World War Two Events
Like most wars, the origins of the Second World War were varied and complicated. Germany’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler, the ‘Fuhrer’ of the National Socialist German Workers' or Nazi Party, was known to be a ruthless and single-minded dictator, convinced that the Germans were a ‘master race’ entitled to dominate the rest of the mankind. His rhetoric throughout the 1930s railed against what many Germans saw as a punitive humiliation, the Armistice agreed under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In speech after speech, Hitler appealed to the resentment of both ordinary Germans and, crucially, the German military establishment which had not fully acknowledged its defeat. He made ambitious plans for rearmament, for revenge and for subjugating his neighbours in Europe and beyond. With fascist and militaristic fervour, Jews in particular were victimised as scapegoats as he proclaimed his ‘Third Reich.’
The rest of the world, not least the victorious nations of 1918, reacted with a mixture of naivety, complacency and detachment. And in any case, by the 1930s they were grappling with increasingly difficult economic problems of recession, inflation and unemployment, believing that rising nationalism in Germany could be appeased, mollified or at least contained. But this was not to be. Germany was rapidly forming alliances with similar fascist regimes, emulating Japan’s aggression in Asia (Manchuria, 1931; China, 1937) and Italy’s in Africa (Ethiopia, 1936), and was flexing its own muscles in central Europe. In 1938 it absorbed Austria in the Anschluss, and also took over much of Czechoslovakia. It devised a cynical non-aggression agreement with the Soviet Union in August 1939 (though this was later to be broken with disastrous consequences from June 1941 onwards), and prepared to go much further … The final straw for Europe’s moderate powers was the German invasion of Poland at the beginning of September 1939. Having guaranteed Poland’s borders, Britain and France, both comparatively unprepared, had no choice but to declare war on Germany for the second time in just 25 years.
Events from then moved with alarming speed. In little more than 12 months, the Soviet Union had also invaded Poland (from the east), and Finland, it had bullied Romania to cede territory and had seized the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania); Germany itself had invaded Denmark and Norway, and had occupied vast swathes of territory in France and the Low Countries (the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg); Italy was mounting invasions into Egypt and Greece. In September 1940 Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a Tripartite Pact meaning that most of Europe, North Africa and East Asia was either conquered or under threat from this ‘Axis’ alliance. In effect, Britain stood alone, in its darkest hour, looking hopefully towards the United States for support, but little was to change until Japan made its reckless attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
After a quiet period of ‘phoney war’, in the summer of 1940 Germany turned on Britain. It’s submarine U-Boats had Britain under siege (indeed, the Battle of the Atlantic against this menace lasted throughout the war), and it clearly intended to neutralise the RAF as a prelude to invasion. In the event its Luftwaffe was unable to overcome the beleaguered but defiant RAF during the Battle of Britain, but German bombers continued operations over British cites and air bases during the subsequent ‘Blitz’. In a cruel tragedy, our village’s first fatality of the war (from a total of seven, marked thus +) took place later that autumn when a stray bomb – or perhaps one targeted deliberately on the railway – fell on Railway Terrace Cottages killing a civilian together with her unborn baby [+ Iris Driver, Campsea Ashe, 21st November 1940.]
About the same time, late in 1940 and through to the spring of 1941, the Italians were still striving to invade Greece, marking the beginning of the long North African campaign. With British air and material support the attacks were eventually repelled, though not without casualties [+ Arthur Hammond, Greece, 28th March 1941], and the Allies held out until the full-scale German invasion began in April when Greece, and later Crete, finally fell. Even at this stage the only telling success for Britain acting alone had been the Royal Navy’s pursuit and destruction of Germany’s great battleship Bismarck in the Atlantic that spring.
Britain was desperate to keep its allies engaged and supportive, and there arose an opportunity for the aristocracy to play its part. Very unfortunately, however, the following summer - seemingly in poor weather - there occurred the notorious Dunbeath air crash in which a Sunderland flying boat suffered a navigational error, and veered into the remote Eagle’s Rock on the northeast coast of Scotland. War proved itself a brutal business: indiscriminate, respecting neither virtue nor privilege, amongst the fifteen killed in the crash was the king’s younger brother, HRH Prince George, Duke of Kent. He was on his way to RAF Reykjavik in Iceland in his capacity as an officer attached to the RAF Inspector General. Included amongst his 15-strong staff and entourage, and killed with him, was the grandson of prominent Campsea Ashe resident James Lowther, Viscount Ullswater [+ John Lowther, Dunbeath, Scotland 25th August 1942.]
After Japan entered the war, from late 1941 onwards their forces were rampant across the Far East. Driving through Burma and the Malay Peninsula, they swiftly overran the British stronghold of Singapore in February 1942, took thousands of British and Commonwealth prisoners of war, and forced them to work as slave labour. Japan had scant regard for the Geneva Convention, and about 12,000 allied servicemen died of exhaustion, disease and maltreatment in the most horrific conditions, compelled to construct the 415 km (258 miles) of the so-called ‘Death Railway’ through Thailand and Burma (present day Myanmar) [+ George Trumpeter, Thanbyuzayat, Burma (now Myanmar), 16th October 1943.] Elsewhere in the Far East theatre of war, the Royal Artillery was stationed in northeast India, in readiness for expected Japanese incursions. The attempted invasion into India (the Battle of Imphal) took place in early 1944 but British and Indian forces, having been on exercises and skirmishes for some months previously [+ Russell Lees, Chittagong, India (now Bangladesh), 29th December 1943], managed to halt the advance.
The war was to rage for another 18 months, but now with Russia and the USA fighting with the Allies. The summer of 1944 saw the seaborne Allied invasion of Normandy – famously on 6th June ‘D-Day’ - after which air and ground forces pushed relentlessly eastwards through occupied France and into Germany. There were many small-scale but vital battles during this time – often spearheaded by airborne paratroops - to secure strategic positions, communications centres, railway hubs, bridges and so forth [+ Clifford Plant, Neustadt bridge, 7th April 1945.] Soviet units were similarly penetrating German held territory from the east and finally secured Berlin at the end of April 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe; Hitler had ignominiously committed suicide on 30 April 1945. Japan surrendered four months later after the Americans had dropped atomic bombs on to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
World War II was over but had been a long and bloody conflict, stretching across the globe with an estimated toll of 15 million military deaths and nearly 38 million civilians. The corresponding figures for Britain alone were 384,000 military deaths and 70,000 civilian, the latter mainly because of enemy bombing. The suffering continued for many years after the hostilities had ceased, with deaths from the effects of war, directly or indirectly, continuing for many years afterwards [+ William Newman, Quarter 1, 1951.] We have seen that, in common with every other community in the UK, Campsea Ashe played its part, making its sacrifices in what has been described as the most savage and destructive world-wide conflict in history. Alongside those remembered from the First World War, the names of our little village’s seven war dead are permanently inscribed on a tablet inside the church.
Pete Carter
Campsea Ashe Heritage Group
January 2025
