The South West How We Won the War

September 3rd 1939, and families all over the country flock to their radios.

-WINSTON CHURCHILL:

-'I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received

'and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.'

In that brief moment, life in our country changed forever.

World War II had begun.

But victory wouldn't be assured by military might alone.

The Blitz, evacuation, rationing, the loss of loved ones -

the war on the Home Front meant that everyone had to do their bit.

From the country's women, who took on everything -

farming, factory work, even flying Spitfires

to the nation's auxiliary firemen,

who worked through the terror of countless air raids,

this is the story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

This is How We Won The War.

I'm travelling across the UK to find out more about how different

regions played their part in Britain's war effort.

I'll be discovering how ordinary citizens went to incredible

efforts throughout the war years.

Our capital city's in my rear mirror now. I've left London behind,

continuing my journey by venturing into the south and west of England.

The corridor that runs between London

and South Wales was home to some of the most important

and varied contributions to the war effort on the Home Front.

On today's programme, I'll be learning how a 23-year-old agent

carried out deadly missions in occupied France.

The Gestapo would be questioning people, punching people.

It was pretty awful.

But Violette was in the thick of it.

..discovering how a natural food created quite a buzz...

They would use it as a valuable commodity to trade

a little bit of extra meat or a butter ration.

..and revealing the ingenious ideas

dreamt up to help keep the country clothed.

-These shoes were made from old felt hats and deckchair canvas.

-Brilliant.

By the summer of 1940,

thousands of aircraft had been mobilised

for the Battle of Britain - one of the largest air battles in history.

Factories across the UK worked flat out to produce aeroplanes, but with

so many pilots engaged in active combat duty, more were needed to do

the vital job of getting planes from the production line to the RAF bases.

Pilots too old or infirm to fly for the RAF saw an opportunity to do their bit.

Richard Poad is Chairman of the Maidenhead Heritage Centre.

So they started lobbying and saying, "We know how to fly an aeroplane,

"there must be something we can do, however small, in this war."

The Air Transport Auxiliary - or ATA -

was soon given the job of ferrying new aircraft.

Amongst their pilots was a retired admiral and two one-armed men,

but it wasn't just the elderly or injured wanting in on the act.

Pauline Gower had 2,000 hours' flying experience, and as the daughter of an MP,

she was well-placed to lobby for women to be allowed to join up.

The principle was conceded very early on - it was conceded

in the autumn of 1939,

despite a lot of vocal opposition from the establishment,

who thought women should stay in the kitchen, basically.

On the 1st of January 1940,

eight women joined the ranks of the ATA pilots.

-NEWSREEL:

-These women are in the news at home

because they've undertaken a somewhat unusual war job.

Their work is to ferry new aircraft of the Royal Air Force

from factory to aerodrome.

But if the new recruits expected the same jobs as their male colleagues, they'd be wrong.

Women would fly less powerful machines.

This wasn't equality at this stage.

The women were going to be stuck on old fashioned aeroplanes,

and the first winter they nearly froze to death,

flying endless Tiger Moths.

Open cockpit aeroplanes. Horrid!

As demand for aircraft continued to increase,

so did the workload of ATA pilots.

Soon, women graduated from Tiger Moths to Hurricanes and Spitfires.

It was clear that women could fly the aircraft just as well as men.

And for the Government, the female pilots had the added

benefit of being a valuable propaganda tool.

They milked it all they could.

In 1944, one of the ladies, Maureen Dunlop,

actually made the front cover of Picture Post,

and she's the face of ATA from now on.

From architects to actresses and mapmakers to mathematicians,

women signed up to fly with the ATA.

Also amongst them was the pioneering pilot Amy Johnson,

who, in 1930, had become the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia.

The Air Transport Auxiliary was headquartered at White Waltham.

No better place, then, to meet two of the 168 pioneering women

who flew as ATA pilots - Molly Rose and Joy Lofthouse.

Joy was only 16 when she received a crash course in flying His Majesty's aircraft.

We had our nine days' technical training,

we learnt about what went on under the hood

and a lot about the weather, because the weather was our biggest danger.

And we had a little exam after the technical training,

and then we went and for the time I saw, and went in, an aeroplane.

After further training, it was chocks away for the ATA pilots

as they ferried aircraft around the country.

Just finding their way from A to B could be tricky.

You couldn't call it navigation even, because we didn't have...

We didn't have any instrument flying, and we didn't have any radio.

It was map reading, really.

One drew on a line on a map and set it up on the compass,

and allowed for the wind, and flew along it.

It was no good diving down and looking at the railway stations

because all the labelling of the railway stations were down,

as indeed they were on the signposts on the roads.

-But actually I never took one to the wrong place, did you?

-No, no!

ATA pilots would face flying through barrage balloons

and dodging friendly fire from anti-aircraft guns.

And if that wasn't enough, they'd often find themselves

in the cockpit of an aircraft type they'd never flown before.

What they were doing in a single day would be the same as you and me driving a Model T Ford,

and then getting in a Formula One racing car, and jumping out of

that into a transit van, and jumping out of that into a 44-tonne truck.

Pilots would get a bible explaining how to fly different aircraft.

In a copy Richard has, there's just one-and-a-half pages given to flying a Hurricane.

-That's amazing, let me have a look.

-Very small print.

Quite often, you'd be sent off on a day's work and presented with an

aeroplane you'd never seen in your life before, so you'd ask your mate

over a cup of coffee, "Have you ever flown this thing called a Defiant?"

Survival odds seemed to be stacked against ATA pilots

but neither Molly or Joy let that worry them.

When you're that age, you're quite sure you're capable of coping with anything.

I think from sort of 19 to 25

is the most assured time of anyone's life.

When you think what the youth do nowadays, bungee jumping

and jumping out of aeroplanes, the young are always rather stupid.

Molly would fly over 37 different types of aircraft

during her time with the ATA.

But you both had the opportunity to fly the Spitfire.

Joy, what was that like as a pilot?

Oh, that was my favourite. As I'm sure it was a lot of people.

And it was so manoeuvrable.

It was a tiny cockpit,

you only practically breathed on the controls and she responded,

and it was the nearest thing to having wings oneself.

Between them, the ATA pilots moved an incredible 309,000 aeroplanes -

that's more than 140 every single day of the war.

To suddenly find yourselves up in the sky, on a day like this,

on your own, with a lovely great big aeroplane underneath you...

And they paid us for it!

Well, absolutely, yes!

I'd have done it for nothing!

Without them, the course of the war would have been radically different.

And there's at least one story of somebody arriving at an airfield

under attack with a brand-new Hurricane,

and one of the pilots saying, "Thank God, you've brought us something to fly."

So it's absolutely inestimable, they were a fabulous bunch.

I think it was great organisation.

It was incredible how it was formed so suddenly,

and one was very proud to have been part of it.

An opportunity of a lifetime.

I'm just thankful that I ever got in,

and I'm very proud to have been part of it.

The women of the ATA were clearly in a league of their own.

Their bravery and confidence inspired the nation.

They risked their lives day to day, not just to keep the RAF

in the air but, more importantly, to keep Britain in the war.

Not all contributions to the war effort were as glamorous

as the ATA girls, but that didn't make them any less important.

When rationing was introduced,

sugar was one of the most missed foodstuffs in Britain.

A natural alternative would create a buzz in back gardens across

the country, but honey wasn't just used to satisfy the nation's sweet tooth.

Joy Simpson is from the Swindon Beekeepers' Association.

It was a very effective healer of wounds

and also a preventer of scarring after burns.

And so it was used in medication quite a lot.

In 1943, with the benefits of the nation producing honey becoming clear,

the Ministry of Food announced a sweetener.

Every beekeeper could claim 10lbs of sugar for feeding his bees

in winter, and 5lbs for feeding bees in the spring.

And this feeding was to keep the bees going if the weather was inclement,

or if they hadn't got enough honey stores in a hive.

With a hive able to produce up to 60 pounds of honey a season

for little cost, the nation was soon busy beekeeping.

But with wood and metal in short supply, potential honey farmers

had to get creative when it came to building a home for their workers.

I've heard that hives were made from pallet wood,

from anything that could be scavenged, from ammunition boxes

and people were very ingenious I think in those times.

Britain was beekeeping, but the government soon noticed honey yields

didn't tally with the amount of sugar it was supplying.

Worried the sugar was ending up on the black market,

a deterrent was devised which had an unexpected side effect.

The government decided in order to keep a tight rein

on the supply of the sugar, that they would colour the sugar green.

And what unexpectedly happened was that sometimes the honey

would turn out green itself.

And was not very popular.

The green sugar plan was quickly abandoned.

As a free antiseptic and sweetener for wartime treats,

nothing could top honey.

For hive owners, there was another benefit of the sticky stuff.

They would use it as a valuable commodity to trade and swap say with

the local butchers, for a little bit of extra meat, or a butter ration.

Sidney Lewis worked at an RAF base

and was one of the nation's amateur beekeepers during the war.

As a four-year-old, his daughter Jean would help bottle and label

their honey before it was sold to locals.

But Sidney's beekeeping adventures

didn't get off to the best of starts.

Unfortunately, the hive he had was a bit of a problem,

because he went to take the honey off,

and the bees got inside his veil.

He had to go into the outhouse, and take all his clothes off.

Unfortunately, he was stung very badly.

Dr Watson from Wootton Bassett said he was lucky to be alive,

cos there was so much poison in his body.

Incredibly, Sidney persevered with his honey hobby.

Soon, he had 24 hives, and was selling his produce widely.

When the family moved to the Wiltshire village of Clyffe-Pypard,

Sidney gained a new group of customers -

men he would later be reprimanded for even speaking to,

but who would leave him with an artistic wartime souvenir.

There were some prisoners of war

that lived in a house in the village.

He got talking to them, and they said, "Well, what do you do?"

He said, "Well, I keep bees", and they said,

"Well, we'd really love some honey, but we haven't got any money."

And my dad said, "Well, what can you do?"

And one of them said, "I can paint."

And they painted him some labels for his honey pots.

And I thought they were so beautiful,

and my father did and my mum, that they

couldn't put them on the honey pots, and I've still got them.

Demand for honey dropped

when sugar came off the ration list in the 1950s.

Today, it's a hobby that's making a resurgence, but the wartime years

would prove the height of amateur honey production.

Honey was a luxury during the war, a really nice golden luxury to have.

Food wasn't the only thing rationed during the war.

In June of 1941,

the government was forced to introduce the rationing of clothes,

and the idea was two-fold, firstly it would ensure that everybody

got their fair share, but secondly, and most importantly,

it would free up valuable workers and factory space

for the war effort.

To prevent their families wandering around in tattered clothes

and hole-ridden boots,

the mothers of Britain broke out their sewing needles, and declared,

"Use it up, wear it out, make it do and do without."

The National Federation of Women's Institutes

played its part in giving wartime women tips and tricks.

Their honorary archivist is Anne Stamper.

I caught up with her at the National Needlework Archive in Berkshire.

We should probably start, I suppose, at the beginning with this.

Is that a ration book, a clothing book?

Yes, that's a clothing ration book, and the allocation was enough

to give you one new outfit for the year.

'And this is how it all worked out.

'Total, 66.'

You really had to watch your rationing rather closely.

The WI came up with a whole range of ingenious ways

of re-purposing household bits and bobs into fabulous fashions.

These were shoes, and these shoes were made from old felt hats

and deckchair canvas.

The government also did their bit.

'Why feed moths with hubbie's battered gardening hat when,

'with a little ingenuity,

'you can turn hubbie's hat into a hat for his sweet little wife.'

Now this is interesting! The easy cot. What's an easy cot?

This is a wonderful idea.

You put two dining room chairs back to back, with a gap,

and you can hang this little hammock for the baby between them,

and the advantage of it was,

you could carry it if there'd been an air raid,

you could take this out into the air raid shelter.

Making the most of what you could get was the name of the game.

Point free blackout material was used for clothing,

while parachute silk was highly prized for wedding dresses.

But when it came to substitute stockings,

the technique was a bit harder to stomach.

The usual thing was to use gravy browning,

mix it up so that you've got a sort of brown goo,

and put that on your legs, and then they would get a friend with

an eyebrow pencil to draw a line down the back of their legs so...

-Just straight up the back?

-Yeah, so it looked like they'd got seams

and they were wearing stockings.

Do you think it was ever effective, did it ever fool anybody?

Probably not!

Make Do And Mend wasn't the only way

to keep your family clothed during the war.

Up and down the country, women, children and men

picked up needles, unravelled wool, and got knitting.

# I'm knitting a singlet for Cecil A nice woolly singlet for Cecil. #

Well, this is a proper hive of activity, isn't it? Hello, ladies.

ALL: Hello!

Joyce! Come and show me what you've got here.

What on earth are those?

Men's swimming costume.

That's a man's swimming costume!

Now, come on then, what do we think about that? Today's fashion.

Are you going to model that?

I would but I think they're a bit small for me!

Across the country, people were also using their crafting skills

to bring comfort to others.

Who remembers knitting during the war? Hands up over here.

What were you knitting?

Teddies.

-Not unlike the one you've got there.

-Teddies like that.

Let's have a look at him. He's lovely.

I think the teddies went up to London to children that were

involved in hospitals or in the blitz.

I mean, it didn't matter quite what they looked like,

just something to cuddle, just to hold.

Another thing we made was little eye patches.

And so I made this last night.

Can I have a quick look?

And I used to love doing those. That was for the hospitals.

-So that's it?

-That's it!

At home or in air raid shelters, knitting was a productive way

to keep busy, and our troops would soon be seeing the benefits.

This is extraordinary, woollies for the RAF.

Have we got woollies for anybody else?

And then there's Royal Navy, Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen,

and again, new woollies that one is.

And that is where the comforts associations came in.

Women joined comforts associations to knit for troops.

Ration coupons spent on wool were returned to the groups.

This is a cap muffler.

Now this is proper...

Commandos were often photographed in these, weren't they?

Oh yes, when you see the cockleshell heroes running up

the beach on the old film, that's what they're all wearing.

There we are.

And then when you take it off, if it gets a bit nippy in the evening,

you can just give it a quick flick like that and it turns into a scarf.

Brilliant.

Troops were soon the grateful recipients

of all manners of knitted goods from the associations,

from socks and scarves to body belts and balaclavas.

Dear old balaclava, this bit here went

over your shoulders inside your collar, keep you warm.

You could imagine, on watch on an arctic convoy in particular,

or at the front, that would be a much prized item, wouldn't it?

Oh, yes. Anything, anything that would keep you warm.

What's your take on the contribution of knitting?

We should be doing it now, a lot more than we do.

In America, they knit for their servicemen overseas

even to this day.

But it's a bit of home, and it lifts morale.

Muriel Friend was a domestic worker from Hassocks in Sussex

who was used to having to make do and mend.

As part of the Mass Observation project, she was one of hundreds of

British civilians to keep a diary of their everyday life during the war.

Muriel's writings offer a rare glimpse of a woman

looking for something else in wartime Britain.

'Tuesday 11th of June.

'Had a letter from HJ saying he will come Sunday.

'Wrote at dinner time asking him

'to get out of train at Burgess Hill and I will meet him there.

'Thursday 13th of June.

'Machined many of my garments making various repairs.

'Even machined ladders in silk stockings,

'a hint I read in The Mirror.

'Quite effective!

'Sunday 16th of June.

'Met the 10.35 train at Burgess Hill.

'H was on it.

'After lunch we found a footpath and wandered around.

'We found a tree trunk to sit on.

'It was quite peaceful to have his arm round me

'and a shoulder to lean on.

'In fact, after telling myself very sternly I was not going to allow

'any lovemaking, I found my behaviour was quite opposite to my resolve.

'When he whispered "Happy?"

'I found that I was wordlessly happy and finding comfort in the contact.'

I've now travelled further along the south coast,

past the port cities of Southampton and Portsmouth

to the location of one of the most secret operations of the war.

From this small field some of the most dangerous, and lonely,

missions of World War II were flown

by men and women belonging to a top secret organisation.

Well, David, to the untrained eye,

this looks like any old bit of Sussex countryside,

but there's a lot more to this field that meets the eye, isn't there?

There certainly is.

This is RAF Tangmere that was famous during the Battle of Britain

because of its location on the south coast,

but at night, operating from here,

there were aircraft, small Lysander aircraft that flew the SOE.

Now, the SOE is one of the great untold stories

in many quarters of the war.

What did it stand for and what did it do?

Well, it stood for the Special Operations Executive,

and it was set up in July 1940,

and its aim was to carry out espionage and sabotage

behind enemy lines, or as Churchill said "to set Europe ablaze."

Michael Buckmaster's father Maurice

was one of the bosses recruited to lead operations.

He was Head of French Section, therefore very responsible

for all the operations of the agents in France,

Occupied France, co-ordinating their coming and going.

SOE agents recreated their missions and training in this footage.

In mansions stretching from the Highlands to the New Forest

they were taught how to kill with their bare hands,

derail trains and escape from handcuffs.

Agents would be parachuted into occupied territory,

but when there was no time for parachute training,

Lysander aircraft would prove perfect for the job.

Then they realised because of their short take-off and landing ability,

they'd be very useful to take agents into and out of fields in France.

Unable to use lights, pilots flew under a full moon,

navigating by its reflection on roads and rivers.

Resistance workers would signal their landing spot

by flashing Morse code.

Pilots spent just four minutes on the ground

before flying back home.

Their job was done, but the agent's mission was just beginning.

They had to find out what was happening

in the way of active resistance against the German occupation,

and in certain cases, there were key operations to blow up

certain factories and particularly the railways.

The SOE was proving effective, but the average life expectancy

of a wireless operator in France was just six weeks.

For other SOE operatives, it wasn't much better.

They weren't in uniform, so if they were captured they would,

they would almost certainly be tortured and killed.

They weren't protected by the Geneva Convention.

In a word, they were spies.

Women were particularly valued as SOE undercover operatives.

Very often the men, had given themselves away a little bit

by one or two of their exploits, and it was more difficult

to pin down who the women might be and where they were operating.

Violette Szabo was one of the daring young agents dropped into France.

In 1940, after a whirlwind romance, she married Etienne,

a dashing French legionnaire officer.

Two years later he was killed in action.

Violette's daughter, Tania, recalls the effect this had on her mother.

She was absolutely shattered. She adored him. She loved him.

He was everything that she could dream of.

She was so proud of him.

The loss of Etienne was one reason Violette signed up

as an SOE agent in 1944.

First of all, there was absolutely the sense of revenge.

Er, there's no doubt about that,

but there was also the fact that her father had been

in the First World War, her brothers were in the Second World War.

And so she wanted to do her bit.

And here was this wonderful opportunity. She took it.

And it was exciting. To begin with.

Leaving two-year-old Tania in England, Violette's first mission

took her to Rouen to check on a betrayed resistance movement,

and organise destroying a viaduct.

She was undercover in a treacherous environment.

The Gestapo would be questioning people, punching people.

Checking their papers, arresting people. It was pretty awful.

But Violette was in the thick of it.

Arrested twice whilst attempting to complete her mission,

Violette was warned by a member of the resistance

working for the Vichy Government that it was time to get out.

She got out, went back to London and discovered only once

she got back that the viaduct had been blown.

Gaining promotion, Violette was soon on her way back to France.

Along with another agent, they'd been tasked with disrupting

German reinforcements on their way to Normandy.

On the 10th of June the pair were ambushed,

and a previous injury from parachute training would prove disastrous.

They were running through fields of corn and Violette tripped

and er, sprained that weakened ankle from her parachute jump.

And she couldn't walk.

Violette's fellow agent escaped,

but she was captured by the Gestapo, questioned and tortured daily.

A rescue plan was hatched,

but before it could be implemented, Violette was moved to Paris,

then on to the Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Conditions were unimaginable.

There were no more of the uniforms with the stripes

that you see in so many pictures.

Some of the women still had theirs, and they guarded them,

and would fight anybody because you had to be like that in Ravensbruck.

You guarded your food, you guarded everything.

With the Germans recognising the war's end was fast approaching,

Heinrich Himmler ordered that all British and American agents

should be executed.

And so Violette, who was very weak by this time,

but still standing was taken into a little, narrow er,

alleyway at Ravensbruck and shot in the nape of the neck.

Violette was just 23 when she died.

She was young, brave and beautiful. And she did a very good job.

SOE agents like Violette gave their lives

carrying out solitary, daring work.

I think what set them apart was they volunteered to do this,

knowing the risks, knowing that the chances were

that they would not come back.

Violette Szabo's bravery and courage has been justly celebrated.

Just like many other thousands of young men and women,

she made the ultimate sacrifice,

she gave up her life not just for her country,

but for the cause of freedom.

Next time I'll be discovering how women took control of balloons

protecting our skies,

taking an evacuee back to the home

that kept him safe throughout the war....

We went through that door, and that became from that minute, home.

..and exploring the site of one of the war's most daring escapes.

The British guards who were guarding that very camp

gave the prisoners, the escape prisoners a push start.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd