Our Land At War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939-45
Duff Hart-Davis
Language: English
Pages: 356
ISBN: B01K3LH15M
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A rich account of the impact of the Second World War on the lives of people living in the farms and villages of Britain.
On the outbreak of war, the countryside was invaded by service personnel and evacuee children by the thousand; land was taken arbitrarily for airfields, training grounds and firing ranges, and whole communities were evicted. Prisoner-of-war camps brought captured enemy soldiers to close quarters, and as horses gave way to tractors and combines farmers were burdened with aggressive new restrictions on what they could and could not grow. Land Girls and Lumber Jills worked in fields and forests. Food – or the lack of it – was a major preoccupation and rationing strictly enforced. And although rabbits were poached, apples scrumped and mushrooms gathered, there was still not enough to eat.
Drawing from diaries, letters, books, official records and interviews, Duff Hart Davis revisits rural Britain to describe how ordinary people survived the war years. He tells of houses turned over to military use such as Bletchley and RAF Medmenham as well as those that became schools, notably Chatsworth in Derbyshire.
Combining both hardship and farce, the book examines the profound changes war brought to Britain’s countryside: from the Home Guard, struggling with the provision of ludicrous equipment, to the role of the XII Corps Observation Unit. whose task was to enlarge rabbit warrens and badger setts into bunkers for harassing the enemy in the event of a German invasion; to the unexpected tenderness shown by many to German and Italian prisoners-of-war at work on the land.
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a new game … Their eyes were opened completely to the possibilities of this great sport of sniping.’ Enthusiasm for sniping permeated even the Home Guard in the far south, where one veteran claimed that in the First World War he personally had had ‘a bag of something like fifty Huns’. Among the men trained at Llanberis were members of the Lovat Scouts, the Highland regiment first raised by Simon, the sixteenth Lord Lovat, to fight in the Boer War. In civilian life many of the men were
about to sail for Normandy. When the pathologist opened his body, it released a strong smell of bitter almonds – the unmistakable call sign of cyanide. Clearly, he had lost his nerve. ‘That was our first p.m. on D-Day,’ wrote Molly sadly. ‘The young soldier who was cut up in Wanstead mortuary while his erstwhile comrades were landing in Normandy.’ Agent Garbo and his orchestra continued their bravura performance right to the wire. At 3 a.m. on 6 June he and four colleagues assembled in the
impedimenta with them. At the end of May there had been 640,000 American field force personnel in England. By the end of September the number had fallen to 33,000. Former GI camps stood empty and abandoned: no longer could children cadge gum and chocolate, or hitch rides in passing vehicles. What they could do, though, was to forage profitably on the huge dumps of canned food that the Americans had left behind. Also abandoned were hundreds of dogs, which the soldiers had somehow appropriated but
disembowel any animal injured beyond hope of recovery’. By no means all carcasses passed through official channels. One night, when a stick of bombs fell among cattle in a field near Upton House in Gloucestershire, locals sallied forth to assess the damage; but they went armed with knives, hacksaws, sacks and buckets, and by morning there was nothing left of the single casualty – a Friesian cow – except its horns and a few scraps of skin. The Luftwaffe had targets all over Britain, and people
by how smart he looked in his blue and orange short-sleeved shirts and khaki shorts, and by the fact that he spoke English so well. Apparently he was a university lecturer, and had been forced to stay in England when war broke out. Only much later did she discover that in 1946 he returned to his native Kenya, leaving behind an English wife and son; that in 1953 he was given a seven-year prison sentence for his alleged involvement with Mau Mau terrorists, and that in 1964 he became President of
