Wales in World War 2

By Quintin Deakin

A comprehensive account of the part played by Wales in WWII and the conflict's impact on every area of the country and all involved: civilians, factory workers, children (those evacuated to and those from Wales), national and regional politicians, soldiers, pacifists, writers, filmmakers and artists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Y Lolfa
• Release date: Feb 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781800995369

Quintin Deakin

A Cambridge history graduate, comprehensive school head of history and author of a Cambridge University Press text book on Early Modern European history, Quentin Deakin has also had articles published on teaching history, education and current affairs. After retiring to Tywyn, he and his wife started the Tywyn history society and created a popular town trail with £10,000 National Lottery grant. He regularly presents to the Tywyn and Harlech history societies and recently gave a keynote address at the Meirionnydd Historical & Record Society.

Book preview

Wales_in_World_War_2__Quentin_Deakin.jpg

Dedicated to all who experienced

their World War 2 in Wales

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Frontispiece

Part 1

The March of War

Chapter 1

The build-up

Chapter 2

The stage is set:

Chapter 3

Invasion threatens: 1940

Chapter 4

A shock wave of evacuation: 1940–41

Chapter 5

‘All hands to the wheel’: 1941

Chapter 6

Base camp for D-Day

Part 2

Close Encounters

Introduction

Community relations

Chapter 7

Lucky escapes: the north

Chapter 8

Trying it out:

Chapter 9

Echoing gunfire:

Chapter 10

Multi-purposed:

Part 3

Combatants

Chapter 11

Soldiers

Chapter 12

Pacifists

Part 4

Carrying On

Introduction

Chapter 13

Community life

Chapter 14

Mass media

Chapter 15

Writers and artists

Chapter 16

The war’s legacy

Conclusion

Endnotes

Selective Bibliography

List of museums,

Gazetteers for regional maps in Part 2

Illustrations

First impression: 2023

© Copyright Quentin Deakin and Y Lolfa Cyf., 2023

The contents of this book are subject to copyright, and may not be reproduced by any means, mechanical or electronic, without the prior, written consent of the publishers.

The publishers wish to acknowledge the support of

Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

Cover design: Y Lolfa

Cover image: Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring,

Laura Knight (1943) © Imperial War Museum

eISBN: 978 1 80099 536 9

ISBN: 978 1 80099 400 3

Published and printed in Wales

on paper from well-maintained forests by

Y Lolfa Cyf., Talybont, Ceredigion SY24 5HE

website www.ylolfa.com

e-mail [e-mail]

tel [phone]

Foreword

This new history of Wales in World War 2 presents a fresh and compelling overview of a nation at war. Not the generalised wartime ‘Britain’ still typical of so many narratives, but an account focused on the people, the communities and the geography of Wales during a conflict that changed Wales as much as it changed Britain.

Drawing on local studies, archival resources, oral history and traces left in the built environment, Wales is presented here not just a constituent element of the British war effort in World War 2, but as a distinct entity for which the war represented unique linguistic, social, political and cultural challenges.

Here you will find space given to the voices of wartime children and service personnel, to intellectuals and poets. The contemporary photographs reproduced here bring wartime life in Wales into sharp focus, while the series of original maps vividly illustrates the extent to which the war physically impacted upon every region of Wales.

Another strength of the book is its breadth of perspective. Historians’ attention has typically been drawn to the industrial war effort in south Wales, and to the Blitzes on the cities of Swansea and Cardiff. In this account, we see too the significant role played by Welsh seaside towns, wartime hosts to training camps, firing ranges, schools and university faculties, government and BBC departments, even weapons research facilities. And we see how the ‘English invasion’ of evacuees, war workers and servicemen, as well as the arrival of refugees, GIs, and POWs – as the author notes, ‘the greatest international migration the Principality had ever seen’ – changed both Welsh communities and individual Welsh lives.

World War 2 embedded itself in Welsh life to a degree that was both extraordinary at the time and largely unacknowledged even to this day. As the author notes, there is still a wealth of evidence yet to be uncovered, from police, school and local council records to personal diaries, correspondence and memorabilia, that will enable us to better understand the Welsh experience of World War 2.

In the stories it presents, the voices it lets speak, and the questions it asks, this book points the way.

Siân Nicholas

Professor of Modern British History

Aberystwyth University

Introduction

Within a few miles of our home in Tywyn on the Cardigan Bay coast I can find half a dozen sites dating from World War 2, including a more-or-less complete air base. Where our house stands there was a small POW camp, and from these shores anti-aircraft gunners practised daily on targets towed by brave pilots praying that a rookie gunner wasn’t on the job. From time to time the sea still washes up rockets fired from a secret firing range at Ynsylas, just across the mouth of the Dyfi estuary. Two of the town’s housing estates partly grew out of social changes emerging from the war. Even the degraded condition of the sand dunes owes much to the conflict. Almost wherever you live in Wales, a similarly impressive war heritage can be found. Some archaeologists have concluded that the world wars made a greater impact on the physical landscape of Wales than any other event of modern times. ¹ But most of the numerous camps, air bases, factories, gun emplacements and other defence works, observation posts, hospitals, depots and decoy sites were constructed for the second rather than the first global conflict. Some were on a massive scale. Unglamorous, strictly utilitarian structures, mostly ruinous, the war’s remains will never compete with stately homes and gardens as desirable places to visit. Most of the sturdier constructions have been demolished. Sadly, the veterans, evacuees and local residents who can still remember them as busy, functioning places are rapidly disappearing too. Fortunately, we possess an immense archive of their recorded memories, full of detail and insight, a major source for this book.

The rolling together of England and Wales into Anglo-centric national histories continues to this day. Even some recent histories of Britain make no specific references to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in their coverage of the war, instead following the conventional pattern of talking about leadership and foreign campaigns, with little to say on the Home Front. Although there are some excellent national histories of Wales, their obligation to cover such a lot of ground has tended to result in some significant gaps in the coverage of World War 2.² Existing books on the war in Wales have concentrated on the experience of south Wales, when the whole of Wales was caught up in its demands in multiple ways. In this book every region is given the attention it deserves, for the whole of Wales had a key role in the manufacture of weapons, the training of forces and evacuations of all kinds. A disproportionately high number of secret military sites were located west of Offa’s Dyke. Native people and service personnel could not avoid coming up against each other, and in some rural areas the service presence was overwhelming. The war changed the demography of the nation, with some wartime incomers, not only from England and Scotland but from all over the world, marrying and settling. Aspects of the cultural history of the war in Wales such as war films made in Wales and the imaginative literature and art it inspired, deserve more attention. Wales produced fine poets in World War 2 just as it had done in World War 1. Arguably, the major role Wales played in World War 2 has never been fully recognised. Researched from a wide range of primary sources, including fresh interviews with those who were children during the war, this is a book designed for the generally interested reader that will also be useful to those studying the war up to and including university level.

What, if anything, separated the Welsh experience from that of the rest of Britain? Rationing, evacuation, the Blitz, blackout and the Home Guard were important in Wales no less than anywhere else in Britain. Never envisaged as somewhere that Germany might attack from the air, remote yet possessing numerous large villages and small towns, Wales was seen as an ideal region for evacuations of all kinds, not just children. However, the Home Front was much more than these familiar elements. The entire landscape and coastal waters of Britain were also prime locations for training the three branches of the regular armed services. Millions of men and women were involved, at times joined by allied forces. The war accounted for the employment of millions of civilians too, in war factories, foundries and mines, the civil service, engineering, technical instruction and the creative industries, with Wales accounting for a high proportion of those working in the war economy. Resourcefulness and adaptability were at a premium during the war, for new skills were required all round. More than half the personnel in the armed forces of Britain spent more than half the war in bases on British soil. Largely conscript forces, most of their time was occupied in training. Clerks and mill workers, decorators and teachers, car mechanics and architects, shopworkers and tailors, mostly too young to have fought in World War 1 – most had never loaded a gun in their lives. Not that loading a rifle was the only skill required. Over the following years some would learn how to target an anti-aircraft gun, others to send messages in Morse code, others to make a bailey bridge, drive a tank, service a plane or any one of a hundred specialist tasks required by a large modern army. Many of the women drafted in to work in aeronautical and munitions factories had never stepped inside a factory, let alone operated a machine lathe, having previously been shop-workers, clerks or unpaid ‘housewives’. Even those who stayed at home had to adapt to a fostering role if child evacuees were billeted with them. Britain may not have been invaded but this was a war entirely visible on the doorstep. Many branches of the forces needed to train in battle conditions, ‘in the field’, not the parade ground as their fathers had done with such disastrous results in World War 1. Sparsely populated, with varied terrain, remote from the enemy, Wales was chosen as one of the prime regions for military training and the war economy.

This time political leaders and top civil servants planned for a long war. During the first global conflict, the supply of shells almost ran out in less than two years, requiring the galvanising leadership of a Welshman, David Lloyd George, to rescue the situation. This time there was a grim realisation at the top that the potential was for another ‘Great’ war lasting several years. This would necessitate the construction of factories making explosives and ‘filling’ bombs and other projectiles. Munitions factories of all kinds (collectively known as ‘ordnance’) would ideally be situated in areas remote from potential enemy attack but close to rail lines for level, steady, safe delivery to ports and depots. Planes, ships, tanks and a host of specialist army vehicles would need to be manufactured in quantity, with the emphasis on planes rather than the warships the country already possessed in large numbers. In spite of massive historical superiority in fleet size, the experience of World War 1 had indicated that naval warfare might only end in stalemate, whereas planes, flying over defences to deliver knock-out blows, had the potential for checkmate. Factories in remote, yet still accessible locations would be required for that, too. The location of such factories would have to be kept secret from the enemy. Wales possessed all these attributes. Particularly in the industrial south and north-east there was another bonus, as towns in areas of record high unemployment were keen to promote their suitability.

Most factories and power stations and almost every home in the 1930s needed abundant supplies of coal, the principal fuel of the time. The northern and southern coasts of Wales were conveniently close to large coalfields and linked by good rail connections to England. To the north-west the port of Holyhead provided a vital short link to Ireland, and thence to North America. Ports on the south coast were linked to international sea routes. Once Germany took France in the spring of 1940, Wales became a potential target for bombing and even for invasion. Despite this increased risk, the authorities in London and Cardiff permitted even more evacuation, not only of city children but of government and national treasures. Some of the allied forces from German-occupied Europe were also given a temporary home in Wales as they regrouped and prepared for the great counter-attack. The result was an increasing potential for accidents and conflicts of interest in the many locations where local people, evacuees, forces undertaking field training and war factories operated alongside one another. It will be seen that in some of its weapons research, Wales was ahead of the rest of the world. With so much going on in the Principality of such high value to the war effort, it is not surprising that secrecy was the order of the day. Those secrets were largely kept, both at the time and since. ‘Hush-hush,’ the contemporary invocation heard from Fishguard to Ynyslas and Rhydymwyn, actually worked. It is remarkable that even today residents are often unaware of the often hair-raising military activity that took place just down the road.

Always there is a need to check claims, to be aware of local boasting, to keep everything in proportion, but what was going on in the ‘provinces’ – from Wales to Devon, Wiltshire to the Midlands and Yorkshire, Liverpool to Leeds, Northern Ireland to Scotland – was often as essential to the success of the war effort as anything happening in London and the ‘home counties’. The Ministry of Information was aware of the annoyance caused by the conflation of ‘England’ and ‘Britain’, warning its broadcasters to avoid this practice right from the start of the war.³ Regardless, in a radio broadcast following the evacuation of the British professional army from Dunkirk in 1940, the Yorkshire playwright JB Priestley suggested that the episode was a ‘very English… epic of gallantry’. Priestley was heedless, or more likely simply unaware, of the contribution of Welsh ships setting sail from Welsh ports.⁴ Churchill’s efforts to foster a sense of Britishness in a drive to sustain morale met with mixed results, ‘often running foul of local sentiment’.⁵ In the last part of the twentieth century a fuller and more frank assessment of the way the public responded to the demands of war was initiated by the historian Angus Calder in his book The People’s War (1969) and even more provocatively by Peter Grafton in his You, You and You! – the People Out of Step with World War 2 (1981). Calder and Grafton showed how not everyone stayed calm and carried on in the face of bombs falling from the sky. Factories making high explosives, artillery and bomber training, chemical and nuclear weapons in production, were sometimes located cheek by jowl with towns and villages brimming with troops and evacuees billeted with local residents, often in areas subject to enemy bombing – this was a high-risk strategy for Wales.

This book is divided into four parts. ‘The March of War’ looks at the war chronologically. The narrative links the fast changing picture of world and national events with the unfolding Home Front in Wales. ‘Close Encounters’ considers the geography of the war regionally – facts and figures but also community relations, the interaction of local populations with the activity of the armed forces. Military chiefs thought in terms of a ‘Western region’, including the entirety of Wales, the West Midlands, the West Country and the far north-west of England. Wales did not possess a national government of its own and military chiefs were allowed to overrule local government. County authorities were given responsibilities relating to policing and assisting the military authorities, but overall, county boundaries were less significant than landscape and transport links in the management of the war effort. Regional maps, gazetteers and lists of museums and exhibitions have been included so that research interests can be followed up.

The first half of ‘Combatants’ considers an often neglected aspect, the working lives of the many soldiers who trained in Wales. The story of those who joined Welsh regiments is also considered in summary. The second chapter in Part 3 looks at the wide range of beliefs of those who opposed participation in the war and how they fared in the wider community.

‘Carrying On’ looks at the continuities and changes that the war brought to Wales, beginning with life in its many small towns and villages. By the middle of the twentieth century the broadcast and print media – together with cinema – were just as significant as chapel and church in shaping opinion, and this is the subject of the second chapter in Part 4. The next chapter considers the story of the more personal work of writers, like Dylan Thomas, and artists in responding to war, many of whom turned their creative skills to propaganda, sometimes contrary to their real feelings. Finally, its last chapter reviews the many ways in which the war affected Wales in the longer term.

Sources and acknowledgements

The otherwise excellent historian AJP Taylor, who was himself an iconoclast in his area of study, dismissed the contribution that oral sources might make to the discipline of history in characteristically blunt terms: ‘Old men drooling about their youth – No!’⁶ Caution is needed, just as it is with every type of source. Memory is selective, our preoccupations change as we move from childhood to early adulthood and onwards. People like to be liked and they may tell an interviewer what they think the interviewer wants to hear or narrow their comments to fit tightly into the interviewer’s framework. Some interviewers are more skilled than others. Nevertheless, the advantages outweigh the problems: access to opinions and feelings, the impact of decisions ‘on the ground’ – even awareness of fine details left out of formal documentary sources – increased knowledge of the daily experience of what used to be called ‘the masses’. ‘Ordinary’ people, the term preferred today, don’t necessarily write everything down, either at the time or ever afterwards for all variety of reasons – educational, personality type, lack of time. Writing in the mid-1960s, when oral history was just beginning to be taken seriously, Donald Swain refuted the scepticism of historians like Taylor arguing that: ‘it is a foolish historian who refuses to talk to the main surviving characters in the field of study.’ Fortunately, many local libraries, local historians, local history societies and public broadcasters followed Swain’s lead and amassed a considerable oral archive while that was still possible.⁷ Used with caution, recorded oral accounts are an invaluable source for the study of World War 2 and as much use as possible has been made of them in researching this book. The voice of the ordinary person comes through too in the Mass Observation Archive, but in the case of Wales that archive is small and less valuable than an extensive social survey carried out by Undeb Cymru Fydd (UCF, the New Wales Union) in the middle of the war. Another kind of source that is consistently undervalued by historians is the archaeological and monumental record. Used in conjunction with documentary sources and the diligent recording of military historians, the work of Cadw and Wales’ archaeological trusts has allowed us to build up a detailed picture of the impact of the war ‘from the ground upwards’. Much valuable research is also to be found in unpublished theses. The BBC has contributed considerably to the oral archive with several major projects.

This has been a project several years in the making, impossible without the help and support of others. As the germ of an idea, it arose from a chance meeting with two veterans walking away from the ruins of Tonfanau, disappointed by the lack of information on site. The information, though in a book rather than on a memorial, was supplied in 2000 by Tywyn historian Rees Ivor Jones with The Military in Tywyn. Years later, finding that there was a substantial archive created by local historians, record societies and individuals from across Wales, my thoughts turned to bringing this under one cover, but in the framework of an analytical overview rather than another compilation of memoirs. Encouragement came from Dr Neil Evans, an authority on modern Welsh social history, who read the first draft. The late Les Darbyshire, from vast personal knowledge as a veteran of both the war and Home Fronts, also gave his full support. Seeking the angle of an outsider – neither an historian nor a Welshman – London-based professional comic actor and writer Chris Emmett read enough to say that the writing hadn’t succumbed to academic indigestion. Richard Stoner, a post-war RAF veteran, helped build my understanding of the air war. Adrian Hughes of the Home Front Museum, pointed to gaps in the northern chapter. Dr Sian Nicholas and Dr John Hirst gave valuable feedback on media and culture. Colin Barber, Chairman of Rhydymwyn History Society, helped in following up the fascinating story of the Valley Works. Many others generously contributed memories, insights and sources and they are acknowledged in the text and notes.

Librarians at the National Library of Wales and those in Carmarthen, Newtown, Tywyn, Mold and Dolgellau provided access to the materials I required and pointed me in other valuable directions. Will Troughton of the National Library was particularly helpful with suggestions for photographic sources. The regional maps were the work of talented cartographer Rhys Davies, ever willing to take on the demands of distilling a mass of data into clear and graphic form.

Above all, I wish to thank the staff at Y Lolfa, particularly commissioning editor Lefi Gruffudd, editor Eirian Jones and designer Alan Thomas. Finally, I owe so much to Liz, my wife, for her patient support and practical suggestions.

Quentin Deakin

September 2023

Frontispiece

The war begins for children

From a photograph taken for the Montgomeryshire Express issue of 3 September 1939. The catalogue description reads ‘larger boys show [the] correct method of fitting masks’. In fact, young girls were being instructed by older girls at the same time, but just a thin slice of their presence visible in the photograph from which this image has been cropped.

© The National Library of Wales

Part 1

The March of War

Chapter 1

The build-up

‘War and the threat of war dominated our adolescence’

(Professor Gwyn Alf Williams, 1996)

‘Wherever they see a tract of wild, unspoiled countryside

[the fighting services] naturally want it for camps, artillery practice, bomb-dropping, poison-gas tests’

(EM Forster, 1937)¹

World events

In 1920 the idea that there could be another world war on the scale of the first one was unthinkable for most people. Humanity, it was widely believed, had emerged blinking into the light from a long dark tunnel – the nightmare Great War, the ‘war to end all wars’, never to be repeated. How could this happen again? In its aftermath the superpowers had attempted something never achieved before, a League of Nations, whose express purpose was to keep the peace between nations. The only weapons the League possessed were peaceful, institutional ones: regular international conferences, an international court, and economic sanctions if all else failed. The lack of any form of international standing army to enforce decisions when aggressors failed to heed the call was a major weakness. The postmortem on the League was to come much later and only after another world war. In the early 1930s not even the blatant aggression of Japan in seizing a large chunk of northern China, or the mechanised cruelty of the army Mussolini sent to conquer Abyssinia in 1935, were enough to make most of the public worry about the prospect of a second Great War. In the very year that the last independent sovereign state in Africa was crushed and Haile Selassie forced into exile in England, a massive opinion poll in Britain, the ‘Peace Ballot’, showed support for the League’s doctrine of ‘Collective security’, the constantly failing notion that nations, acting together in support of any one victim of aggression, would be able to resolve conflicts and bring lasting peace by all means short of war.

Only the reemergence of Germany, Britain’s Great War enemy, was to shake this pattern of belief. Even then, for the first two years of Hitler’s power the comforting illusion of lasting peace ahead was slow to disappear. Even aggressor powers could have their uses: Germany could take on communist Russia, Italy could be an ally against Russia or France. As for Japan, another potential enemy for Russia, that was too far away to worry about so long as its leaders’ ambitions took them north, away from India, Singapore and Australia. Some though believed that Germany was a wholly different matter, rearmed under a bold and angry dictator, elected on a ticket to avenge the shame of shrunken borders following the humiliation of a surrender that was, Hitler roared, a political betrayal. Was the challenger returning to the ring for a rematch? The signals were confusing. Over the year 1933, his first year as Chancellor, Hitler did nothing outside Germany’s borders to seriously alarm the great powers. Yet even as he sought to reassure foreign leaders, he was closing down the possibilities for future democracy by a systematic elimination of internal opponents.

British civil servants and generals were the first to read the runes. The majority of the public, understandably in these years of severe economic depression, wanted their governments to concentrate on replacing slums, ending unemployment and alleviating poverty. However, senior civil servants and heads of the armed forces pressed each prime minister in turn – MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain – to rearm in readiness for a possible new Great War. The slow-burning fuse of alarm, ignited for some in 1933 by the elevation of Hitler to power, burnt faster when Hitler made an attempt to unite Germany and Austria the following year. The year 1935 saw him assume dictatorial powers and organise a huge paramilitary rally at Nuremberg. Alarm bells, sounded in the back rooms of Whitehall, were reluctantly heard by politicians in 1935 and translated into a commitment to significantly increase arms spending. Events over the next two years took away any lingering doubts that war with Germany might be a possibility for Britain before the decade was out. In 1936 Hitler retook the Rhineland, unopposed by France and an increasingly ignored and discredited League of Nations. A year later Hitler and Mussolini tried out their bombers in the Spanish Civil War, on the side of Franco’s Nationalists, targeting Guernica, killing 1645 and injuring 885, figures based on the testimony of hospitals receiving casualties. Hitler’s wanton disregard of the post-war settlement of 1919 took him next to Austria, which he absorbed into the German Reich in 1938 and then to Czechoslovakia which was taken in two stages in the autumn of 1938 and spring of 1939.

Major steps towards rearmament started during the Baldwin government, with plans to construct ‘shadow factories’, a scheme devised in 1935. New secret factories would be set up to increase aircraft and munitions production, with a particular emphasis on bomber manufacture. Taken over by Herbert Austin and the Air Ministry in 1936, work began on construction before the end of the year, including a number to be sited in Wales. Baldwin was unequivocal about the need for rearmament, much to the annoyance of EM Forster, writing in the first months of his premiership: ‘Mr Baldwin, who demands preparedness and armaments, should keep in touch with the Mr Baldwin who is vice-president of the National Trust.’ ‘Damage’ and ‘destruction of the countryside’, he wrote, was inevitable and all too visible already in southern England, with tanks on Bere Heath, the RAF at Abbotsbury and machine-gun practice on Salisbury Plain. Woolwich was ‘a park of death’. The high level of preparation already achieved in the most vulnerable places was striking: ‘Plymouth is so thoroughly defended that its inhabitants have scarcely anywhere to walk except the Hoe.’²

By 1939 the public expenditure on rearmament had increased by a factor of ten over the last fifteen years.³ Despite an international ban on chemical weapons, these were also included in the spending programme, though always on the basis of defensive retaliation. In one of his last acts as Prime Minister, it was to be Chamberlain, infamous in history to many as the great appeaser, who in the summer of 1939 created a new ministry, the Ministry of Supply, which under this misleadingly benign name, was to be vital in building up the deep defensive and offensive resources considered necessary to win a world war with the latest technology. Among the munitions to be made in bulk – strictly for retaliatory purposes were the enemy to use them – were stocks of the most lethal and illegal of all, chemical weapons outlawed by the Geneva Convention of 1925. Plans were made to build three factories in north-west England and one in Wales to make the