History UsefulNotes / TheHomeFront

Understandably, pretty much everyone in Britain was very happy to hear that Germany finally surrendered. On both 7 May and the day after, Brits all over the country threw what must have been the Greatest. Party. '''''EVER'''''. The streets of every city was flooded with people celebrating, and some of the footage of it has to be seen to be believed. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rePb2NadxQw Here's]] an old newsreel of the event.

After the war, the US and USSR grabbed all the scientists and documentation they could, using it for their ballistic missile and space programs (an orbital launch vehicle is just an ICBM with a satellite or capsule attached instead of a warhead).

More people died making it (slave labour was used) than were killed by it.

Britain had a few tricks up its sleeve. One of these was RADAR ([=RAdio=] Detection And Ranging). Whilst the Luftwaffe tried to surgically attack the British air bases the RAF did not have to try and patrol all of their skies all of the time, burning up fuel reserves and stopping the pilots from sleeping, but rather wait for the little bleeping lights. Of course, loose lips sink aircraft, and Britain didn't want the Germans knowing about RADAR, so they claimed that [[http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/carrots.asp the pilots had very good eyesight from eating carrots]]. Carrots suddenly became very popular in Britain.

Although the Chain Home stations were rather low tech, this also meant they could be built rapidly, allowing them to be finished before The Battle of Britain and reducing the number of things that could go wrong. The Germans were, in fact, aware of them. However, they decided that the towers were too hard to destroy with bombing, and that the stations would not affect the war that much. In fact, the Chain Home stations (later joined by Chain Home Low and Chain Home Extra Low, mobile units intended to lower the minimum detection height of the RADAR) became vital, and their operators became capable of interpreting more in the data than the stations were designed to give them. They could not only tell where the enemy was but their speed, height, direction of flight and even the number of enemy planes. The creation of this system was driven by Hugh Caswall Tremenheere "Stuffy" Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, who tied the wide network of Radar, spotting stations, and airfields together by telephone and radio, enabling fighters to be launched at the optimum time for interception; as with the Bletchley Park codebreakers, Fighter Command was a triumph of technological innovation, forward thinking, and applied intelligence.

Of course the best way to avoid death and costly losses is to have the Germans drop their bombs in the wrong places. A special command in Bomber command was set up, with the aid of stage magicians to make decoy aircraft and buildings. 297 decoy sites, including several entire airfields, were built. About 1 in 20 German bombs landed on a British decoy, and these skills were going to prove vital in concealing the D-Day landings.

The Germans found the RAF to be a more effective opposing force than any they had encountered previously, nevertheless much damage was done and some believe that if the Germans had continued to press their anti-RAF bombings, rather than switching to the Blitz, they may have broken through.

It wasn't just British pilots, of course. [[FightingForAHomeland People from Occupied Europe]] fought with the RAF (the Poles were especially good and remarkably numerous given the [[{{Determinator}} long journey]] through occupied Europe they had had to undertake), along with Commonwealth forces and [[EagleSquadron American volunteers]].

15 September 1940, although by no means the day with most fighting, had an air of "the deciding moment about" is often believed to be the point where Hitler effectively gave up and it has become Battle of Britain Day. UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill's account of that day in ''The Second World War'' is well worth reading- the RAF launched pretty much everything they had and were fortunate that the Germans ran out of fuel just as their planes had to land.

In addition to bombing RAF airstrips and factories, the Germans also bombed industrial targets. During a raid on Thames Haven, on 24 August 1940, some German aircraft strayed over London and dropped bombs in the city. This prompted the British to mount a retaliatory raid on Berlin the next night causing 50 deaths. After several more similar attacks by Britain, Hitler was said to be furious, and on 5 September 1940, at the urging of the Luftwaffe high command, he issued a directive "... for disruptive attacks on the population and air defences of major British cities, including London, by day and night". The Luftwaffe began day and night attacks on British cities, concentrating on London. This relieved the pressure on the RAF's airfields but increased the civilians death tolls drastically. This was the beginning of the period known as The Blitz.

* Rubber (for tyres) was increasingly unavailable and became virtually unobtainable after The Fall of Singapore (and the consequent drying-up of most of the world's natural rubber supply). The expensive synthetic rubber (Buna, etc, all produced from coal) was reserved for military use. Civilians got by in much the same way they had before - patching - but after a certain amount of wear-and-tear no further patching was possible [[note]] Interestingly, Jardine & Mathesons' desire to safeguard their rubber plantations in the immediate post-war period caused the naming of the 'Malayan Emergency', the name the Malaysian government gave to their guerilla/Civil War so the company could continue claiming insurance for damages incurred by the fighting [[/note]].

* Rubber (for tyres) was largely unavailable (the Japanese controlled the rubber producing countries).

* Station X, the codename for Bletchley Park. Assembling crossword puzzle fanatics, mathematicians (famously, Alan Turing), electronics engineers, and assorted others, Station X succeeded in industrialising the business of signals intelligence. Intelligence derived from the breaking of the Wermacht's three-rotor Enigma machine was codenamed [=ULTRA=]; Turing helped design the machines, known as bombes, that applied the principles discovered by Czech and Polish cypher experts on an unprecedented scale, to the extent that it was suspected that the British had sometimes read secret messages before the Germans had. They also broke several other systems during the war; The Kreigsmarine had a four-rotor Enigma, used by the German U-boat fleet, the breaking of which ultimately won the battle of the Atlantic and secured supply lines from America. There was also a ten-rotor system based on teletype codes that was used for extremely high-level German government traffic; that was broken by a machine named Colossus, which fell only slightly short of being the first stored-program electronic computer. The intelligence services also organised the fabrication of cover stories to hide the fact that we were breaking the German codes; a large part of that consisted of locating German agents inside Britain based on [=ULTRA=] decrypts, and promptly turning them into double-agents.

* Station X, the codename for Bletchley Park. Assembling crossword puzzle fanatics, mathematicians (famously, Alan Turing), electronics engineers, and assorted others, Station X succeeding in industrialising the business of signals intelligence. Intelligence derived from the breaking of the Wermacht's three-rotor Enigma machine was codenamed [=ULTRA=]; Turing helped design the machines, known as bombes, that applied the principles discovered by Czech and Polish cypher experts on an unprecedented scale, to the extent that it was suspected that the British had sometimes read secret messages before the Germans had. They also broke several other systems during the war; The Kreigsmarine had a four-rotor Enigma, used by the German U-boat fleet, the breaking of which ultimately won the battle of the Atlantic and secured supply lines from America. There was also a ten-rotor system based on teletype codes that was used for extremely high-level German government traffic; that was broken by a machine named Colossus, which fell only slightly short of being the first stored-program electronic computer. The intelligence services also organised the fabrication of cover stories to hide the fact that we were breaking the German codes; a large part of that consisted of locating German agents inside Britain based on [=ULTRA=] decrypts, and promptly turning them into double-agents.
* Double Cross System- the use of captured German agents for deception purposes, including convincing the Germans D-Day would be at Calais to the extent that some of the agents involved got the Iron Cross from the Germans and Operation Crossbow, where the Germans were made, by false intelligence reports, to alter the aiming settings of the V-1 and V-2 so they would land further from London. The people in charge of the operation were called The Twenty Committee, as 20 in Roman Numerals is XX.

The pride of the Royal Air Force was the [[CoolPlane Supermarine Spitfire]], indisputably the best British fighter of the war, and more than a match for the German Messerschmitt 109. While media both at the time and since focused on the Spitfire, the more numerous fighter was the Hawker Hurricane - not as fast and agile as the Spitfire, but rugged, dependable and just as loved by its pilots. In a case of BoringYetPractical, the Hurricane's stability in flight, which made it less suited for dogfighting, made it far more capable when it came to the business of taking on German bombers; the Spitfires drew the glory, but the Hurricanes almost certainly saved more lives on the ground.

** It was discovered after the war that Double Cross had been so good at its job that ''every single German agent in Britain'' had been turned. On the other hand, they also discovered - rather later on - that one of Russia's agents in Britain, Anthony Blunt of the Cambridge spy ring, had actually worked as the personal assistant to Guy Liddell, one of the key players in the Double Cross System; everything the British were doing to feed the Germans innacurate information was being reported to Moscow, and could potentially have fallen into German hands as a result. Tar Robertson, another key player in the Committee, disliked Blunt intensely - but due to a touch of homophobia on Robertson's part, and not because he suspected Blunt was a spy.

They could be intercepted, with one Spitfire pilot flipping one over with his wings.

The V-2 was the first ballistic missile and first man-made object launched into space, the progenitor of all modern rockets. Over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets in World War II. Unlike the V-1, they were completely impossible to stop; luckily, their accuracy left much to be desired.

Once France fell the eyes of the Nazi mare-with-panje-cart[[note]] Germany invaded the Soviet Union, starting the Soviet-German war, with 120,000 vehicles and ''over 600,000 horses''. ''Even the British'' had a more motorised (proportionally) military force than Germany did throughout the war despite her poverty and second-fiddle-to-the-USA status [[/note]] turned to Great Britain. After Dunkirk the British army was in tatters, although if it had failed to evacuate as many troops from France things would have been even worse. During the first year of the battle of Britain the only fully equipped battalion in Britain was Canadian, the British forces having abandoned their equipment in the retreat. A galling consequence, noted by many observers in the years following, was that the lorries and motor vehicles, as well as some tanks abandoned in France, were refurbished and used to equip new German formations and many saw action as far as Belgrade and Minsk under their new drivers (because they used such unorthodox parts and were worse than useless against contemporary Soviet armoured vehicles, they were used to massacre civilians and kill partisans). When the cream of the Wehrmacht's armoured forces were destroyed in the western Ukraine in 1943-44, some of these British tanks were actually put back into front-line usage... to little effect.

Television switched off as soon as the war began and did not come back on until after it had finished. TheBBC kept going in the form of radio. Note that at this time not many people had television sets in the first place, so this was less of an inconvenience than it would be now. There was one network for the British audience, the BBC Home Service, which today is now BBC Radio 4. The BBC overseas broadcasting was of valuable help to LaResistance (who got coded messages telling them that D-Day was imminent through it) and for propaganda purposes, as it also broadcast in German.

It was during this period that King George VI and his queen, Elizabeth (no, [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen not that one]], though then-Princess Elizabeth was well-loved in her own right), won the enduring devotion of their people; the King vowed to remain in London "[[InItsHourOfNeed for the duration]]," and, despite his stutter, made a series of wartime broadcasts that helped keep morale up even as bombs rained over southern England. Buckingham Palace was bombed at the height of the Blitz, and the Queen Mother cemented her place in the hearts of the British people forever with the quote, "Finally. Now I can look the [heavily bombed] East End in the face." She also said, when asked why the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were not sent to the relative safety of the Commonwealth -- after all, the Dutch royals-in-exile had sent their Queen and princesses to Canada -- that "The girls cannot go without me; I cannot go without the King; and the King will never leave his country." Elizabeth and Margaret would remain in Buckingham Palace or nearby Windsor Castle for the duration, and HRH Elizabeth joined up with the Women's Auxiliaries as a driver and auto mechanic during the final months of the war. She remains both the only female member in the history of the British Crown to hold a military title in her own right -- she rose to the rank of Junior Commander -- and the last living sovereign to be a veteran of the Second World War.

The Blitz effectively ended around 16 May 1941, when Hitler transferred most of his bombers in France to the Eastern Front in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. The General Staff had told him - some of them lying through their teeth but, worse still, most really believing it - the Soviet Union would be defeated in two weeks. In the third week the German Army's reserves could be demobilised, halving the size of the army overnight, and the Soviet Union's vast material wealth would be available for use against Britain. Of course, history took a different course, almost entirely because invading Russia successfully is only slightly more difficult than walking to Pluto -- or, as the world found out, achieving total air superiority over Great Britain [[WhatAnIdiot without having a real plan how to do that or sticking to it]]. Germans or no, the whole war went down about as well as a plan dreamt up and carried out by a bunch of infighting genocidal racist conspiracy-theorists to.

It was during this period that King George VI and his queen, Elizabeth (no, [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen not that one]]), won the enduring devotion of their people; the King vowed to remain in London "[[InItsHourOfNeed for the duration]]," and, despite his stutter, made a series of wartime broadcasts that helped keep morale up even as bombs rained over southern England. Buckingham Palace was bombed at the height of the Blitz, and the Queen Mother cemented her place in the hearts of the British people forever with the quote, "Finally. Now I can look the [heavily bombed] East End in the face." She also said, when asked why the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were not sent to the relative safety of the Commonwealth -- after all, the Dutch royals-in-exile had sent their Queen and princesses to Canada -- that "The girls cannot go without me; I cannot go without the King; and the King will never leave his country." Elizabeth and Margaret would remain in Buckingham Palace or nearby Windsor Castle for the duration, and HRH Elizabeth joined up with the Women's Auxiliaries as a driver and auto mechanic during the final months of the war. She remains both the only female member in the history of the British Crown to hold a military title in her own right -- she rose to the rank of Junior Commander -- and the last living sovereign to be a veteran of the Second World War.

* The [[{{SOE}} Special Operations Executive]], created by Churchill and part set up by Chamberlain while he was in the war cabinet, with the mandate to "Set Europe Ablaze" with every last act of sabotage and dirty trickery that the trainers could think of. Trained and dropped spies over Europe to help the resistance groups, ordinary men and women risking life and limb sending secrets back the British Government. They were also responsible for Operation ANTHROPOID, training and inserting the two Czechoslovakian nationals who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS and major architect of the Holocaust. We won't know the full story of what they did and where until after all of their agents are dead as the files are sealed until then. This is a pitty as that means we won't know exactly how awesome ChristopherLee is until he isn't around for us to be in awe of him.

'''The Home Guard'''

* Petrol (gas) was needed for the military and farming. The farming petrol was dyed red to stop people selling it on the black market. This didn't work since the dye came out if you ran it through a gas mask respirator (note that "red diesel" still exists today, with a much better dye).

The Blitz effectively ended around 16 May 1941, when Hitler transferred most of his bombers in France to the Eastern Front in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. He anticipated that he would defeat the Soviets quickly and then resume the Blitz. Of course, history took a different course, almost entirely because invading Russia successfully is only slightly more difficult than walking to Pluto -- or, as the world found out, achieving total air superiority over Great Britain.

In January 1940, Britain introduced rationing, since 70% of its foodstuffs were imported and the Germans wanted to starve the UK into submission. It was not the only country to do, by any means (Nazi-occupied Europe did too - even neutral Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland did, albeit under better conditions).

Rationing continued after the war. In 1946 bread was actually rationed because of the need to feed starving Europeans (specifically Germans). It was not until 1954 that the last item (bananas) stopped being rationed.

''However'', the war didn't end with the defeat of Germany... and when the British public realised that, morale and public support for the war sunk to a new low. As June and July dragged on it became crystal-clear that the British public didn't give two hoots whether Britain got to Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong etc back: they were sick of high taxation, they were sick of rationing, they were sick of people dying (especially the specific bits they were dying for), and they wanted political and social reform to build the country anew. And they were ''very'' specific on that last part: they had ''not'' died in the tens of thousands just to get the old Britain back, they wanted a new one - better than before. In short they wanted the findings of ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_Report The Beveridge Report'']] implemented so that everyone would be fed, everyone would be educated, everyone would have a place to call home, everyone would have a job, and everyone would be looked after when they were sick or unemployed or old. Winston Churchill infamously opposed the implementation of the report, at least until he realised that it was so popular that his party would lose for sure if they continued to do so. Ultimately his refusal to explicitly endorse implementing the report cost him victory in the General Election on the 5th of July 1945... ushering in the Labour Party and a political unknown, the quiet and soft-spoken UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee...

The idea was to flatten the cities, wreck the infrastructure and demoralise the people. Despite [[BlitzEvacuees creating plot fodder for a generation of childrens' books,]] it didn't really work. True, every night the people of major cities on the South coast (and elsewhere) were bombed, but rather than demoralising them, it generally galvanised them. "We are all in this together" was the attitude: if your shop-front was blown in you swept up the glass and hung a "[[GallowsHumor more open than usual]]" sign on the door frame, if half your factory was flattened you put up tarpaulins and carried on working in the other half.

This reaction was by no means universal, of course. Many slept far from their homes before going into work each day.

Once France fell the eyes of the Nazi mare-with-panje-cart[[note]] Germany invaded the Soviet Union, starting the Soviet-German war, with 120,000 vehicles and ''over 600,000 horses''. ''Even the British'' had a more motorised (proportionally) military force than Germany did throughout the war despite her poverty and second-fiddle-to-the-USA status [[/note]] turned to Great Britain. After Dunkirk the British army was in tatters, although if it had failed to evacuate as many troops from France things would have been even worse. During the first year of the battle of Britain the only fully equipped battalion in Britain was Canadian, the British forces having abandoned their equipment in the retreat. A galling consequence, noted by many observers in the years following, was that the lorries and motor vehicles, as well as some tanks abandoned in France, were refurbished and used to equip new German formations and many saw action as far as Belgrade and Minsk under their new drivers (because they used such unorthodox parts, they were used to massacre civiliand and kill partisans). When the cream of the Wehrmacht's armoured forces were destroyed in the western Ukraine in 1943-44, some of these British tanks were actually put back into front-line usage... to little effect.

Once France fell the eyes of the Nazi mare-with-panje-cart[[note]] Germany invaded the Soviet Union, starting the Soviet-German war, with 120,000 vehicles and ''over 600,000 horses''. ''Even the British'' had a more motorised (proportionally) military force than Germany did throughout the war despite her poverty and second-fiddle-to-the-USA status [[/note]] turned to Great Britain. After Dunkirk the British army was in tatters, although if it had failed to evacuate as many troops from France things would have been even worse. During the first year of the battle of Britain the only fully equipped battalion in Britain was Canadian, the British forces having abandoned their equipment in the retreat. A galling consequence, noted by many observers in the years following, was that the lorries and motor vehicles, as well as some tanks abandoned in France, were refurbished and used to equip new German formations and many got as far as Stalingrad under their new drivers. Captured British tanks were thought sub-standard for front line use but were used by the Germans for training and rear-area police work. (Some were used in 1945 as desperation issue against the Russians).

If Germany had taken the British Isles then an Allied invasion of Europe would have been almost impossible. Luckily, the prospects of Germany successfully being able to invade and subjugate Britain were completely non-existent, not that this was known by the people of Britain at the time.

Once France fell the eyes of the Nazi war machine turned to Great Britain. After Dunkirk the British army was in tatters, although if it had failed to evacuate as many troops from France things would have been even worse. During the first year of the battle of Britain the only fully equipped battalion in Britain was Canadian, the British forces having abandoned their equipment in the retreat. A galling consequence, noted by many observers in the years following, was that the lorries and motor vehicles, as well as some tanks abandoned in France, were refurbished and used to equip new German formations and many got as far as Stalingrad under their new drivers. Captured British tanks were thought sub-standard for front line use but were used by the Germans for training and rear-area police work. (Some were used in 1945 as desperation issue against the Russians).

* The Cabinet War Rooms, built in London under the instruction of NevilleChamberlain (but most famously used by UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill), were a state of the art bunker (although it was 1943 before it was bombproof and Churchill had a habit of going up on the roof during the Blitz to watch the planes in any case) and intelligence hub that had the UK's first florescent lighting for its war maps and a transatlantic phone link to the White House. The scrambling equipment for the phone was so big that the actual line ended in Westminster and an extension was set up and concealed by the simple expedient of putting a toilet door lock on it, everyone assumed that Churchill had a private loo. Apparently Churchill infuriated the White House staff by ringing whenever he had a question or idea, regardless of whether it was 3 AM or not.