Sunday mornings in Britain had a special sound. It was quiet. A real quietness. There was no hum of movement or steady background noise. For this one morning a week, it seemed that everyone was resting in his house and the only real sound to be heard was distant church bells. For one small boy of 5 going on 6, this Sunday morning was no different than any other except that his father was home and already up. The weather was still warm and the sun was shining as he played in the garden of the large Victorian corner house, with its big garden. He had a tortoise and was trying to get it to eat some lettuce but it would keep moving on at its own speed, ignoring the food.
Then he heard his father calling from the kitchen door and , when he went inside, he found his mother, grandmother, an aunt and uncle all sitting round near the wireless in the living room. His father told him just to sit and listen, and remember this day as part of history. But the boy did not really listen and cannot now remember what the voice said, but he knew it was an unusual day and that all the grown-ups were not smiling
It was 11 a.m. on 3rd September 1939 and Chamberlain had just announced that Britain was at war with Germany as a result of their invasion of Poland on 1st September. After years of behaviour that can only be called quixotic, in the face of the facts as they unfolded, Chamberlain had on 31st March finally, for the right reasons, but with nothing to back up his words, stood by one of the countries threatened by Hitler, and guaranteed to help Poland in case of unprovoked aggression by Germany. Now the guarantee had been called in. Never mind that the Germans had manufactured provocation in their usual brutal and soulless manner, by dressing their own men in Polish uniforms and then pretending that they had attacked a remote radio station, leaving behind eleven dead concentration camp prisoners, who had previously been murdered by injection and their bodies shot, the fact of war was established beyond recall. By 3rd, the German armies had not so much advanced as instantly subjugated whole areas of Poland as 5 armies subjected them to a simultaneous blitzkrieg.
Blitzkrieg, a word that was to become feared throughout Europe as Hitler continued his conquest, literally translates as 'lightning war'. It is an apt description for something the world had not seen before, a war waged from the air followed up by mobile artillery in the form of tanks. And close behind these are the infantry, transported in lorries until needed to advance on foot, as the final step in the actual elimination of the opposing troops as a fighting force. Even if Poland had had a modern army, their long border with Germany made defence almost impossible without a standing army of millions stationed all along it, with good roads to enable reinforcements to meet specific attacks. They did not have any of these and, additionally, the whole of the interior of the country was one large plain, ideal for tank warfare. The German commanders were as surprised as the Poles at the speed of advance, and all their planning against the onset of the autumn rains in October, was needless. For their only real worry had been rain which would have turned whole areas into mud and would have swollen the main rivers back to their normal banks, to make really formidable barriers to cross-country tank fighting.
