Читать книгу We Were Young and at War: The first-hand story of young lives lived and lost in World War Two - Sarah Wallis - Страница 28

‘Please send me a map of France, Belgium and Southern England’

From September 1939, Britain and France had been preparing to defend themselves against Germany’s Blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning war’, which had defeated Poland so quickly. Britain had no conscript army and spent the opening months of the war building up its manpower, while sending the five existing regular divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) across the Channel to France in December. France called up all 101 divisions of its army, still haunted by the experience of the First World War. Many soldiers were deployed to the Maginot Line, concrete defences built along the border with Germany, which the French hoped was inviolable and would prevent a surprise attack. By the spring, Hitler had already postponed his invasion of Western Europe twice, once because of the autumn mud and the second time after an intelligence breach.

To the majority of people in Britain and France in the winter of 1939-40, the war hardly seemed real. Aside from the absence of enlisted fathers, sons and brothers, nothing much seemed to happen. In London and Paris, cafés and restaurants were full; theatres and cinemas opened as usual. In Britain the period became known as ‘the phoney war’, in France ‘la drôle de guerre’, the funny or odd war. Many of the British children evacuated from the cities in September 1939, in anticipation of devastating German bombing raids, returned home. By April 1940 the German generals had drawn up a new strategy and were now waiting for a period of favourable weather to launch their offensive in the West.

Seventeen-year-old Herbert Veigel, from the provincial town of Heilbronn in southern Germany, had just completed his training in radio communication with the Luftwaffe. On the outbreak of war he had signed up as a volunteer, lying about his age and forging his father’s signature. Six years in the Hitler Youth had groomed him as a soldier and prepared him for the ‘unavoidable war’ to win new German ‘living space’ in foreign lands. Soldiering also offered him an escape from his pious parents and the tedium of school. The youngest boy of seven siblings, Herbert had often felt overshadowed by his elder brothers’ academic and sporting successes. Now that three of his brothers, all devout Nazis, were fighting for Germany, one already decorated for his part in the invasion of Poland, Herbert was determined not to be left behind.

Thirteen-year-old Parisian Micheline Singer’s main experience of the war so far was the flattering attention she received from British Expeditionary Force troops stationed in France. When war was declared the previous September, Micheline and her family had been staying with relatives in the Normandy town of Verneuil. Her father enlisted immediately, while the rest of the family stayed on in Normandy rather than return home to Paris, the more likely target of a German attack. Micheline’s mother struggled on her own to rein in her increasingly independent-minded daughter.

In England, sixteen-year-old grammar school boy Brian Poole could not wait for the war to speed up. He was impatient to leave the Boy Scouts and enlist in the armed forces. An only child, Brian lived in the Cheshire village of Lostock Gralam, an hour’s bus ride from Manchester. A year earlier Brian had signed up for a penpal scheme, and he and New Jersey schoolgirl, Trudie Lach, now also sixteen, had been exchanging regular letters across the Atlantic. Brian had initially introduced himself, describing his hobbies as ‘stamp collecting, model aeroplane building, keeping birds, cycling’ and scouting. When Brian wrote to Trudie that April, almost exactly a year into their friendship, they were still getting to know each other.