Here we are, on the edge of yet another one, but I don't particularly care
for summer myself. At least as compared with spring and fall. My clock
started ticking when the Germans were trying to figure out a cross-channel
invasion schedule. I was born in the north of Scotland on what was regarded
popularly, though not with complete astronomical precision, as a summer's
day, June 6, 1941, three years before D-Day, with my father far away in
London where the Luftwaffe's bombs and rockets were falling. My mother had
evacuated to the large house of an American friend, just north of Inverness.
She felt the pangs come on that Sunday morning, and the doctor arrived with
kilt and fishing rod, mightily displeased to be called from his fly-casting.
Down in London and denied access to the north of Scotland because he was a
Red, my father went down the street to the shop to get a Sunday paper. Down
came one of Hitler's rockets, up went 5, Acacia Road and St. Johns Wood. My
father returned to find a lot of rubble and the cat with its fur blown off.
The cat thought my father had done it, had a nervous breakdown, and never
did forgive. So much for seasonal precedent.
Hitler had plans. One of them was to shoot my father. The Nazi blacklist
prepared for the German force poised to cross the channel featured Claud
Cockburn. We never saw a copy until Alan Moorhead used the relevant page as
an illustration in his book Invasion 1940, because Churchill's name was on
it. There was papa's name, a few lines lower, with the correct address for
his office on Victoria Street, where he'd published The Week, a newsletter
the Fuehrer and his associates didn't care for.
All Commies would have been shot, anyway. The Nazis felt the same way as
the British War Office, whose plan was to draft all the Reds, send them to
the front lines, and hope that the German Panzers would do their duty.
But then the War Office worried that the Commies, in the span between
recruitment and dispatch to the front lines, would foment discord and mutiny
among the troops. So, my father got his call-up papers, then, almost
immediately, a letter saying forget about it.
Back in London, I spent a lot of my first summer evenings down in St. Johns
Wood subway station, where many in our neighborhood would flee when the
bombing got bad. At first, the authorities refused to allow any deep shelter
program on the grounds that if the people went underground, they'd never
come out. Even though Churchill used an abandoned subway station as a
shelter himself, according to his secretary, he was "thinking on
authoritarian lines about shelters and talks of forcibly preventing people
from going into the underground."
There's a myth now about the British hanging together in those dark days.
"London can take it," Ed Murrow told America in his CBS broadcasts.
Actually, morale was appalling. Most people correctly had little confidence
in the competence of their government, and thought Germany was going to win.
In the Channel Islands, which the Nazis did take over, the people greeted
them hospitably and turned in Jews with zest. The British Ministry of
Information employed 10,000 people to read people's mail surreptitiously,
intercepting about 200,000 letters a week, and discovered that people were
deeply pessimistic and thought Churchill was "played out."
Secret government reports spelled out the popular lack of nerve:
"Portsmouth -- on all sides we hear that looting and wanton destruction had
reached alarming proportions. The police seem unable to exercise control.
... The effect on morale is bad, and there is a general feeling of
desperation ... their nerve had gone." In Portsmouth during the heavy
bombing, about 90,000 a night were leaving the city.
Churchill's famous speeches about their "finest hour," and so forth, didn't
have much effect, either. He delivered them in the House of Commons, and
when the BBC asked him to rebroadcast them on the radio, he refused. So, the
BBC secretly used an actor named Norman Shelley to read them out, pretending
to be Churchill. Shelley's usual role was to play Larry the Lamb on
"Children's Hour." Most people didn't actually know what Churchill's voice
sounded like, and those who did thought it sounded funny. Letters poured
into Number 10 Downing St., asking what was wrong with the P.M.
Many people tried to shut out the war as much as they could. By the end
of 1940, nearly a third of the population admitted to not following news of
the war. When asked what depressed them most, people put the weather first,
then, war news, then, the air raids. Life was rotten anyway for a huge slab
of the population, which was malnourished, poorly housed, barely educated
and deeply discontented. When they visited the East End, the King and Queen
were soundly booed. In the summer of 1941, a woman got five years in prison
for saying, "Hitler was a good man, a better man than Mr Churchill."
Summers were colder and wetter back then before the blessed arrival of
nineties warm-up. Even now, in Northern California, I'm not enamored of the
season. By rights, spring should last until late July. Then, a week of
summer, abolish August, and then, have a fall lasting until February. A
month of winter, then spring again.
To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other
columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at
www.creators.com.
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