Spare Stories to Share

I found an enchanting little story about World War II military dispatches, of all things.

The heads of Britain’s army, air force, and navy provided King George VI with daily updates on their progress and their perspective on the war. The magic lies not in the paperwork, but in its delivery. At 10:00 each morning throughout the war, an elegant carriage – a brougham - departed Buckingham Palace and headed for Trafalgar Square. Automobile traffic stopped as the elegant horse-drawn carriage, guided by two grooms, turned and clip-clopped toward Whitehall, where the headquarters of Britain’s military branches were situated. A uniformed officer sat inside the carriage, guarding a locked red-leather box which was used to carry reports on the course of the war back to Britain’s monarch.
 
I’ve been spending time recently going back through my research materials, making sure that I haven’t overlooked any stories that will enrich my book. This story about the King, the brougham, and the dispatch box is not an item that helps my book in any way, but I still found it interesting, and wanted to share it before burying it for good.
 
Here are a few more stories in that same quirky category.
 
The 1940 Summer Olympics were scheduled to be held in Tokyo. Although Japan would not launch its surprise attack against the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor until December 1941, the Japanese were already at war with China. The International Olympic Committee announced the relocation of the summer games to Helsinki, Finland. After Finland was invaded by Russia, the 1940 Summer Olympics were cancelled altogether. The 1940 Winter games, scheduled for Sapporo, Japan, were cancelled as well - as were the 1944 summer and winter games, scheduled to be held in London and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy respectively. After a 12-year gap, The Olympics resumed in 1948, with the winter games held in St. Moritz Switzerland, and the summer games held in London.
 
In October 1939, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee announced that there would no award in that year. The prize would not be awarded again until 1944, when the International Committee of the Red Cross was the recipient.
 
If I was writing a movie, this would be the opening scene: Animals were not permitted in London’s air raid shelters. The A.R.P.A.C. (Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee} installed hundreds of white posts equipped with leads throughout Hyde Park. As the citizens of London heeded the call of air-raid sirens, many clipped their dogs’ collars to the leads on their way to cover. The image of hundreds of cowering dogs, their eyes reflecting the arcs of searchlights, and their frightened wails competing with sirens and bomb blasts has haunted me ever since the first time I read about this.
 
I never intended to write about Heligoland. That was an archipelago in the North Sea where Hitler’s Germany built a submarine bunker and a major sea fortress. I’m writing about navies, but this was one of those “too inside-baseball” bits of information that add nothing to my book. But then I read that Heligoland used to belong to Great Britain. Britain had acquired Heligoland from Denmark in 1814, then traded Heligoland to Germany in return for the right to claim Zanzibar as a British protectorate in 1890. This additional detail, of course, would add less than nothing to my book, but it’s one of those fascinating (to me at least) - if utterly distracting - pieces of information that I live for.
 
Multiple books were written by and about Duff Cooper and Lady Diana Cooper. Three days after Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler and Mussolini in 1938, Duff Cooper resigned his post as First Lord of the Admiralty. Cooper declared at the time: “I have forfeited a great deal. I have given up an office that I love, work in which I was deeply interested…. I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is little matter; I have retained something which is to me of great value – I can still walk about the world with my head erect.”  Winston Churchill appointed Cooper Minister of Information in his first cabinet, and he was named Britain’s first Ambassador to newly-liberated France in 1944. What really captured my attention was a single sentence from Trumpets from the Steep, the third and final volume of Lady Diana’s memoirs. I still might use it in my book, but I’d like to share it here nonetheless. It’s an observation that is as appropriate today as it was in the year before World War II broke out:
 
“In 1939 the writing so long scrawled on the wall was translated into many languages.”
 
Thanks for reading.
Bill