain can survive.

Every Spitfire climbing out of Biggin Hill burns fuel that crossed the Atlantic in a tanker. Every loaf of bread on a ration book exists because a merchant ship made it through. The fighter pilots will rightly be remembered as the Few, but behind them stands an army of merchant seamen, thousands of ordinary civilians in oilskins, who sail into waters they know are hunted, again and again, because if they stop, Britain starves.

Churchill himself, writing after the war, confessed that ”the only thing that ever really frightened me” was the peril posed by the U-boats. Not the Luftwaffe. Not invasion. The slow, silent strangulation of the sea lanes. When the man who never blinked admits to fear, we should pay attention to what frightened him.

The battle in the sky will be counted in weeks and months. The battle in the Atlantic will be counted in years. It is the longest campaign of this entire war, and in July 1940 it is only just revealing its true shape.

What Comes Next

The Luftwaffe’s raids on the Channel convoys are intensifying by the day, and the great air battle over southern England is still building towards its climax. Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic, U-boat crews operating from their new French bases are about to enjoy a period of hunting so successful that they will give it a name of their own. We will get to that.

The sky and the sea. Two battles, one survival.

Out!

But before we climb back into the cockpit, I want to take you somewhere quieter. Look down from those contrails over Kent and Sussex, past the wheeling fighters, to the fields below. Because while the most famous air battle in history was being fought overhead, another battle for Britain’s survival was being fought in the soil. This special instalment runs a little ahead of our main timeline, through the harvest of 1940, before we return to the air war.

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The Hungry Island

Britain went to war in September 1939 as a nation that could not feed itself. In 1939 the country was importing around 55 million tonnes of food every year, and roughly 70 percent of what the British people ate came from abroad. Meat, cheese, sugar, fruit, cereals, butter: nearly all of it arrived by ship, along sea lanes that German submarines were already hunting.

Everyone in Whitehall understood the arithmetic. Every acre of wheat grown at home was cargo space freed for weapons, fuel and men. Every field left idle was a gift to the enemy. In January 1940, bacon, butter and sugar went on the ration. The war for food had begun before a single Spitfire had fired its guns in the Battle of Britain.

The Plough Up

Remarkably, the government had moved before the war even started. In May 1939, four months before the invasion of Poland, the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, announced that farmers would be paid £2 for every acre of old permanent grassland they ploughed up and brought back into cultivation. Land that had lain under grass for seven years or more was to feel the plough again, and the state would pay for it. The scheme was backed by the Agriculture Development Act of 1939.

When war came, the machinery was ready. County War Agricultural Executive Committees, soon known simply as the War Ags, took charge in every county, staffed by local farmers and landowners who knew their ground. In October 1939 the government set the target: one and a half million additional acres under crops in time for the 1940 harvest, with the ploughing grant extended to the end of March 1940. Ministers publicly pledged that farmers would be helped with the initial outlay and that returns under wartime policy would be adequate for the task.

Did it work? On 23 May 1940, as the German panzers raced for the Channel coast, the House of Commons heard the answer. Farmers in England and Wales had ploughed 1,542,236 additional acres, beating the target by some 42,000 acres. While the British Expeditionary Force was falling back on Dunkirk, British farmers had already won their first campaign of the war.

Land Girls and a Living Wage

Labour was the other half of the problem. Farm workers were being called up, and someone had to replace them. On 1 June 1939 the Women’s Land Army was revived under the formidable Lady Denman, who ran it from her own Sussex home, Balcombe Place. Around a thousand trained volunteers were already on farms when war was declared, and by the spring of 1940 roughly six thousand Land Girls were at work, ploughing, milking, catching rats and driving tractors, many of them straight from towns and cities.

And the men who remained on the land finally saw their pay addressed. In the summer of 1940, with government pressure behind it, a national minimum wage of 48 shillings a week was established for adult male farm workers, a significant rise for one of the worst paid occupations in the country. The message from the state was unmistakable: feeding Britain was war work, and it would be paid like it mattered.

A New Man at the Ministry

Churchill’s arrival in Downing Street on 10 May 1940 reached into the ministry too. On 14 May he dismissed Dorman-Smith, who had been close to the farming lobby but whom the new Prime Minister judged not equal to the emergency, and replaced him with Robert Hudson, a politician who had visited Moscow in 1939 to argue for better Anglo-Soviet relations.

Hudson would hold the post for the rest of the war, driving production relentlessly and pressing every usable acre into service. Whatever else changed in those chaotic May days, the direction of agricultural policy did not waver: grow more, plough more, waste nothing.

Harvest Under Fire

Now come back to July 1940, and to the South East, where all of this collided with the air war.

Kent and Sussex were the front line. The Luftwaffe’s fighters in the Pas de Calais were a mere six minutes’ flying time from the RAF station at Hawkinge, near Folkestone. The Dover and Folkestone corner of Kent came under bombing and long range shelling from German guns on the French coast, earning it the grim nickname of Hellfire Corner. And directly beneath the greatest air battle ever fought lay some of the most productive farmland in England, in the middle of harvest.

The farmers and Land Girls of the South East gathered in the 1940 harvest under the dogfights. The evidence of the battle fell into their fields, sometimes literally. In July 1940 a German bomber was brought down in a hop garden near Marden in Kent. Near Lewes in Sussex, locals gathered around a Messerschmitt fighter that came down in a field, its pilot taken prisoner. In August a Stuka dive bomber ended its war at Bowley Farm at South Mundham in West Sussex. Across both counties, wreckage, craters and unexploded bombs became part of the working landscape, and the harvest went on around them.

Sheep Off the Marsh

Nowhere shows the strangeness of that summer better than Romney Marsh, the great sheep pasture on the Kent and Sussex coast. German invasion planning marked the flat coastline of Kent and Sussex as landing ground, and the Marsh sat squarely in the danger zone. Precautions followed. The government arranged for the best sheep of each flock to be taken at a fixed price and moved for safekeeping to inland counties, preserving the famous Romney breed against whatever was coming. Local histories record around 200,000 sheep on the Marsh in 1939; over the course of the war the flocks were roughly halved while arable farming on the Marsh expanded several times over. Even the sheep, it turned out, had their part in the defence of the realm.

Why This Matters

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. In 1940, food was not a lifestyle question or a line in a trade negotiation. It was a weapon, as surely as the Spitfire or the destroyer. And the government of the day acted like it. It paid farmers hard cash to plough, committed itself publicly to adequate returns, recruited an army of women to work the land, and put a floor under farm workers’ wages, all while fighting for national survival. Farming was not left to fend for itself in Britain’s darkest hour; it was placed at the centre of the war effort.

Eighty six years later, Back British Farming is once again a rallying cry, and British farmers are once again asking whether the state truly stands behind the people who feed the country. I will leave you to judge how today’s support measures up against 1940’s. But the history is not ambiguous: when Britain’s back was against the wall, backing British farming was not a slogan. It was survival policy, funded and enforced from the top.

Sources

• Hansard, 3 May 1939 (Emergency Proposals: £2 per acre ploughing grant announcement)

• Hansard, 19 October 1939 (Food Production, Government Proposals)

• Hansard, 23 May 1940 (Grassland Ploughing: acreage results)

• Hansard, 30 May and 13 June 1940 (Farm Workers’ Wages; National Minimum Wage, 48s)

• Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading (wartime food imports and rationing)

• Imperial War Museums (Battle of Britain photographs and Kent airfields)

• Kent Battle of Britain Museum, Hawkinge (RAF Hawkinge and Hellfire Corner)

• West Sussex Record Office (downed aircraft on Sussex farms, 1940)

• Romney Marsh Research Trust monograph: Sheep Keeping and Lookers’ Huts on Romney Marsh (1998)

• KentOnline archive (Marden hop garden bomber, July 1940)

The Hardest Order

Here was the problem that kept the War Cabinet awake through the last week of June 1940. The French Navy was the fourth largest in the world, and it was largely intact. Its finest squadron, including the modern battlecruisers Dunkerque and Strasbourg, lay at anchor at Mers el Kébir, a naval base near Oran on the Algerian coast. Article 8 of the armistice required the French fleet to gather in designated ports, where it would be demobilised and disarmed under German or Italian control, and Berlin solemnly declared it had no intention of using the ships. Churchill did not believe a word of it. If that fleet passed into German or Italian hands, Britain could lose command of the sea, and with it the war.

So the Admiralty drew up Operation Catapult. A new squadron, Force H under Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville, sailed from Gibraltar with the battlecruiser Hood, the battleships Valiant and Resolution, and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. On the morning of 3 July 1940, Force H arrived off Mers el Kébir and presented the French commander, Admiral Marcel Gensoul, with an ultimatum. Sail with us and fight. Sail to a British port. Sail to the French West Indies and sit out the war. Or scuttle your ships where they lie.

Somerville hated every part of it. These were men who had been allies ten days earlier. The Admiralty’s signal to him acknowledged as much, calling it one of the most disagreeable and difficult tasks a British admiral had ever faced. Gensoul, proud and cornered, refused every option and signalled that force would be met with force.

The negotiations dragged through the heat of the day. They failed. Shortly before six in the evening, the fifteen inch guns of Force H opened fire on the anchored French fleet. In roughly ten minutes of bombardment the battleship Bretagne blew up and capsized, other ships were crippled, and 1,297 French sailors were dead. Strasbourg fought her way out of the harbour and escaped to Toulon. British losses in the action were five aircraft and two men.

The Message It Sent

When Churchill reported the action to the House of Commons on 4 July, he spoke of the measures with sincere sorrow. By his own later account, it was this speech, not the famous ones, that finally won over the Conservative MPs who had regarded him with reserve since May. Not because anyone celebrated dead French sailors, but because of what the act proved.

Understand what the world believed in early July 1940. Most neutral observers, and plenty of people in Washington, assumed Britain would negotiate within weeks. Mers el Kébir ended that conversation. A nation preparing to seek terms does not open fire on the fleet of its oldest ally to keep those ships out of enemy hands. President Roosevelt, told of the attack, said he would have done the same thing. In the brutal arithmetic of 1940, that American reaction may have been worth more to Britain’s survival than the ships themselves.

The price was real. Vichy France broke off relations and bombed Gibraltar in reprisal, and the bitterness at Mers el Kébir poisoned Anglo French relations for years. Churchill carried it for the rest of his life. But nobody, anywhere, doubted any longer that Britain meant to fight.

The Channel Becomes a Battlefield

While Force H was steaming back to Gibraltar, the Luftwaffe was moving onto the airfields of northern France, some of its fighters now based within sight of the Dover cliffs. Hermann Göring, who had assured Hitler his air force could bring Britain to its knees, gave orders at the end of June to begin drawing the RAF into battle.

The Germans called this opening phase the Kanalkampf, the Channel battle. The targets were the coastal convoys, the small, slow, unglamorous colliers and coasters carrying coal and supplies along the south coast. The logic was simple and cold. Attack the convoys, and the RAF must come up to defend them. Every fighter destroyed over the Channel in July was one that could not defend the airfields in August.

Systematic attacks on shipping began on 4 July, when Stuka dive bombers struck at Portland. But it is 10 July 1940 that British history records as the opening day of the Battle of Britain. That morning a convoy codenamed Bread was rounding the North Foreland when the Luftwaffe found it. By mid afternoon roughly 70 German aircraft were battling around 30 RAF fighters over the Dover Straits. Vapour trails snaked across the summer sky while people watched from the cliffs. When it was over, the convoy sailed on with the loss of a single small ship.

The battle Churchill had named three weeks earlier had begun.

The Machinery of Defence

One last thing before we leave July, because it explains everything that follows. The RAF that rose to meet the Luftwaffe was outnumbered. At the start of July, Fighter Command could field roughly 750 serviceable fighters against a German force of over 4,000 aircraft, including more than 1,100 single seat fighters and some 1,800 bombers and dive bombers.

But numbers were never the whole story. Britain possessed something no defender had ever possessed before: the Dowding System. A chain of radar stations along the coast, thousands of Observer Corps volunteers with binoculars and field telephones, and a filtering and plotting network that fed it all to Fighter Command headquarters at Bentley Priory and out to the group operations rooms. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, austere, awkward, and utterly unbending, had led Fighter Command since 1936 and had spent those years building it. It meant the RAF did not have to patrol and hope. It could see the enemy coming and meet him with exactly as much force as it chose to spend.

The Germans knew the radar masts existed. They never understood what stood behind them. That failure of imagination would cost them the battle.

Why This Matters

I want to sit with Mers el Kébir for a moment, because it is the uncomfortable heart of this story, and we do the past no favours by looking away.

We like our history clean. Dunkirk, the little ships, the Few. Mers el Kébir does not fit, and that is precisely why it matters. Churchill’s greatness in the summer of 1940 was not that he made noble speeches, though he did. It was that he was willing to do a genuinely dreadful thing, kill 1,297 sailors of a defeated ally, because the survival of everything else depended on it. War at this level is not a choice between good and bad. It is a choice between terrible and worse, made at speed, with the lights going out across a continent.

And the Kanalkampf matters because it reminds us who stood in the front line first. Before the fighter pilots became the Few, the merchant seamen of those Channel convoys, civilians on ships that could neither fight nor run, sailed under the Stukas because the coal had to get through. The Battle of Britain did not begin over Kentish orchards. It began over the grey water of the Dover Straits, above the heads of men earning a working wage.

The stage is now set. The radar chain is watching, the squadrons are waiting, and across the Channel the Luftwaffe is massing for the main assault. Next time, the battle begins in earnest.

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The Fall of a Nation

By the middle of June 1940, France was finished as a fighting power. Paris fell on 14 June without a shot fired in its defence. Two days later the government of Paul Reynaud, the man who had begged Churchill for more fighter squadrons, collapsed. In his place came Marshal Philippe Pétain, the aged hero of Verdun, and Pétain wanted an armistice.

Think about what that meant in London. For nine months Britain had planned, supplied, and fought this war on the assumption that the French Army, the largest in western Europe, would hold the line as it had held it for four years in the last war. That assumption died in six weeks. Every plan, every calculation, every map in the War Office was now waste paper.

Their Finest Hour

On 18 June 1940, at eleven minutes to four in the afternoon, Churchill rose in the House of Commons. He had been Prime Minister for barely five weeks. He spoke for 36 minutes, and he did not soften a single edge of the truth. France was falling out of the war. Invasion was possible. Bombing was certain.

But he also did something else. He gave the coming ordeal its name before it had even begun. “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin,” he told the House, and then he reached for the words that would outlive him and everyone listening: if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasted for a thousand years, men would still say, “This was their finest hour.”

He repeated the speech over the BBC that evening. And on that same day, in a London studio, a tall and largely unknown French general named Charles de Gaulle made his own broadcast, appealing to Frenchmen everywhere to fight on. Two men, one day, two nations choosing defiance. History does occasionally have a sense of theatre.

A Railway Carriage at Compiègne

Hitler had a sense of theatre too, and his was crueller. On 22 June 1940, the French delegation signed the armistice at Compiègne, in the very same railway carriage in which Germany had been made to sign its surrender in November 1918. Hitler had the carriage hauled out of its museum for the occasion. He sat in the chair Marshal Foch had occupied twenty two years earlier, listened to the preamble, and left. The message needed no translation.

The armistice came into effect on 25 June. France was cut in two, the north and the Atlantic coast under German occupation, the south left to Pétain’s new government at Vichy. Britain’s last great ally on the continent was gone. From the cliffs of Dover, on a clear day, you could now see enemy territory.

British Soil Under German Boots

There is one part of this story that rarely gets the attention it deserves, and it happened not in France but on British soil.

The Channel Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark, lay just off the Normandy coast, far closer to France than to England. On 15 June the British government made the cold, logical, and agonising decision that they could not be defended. The garrisons were withdrawn and the islands demilitarised. Around 25,000 islanders were evacuated. The rest stayed.

The trouble was that nobody told the Germans. On 28 June, Luftwaffe bombers attacked the harbours of St Peter Port and St Helier, mistaking lorries queued up with tomato crates for troop transports. Forty four islanders were killed. Two days later, on 30 June, German forces landed on Guernsey and the island surrendered. Jersey followed on 1 July, Alderney on 2 July, tiny Sark on 4 July.

The Channel Islands became the only part of the British Isles occupied by German forces in the entire war, and the swastika now flew over British Crown territory. The islanders would live under occupation for almost five years. In Berlin, the propaganda machine declared that England was finished.

Why This Matters

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. We remember the summer of 1940 through the roar of Merlin engines and vapour trails over Kent, and we will get to those. But the Battle of Britain was decided, in part, before a single shot of it was fired, in rooms and choices like the ones above.

Churchill’s 18 June speech was not decoration. It was a strategic act. It closed the door, publicly and irrevocably, on any negotiated peace, at a moment when perfectly intelligent people in Britain thought terms with Hitler were worth exploring. Once a Prime Minister tells the world this will be your finest hour, there is no quiet climbdown available.

And the Channel Islands matter because they show us what the alternative looked like. Occupation was not an abstraction. It was rationing, deportations, informers, and a swastika over St Helier. When we ask why ordinary Britons endured what was coming, part of the answer is that by July 1940 they could look a hundred miles south and see precisely what defeat meant.

The fall of France did not just remove an ally. It moved the front line to the English Channel, and it made every fishing town, every airfield, and every radar mast on the south coast part of the battlefield. The war was no longer somewhere else.

What Comes Next

Britain now stood alone, but standing alone still required terrible choices. In Part Two, the Royal Navy turns its guns on the French fleet at Mers el Kébir, the most agonising order Churchill ever gave, and over the grey waters of the Channel the Luftwaffe begins probing at British convoys. The Battle of Britain is about to earn its name.

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Churchill took his seat in the House of Commons in February 1901 as the Conservative MP for Oldham. He had barely warmed the bench before he was causing trouble. He criticised his own party’s defence spending. He argued against army funding increases. He associated himself with a loose grouping of reform-minded Conservatives who were already out of step with the party mainstream.

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By May 1904 he had seen enough. On 31 May 1904, after a dramatic hesitation at the bar of the House of Commons, he turned right rather than left and took a seat on the Liberal opposition benches. He had crossed the floor. It was a move that earned him enemies on both sides of the chamber that he would never fully shake. The Conservatives never forgave him. Many Liberals never entirely trusted him either. The word used most often about Churchill in those years was the same word that would follow him for decades: opportunist.

Although Churchill’s shift was one of principle, it also proved to be well timed. In the general election of 1906, the Conservatives lost more than half their seats, while the Liberals swept into power. Churchill became part of the great reforming Liberal governments of 1906-15, rising quickly to cabinet rank, and ultimately heading the Admiralty at the outbreak of World War I (source).

The charge was unfair but not entirely without foundation. Churchill was genuinely principled, but he was also genuinely ambitious, and the two things did not always pull in the same direction. What cannot be disputed is that his rise within the Liberal ranks was swift. He served as Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, then President of the Board of Trade, then Home Secretary, then First Lord of the Admiralty all before he was forty years old. Each promotion was earned in the full glare of a press that had decided he could not be trusted.

At the Board of Trade and as Home Secretary he championed prison reform, supported minimum wage legislation, helped to establish labour exchanges for the unemployed, and was instrumental in shaping the National Insurance Act of 1911 alongside Lloyd George. The man the press portrayed as a reckless warmonger was also one of the architects of what would eventually become the welfare state.

Why This Matters

This is a detail that tends to get buried under the drama of what came later, but it is worth sitting with for a moment. Churchill’s understanding of ordinary people, their poverty, their vulnerability, their need for dignity, was not abstract. He had covered wars among the poor and desperate. He had commanded men who had nothing. He was not a sentimentalist, but he was not a purely aristocratic figure either. The politician who would later rally a nation was also someone who had spent years thinking about what that nation owed its citizens. That breadth of vision mattered enormously in 1940.

The Admiralty, and the Shadow That Never Left

In October 1911 Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. He was thirty six years old and he threw himself at the job with the intensity of someone who had been waiting for it his entire life. He spearheaded a modernisation of the British fleet, transitioning it from coal to oil power, investing in submarines and airplanes, and establishing the Royal Naval Air Service, the precursor to what would become the Royal Air Force. He understood, earlier than almost anyone in government, that air power would define the wars of the coming century.

Then the war came, and with it Gallipoli.

The operation was intended to open the Dardanelles, relieve pressure on Russia, and potentially knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war by threatening Constantinople. The original idea was not Churchill’s alone, and the Cabinet as a whole supported it. He was, however, an enthusiast for the project and held an overly optimistic view about its prospects (source). But Churchill was the most visible enthusiast, and when it failed, he was the most visible target.

The Dardanelles failure became a crisis for the government. The Conservatives agreed to join a wartime coalition only on the condition that Churchill be removed from the Admiralty. Clementine Churchill later said she thought he would die of grief. He declared to a friend: “I am finished.” (source).

It makes you wonder how many politicians were jelous of Churchill’s strategic foresight.

Churchill was not finished. But the scar tissue left by Gallipoli would follow him for twenty five years.

He was offered a token Cabinet post and accepted it briefly. Then, in November 1915, he did something that almost no senior British politician would have done. He resigned from government entirely and applied for a fighting command on the Western Front.

Chruchill Moves Into the Trenches

Churchill was first posted to the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards for a month’s training in the trenches in December 1915, before taking command of the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers in January 1916. He was not welcomed at the Guards. His fellow officers, almost all diehard Tories, had not forgotten his defection to the Liberal Party in 1904 and gave him a frosty reception (source). He earned their grudging respect the way he had always earned respect, by going forward when others did not.

What happened next was revealing. Despite his inexperience and eccentricities as a commander, he gradually earned the respect of his men. In the tedium, chaos and danger of the trenches he became a focused and sympathetic leader and took considerable satisfaction in his new role (source). Churchill served until May 1916, then returned to Parliament. Many politicians would have given up, but not Churchill.

The Return, and Another Rise

In 1917 he returned to government under Lloyd George. He served as Minister of Munitions, then Secretary of State for War, then Minister of Air, then Secretary of State for the Colonies. The Gallipoli label followed him everywhere. Every appointment attracted protest from Conservatives who had not forgiven him, and from a press that found it useful to keep the wound open.

He crossed the floor again in the 1920s, returning to the Conservatives, and from 1924 to 1929 served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Stanley Baldwin. It was not a glorious tenure. His decision in 1925 to return Britain to the gold standard at the pre-war parity triggered severe deflation and unemployment, drawing strong criticism from economists including John Maynard Keynes, who warned explicitly of the consequences (source).

When the Conservatives lost the 1929 election, Churchill went with them into opposition. And then, gradually, the establishment began to decide that it had seen enough of Winston Churchill.

The Political Wilderness

The decade that followed is the part of Churchill’s story most people know least and understand least, because it sits between the glamorous adventures of his youth and the heroic narrative of 1940. It was a decade of isolation, financial anxiety, political marginalisation and, underneath it all, a deepening certainty about something almost nobody else in British politics wanted to hear.

After Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933, Churchill was quick to recognise the threat. As early as 16 March that year he addressed the Commons on the matter, speaking of the recent breaches of the Treaty of Versailles by Germany. Read the transcript here.

Nobody thanked him for it. During the 1930s Churchill would regularly stand up in the Commons and reel off the increasing numbers of German weapons and planes to an unlistening government. It is easy to see why he was called a warmonger, but Mr Churchill wasn’t goign to bury his head in the sand. His own party attempted to remove him as a candidate for re-election. He survived the attempt and kept speaking.

Churchill’s Illicit Acquiring of Evidence

According to the Churchill Archives Centre, n October 1937 Churchill sent his old friend and colleague Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, information about German rearmament that he had obtained from serving officers within the War Office. Churchill’s actions are not surprising but Sir Maurice didn’t share Churchill’s view on underhanded tactics.

“It shocks me not a little that Officers in disciplined Forces should be in direct communication with a leading Statesman who, though notoriously patriotic beyond criticism, is nevertheless in popular estimation regarded as a critic of the Departments under whom these Officers serve.

I do not question the motives of these officers. They can only be of the highest, for the reason that they have personally nothing to gain from their supposed revelations. On the contrary, they jeopardise their official careers by their action, for a slip might prove disastrous to them, and even though they escape this possibility, it may all come out years after and damage their reputations before posterity

Nevertheless I feel in my bones that these unofficial communications are all wrong, that the thing is infectious and subversive to discipline and that the damage done to the Services far outweighs any advantage that may accrue – especially as, when the matters in question are investigated, there is almost invariably a perfectly sound explanation forthcoming.”

The intelligence gave Churchill’s warnings a precision that could not simply be dismissed as bluster, however much his opponents tried.

Churchill also came close to financial ruin. To keep his seat and keep his voice, wealthy friends paid off substantial debts so that he would not have to sell Chartwell, his beloved home in Kent. History rarely acknowledges those people, but without them Churchill might have been gone from Parliament entirely before 1939.

When Munich came in September 1938, and Chamberlain returned from Germany waving his piece of paper, Churchill bluntly told the House of Commons: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.” (source). Churchill was roundly mocked. Within a year Hitler had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland, and Britain was at war.

Why This Matters

The wilderness years did something to Churchill that no amount of success could have done. They gave him moral authority. When he stood in the Commons in 1940 and said there could be no negotiated peace with Hitler, he was not speaking as a man who had never been tested. He was speaking as a man who had been proved right, publicly and painfully, across a decade in which it had cost him everything to keep saying so. That is a different thing entirely from mere political confidence. It is the voice of someone who has already paid.

Back to the Admiralty

When war was declared in September 1939, Chamberlain had no politically credible choice but to bring Churchill back. The public announcement was brief. The informal signal sent to the fleet read simply. Winston is back (source).

Churchill returned to the Admiralty, the same post he had held at the outbreak of the last war. He was sixty four years old. He had been in and out of Cabinet more times than any living politician. He had been blamed for one of the worst military disasters in British history and had refused to leave the stage. He had been right about Germany when everyone around him wanted him to be wrong.

And now Norway was unravelling. The Allied campaign there had been a shambles from the start. Britain had committed troops, lost ground, and was preparing to withdraw. Chamberlain was crumbling. The House of Commons was restless, angry, and looking for someone to blame.

What came next was not a resignation letter or a quiet conversation in a back corridor. It was two days in the House of Commons that changed the course of the war.

Coming in Part Three: Leo Amery and the Six Words That Ended a Government

On the evening of 7 May 1940, a Conservative MP stood up in a filling chamber and delivered a speech that Harold Macmillan would later say had effectively destroyed the Chamberlain government.

His name was Leo Amery. He was not a famous orator. He was not considered a commanding parliamentary presence. Normally considered a dull speaker, he began in a near empty chamber, but as it rapidly filled again after dinner and the atmosphere tightened. According to the Hansard Society, Amery concluded with a devastating denunciation that echoed doubts now spreading far beyond the usual government critics.

Amery reached back three centuries for words that Oliver Cromwell had once directed at a Parliament he considered unfit to govern. And he aimed them, in a near whisper, straight at the Prime Minister sitting across from him.

Lloyd George told Amery afterwards that in fifty years he had heard few speeches that matched it in sustained power, and none with so dramatic a climax (source).

Within days, Chamberlain was gone. A king would summon Winston Churchill and ask him to save his country.

That story is Part Three.

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That spring, British forces stumbled ashore on frozen Norwegian coastlines, scrambling to push back a German invasion that had moved with speed and precision. For weeks they held on. Then, one by one, they were driven back to the sea.

On the surface, it looked like a German victory. And in purely military terms, it was. But wars are not won on military terms alone.

Why this matters: The Norway campaign did something the battlefield alone could not. It exposed Neville Chamberlain. The man who had promised peace, who had returned from Munich waving a piece of paper, now had to stand in the House of Commons and answer for a military disaster that unfolded on his watch. The anger that filled that chamber in May 1940 was not just about Norway. It was about everything that had been promised and everything that had gone wrong. Norway was simply the moment the bill came due. Chamberlain would not survive it.

Arise Winston Churchill May 1940

April 1940. You already know the name. You have seen the photograph, the set jaw, the dark suit, the cigar, the look of a man who has decided something and will not be moved from it. But we are not there yet. To understand the figure who is about to walk through the door of Number 10, we need to go back to the beginning. Back to a boy who failed Latin, lost his father early, was raised largely by a nanny, and spent the better part of his youth being told, in various polite and not so polite ways, that he was not quite good enough.

He was wrong to believe them. So were they.

Blenheim, 1874

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on 30 November 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Marlborough. It was a grand address for a boy who would spend most of his early life feeling overlooked.

His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, a Conservative Member of Parliament for Woodstock and a man of dazzling political gifts who burned bright and burned out fast. By 1886, at only thirty seven years old, Lord Randolph had reached the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, the youngest holder of that office in over a century. Within months he resigned over a point of principle and never held high office again. One could not grow up in that house, Winston would later write, without understanding that there had been a great political disaster.

Chruchill’s mother was Jennie Jerome, an American heiress from New York, widely considered one of the great beauties of her age. She was warm, glamorous and largely elsewhere. Both parents were brilliant and both were distant. The boy who would one day hold the British nation together through its worst crisis was raised primarily by his nanny, Elizabeth Everest, a woman he called Woomany and described, with the full weight of someone who means it, as his dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years he had lived. When she died in 1895, Churchill rushed from Aldershot to be at her bedside. He and his brother Jack paid for her gravestone. He never forgot her.

Why This Matters

The emotional architecture of a leader matters. Churchill grew up in a household where love was expressed through absence. His father was frequently dismissive of him. His mother was preoccupied with a social world Winston could not reach. What grew in that space was not bitterness, though there was some of that, but something more useful, a fierce, restless need to prove himself. Every campaign he fought in, every despatch he filed, every book he published in his twenties was also a letter to his father that Lord Randolph never lived to read. Understanding that hunger helps explain a great deal of what is coming.

The School That Did Not Know What It Had

Churchill attended three schools before Harrow. The first, St George’s in Ascot, was expensive and brutal. The headmaster flogged boys with what one account described as religious fervour. Churchill hated it and did poorly. He was moved to Brunswick School in Hove in 1884, where the atmosphere was gentler and his work improved.

In April 1888, aged thirteen, he sat the entrance examination for Harrow School. He produced, by his own later account, his name in block letters, the number one in brackets, an ink blot and several smudges (source).

Harrow historians have never found the paper, and Churchill himself was a man who enjoyed a good story about himself, but the essential truth holds: he scraped in, and he arrived at the bottom of the bottom form.

He was not academically brilliant, except in English and History, and his teachers complained that he was unpunctual and careless. Latin, which Harrow valued above almost everything, defeated him. Mathematics was not much better. But there were things Harrow could not see in its own narrow frame.

He excelled in subjects that appealed to him. He also showed athletic ability by winning the Public Schools’ fencing championship, with the school newspaper reporting that his success was chiefly due to his quick and dashing attack, which quite took his opponents by surprise (source).

He joined the Harrow Rifle Corps within a month of arriving. He collected toy soldiers obsessively. At the age of seven his earliest surviving letter was already about flags, castles and military formations. While other boys were memorising Cicero, Winston was thinking about tactics.

At Harrow, he told a friend: “I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London. In the high position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the Capital and save the Empire.” (source).

His father decided a military career was the right place for a boy with these results. Churchill failed the Sandhurst entrance examination twice. On his third attempt he passed, and once there he applied himself seriously and graduated twentieth in a class of one hundred and thirty.

He had found his element. The army gave Churchill what school never had. The army give him a structure in which energy, nerve and physical courage were rewarded rather than punished.

Cuba, India, the Sudan: A Young Man Who Needed to Be Shot At

In 1895, the year his father died, Churchill was commissioned into the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars. He was twenty years old, newly bereaved, and almost immediately looking for a war.

He found one in Cuba, travelling there as an observer and correspondent for the Daily Graphic during the Cuban War of Independence. He was twenty one years old when he heard bullets for the first time, on his birthday as it happened. He began smoking cigars. He began to understand that he was someone who found danger clarifying rather than paralysing.

India came next. Churchill arrived in October 1896 with his regiment and spent month after frustrating month in Bangalore, which he irritably described to his mother as a third rate watering place.

But Bangalore was not wasted time. He began a programme of self education that he had never managed at school. Churchill read widely, including Plato, Edward Gibbon, Charles Darwin and Thomas Babington Macaulay, with books sent regularly by his mother. He was building the mind that would one day write a Nobel Prize winning history of the English speaking peoples.

When the fighting started on the North West Frontier, he went without being invited. He attached himself to the Malakand Field Force fighting Pashtun tribesmen in the mountains of the Northwest Frontier, in the vicinity of modern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Churchill served as a correspondent, he filed despatches, survived firefights, and turned the whole experience into his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published in 1898.

Then came Sudan. According to the International Churchill Society Churchill lobbied hard to be included in Kitchener’s campaign, using all the considerable influence of his mother and her friends in the military and government.

General Kitchener, a man who did not enjoy being managed, was against Churchill coming out. He was of the opinion that Churchill was using the army as a convenience for his own purposes. He was not entirely wrong. But pressure from the Prince of Wales and others eventually forced Kitchener’s hand.

At the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, Churchill took part in the charge of the 21st Lancers. He had injured his sword hand before the battle and armed himself instead with a Mauser pistol. When he was cut off and surrounded by Mahdist fighters, the pistol almost certainly saved his life (source). He was twenty three years old. He wrote a book about it. He was already writing the biography of himself before anyone else had thought to.

South Africa and the Escape That Made Him Famous

By the time Churchill was twenty five, he had seen combat in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa, earned four campaign medals, written five books, established himself as a celebrated war correspondent and been elected to Parliament. International Churchill Society

The South Africa chapter deserves a moment of its own.

He went to the Boer War in 1899 as a correspondent for the Morning Post, the highest paid war correspondent in the field at the time. In November, his armoured train was derailed by Boer artillery. He was captured and interned in a prisoner of war camp in Pretoria. Reports suggest that Churchill made a formal protest about his internment on the grounds of journalist status, but was told he had invalidated that by carrying a revolver.

He escaped in December, evading his captors by stowing aboard freight trains and hiding in a mine, eventually making it to safety in Portuguese East Africa. He had covered more than three hundred miles through enemy territory, with a price on his head. He returned to South Africa a celebrity. Britain could not get enough of him.

He stood again at Oldham in the October 1900 general election and won. He was twenty five years old and a Member of Parliament.

The Thread Running Through All of It

There is something worth sitting with here, as the spring of 1940 gathers pace and the situation in Norway unravels and the men in Westminster begin to whisper that Chamberlain cannot hold on. As we will learn, Leo Amery’s words echoed in the chambers.

Churchill was teh boy who failed Latin at Harrow, who could not pass Sandhurst on his first or second attempt. He was repeatedly told by the machinery of establishment that he was not quite the right shape, had spent the intervening forty years doing something very specific. Churchill had gone, again and again, to places where things were being decided by force. He had looked at war from the inside, not from a map on a wall. He had been shot at, captured, and had escaped on nerve alone. He had written about what he saw with a clarity that made readers feel they were standing next to him in the dust.

No one in British politics in April 1940 had a military education like that. No one came close.

In Part Two, we will follow Churchill into Parliament, through the catastrophe of Gallipoli (April 1915 – January 1916), through the wilderness years when almost nobody wanted to listen, and right up to the room where a king will ask him to save a country.

Stay with me.

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Welcome back to Project World War 2. We’re in 1940. The war is ramping up. Germany is getting more ambitious. Britain is largely alone, and the United States is watching from the sidelines.

Before we move deeper into the spring of 1940, we need to stop and look at the man who is about to walk through the door of Number 10 Downing Street. He is sixty five years old, difficult, brilliant, and exhausting. He has been a soldier, a war correspondent, a prisoner of war, a cabinet minister, a First Lord of the Admiralty, and for a long, grinding decade, a voice in the wilderness that almost nobody wanted to hear.

His name is Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, and the world has been getting him wrong for most of his life.

Next week, we will trace the full arc of how he got here, from the nurseries of Blenheim Palace to the battlefields of India, Sudan, and South Africa, from the benches of the House of Commons to the corridors of the Admiralty, through the catastrophe of Gallipoli and the silence of the wilderness years, right up to the moment a king asks him to save his country.

This is not just the story of a politician rising to power. It is the story of a man shaped by decades of war, failure, and absolute refusal to quit, arriving, finally, at the precise hour he was built for.

Stay tuned for the Winston Churchill edition of Project World War 2.

Good day readers. I haven’t forgotten about you. The world has changed a lot since I last wrote. The situation in Ukraine shows no signs of a resolution and the war with Iran has rocked global markets. I’ve had my own setbacks, but enough of all of that.

Does the current situation in Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf give a sense of the build-up to the Battle of Britain and the subsequent escalation of kinetic activity between Britain and Germany? I think it does, becuase nobody can predict what is going to happen next.

Ordinary people are going about their day-to-day business while planners and politicians decide on military outcomes, just as they did in 1940.

🇬🇧Today marks our first competition. You can find details at the bottom of this post.

👋I would like to welcome our latest member . Olha is writing a WWII novel based on my grandmother’s story as an Ostarbeiter in Nazi Germany.

When I last wrote, we had reached early February 1940. On the surface, the war in western Europe still looked strangely quiet. Britain and France were at war with Germany, yet the great clash many expected had not arrived. The phrase “Phoney War” still fitted. But quiet is not the same as stillness. Beneath that uneasy calm, the conflict was already hardening into something darker, broader and more ruthless.

Finland And Russia

In the far north, Finland was still fighting for survival against the Soviet Union. The Winter War, which had begun in November 1939, entered a more desperate phase in February 1940 as Soviet forces reorganised, adapted and pressed harder against the Mannerheim Line. Finnish resistance remained fierce and, for a time, astonishing, but courage could not fully cancel out weight of numbers, shells and materiel.

By early March, the line was breaking. Finland sued for peace on 6 March, and the Treaty of Moscow was signed on 12 March, with the ceasefire taking effect the following day. Finland survived as an independent state, but only after ceding significant territory, including much of the Karelian Isthmus and Viipuri.

Britain and France have a dilemma

For Britain and France, the Finnish struggle posed a moral and strategic dilemma. Sympathy for Finland was widespread, and there were discussions about intervention, yet helping Finland was never a simple matter. Any serious Allied move northwards risked dragging Norway and Sweden into the war and entangling the question of Swedish iron ore, which Germany depended on. In other words, even while the Western Front seemed quiet, northern Europe was becoming a live wire. The road to the Norwegian campaign was already being laid, even if many people did not yet see it clearly.

British POWs Freed

Then came the Altmark incident on 16 February 1940, one of those episodes that looks small on paper but large in hindsight. The German tanker Altmark, carrying captured British sailors from ships sunk by the Admiral Graf Spee, was intercepted by HMS Cossack in Norwegian waters.

The British boarding party freed nearly 300 prisoners. In Britain it was celebrated as a bold stroke and a badly needed lift in morale. For Germany, it was proof, or at least a useful argument, that Norwegian neutrality could not be trusted to protect German interests. The incident did not cause everything that followed, but it sharpened the urgency around Norway in German planning.

At sea, the wider pressure never let up. The Battle of the Atlantic had not yet reached its most devastating phase, but the struggle for shipping lanes was already central to the war. Britain depended on imports for food, fuel and raw materials, and German U boats were already part of the long campaign to choke that lifeline. This mattered even in these supposedly quieter months, because Britain’s war effort rested not only on armies in the field but on whether the country could continue to eat, manufacture and endure.

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Meanwhile, in occupied Poland and across the Nazi sphere, the war was becoming more brutal in ways that went beyond conventional military campaigning. In Łódź, from early February 1940, Jews were forced into a designated ghetto area, part of the widening machinery of persecution that would later become genocidal. Around the same period, the Nazi regime was also advancing its so called euthanasia programme against disabled people, another sign that this war was being shaped not only by armies and borders but by ideology, race policy and state murder. The front lines told only part of the story.

Europe Braces For Total War

So by 15 March 1940, Europe stood at a deceptive moment. Nothing on the Western Front yet matched the drama that would come in April and May, but the ingredients were already in place. Finland had been battered into peace. Neutral Scandinavia was under growing pressure. Britain had shown it was willing to act boldly at sea. Germany was thinking ever more seriously about Norway and Denmark. The Atlantic lifeline was under threat. Nazi persecution was intensifying behind the battle maps. The war still looked, to some, as though it had paused. In truth, it was loading the next chamber.

Happy 90th Birthday Spitfire

There is also a timely note of remembrance to add here. On 5 March 2026, the Spitfire marked the 90th anniversary of its first flight. Prototype K5054 took to the air on 5 March 1936, flown by Joseph “Mutt” Summers from what is now Southampton Airport. The RAF marked the anniversary this month with commemorative events and flights across the UK.

It is worth pausing on that while writing about early 1940, because the Spitfire had not yet become the full legend we now know. That fame still lay ahead. In these weeks before the storm broke across Norway, the Low Countries and France, the aircraft was present, promising, and waiting for its moment in history.

That may be the real shape of this missing stretch in the timeline. Not a void. Not an intermission. More like the tightening of a spring. Early February to mid March 1940 was a period in which the war’s true character came into sharper focus. Frozen battlefields, strained neutrality, pressure at sea, ideological violence on land, and the growing sense that Europe was heading towards something much bigger. The silence was real, but it was the silence before doors were kicked in.

Thank goodness for R.J. Mitchell’s amazing machine.

Competition Time

I am running a small giveaway for readers of Project World War 2.

You can win a copy of Brothers in Arms by

This book is the best book I have ever read. That’s a strong statement. I am not talking just about World War 2, I am talking about every book I have ever read. I really would have liked to have met some of those brave souls. Padre Lesley Skinner, Arthur Reddish, Stanley Christopherson and most of all David Render.

Why David Render?

Oddly, I listen to the audio book twice, narrated by Al Murray, and both occassions when he introduced David, I was driving through his home of Totteridge, North London.

It sounds made up, but it’s absolutely true. I still haven’t been to the Orange Tree Pub in the village.🍺

To enter, simply share this publication with two people and then send me a note in the chat to let me know you have done it.

The winner will be chosen on 31 March 2026, and I will post the book out after that date.

Good luck and stay tuned.

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This week I want to talk about the civilian workforce that kept the country moving, and I’m starting with coal, because coal powered almost everything. Factories. Rail. Electricity. Heating for homes and barracks. The stuff that turns a nation into a machine.

My grandfather was one of them.

He was a Bevin Boy at Elsecar Colliery, in South Yorkshire. He had wanted to join the Royal Navy. Someone sat him down, talked him out of it, and kept him down the pit instead. That is the first thing to understand about coal in wartime Britain, it was not a backwater job. It was a strategic one.

Coal was a weapon, even if it arrived in lumps

Coal did not just keep the lights on. It kept the war economy breathing.

Official UK government historical data shows that total inland coal consumption rose from about 180.8 million tonnes in 1938 to about 198.9 million tonnes in 1940. Overseas shipments and bunkers were about 46.8 million tonnes in 1938, but fell to about 26.9 million tonnes in 1940, as the war tightened sea routes and priorities changed.

Another set of figures, from parliamentary answers just before the war, puts 1938 saleable coal output at 228,214,000 tons, with 35,861,000 tons exported and 10,489,000 tons shipped as foreign bunkers.

Coal was also a household necessity. Parliament discussed domestic coal consumption as an annual figure in the tens of millions of tons, even before wartime pressures fully bit.

And it is worth remembering that in the 1940s, electricity was only a slice of coal’s role. One analysis of long run UK energy data notes that in the 1940s electricity accounted for about 12 percent of UK coal consumption, with much of the rest going into industry, coke production, and domestic use.

So yes, the coal face mattered. Literally.

Who were the Bevin Boys

The Bevin Boys were young men directed into coal mining during the war, named after Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour and National Service.

From late 1943, the scheme drew men who might otherwise have gone into the armed forces. Many were selected by ballot, with others volunteering, and they were sent to coalfields across Britain.

Roughly 48,000 men served as Bevin Boys, and a striking detail from the same museum summary is that only 41 were conscientious objectors.

They were not given a uniform. They were not given medals at the time. Many came home with stories they did not talk about, because the pits were dangerous, hard, and often misunderstood by people who thought “real service” only came with a rifle.

Yet without them, Britain’s ability to make weapons, move supplies, and keep warm would have been badly compromised.

Elsecar: a coal village that powered a country

Elsecar Main Colliery opened in 1903 and closed in 1983. At its peak it employed up to 7,000 men and worked multiple seams, including the Silkstone seam.

That is a whole world of labour, skill, and routine. Early shifts. Coal dust. The constant negotiation between speed and safety. The odd quiet pride of doing a job that few people properly understood, but everyone relied on.

My grandfather’s story sits inside that bigger story: a war where the Home Front was not a slogan, but a working system.

Why this matters now

The Bevin Boys remind us that war is not only fought at the front. It is fought in supply chains, in shifts, in shortages, and in the decisions that send one man to sea and another man underground.

Coal was not glamorous. Neither were the men who dug it.

Coal didn’t have a bad name as it did today. Britain still ran on it.

The War begins to gather pace

By late January 1940, the war in Western Europe remained in the uneasy phase later labelled the Phoney War. Britain and France were officially at war with Germany, yet large-scale land battles had not begun along the Western Front. Behind the quiet, both sides were preparing for a much bigger conflict.

28 January 1940

Winter War (Finland): Finnish troops eliminated Soviet forces encircled in the Pieni-Kelivaara pocket on the north shore of Lake Ladoga.

Battle of the Atlantic: German U-boat U-34 torpedoed the Greek merchant ship Eleni Stathatou about 100 miles off Brest.

29 January 1940

Winter War (Kuhmo): Finland’s 9th Division attacked the Soviet 54th Division near Kuhmo (from 0500).

Diplomacy (Winter War): The USSR abandoned the Terijoki “puppet” government and began probing peace terms via Sweden, recognising Finland’s legitimate government.

Channel war: German air attacks hit British shipping in the English Channel, with multiple ships reported sunk.

30 January 1940

Battle of the Atlantic: U-boat U-55 sank the British tanker Vaclite (convoy OA-80G) off Land’s End, then sank the Greek ship Keramlai; later U-55 was hunted and attacked by Allied destroyers and an RAF Sunderland.

Nazi Germany (home front): Hitler gave a major anniversary speech in Berlin marking seven years of Nazi rule.

31 January 1940

Winter War (Karelian Isthmus): Soviet forces massed in the Summa sector, building to around 12 divisions and 400 heavy artillery pieces as preparations intensified for a major push.

British procurement: Britain secretly approached neutral Italy about purchasing fighter aircraft; the effort was ultimately blocked by German pressure.

1 February 1940

Winter War (Summa): The Second Battle of Summa began as the Soviets launched an all-out assault on the Karelian Isthmus.

Japan: Japan passed a major budget committing unprecedented sums to armaments and training.

2 February 1940

Balkan diplomacy: Members of the Balkan Pact met in Belgrade.

Occupied Europe (Protectorate): In Prague, Nazi authorities removed prominent names from major railway stations (Wilson Station became “Main station”).

3 February 1940

Air war reaches England: A Heinkel He 111 became the first enemy aircraft to crash on English soil in the war after being shot down near Whitby, North Yorkshire (credited to F/L Peter Townsend, 43 Squadron).

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It is often treated as the Spitfire’s less glamorous sibling, the dependable one, the workhorse. Even in popular history and television, you will sometimes hear it described as the aircraft that did the heavy lifting while the Spitfire took the spotlight. Yet when the pressure came on, the Hurricane was there, day after day, taking punishment, coming back with holes in it, and going up again.

Hurricane Designed for the job, not the poster

The Hurricane was a British single seat fighter that became a vital RAF aircraft in the early years of the war, especially during the Battle of Britain. It was not the fastest and it did not have the same sleek reputation as the Spitfire, but it had a quality that matters more than glamour in wartime.

It worked.

And it worked at scale, under stress, with airfields bombed, crews exhausted, and time always running out.

Sydney Camm’s practical leap

Designed by Sydney Camm at Hawker, the Hurricane represented a decisive shift from the biplane era to the modern monoplane fighter. It took lessons from earlier Hawker designs and pushed them into a form that could meet the realities of a new kind of air war.

Key features included:

1. A low wing monoplane layout

2. Retractable undercarriage

3. An enclosed cockpit

4. A Rolls Royce Merlin liquid cooled V 12 engine

5. A performance threshold that finally took RAF fighters beyond 300 mph in level flight

That last point matters. In aviation, a small jump in speed can change the entire equation of who catches who, who escapes, and who survives.

Built to be repaired, built to return

One of the Hurricane’s greatest strengths was not a headline number. It was its construction.

The airframe used a robust, relatively conventional structure, with a steel tube fuselage and, early on, fabric covered wings and tail surfaces. Later versions moved to metal wing skins. The result was an aircraft that could absorb damage and be repaired quickly, often with the kind of improvisation that only wartime necessity permits.

In a sustained campaign, serviceability becomes a weapon in its own right. An aircraft that can be patched, turned around, and flown again is an aircraft that keeps contributing when others might be written off.

The numbers that mattered

A typical early war Hurricane I is commonly described as having:

1. Top speed around 330 mph, roughly 530 km per hour

2. Service ceiling around 36,000 ft

3. One pilot

4. Armament of eight 0.303 inch Browning machine guns mounted in the wings

That armament reflected an Air Ministry requirement for concentrated fire. Eight wing guns gave a brutal, sustained stream of rounds in the few seconds a fighter might have in a firing pass.

Fact check note: exact figures vary by variant, production batch, and source. The values above are widely cited in general references, but I have not verified them against primary documents in this post.

From interceptor to battlefield hammer

As the war evolved, so did the Hurricane.

Later Hurricane II variants, with more powerful Merlin engines, could carry:

1. Twelve 0.303 inch machine guns

2. Or four 20 mm Hispano cannon

3. Bombs for ground attack

4. Later, air to ground rockets

That shift is important. It shows how quickly aircraft roles changed under operational pressure. The Hurricane’s adaptability helped move it from pure interceptor work into fighter bomber and ground attack duties, where sturdiness and reliability became even more valuable.

The Spitfire and the Hurricane: a partnership, not a rivalry

It is tempting to frame the story as a contest. Spitfire versus Hurricane. Beauty versus brawn.

The truth is more interesting. In 1940, the RAF needed both. The sleek performer and the rugged problem solver. The aircraft that could chase and the aircraft that could take hits. The Hurricane’s reputation as “second fiddle” often says more about peacetime storytelling than wartime reality.

There is a line you will often hear that the Hurricane accounted for the majority of enemy aircraft destroyed by RAF fighters during the Battle of Britain.

Fact check note: this claim is widely repeated, but the exact proportions depend on how totals are counted and which records are used. If you use it, it is best presented as “often credited with” rather than as a fixed statistic.

Why this still matters

The Hurricane is a reminder that victory is rarely a single perfect solution. It is usually a system of good decisions, made quickly, under pressure, and improved week by week by engineers and ground crews who refuse to accept failure as normal.

In aviation, as in life, the glamorous option is not always the one that carries you through the storm.

On the surface the of ocean, the Royal Navy was fighting a war of attrition.

Sunday 21 January 1940

Royal Navy destroyer HMS Exmouth is torpedoed by German submarine U 22 in the Moray Firth and sinks with all hands.

The Asama Maru incident: HMS Liverpool stops the Japanese passenger liner Asama Maru and removes 21 German seamen, triggering an immediate political storm in Japan.

War at sea continues with multiple sinkings recorded for the day in the North Sea and nearby waters.

Monday 22 January 1940

In France, the British Expeditionary Force settles into winter routine: Imperial War Museums holds an image dated 22 January 1940 showing 2nd Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment on parade in the snow at Rumegies.

Tuesday 23 January 1940

The Pan American Security Zone dispute continues to simmer. British policy, as set out in diplomatic notes of the period, makes clear the UK does not accept new neutrality rules that would restrict belligerent rights at sea unless conditions are met.

Wednesday 24 January 1940

In the General Government of occupied Poland, Jewish property is ordered to be registered, an administrative step with brutal implications for confiscation and later deportation.

Thursday 25 January 1940

Hans Frank, as Governor General in occupied Poland, corresponds with Hermann Göring on labour policy, advocating mass deportations of Polish workers to Germany.

Friday 26 January 1940

HMS Durham Castle strikes a mine laid by U 57 and sinks off Cromarty while under tow, bound for Scapa Flow.

In the Asama Maru affair, Foreign Office telegram traffic shows London balancing legality, diplomacy, and the risk of pushing Japan closer to Germany.

Saturday 27 January 1940

Wilhelm Keitel issues a memorandum placing planning for operations against Norway and Denmark under his direct and personal guidance, marking a shift from concept to detailed preparation for what becomes Operation Weserübung.

In heavy weather around the Orkneys, U 20 sinks several neutral merchant ships including Faro, England, Fredensborg, and Hosanger, a sharp illustration of how quickly “neutral” could become “dead”.

This is the shape of early 1940: a war that seems stalled in France yet accelerates elsewhere. Sea lanes remain the pressure point, neutrals are pulled into the undertow of belligerent lawfare, and occupation policy becomes paperwork that enables plunder, forced labour, and worse.

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From recruitment drives in cities, villages, and hill towns to supply lines that stretched across oceans, the war effort depended on those who fought, laboured, and endured far from the headlines. Within that story, the service of Gurkha and Sikh soldiers stands out not as a footnote, but as a reminder that courage came in many languages, under many flags, and with traditions that carried strength into the harshest conditions. Their contributions deserve to be remembered properly, not as a passing mention, but as part of the war’s beating heart.

Sikh Martial Excellence: Victoria Cross and Beyond

The Sikh regiments of the British Indian Army earned a reputation as warriors of exceptional calibre, and this reputation was reinforced during the Second World War. Research identifies at minimum four Sikhs awarded the Victoria Cross during the conflict, all of whom earned their medals in the Burma Campaign between 1943 and 1945.

Naik Nand Singh: The Posthumous Honour and Unique Recognition

Among the most extraordinary figures stands Jemadar Nand Singh, acting Naik in the 1st Battalion, 11th Sikh Regiment. On 11–12 March 1944, on the Maungdaw-Buthidaung Road in Burma, Nand Singh was ordered to recapture a position that had been captured by enemy forces. Commanding a leading section of the attack, he led his men up a steep, knife-edged ridge under very heavy machine-gun and rifle fire. Wounded in the thigh but refusing to be deterred, he captured the first trench.

Crawling forward alone and suffering additional wounds to his face and shoulder, he captured the second and third trenches in succession, effectively clearing a critical enemy position through personal courage and tactical skill. Nand Singh was presented with his prestigious Victoria Cross by King George VI.

Nand Singh was a unique soldier, and he was posthumously Maha Vir Chakra (MVC), India's second-highest decoration for battlefield gallantry.

The Gurkha Legacy: 12 Victoria Crosses in the Second World War

The Gurkhas, Nepal’s legendary martial force integrated into the British Indian Army since 1815, earned 12 Victoria Crosses during World War 2, with five awarded posthumously. These warriors fought across three principal theatres of North Africa, Italy, and the Far East. Gurkhas achieved their most celebrated actions in Burma, where the dense and unforgiving terrain, relentless Japanese offensives, and prolonged supply-line warfare created circumstances that forged some of the conflict’s most memorable individual actions.

Lachhiman Gurung: The One-Handed Defender

Among the most extraordinary cases stands Rifleman Lachhiman Gurung of the 4th Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifles, whose actions at Taungdaw in May 1945 exemplify both the physical sacrifice and psychological resilience of Gurkha soldiers. Gurung stood only 4 feet 11 inches tall, which was below the peacetime minimum height threshold. Wartime recruitement pressures meant Lachhiman Gurung yet was permitted to enlistment in December 1940.

On the night of 12–13 May 1945, Gurung manned the most forward post of his platoon near Taungdaw, Burma, which came under assault from over 200 Japanese soldiers. In the engagement, he hurled back two hand grenades, but a third exploded in his right hand after he attempted to throw it back. The detonation severed his fingers, shattered his arm, and inflicted severe wounds to his face, body, and right leg. With both section companions also badly wounded, Gurung found himself alone.​

Rather than withdrawing, Gurung loaded and fired his rifle with his left hand for four uninterrupted hours, maintaining a steady rate of fire at point-blank range against waves of Japanese assaults. His citation records that he killed 31 enemy soldiers in front of his trench alone, with 87 total casualties inflicted by his company. Observers reported him shouting defiance: “Come and fight a Gurkha!” He was invested with the Victoria Cross by Lord Louis Mountbatten on 19 December 1945 at the Red Fort, New Delhi, and lived to see the establishment of independent India, dying on 12 December 2010 at the age of 92.

This Week in 1940: 15 January to 21 January 1940

The Western Front still had the feel of a paused breath, but the wider war did not share the mood. At sea, the Atlantic remained unforgiving. In Finland, bombs and bitter weather shaped daily life. At home in Britain, the machinery of wartime control tightened another notch.

Monday 15 January 1940
In Britain, the Ministry of Food moved into full control of meat supplies, a practical reminder that modern war quickly becomes a matter of logistics and diet. Diplomatically, Belgium protested Germany over the Mechelen incident, a small country trying to hold neutrality while larger powers pressed on every side. At sea, U boat U 44 sank merchant ships in the Atlantic, another entry in the steady arithmetic of the blockade.

Tuesday 16 January 1940
Japan changed prime minister, with Mitsumasa Yonai replacing Nobuyuki Abe, a political shift taking place while the wider conflict in Asia continued to harden. In London, Neville Chamberlain told Parliament that there was “a lull in the operations of war”, while warning it could be broken quickly, a line that reads like calm weather before a storm.

Wednesday 17 January 1940
A brutal cold spell tightened across Europe, freezing rivers and disrupting movement, adding a physical enemy to the political one. Contemporary accounts and later analysis note the Thames freezing during the severe winter conditions of January 1940. It is a sharp reminder that in wartime, the elements get a vote.

Thursday 18 January 1940
In occupied Poland, German repression escalated into mass arrests and executions that would become associated with Palmiry, part of the broader pattern of terror used to break civil society. At sea, U boats continued to pick off merchant shipping, with U 44 sinking the Canadian Reefer among other losses recorded that week.

Friday 19 January 1940
The sea war struck the Royal Navy directly when the destroyer HMS Grenville hit a mine in the Thames Estuary and was lost with heavy casualties. The same day, U boat U 9 sank the Swedish ship Patricia, a reminder that neutral flags did not guarantee safety in mined waters and contested sea lanes.

Saturday 20 January 1940
Winston Churchill used a radio broadcast to speak about the war at sea and the peril facing neutral shipping, framing the conflict as something that could not be contained by wishful distance. In China, fighting in the Winter Offensive continued, with Chinese forces capturing Licheng according to period chronologies, another signal that this was always a global war, not a single front.

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In this edition, I wanted to widen the lens on World War 2. We often picture the war through Europe’s battlefields and the decisions made in a few great capitals, but the truth is the conflict was carried by the Commonwealth in ways that are still under told.

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It’s easy to forget the enablers, the ones who feed, supply and maintain a military war machine. There’s an old army joke that the hardest course to pass is the cook’s course because nobody has ever passed it. Apologies to all you chefs out there. You know the banter, something that keeps every army going. If you’ve served, or read any of Spike Milligan’s books, you’ll know what I mean.

On the train this morning I read a personal diary of a woman besieged in Mariupol during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It got me thinking about the synergies between conflicts. Civilians often come off worst. Homes are wrecked, loved ones are lost, and food becomes scarce.

Britain began food rationing for bacon and ham, butter and sugar on 8 January, a clear signal that the home front was now part of the battlefield. Every patch of allotment mattered. We saw shortages during the pandemic, a mere snippet of what life is like during hostilities.

One of the most vital enablers in any army is the medical services. Morphine was widely used in the Second World War, and battlefield medicine has improved dramatically over time. More recently in Afghanistan, the British Army had an exceptional hospital at Camp Bastion.

Royal Army Medical Corps

During World War 2 the Royal Army Medical Corps and Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service provided crucial care from first aid to hospital treatment, often operating under extreme danger. Wartime medicine pushed forward systems for blood transfusion and the use of penicillin, while nurses served across multiple theatres and some were taken prisoner.

The Royal Army Medical Corps has proudly won 29 Victoria Crosses. Its cap badge carries the Rod of Asclepius, a symbol associated with healing and medicine.

This week in 1940

In Finland, the Battle of Suomussalmi ended in a Finnish victory on 8 January, one of the Winter War’s defining moments.

On 10 January, the Mechelen incident saw German plans for Fall Gelb compromised after a crash landing in Belgium, prompting alarm and defensive measures in the Low Countries.

At sea, the war continued to bite. HMS Starfish was lost on 9 January, and the Danish tanker Danmark was torpedoed off Orkney on 12 January.

In China, the Battle of Kunlun Pass concluded on 11 January with Chinese forces holding the pass, part of the wider Second Sino Japanese War running alongside the European conflict.

Day by day

Monday 8 January

1. Finland: Battle of Suomussalmi ends in Finnish victory.

2. Britain: rationing begins for bacon and ham, butter and sugar.

Tuesday 9 January

1. North Sea: HMS Starfish is sunk after being depth charged in the Heligoland Bight.

Wednesday 10 January

1. Belgium: Mechelen incident. A German aircraft crash lands in Belgium carrying elements of the western offensive plans, setting off an intelligence and diplomatic storm.

Thursday 11 January

1. China: Battle of Kunlun Pass ends with the Chinese holding the pass.

Friday 12 January

1. Orkney: Danish tanker Danmark is torpedoed by German submarine U 23 while anchored in Inganess Bay at Kirkwall. The crew escape.

Saturday 13 January

1. Low Countries: Belgium and the Netherlands order partial mobilisation in response to the Mechelen incident.

Sunday 14 January

1. Germany: Hitler issues an internal order tightening secrecy, insisting nobody should know more than he does about any secret matter.

Why this week matters

This is one of those weeks that shows how the war moved on multiple clocks at once.

In the north, Finland’s victory bought time and prestige, even as the strategic odds remained brutal.

In Britain, rationing was not just administration, it was strategy, a quiet answer to the threat of blockade and the long haul ahead.

And in Belgium, a fog, a wrong turn, and a briefcase of papers foreshadowed the earthquake coming in the west.

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Source note for readers
The day by day items are compiled from secondary references.

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Before we get into that, I asked myself a simple question. Why do I keep returning to the Second World War? Why the books, the documentaries, the podcasts?

I beleive its a period of time that we shouldn’t forget. Nostalgia plays a part, and there is a hunger to learn. An understanding that this period still shapes the world we live in. Finally, it’s important not to forget the selfless acts of courage and committment so many men and women gave so that we can enjoy our freedoms. That is why this has become a weekly newsletter.

Books, Brilliance, and Unlikely Origins

We have not spoken much about books yet, but that is going to change.

At the moment, SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre is playing through my AirPods, not for the first time. It is not the only Second World War book I have revisited. Brothers in Arms by James Holland remains one of my favourites.

What continues to puzzle me is this. Why did it take a relatively junior officer, David Stirling, to conceive the idea of the Special Air Service? Of the hundreds of British officers in uniform, why was it a man with limited conventional experience who pushed through such an unorthodox concept?

Yes, Stirling was fortunate in places. His meeting with Randolph Churchill helped. The early days were far from smooth. Yet the question lingers.

Perhaps it is not unique. The same could be asked of T. E. Lawrence in the First World War.

World War 2 Myths We Still Cling To

Everyone loves a good myth. As the saying went in the army, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

I have the privilege of seeing St Paul’s Cathedral most days. The surrounding area took a severe beating during the Blitz. One persistent myth claims the Germans deliberately avoided bombing the cathedral. That is nonsense.

Bombing accuracy in the Second World War was poor, particularly early on. Few RAF bombs landed within five miles of their target, a reality highlighted by the Butt Report. Navigation and targeting improved later, but precision bombing was the exception, not the rule.

Another myth concerns the M4 Sherman, often dismissed as inferior.

Sherman crews would likely disagree. The Tiger I had a fearsome reputation with its 100mm frontal armour, but it was not invincible. A Sherman’s high rate of fire meant that a crew who reacted first and fired multiple rounds quickly could disable a Tiger, or at least force the Panzer crew to abandon it.

Fighting in tanks was tough, and crew fatigue and experience all affected how many rounds a crew could fire in a minute.

Film, Fiction, and the Reality of War

There are countless stories still untold, and that is part of the draw.

As a former soldier, I can say that the best stories often emerge from the most unexpected moments. Books tend to capture this human detail far better than films, which are built for drama.

Take Where Eagles Dare. I love it, but as a former radio operator I am still trying to work out how Richard Burton manages to speak to London using a basic telescopic aerial. A superb film nonetheless.

Then there is Fury, starring Brad Pitt. It is often praised, but it has flaws. One scene in particular shows a Sherman advancing on a German defensive position with neatly cut trenches, perfectly formed, and not a mound of spoil in sight. C’mon. Who was advising on that scene?

The rain is coming down hard as I sit here writing this, and I can tell you that soldiering in wet and cold coditions is miserable. As we’ll find out, life on the Eastern Front was brutal, especially in winter. Digging is hard work. Depending on the ground, a proper trench can take up to 24 hours to complete, and it never looks tidy like it has been excavated by a mechanical digger.

Over to You

There are more talking points than can fit into one edition, which is exactly why this project exists. In the coming weeks I will be talking about the Gurkhas and I will be recognising the Sikh contribution to the Allied effort.

Get involved in the comments. Share your thoughts. Bring a friend along.

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One final question. What would you like to see more of in this small historical corner of the internet?

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Don’t forget to read the countdown to war.

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The evacuation of Dunkirk remains one of the most extraordinary episodes of the war. Operation Dynamo was a triumph of urgency and improvisation at a moment when defeat on land looked final. The Luftwaffe had the beaches and the Channel in their sights, yet the Royal Navy, supported by hundreds of small boats, brought home over 300,000 troops.

Britain’s next great test arrived in late summer and early autumn, during the Battle of Britain. You probably know the outline, but the familiarity of the story does not dull the stakes. When you revisit 1940 closely, it becomes clear how many outcomes depended on thin margins, exhausted people, and decisions made under brutal pressure.

And it is worth remembering that, in 1940, figures like David Stirling, Paddy Blair Mayne, and Jock Lewes were still largely unknown. More on that in the weeks to come.

One final note: in a bid not to clog your inbox, Project World War 2 will become a fortnightly publication.

When you think of 1940, what feels like the real turning point for Britain: supply, Dunkirk, or the battle in the skies?

This week’s Chronological highlights

7 January 1940 – Raate Road, Finland

Finnish forces complete the destruction of the Soviet 44th Rifle Division at Raate Road, a decisive Winter War victory achieved through encirclement, mobility and winter tactics.

8 January 1940 – Karelian Isthmus, Finland

Soviet assaults against the Mannerheim Line continue but fail to achieve a breakthrough, reinforcing international perceptions of Red Army weaknesses.

9 January 1940 – London, United Kingdom

The British War Cabinet reviews plans for possible intervention in Scandinavia, weighing support for Finland against the risks of provoking Germany.

10 January 1940 – Mechelen-aan-de-Maas, Belgium

A German aircraft carrying operational documents crash-lands in Belgium, an incident that compromises elements of Germany’s planned offensive in the west and forces a reassessment in Berlin.

11 January 1940 – North Sea

The Royal Navy steps up patrols and convoy escorts as German U-boat activity continues to threaten merchant shipping in northern waters.

12 January 1940 – Paris, France

Allied commanders continue discussions on the defence of the Low Countries, with uncertainty growing over German intentions and timing.

13 January 1940 – Finland

Finnish morale remains high following recent victories, while Soviet command begins restructuring forces in preparation for renewed, larger-scale offensives.

Why this week mattered in World War 2

This week marked a turning point in the opening phase of 1940. Finland’s success at Raate Road became one of the most striking early defeats suffered by the Soviet Union, reshaping global views of Red Army competence and emboldening smaller nations watching from the sidelines. At the same time, political and military unease spread across Western Europe.

The Mechelen incident exposed how fragile German planning could be, while British and French leaders wrestled with the dilemma of whether and where to intervene next. The war was no longer confined to Poland’s aftermath. It was becoming a contest of intelligence, endurance and strategic nerve.

Speaking of intelligence, false intelligence at that, this week’s person in focus was an American born Nazi sympathiser.

Lord Haw-Haw: William Joyce and Nazi Radio Propaganda During World War II

William Joyce, better known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” stands as one of the most notorious figures in British wartime history, a man whose distinctive voice and biting commentary made him simultaneously famous and reviled across Britain and the Commonwealth. His six-year career as a Nazi propagandist culminated not with a whimper but with a defiant walk to the gallows in January 1946, making him the penultimate person executed for treason in British history.

Origins of a Fascist

Joyce’s path to infamy began unremarkably. Born in Brooklyn on April 24, 1906, to British parents, he was an American citizen by birth. The family relocated to Galway, Ireland, in 1909, where young William grew up among the turbulent politics of Irish independence. During the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920s, Joyce claimed to have served as a courier for the British Army, and came perilously close to assassination by the IRA for his trouble. Fearing for his life, he was dispatched to England in 1922.​

At Birkbeck College in London, Joyce distinguished himself academically, earning first-class honors in English Language and History by 1927. Yet his intellectual prowess masked a growing attraction to fascism. During a political meeting in the late 1920s, communist opponents attacked him with razors, leaving a permanent scar that ran from his earlobe to the corner of his mouth. This physical wound seemed to harden his ideological extremism. He joined the British Fascists in 1923 and later became a prominent member of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), rising to Deputy Leader by 1934.​

Joyce’s relationship with Mosley, however, deteriorated when he found Mosley insufficiently radical and antisemitic. In 1937, Mosley dismissed him, prompting Joyce to establish his own organization, the National Socialist League, dedicated to importing German Nazism wholesale into Britain. The venture attracted only a tiny membership, and by 1939, embittered and increasingly alcoholic, Joyce made a fateful decision: he would emigrate to Nazi Germany.​

William Joyce The Propaganda Broadcaster

On August 24, 1939, just days before the German invasion of Poland, Joyce obtained a British passport through fraudulent claims of British citizenship, then immediately fled to Berlin with his second wife, Margaret. Within two weeks, he was recruited by Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. On September 18, 1939, one week after the outbreak of war, Joyce made his first broadcast under the auspices of the German Radio Corporation (Reichsrundfunk).​

The opening of each broadcast became iconic: “Germany calling, Germany calling,” delivered in an exaggerated upper-class English accent that suggested aristocratic insider knowledge. The nickname “Lord Haw-Haw” was coined by Daily Express radio critic Jonah Barrington, initially applied to another broadcaster, but it was Joyce with whom the name became permanently associated. His distinctive nasal tone, itself the product of that razor wound received in the 1920s, became instantly recognizable across Britain.​​

The “Germany Calling” programme aired from medium wave (Reichssender Hamburg) to the United Kingdom and by shortwave to the United States, continuing from September 18, 1939, until April 30, 1945, the very day Hitler committed suicide. During the “Phoney War” period of late 1939 and early 1940, Joyce’s audience was staggering: estimates suggest six million regular listeners and eighteen million occasional listeners by March 1940. By comparison, a typical evening saw one in every six British adults listening regularly to Joyce, while four in every six listened to BBC News.​

Lord Haw-Haw Content and Strategy

Joyce’s broadcasts were carefully crafted to undermine British morale and confidence. Initially, he attacked the legitimacy of Britain’s government, criticizing the rationing system, the class structure, alleged Jewish dominance of business, and the supposed decadence of British institutions. One infamous broadcast asserted: “The whole system of English so-called democracy is a fraud. It is an elaborate system of make-believe, under which you may have the illusion that you are choosing your own government, but which in reality simply ensures that the same privileged class, the same wealthy people, shall rule England under different names.”​

As the war escalated following the German invasions of Denmark, Norway, and France in spring 1940, Joyce’s tone shifted to threats and demands for unconiliation. He warned of imminent German invasion, emphasized German military superiority, inflated reports of Allied losses, and directly urged British surrender. Critically, his broadcasts often contained fragments of accurate information mixed with disinformation, details about Allied positions, shipping losses, and military movements that suggested either sophisticated espionage networks or remarkable intelligence gathering.

Summary: William Joyce Trial, Execution and Historical Significance

William Joyce was returned to Britain after the war and tried for high treason at the Central Criminal Court in September 1945. The case hinged on a fundamental legal question: could Joyce, an American citizen, owe allegiance to the British Crown? The court ruled that by fraudulently obtaining and using a British passport in 1938 and again in 1939, Joyce had voluntarily assumed duties of allegiance. By broadcasting propaganda for Nazi Germany while holding that passport, he was deemed to have committed treason abroad. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Appeals to both the Court of Criminal Appeal and the House of Lords failed, despite a notable dissent.

Joyce was executed at Wandsworth Prison on 3 January 1946 by Albert Pierrepoint. His death was historically significant, being the penultimate execution for treason in Britain. He was buried in an unmarked grave, later reinterred in Galway at his daughter’s request.

Historians continue to debate the real impact of Joyce’s wartime broadcasts. While they did not break British morale, they exposed public anxieties, fuelled rumours and demonstrated the psychological power of radio propaganda. His case prompted serious counter-propaganda efforts by the British state and highlighted the reach of mass communication during total war.

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Most enduringly, Joyce became a symbol of wartime betrayal. His trial set a lasting legal precedent by establishing that holding a British passport created obligations of allegiance, even for non-British citizens acting overseas.

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If I had been standing on the perimeter track of RAF Biggin Hill in December 1939, camera in hand, I might have trained my lens on a Hawker Hurricane returning from patrol, or a Spitfire gliding in against the grey winter sky. Perhaps I would have found myself in a market square instead, watching Londoners carry on quietly, hoping that 1940 might somehow bring peace. 1940 didn’t and the year would test Britain’s resolve.

But what would that lens have been? In 1939, photography was still a manual art, light measured by instinct, focus by touch, and patience by habit. The cameras of the day were mechanical marvels:

• Leica IIIa and IIIb (Germany) — 35 mm rangefinders prized for portability and precision. War correspondents and photojournalists used them to capture candid, close-range scenes.

• Rolleiflex Automat (Germany) — a twin-lens reflex camera that delivered exceptional sharpness on 6×6 cm film. Loved by professionals for portraits and press work.

• Contax II (Germany) — with its advanced rangefinder system and fast Zeiss lenses, it was one of the finest 35 mm cameras available, a direct rival to Leica.

• Kodak Retina II (USA/Germany) — compact and accessible, a favourite for travellers and servicemen before the war spread globally.

• Graflex Speed Graphic (USA) — the press camera of record, often seen in the hands of newspaper photographers covering the war’s early months.

Film stocks were slower, mostly black-and-white, with ISO ratings around 25 – 100. Exposures required deliberation; you didn’t waste a frame. Each click of the shutter must have felt like a small decision to record history.

Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke-White, George Rodger, and Cecil Beaton were all famous wartime photographers. Rodger was noted for his work in Africa, and for photographing mass deaths at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Miller covered the Blitz, the liberation of Paris and some of the other notorious concentration camps (Buchenwald and Dachau).

Speaking of snapshots, let’s recap what happened on this day in 1939, and the week that followed.

Chronological Highlights of World War 2

31 Dec 1939 – Western Front, Europe
After static trench and patrol warfare through the autumn, Allied and German forces remain in reinforced positions as the so-called Phoney War enters its fourth month, with patrols and limited engagements continuing along the Franco-German border.

1 Jan 1940 – Finland, Winter War (Suomussalmi region)
Soviet forces hold trapped 163rd Rifle Division positions on the Raate Road near Suomussalmi, setting the stage for a significant Finnish counterattack later in the week.

2 Jan 1940 – Karelian Isthmus, Finland
Heavy winter fighting continues as Finnish defenders of the Mannerheim Line repulse renewed Soviet assaults aimed at breaking through to Viipuri, exploiting the terrain and cold to slow the numerically superior attackers.

3 Jan 1940 – Atlantic Ocean (U-boat campaign)
German U-boat operations intensify in the North Atlantic as submarines target Allied merchant shipping, beginning what will become the prolonged Battle of the Atlantic. (History.com)

4 Jan 1940 – Finland, Battle of Raate Road begins
Finnish forces launch a decisive counterattack along the Raate Road against isolated Soviet units, encircling and inflicting heavy casualties on the Red Army.

5 Jan 1940 – Northern Europe
Winter conditions deepen, challenging supply and reinforcement for all belligerents, with both sides relying on improvisation to sustain operations.

6 Jan 1940 – Arctic convoys preparations
Allied naval planners begin developing Arctic convoy routes to supply the Soviet Union via Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, anticipating the northern sea operations to come. (History.com)

Why This Week Mattered

The week bridging 1939 and 1940 marked the moment when the war stopped feeling new and began to deepen. The Winter War revealed how determination and terrain could outweigh numbers. The Atlantic grew more dangerous as U-boats hunted the supply lines that Britain depended on.

In Western Europe, the strange calm of the Phoney War continued, soldiers waiting, civilians adapting, photographers perhaps standing quietly with their cameras, aware that history was just beginning to develop in the tray.

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The 55th Kent Heavy Anti Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery, sat in defensive positions along the river line, listening to the silence and pretending it was just another night. The frost had been hard. The cold had been honest about what it planned to do to fingers, boots, tempers, and sleep.

Battery Sergeant Major Arthur Firth had finished his rounds. He had done what good sergeants have always done, which is make routine feel like protection. Equipment checked. Straps tight. Faces washed. Shaves completed, or at least attempted with the sort of commitment you can manage when your hands do not quite belong to you.

Morale was high, in that stubborn way soldiers manage when home is somewhere else and the calendar refuses to wait.

A few of the men stamped their feet to keep the blood moving. Not to complain, officially, but to remind their bodies they were still on duty. Nearby, Gunners Hugh Morris and Jack Straw decided to solve the problem of cold the British way, by making noise.

“We Three Kings…” Hugh started, confidently, as if the fog itself might join in.

Jack followed, slightly louder, because Christmas is not Christmas unless someone sings like they are trying to win an argument.

Within seconds, other voices gathered, half harmony and half mischief, rising into the grey blanket like a flare you could not quite see. For a moment, it sounded almost normal. Almost like a village church. Almost like home.

Firth let it run. He did not smile, not properly, but he did not stop it either. He looked out into the fog and tried to read the night.

Surely the Germans will not send their bombers over England tonight, he told himself. Christmas Eve has rules, even in wartime.

Then again, war is famous for ignoring the rules.

Breakfast came as relief, not celebration. Bread and jam disappeared quickly, washed down with strong tea that tasted of warmth, discipline, and the promise that you could keep going another few hours. Men spoke in short sentences, shoulders hunched, hands wrapped around mugs as if they were holding onto something more than heat.

When the last crumbs were gone, Firth returned to his letter.

He wrote by feel as much as sight, in a world of damp paper and colder air. Irene would read this later, somewhere safe, with the cottage walls between her and the estuary fog. That thought mattered.

Dear Irene,

I hope you are well. I am missing you this Christmas, but I know you are out of harm’s way in the family cottage.

By the time you read this it will be 1940.

The boys are in good spirits. We have not seen Gerry, but the lads are keen to get into the action. I have a bit of a sore throat, but that is to be expected as we are out in the cold all day and night.

I will write again soon.

Love, Arthur

He paused after his name.

Outside, the men were back to waiting, back to listening, back to the strange work of standing between a dark sky and the people who slept beneath it. The fog gave nothing away. No engines. No stars. No certainty.

Only the quiet question that always sits behind sentry duty, even on Christmas Eve.