23.4.41

The Greeks appear to be packing up. Evidently there is going to be hell to pay in Australia. [1] So long as it merely leads to an inquest on the Greek campaign, and a general row in which the position of Australia in the Empire will be defined and perhaps the conduct of the war democratised somewhat, this is all to the good.

[1] The anxiety felt by Australians and New Zealanders that their troops had been lost pointlessly was, perhaps, the reason for Churchill’s giving, in his history of the war, the total losses as percentages: 55.8% for United Kingdom troops, 25.1 for Australians, and 19.1 for New Zealanders (The Second World War, III, p. 206). The percentage lost of those in Greece at the time of the attack (which Churchill does not calculate) were 34% UK troops lost; 17.33% Australians; and 13.55% New Zealanders. See also 3.5.41. A New Zealander, General Bernard Freyberg, VC, took command in Crete. Peter Davison

22.4.41

Have been 2 or 3 days at Wallington. Saturday night’s blitz could easily be heard there – 45 miles distant.

Sowed while at Wallington 40 or 50 lb. of potatoes, which might give 200 or 600 lbs. according to the season, etc. It would be queer – I hope it won’t be so, but it quite well may – if when this autumn comes those potatoes seem a more important achievement than all the articles, broadcasts, etc. I shall have done this year.

The Greek-British line seems to have swung south, hingeing on Janina, to a position not far north of Athens. If the newspaper reports are truthful, they got across the plain of Thessaly without being too much damaged. The thing that disturbs everyone and is evidently going to raise a storm in Australia, is the lack of real news. Churchill in his speech said that even the government had difficulty in getting news from Greece. The thing that most disturbs me is the repeated statement that we are inflicting enormous casualties, the Germans advance in close formation and are mown down in swathes, etc., etc. [1] Just the same as was said during the battle of France… Attack on Gibraltar, or at any rate some adverse move in Spain, evidently timed to happen soon. Churchill’s speeches begin to sound like Chamberlain’s – evading questions etc., etc.

British troops entered Irak° a couple of days ago. No news yet as to whether they are doing the proper thing, wiping up German agents etc. People on all sides saying, “Mosul will be no good to Hitler even if he gets there. The British will blow up the wells long before.” Will they, I wonder? Did they blow up the Rumanian wells when the opportunity existed? The most depressing thing in this war is not the disasters we are bound to suffer at this stage, but the knowledge that we are being led by weaklings…It is as though your life depended on a game of chess, and you had to sit watching it, seeing the most idiotic moves being made and being powerless to prevent them.

[1] Orwell’s suspicion that German troops had not been ‘mown down in swathes’ was well founded. For details of losses, see War-time Diary 3.5.41. Peter Davison

17.4.41

Very heavy raid last night, probably the heaviest in many months, so far as London is concerned…Bomb in Lord’s cricket ground (school-boys having their exercise at the nets as usual this morning, a few yards from the crater) and another in St. John’s Wood churchyard. This one luckily didn’t land among the graves, a thing I have been dreading will happen…Passed this morning a side-street somewhere in Hampstead with one house in it reduced to a pile of rubbish by a bomb – a sight so usual that one hardly notices it. The street is cordoned off, however, digging squads at work, and a line of ambulances waiting. Underneath that huge pile of bricks there are mangled bodies, some of them perhaps alive.

The guns kept up their racket nearly all night…Today I can find no one who admits to having slept last night, and E[ileen] says the same. The formula is: “I never closed my eyes for an instant”. I believe this is all nonsense. Certainly it is hard to sleep in such a din, but E[ileen] and I must have slept quite half the night.

15.4.41

Last night went to the pub to listen to the 9 o’clock news, and arriving there a few minutes late, asked the landlady what the news had been. “Oh, we never turn it on. Nobody listens to it, you see. And they’ve got the piano playing in the other bar, and they won’t turn it off just for the news.” This at a moment when there is a most deadly threat to the Suez canal°. Cf. during the worst moment of the Dunkirk campaign, when the barmaid would not have turned on the news unless I had asked her… [1] Cf. also the time in 1936 when the Germans re-occupied the Rhineland. I was in Barnsley at the time. I went into a pub just after the news had come through and remarked at random, “The German army has crossed the Rhine”. With a vague air of remembering something someone murmured “Parley-voo”. [2] No more response than that…So also at every moment of crisis from 1931 onwards. You have all the time the sensation of kicking against an impenetrable wall of stupidity. But of course at times their stupidity has stood them in good stead. Any European nation situated as we are would have been squealing for peace long ago.

[1] See War-time Diary, 28.5.40 and 24.6.40.

[2] Refrain from World War I song ‘Mademoiselle from Armentiѐres,’ or ‘Armenteers,’ as it was sung. Peter Davison

14.4.41

The news today is appalling. The Germans are at the Egyptian frontier and a British force in Tobruk has the appearance of being cut off, though this is denied from Cairo. [1] Opinion is divided as to whether the Germans really have an overwhelming army in Libya, or whether they have only a comparatively small force while we have practically nothing, most of the troops and fighting vehicles having been withdrawn to other fronts as soon as we had taken Benghazi. In my opinion the latter is the likelier, and also the probability is that we sent only European troops to Greece and have chiefly Indians and Negroes in Egypt. D., speaking from a knowledge of South Africa, thinks that after Benghazi was taken the army was removed not so much for use in Greece as to polish off the Abyssinian campaign, and that the motive for this was political, to give the South Africans, who are more or less hostile to us, a victory to keep them in good temper. If we can hang on to Egypt the whole thing will have been worth while for the sake of clearing the Red Sea and opening that route to American ships. But the necessary complement to this is the French West African ports, which we could have seized a year ago almost without fighting.

Non-aggression pact between Russia and Japan, the published terms of which are vague in the extreme. But there must presumably be a secret clause by which Russia agrees to abandon China, no doubt gradually and without admitting what is happening, as in the case of Spain. Otherwise it is difficult to see what meaning the pact can have.

From Greece no real news whatever. One silly story about a British armoured-car patrol surprising a party of Germans has now been repeated three days running.

[1] General Rommel’s troops encircled Tobruk on 12 April. The British forces had been swept out of Cyrenaica very rapidly (their strength having been depleted to send a force to Greece). However, Tobruk held out until relieved on 4 December 1941. Peter Davison

13.4.41

No real news at all about either Greece or Libya…Of the two papers I was able to procure today, the Sunday Pictorial was blackly defeatist and the Sunday Express not much less so. Yesterday’s Evening Standard has an article by “Our Military Correspondent”… which was even more so. All this suggests that the newspapers may be receiving bad news which they are not allowed to pass on…God knows it is all a ghastly mess. The one thing that is perhaps encouraging is that all the military experts are convinced that our intervention in Greece is disastrous, and the military experts are always wrong.

When the campaign in the Near East is settled one way or the other, and the situation is in some way stabilised, I shall discontinue this diary. It covers the period between Hitler’s spring campaigns of 1940 and 1941. Some time within the next month or two a new military and political phase must begin. The first six months of this diary covered the quasi-revolutionary period following on the disaster in France. Now we are evidently in for another period of disaster, but of a different kind, less intelligible to ordinary people and not necessarily producing any corresponding political improvement. Looking back to the early part of this diary, I see how my political predictions have been falsified, and yet, as it were, the revolutionary changes that I expected are happening, but in slow motion. I made an entry, I see, implying that private advertisements would have disappeared from the walls within a year. They haven’t, of course – that disgusting Famel Cough Syrup advert, is still plastered all over the place, also He’s Twice the Man on Worthington and Somebody’s Mother isn’t Using Persil – but they are far fewer, and the government posters far more numerous. Connolly said once that intellectuals tend to be right about the direction of events but wrong about their tempo, which is very true. [1]

Registering on Saturday, with the 38 group, I was appalled to see what a scrubby-looking lot they were. A thing that strikes one when one sees a group like this, picked out simply by date of birth, is how much more rapidly the working classes age. They don’t, however, live less long, or only a few years less long, than the middle class. But they have an enormous middle age, stretching from thirty to sixty.

[1] Connolly not only said but wrote this: ‘For the weak point in the judgment of intellectuals is that they tend to be right about the course of events, but wrong about their tempo’ (Comment, Horizon, September 1940, p. 83). Peter Davison

12.4.41

The idea that the German troops in Libya, or some of them, got there via French ships and French African territory, is readily accepted by everyone that one suggests it to. Absolutely no mention of any such possibility in the press, however. Perhaps they are still being instructed to pipe down on criticisms of Vichy France.

The day before yesterday saw fresh-water fish (perch) for sale in a fishmonger’s shop. A year ago English people, i.e. town people, wouldn’t have touched such a thing.

11.4.41

Reported in yesterday’s papers that Britain is arranging to lend £2,500,000 to Spain – as a reward for seizing Tangier, I suppose. This is a very bad symptom. Throughout the war it has always been when we were in exceptionally desperate straits that we have begun making concessions to the minor totalitarian powers.

9.4.41

The budget has almost knocked the Balkan campaign out of the news. It is the former and not the latter that I overhear people everywhere discussing. [1]

This evening’s news has the appearance of being very bad. The Greek C. in C. has issued a statement that the Serbs have retreated and uncovered his left flank. The significance of this is that people don’t officially say things like that – practically a statement that the Serbs have let the Greeks down – unless they feel things to be going very badly.

The Home Guard now have tommy guns, at any rate two per company. It seems a far cry from the time when we were going to be armed with shotguns – only there weren’t any shotguns – and my question as to whether we might hope for some machine guns was laughed off as an absurdity.

[1] The budget raised the basic rate of income tax to ten shillings in the pound (50%). Peter Davison

8.4.41

Have just read The Battle of Britain, the M.O.I.’s best-seller (there was so great a run on it that copies were unprocurable for some days). It is said to have been compiled by Francis Beeding, the writer of thrillers. I suppose it is not as bad as it might be, but seeing that it is being translated into many languages and will undoubtedly be read all over the world – it is the first historical account, at any rate in English, of the first great air battle in history – it is a pity that they did not have the sense to avoid the propagandist note altogether. The pamphlet is full of “heroic”, “glorious exploits”, etc., and the Germans are spoken of more or less slightingly. Why couldn’t they simply give a cold accurate account of the facts, which after all are favourable enough? For the sake of the bit of cheer-up that this pamphlet will accomplish in England, they throw away the chance of producing something that would be accepted all over the world as a standard authority and used to counteract German lies.

But what chiefly impresses me when reading The Battle of Britain and looking up the corresponding dates in this diary, is the way in which “epic” events never seem very important at the time. Actually I have a number of vivid memories of the day the Germans broke through and fired the docks (I think it must have been the 7^th September), but mostly of trivial things. First of all riding down in the bus to have tea with Connolly, and two women in front of me insisting that shell-bursts in the sky were parachutes, till I had a hard job of it not to chip in and correct them. Then sheltering in a doorway in Piccadilly from falling shrapnel, just as one might shelter from a cloudburst. Then a long line of German planes filing across the sky, and some very young  R.A.F. and naval officers running out of one of the hotels and passing a pair of field glasses from hand to hand. Then sitting in Connolly’s top-floor flat [1] and watching the enormous fires beyond St. Paul’s, and the great plume of smoke from an oil drum somewhere down the river, and Hugh Slater sitting in the window and saying, “It’s just like Madrid – quite nostalgic.” The only person suitably impressed was Connolly, who took us up to the roof and after gazing for some time at the fires, said “It’s the end of capitalism. It’s a judgment on us”. I didn’t feel this to be so, but I was chiefly struck by the size and beauty of the flames. That night I was woken up by the explosions and actually went out into the street to see if the fires were still alight – as a matter of fact it was almost as bright as day, even in the N.W. quarter – but still didn’t feel as though any important historical event were happening. Afterwards, when the attempt to conquer England by air bombardment had evidently been abandoned, I said to Fyvel, “That was Trafalgar. Now there’s Austerlitz”, [2] but I hadn’t seen this analogy at the time.

The News Chronicle very defeatist again, making a great outcry about the abandonment of Benghazi, with the implication that we ought to have gone for Tripoli while the going was good instead of withdrawing troops to use in Greece.[3] And these are exactly the people who would have raised the loudest squeal if we had gone on with the conquest of the Italian empire and left the Greeks in the soup.

[1] Cyril Connolly then had a furnished flat on the top floor of Athenaeum Court, Piccadilly, partly paid for by Peter Watson, sponsor of Horizon. For watching the raid from the roof-top on 7 September 1940, see Michael Shelden, Friends of Promise, p. 62. For Hugh Slater, see War-time Diary, 23.8.40, n. 4

[2] Admiral Nelson defeated the French fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, but Napoleon nevertheless went on to victory at Austerlitz later that year, defeating the combined forces of Russia and Austria and forcing Austria out of the war. Hitler may have lost the Battle of London, Orwell was saying, but it must be expected that he would have subsequent victories elsewhere.

[3] See War-time Diary, 14.3.41, nn. 1 and 2. Peter Davison