I have been in love with the
Brits since I was ten years old.
That was 1940, the year of the Battle of Britain. I was just old enough to understand
what was going on and what was at stake.
By mid-year, the Nazi war machine had overrun almost all of
western and central Europe. The
British Expeditionary Force, sent to help defend France, had been
shattered—some 68,000 of its troops killed, wounded or captured and virtually
all of its equipment abandoned.
Just before France fell in June, the BEF's remnants had barely escaped
from Dunkirk, its evacuation aided by the miraculous armada of small boats.
Every sea-worthy vessel from the coast of England, mostly manned by civilians,
sailed under fire across the Channel to aid in the rescue of a third of a
million BEF and allied soldiers.
Britain now stood alone against Germany, Hitler fully
expecting it to sue for a negotiated peace. Winston Churchill, who had recently been appointed prime
minister, had a fiery answer: "We shall defend our island, whatever the
cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing
grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the
hills; we shall never surrender."
Hitler made plans to invade.
The Battle of Britain turned out to be totally an air
battle. Given the strength of the
British navy, Hitler knew that he could not mount a cross-Channel invasion without
complete control of the air. He
sent the Luftwaffe to demolish the Royal Air Force (which had already lost
almost 1000 aircraft and 1500 crew members in France) and its airfields, as
well as other military installations and harbors, and to bomb cities in order
to destroy civilian morale.
At the start of the Battle, the only thing in the
Luftwaffe's way beside anti-aircraft gun batteries were fewer than 1000 RAF
fighter planes and a few more pilots.
With the help of their newly invented radar, which detected incoming
aircraft, the British were able to send fighters on sorties pretty much around
the clock in all weather to intercept the Luftwaffe bombers over the
Channel. Planes that returned
operational were often refueled as soon as they landed, manned by a fresh
pilot, and returned to battle.
Casualties were severe—a newly trained pilot had little chance of
surviving more than five sorties.
But by mid-September the RAF had won the Battle, destroying
perhaps half of the incoming Luftwaffe force and forfending an invasion of the
island. Hitler decided to plan for
an invasion of the Soviet Union instead. That was when Churchill said,
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so
few."
How could a boy of ten not fall in love with such bravery?
The first personal liaison of my love affair was twelve
years later, in 1952, just after obtaining my Master's degree. I had gotten a summer job as a
laboratory assistant at Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company in Chelmsford,
just northeast of London. I was a
bit worried, because I had repeatedly been told that I would find the Brits
cold and removed. Nothing could
have been further from the truth; I found them uniformly warm and welcoming to
a youngster abroad for the first time.
My pay was £7 10s 6d per week in the old coinage (20
shillings to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling), worth about $21 at the
time—more than adequate to live on.
Half of that went to my boarding house—a room plus two meals a day. My room had an "electric fire"
in the fireplace, and there was a small water heater over the bathtub in the
communal bathroom. Both were
operated by inserting a penny at a time—a copper coin only a bit smaller than a
U.S. half dollar and worth about 1¢.
I had to remember to keep several pence around at all times if I wanted
to stay warm and clean!
I immediately bought a used bicycle so that I could get
around. That soon brought me into
contact with my first British police constable, who stopped me because the
bicycle's dynamo wasn't working, so I was riding at dusk without a light. When I explained that I had just
arrived from America and only that day bought the bike, he said,
"Well, let's see what we can do about that." He removed his helmet, neatly folded
his jacket and laid it on the ground, rolled up his sleeves, and within a few
minutes had repaired the dynamo.
He then sent me on my way with a "Welcome to England!" and a
cautionary word about riding without a light. A lad from New York City was unused to such an obliging
police officer.
The bike also quickly showed me what Churchill had meant by
"we shall fight in the fields."
On my first week-end, I biked through the countryside toward the Channel
(which is less than 20 miles from Chelmsford). I was puzzled by the many concrete cylindrical structures I
saw, which had narrow slits in them.
On inquiry, I was told they were "pillboxes." With most young men in the army during
the war, they were a local line of home defense. If the Germans invaded, church bells would sound, and
locals—mostly older men and women—would rush to them so they could shoot at
invading Nazi Panzer divisions with their rifles! No one was going take "this scepter'd isle ... this
blessed plot, this earth, this realm" from the Brits.
On arriving in Britain, I had been given a ration
book—pretty much everything was still rationed in 1952, seven years after the
war. The weekly meat ration, for
example, was whatever 21 pence could buy, perhaps six ounces of steak or a
pound of sausage. I had to turn
over the food rations to my boarding house, but could keep the special ration
for sweets given to foreigners (I don't know why)—an outlandish two pounds
(weight) per month. I luckily
don't have a sweet tooth, so I used my first month's ration on two pounds of
chocolates to bring to my boss' home when I was invited to dinner there. I'm so glad I did, because my hosts had
obviously spent the whole family's meat ration for a week or two on fine lamb
chops. One of their children could
not refrain from piping up, "Oh Mum! This is so nice!" And the children couldn't keep their
hands off the chocolates I had brought, as if they had never seen so much candy
at one time. Things were still that pinched so many years after the war.
London, which I visited several times, was still desolated
from the Blitz—the rubble was cleared away, but huge swaths of empty lots were
all around, the results of five years of air raids. (On one of the worst nights alone, 29/30 December 1940, more
than 24,000 high-explosive bombs and 100,000 incendiary
bombs were dropped on London.) I was in a state of shock at my first sight of the
destruction of warfare—and that was years afterwards, not in the midst of the actual
killings and fires. Many medieval
and Renaissance masterpieces were gone. Fortunately, because Churchill had
ordered that Christopher Wren's magnum opus
of St. Paul's Cathedral be saved at all costs, it sustained only minor damage,
but much of the area around it was still leveled in 1952. The Brits went about their business as
if nothing had happened. Perhaps
they were not cold and removed, but they certainly had their well-known stiff
upper lips.
My ardor for the Brits flared during that summer. In the intervening six decades until
now, I have visited that "scepter'd isle" perhaps a score of
times. I remain very much in love
with it and its occupants.