大象传媒

We have spoken of the disastrous times in Germany and how they made almost inevitable a renewal of conflict but almost everyone was on the bread line after the first war. Even America suffered - remember John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath?"
Widespread industralisation had drawn people off the land and farms lay idle. A Btitish newspaper had stock character in it's cartoons, a gaunt, ragged and starving creature known as 'Idle Acres.'
It is small wonder that opposition to rearmament was rife, despite Germany's mounting stockpile of offensive weaponry. Only the persistence of a few politicians like Winston Churchill, cryng 'havoc' from the back benches got us going.
So called 'shadow factories' were built ready to go into production when needed and they soon were!
It was not only in numbers that we were woefully behind, our weaponry was far from the standard of Germany's. Our plane's were still bi-planes, the Hawker 'Hurricane' was the first of our monoplane fighters. After came Mitchell's brilliant Spitfire that so outclassed the enemy Messerchmits.
Our tanks were lightly armoured and ludicrously under gunned by comparison with the monsters they would have to face. The French had started building bigger tanks and a cinema newsreel of the time showed one running a wooden pile halfdriven into the ground.We were invited to admire the way the wight of the tank sank the pile to ground level!
When war came, our finest weapon was the dogged British 'Tommy'-the famed 'Tommy Atkins' of the 1914/18 war. They never knew when they were defeated, the British Army had always come through and it wasn't going to stop now. It was said of them: 'The only time you have to worry is when they stop grumbling."
And at home, when the Luftwaffe unloaded torrents of bombs onto our cities night after night, the same dogged, obstinate spirit sustained the civilians. People would spend the night in the air raid shelter and pick their way through the rubble the next morning. Some might be going back to a shop where they worked, where on a front shattered by a bomb hung the ubiquitous sigh, "Business as usual!"

This story was submitted to the People's Wwr website by a volunteer of the Stoke CSV Action Desk on behalf of John Pound and was added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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