Britain's oldest Second World War veteran, Donald Rose, dies aged 110

How we prepared for nuclear Armageddon in the 70s and 80s

Scotsman

13 hours ago

Scotsman

How we prepared for nuclear Armageddon in the 70s and 80s

As tensions between the US and the Soviet Union ramped up during the Second World War, the threat of a nuclear attack felt alarmingly real. These photos show how we prepared in the UK, including the bunkers people built and the radiation suits they hoped would protect them from the fallout. In the US, schoolchildren took part in 'duck and cover' drills to prerpare them for a nuclear attack. Nuclear drills were not commonplace in UK schools, though some people do recall them taking place, even if one described those drills as 'a way to bunk most of a lesson'. Most people who were around then recall the UK's Protect and Survive public information campaign, though it provided little comfort. People were instructed to prepare their own 'fall-out room', with essential items including water, warm clothes, a radio, loo roll, and a bucket with which to craft a makeshift lavatory. They were told to coat windows with emulsion paint to deflect the 'heat flash' and to keep heavy curtains up to protect yourself against flying glass. And they were advised to build an 'inner refuge', filling heavy furniture with sand, earth, books and clothes to provide a barrier against radiation. One person likened the advice it contained to 'putting an Elastoplast on a broken leg', for all the good it would do. Some people took matters into their own hands, building nuclear shelters stocked with tins and cans, and ordering radiation suits. There were also official nuclear bunkers constructed by the Government around the country, including one in York, which only closed in 1992 and is now a visitor attraction. It was created to monitor nuclear explosions and the fallout across Yorkshire in the event of an attack, and includes a dormitory in which the 50-60 staff would take it in turns to sleep, an air-filtering system, sewage ejector unit and enough supplies to last for 30 days. In all, around 1,500 'observation stations' were built around the UK during the early stages of the Cold War and were manned by volunteers from the Royal Observation Corps. Rather than prepare for an attack, many members of the public took action by campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Protests took place around the country, including, perhaps most memorably, at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, which was set up in 1981 to oppose nuclear weapons being stored at the RAF base in Berkshire. For all the protests, news bulletins and public information campaigns, the thing which terrified the public most at the time was the BBC film Threads, which first aired on September 23, 1984. The devastating drama depicted a nuclear attack on Sheffield and the fallout, and people who watched as children all those years ago have told how they are still haunted by nightmares. One person recalled how the brutal depiction of the attack's aftermath meant most viewers were left hoping they would be killed by the initial blast rather than having to suffer radiation poisoning and the horrors of a post-apocalyptic Britain. These photos show some of the ways in which people across the UK prepared for the very real threat of nuclear war during the 70s and 80s. Did you live through the Cold War, and did you do anything to prepare for a nuclear attack? Let us know in the comments section. 1 . Nuclear family Phyllis Millet and her daughters Roberta and Katie (right) having breakfast in their underground nuclear shelter during a five-day trial in October 1980 | Getty Images Photo: Graham Turner/Keystone Photo Sales 2 . Anti-radiation suits A family wearing anti-radiation suits in the village of Wellingore, Lincolnshire - the home of Civil Defence Supply, a mail order business that supplies products to survive a nuclear attack - in May 1980 | Getty Images Photo: Ian Tyas/Keystone Features Photo Sales 3 . Two weeks of supplies Inside a domestic nuclear shelter with an intake air pump and a supply of food which would last a single adult two weeks, in January 1981 | Getty Images Photo: Central Press Photo Sales 4 . Nuclear survival system A British-built Nuclear Emergency Survival System (NESST) being installed. It was intended to enable up to 12 occupants could live comfortably on a normal diet for up to four weeks with protection from the initial nuclear explosion and subsequent radioactive fallout, as well as from biological and chemical weapons. Designed by the Swiss engineer Dr Werner Heierli, and manufactured for Personal Survival Systems, it cost £10,000. | Getty Images Photo: Keystone Photo Sales

How four women defied the Nazis – from within a concentration camp

Telegraph

17 hours ago

Telegraph

How four women defied the Nazis – from within a concentration camp

The 80 th anniversary of the Second World War continues to produce its avalanche of books, many of them increasingly angle-hungry to avoid repeating so much of what we know already. American historian Lynne Olson's angle in The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück is not merely the woman's view, as must be expected about a Nazi concentration camp designed specifically for them, but one that loses no opportunity to give French men a kicking. Her thesis, which we should be far from ready to accept, is that the story of the French resistance has long been presented as a basically masculine enterprise in which the women broadly had a support role. It is not true that the resistance (in all its forms: Olson is quite right to state that it was hardly a unified organisation) operated like that. But nor is it true that that is how history has presented it, as many of the secondary sources (on which this book is perhaps too heavily reliant) have for decades made clear. If people want to believe that women have been written out of the script then that is up to them, and it would suggest they have not read much of the existing literature. Still, every new book on the heavily-exploited subject of Hitler 's war needs a unique selling point, and that appears to be Olson's. To her credit, she has read a lot of other people's work on the subject, though it does not prevent her from making the odd slip. When I last went there Niort was a town in the west of France, not one in the north-east; and her statement that 'more than a million Allied soldiers rounded up during May and June 1940 [on the Western Front, around the Fall of France] were scheduled to be shipped to Germany to do slave labor' [sic] is just bizarre. As she points out later in the book, Germany was selective about in which camps it observed the Geneva Convention; but captured Allied soldiers at that time did not normally face the fate of ending up in a situation where the Convention was not observed. The endnotes offer no indication of where her slave labour idea came from. Indeed, many of the French who were captured were sent back to France as civilians after the armistice signed by Pétain, even if they ended up as forced labourers after the crumbling Nazi war economy started conscripting French people as workers once Vichy was occupied in 1942. The author focuses on various women who were genuinely heroic and, for their resistance activities, ended up in Ravensbrück. The camp was opened shortly after the start of hostilities to house female political prisoners and others who had offended the master race in some way. The camp was north of Berlin and in what, immediately after the war, would become the Soviet zone of occupation. It was not, until very near the end of the war, an extermination camp: it became one when Hitler, in his increasing psychopathy and madness, decided that none of the prisoners of the Reich should survive. However, conditions in the overcrowded camp, with its regime of forced labour, were almost non-existent and foul food and random sadism ensured that many women did die. A crematorium was provided for convenience as a result. The heroines of Olson's book – Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of the General, Germaine Tillion, an eminent anthropologist, Jacqueline d'Alincourt, a young French aristocrat, and Anise Girard, who while still a teenager was recruited into an anti-Nazi intelligence network – all survived. They have provided testimonies to numerous historians of the camp on which Olson has drawn, having all died long before she wrote her book. The last survivor was Girard, who at 93 was present at the interment of Tillion and de Gaulle in the Panthéon in Paris: for all the talk about the female contribution to the resistance being overlooked, these two women were done the honour their heroism merited. The fact that they survived was rather as though they were winners of some sort of diabolic lottery. Tillion's mother, Émilie, was also rounded up and, having survived until the final acts of psychopathic madness in the last phase of the war, went to the gas chamber. This was largely because of her age (she was in her late 60s), and despite efforts by the other women to hide her and disguise the physical manifestations of ageing through makeup and through having her wear a scarf to conceal her greying hair at roll-call. An inmate working in the camp's records department – the Nazis were very meticulous at keeping records of their victims – forged her age on her file, but it was all to no avail. Her daughter and her three friends were spared the cull for various reasons. In most cases it was their relative youth, and that they could, despite malnutrition and disease, still perform the various acts of slave labour their captors imposed on them – not to mention the routine beatings. Camaraderie not just among the French women, but among all the inmates of whatever nationality, was intensified by the hatred of their oppressors. Small acts of kindness assumed gigantic proportions in such a scene of horror. The camp ended up containing around four times as many women as it was intended to house: inevitably many died of disease, saving the Nazis the trouble of slaughtering them. After a long period in a hellish solitary confinement, de Gaulle was first moved to a less spartan part of the camp and then, after the liberation of France, released. Himmler, as the head of the SS, had seen her as a potential hostage because of her relationship to her uncle, but eventually saw the benefit of exchanging her in a prisoner swap to boost his own credentials with the people he realised were going to win the war, and save his own neck. His suicide rendered that pointless, and Hitler profoundly disagreed with his idea of a negotiated peace. As the camp authorities proceeded to murder as many as they could, lives were eventually saved by the Swede Count Bernadotte who, anxious to improve neutral Sweden's post-war reputation in the light of its having been considered rather too friendly to the Nazis, negotiated the rescue of the camp's remaining inmates and their repatriation to their own countries. A number went straight back to France; some had a period of recuperation in Sweden first. The camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, escaped and was found in 1949 working as a waiter in Munich. Although Olson is highly critical of the use of the British common law system, saying it was inadequate for the seven trials of Ravensbrück war criminals, Suhren got what was coming to him, and was shot by a French firing squad in 1950. Olson spends too long on the after-story of the inmates, the book becoming tedious in its later stages with a rather dull episode about an American woman's making of a documentary on the camp. Readers will be glad to hear of the fulfilling family lives that the women lived after their nightmare, and that many of those who tormented them received justice; but much else in the last part of the book is irrelevant. Also, the book is a struggle to read. It is written in American and the publisher has not thought it worth the investment of translating it into English. Olson's style is at times cloying and always adjective-rich, which makes the reader feel he or she is trapped in an interminable, over-written article in a women's magazine. The story of Ravensbrück, and of the role of French women in resisting Nazi occupation, is important: but it has already been told, and much better than this. ★★★☆☆

Scotsman

17 hours ago

Scotsman

How we prepared for nuclear Armageddon in the 70s and 80s

As tensions between the US and the Soviet Union ramped up during the Second World War, the threat of a nuclear attack felt alarmingly real. These photos show how we prepared in the UK, including the bunkers people built and the radiation suits they hoped would protect them from the fallout. In the US, schoolchildren took part in 'duck and cover' drills to prerpare them for a nuclear attack. Nuclear drills were not commonplace in UK schools, though some people do recall them taking place, even if one described those drills as 'a way to bunk most of a lesson'. Most people who were around then recall the UK's Protect and Survive public information campaign, though it provided little comfort. People were instructed to prepare their own 'fall-out room', with essential items including water, warm clothes, a radio, loo roll, and a bucket with which to craft a makeshift lavatory. They were told to coat windows with emulsion paint to deflect the 'heat flash' and to keep heavy curtains up to protect yourself against flying glass. And they were advised to build an 'inner refuge', filling heavy furniture with sand, earth, books and clothes to provide a barrier against radiation. One person likened the advice it contained to 'putting an Elastoplast on a broken leg', for all the good it would do. Some people took matters into their own hands, building nuclear shelters stocked with tins and cans, and ordering radiation suits. There were also official nuclear bunkers constructed by the Government around the country, including one in York, which only closed in 1992 and is now a visitor attraction. It was created to monitor nuclear explosions and the fallout across Yorkshire in the event of an attack, and includes a dormitory in which the 50-60 staff would take it in turns to sleep, an air-filtering system, sewage ejector unit and enough supplies to last for 30 days. In all, around 1,500 'observation stations' were built around the UK during the early stages of the Cold War and were manned by volunteers from the Royal Observation Corps. Rather than prepare for an attack, many members of the public took action by campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Protests took place around the country, including, perhaps most memorably, at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, which was set up in 1981 to oppose nuclear weapons being stored at the RAF base in Berkshire. For all the protests, news bulletins and public information campaigns, the thing which terrified the public most at the time was the BBC film Threads, which first aired on September 23, 1984. The devastating drama depicted a nuclear attack on Sheffield and the fallout, and people who watched as children all those years ago have told how they are still haunted by nightmares. One person recalled how the brutal depiction of the attack's aftermath meant most viewers were left hoping they would be killed by the initial blast rather than having to suffer radiation poisoning and the horrors of a post-apocalyptic Britain. These photos show some of the ways in which people across the UK prepared for the very real threat of nuclear war during the 70s and 80s. Did you live through the Cold War, and did you do anything to prepare for a nuclear attack? Let us know in the comments section. 1 . Nuclear family Phyllis Millet and her daughters Roberta and Katie (right) having breakfast in their underground nuclear shelter during a five-day trial in October 1980 | Getty Images Photo: Graham Turner/Keystone Photo Sales 2 . Anti-radiation suits A family wearing anti-radiation suits in the village of Wellingore, Lincolnshire - the home of Civil Defence Supply, a mail order business that supplies products to survive a nuclear attack - in May 1980 | Getty Images Photo: Ian Tyas/Keystone Features Photo Sales 3 . Two weeks of supplies Inside a domestic nuclear shelter with an intake air pump and a supply of food which would last a single adult two weeks, in January 1981 | Getty Images Photo: Central Press Photo Sales 4 . Nuclear survival system A British-built Nuclear Emergency Survival System (NESST) being installed. It was intended to enable up to 12 occupants could live comfortably on a normal diet for up to four weeks with protection from the initial nuclear explosion and subsequent radioactive fallout, as well as from biological and chemical weapons. Designed by the Swiss engineer Dr Werner Heierli, and manufactured for Personal Survival Systems, it cost £10,000. | Getty Images Photo: Keystone Photo Sales

Britain's oldest Second World War veteran, Donald Rose, dies aged 110

Hashtags

Try Our AI Features

Comments

Related Articles

How we prepared for nuclear Armageddon in the 70s and 80s

How four women defied the Nazis – from within a concentration camp

How we prepared for nuclear Armageddon in the 70s and 80s

Britain's oldest Second World War veteran, Donald Rose, dies aged 110

Hashtags

Try Our AI Features

Comments

Related Articles

How we prepared for nuclear Armageddon in the 70s and 80s

How four women defied the Nazis – from within a concentration camp

How we prepared for nuclear Armageddon in the 70s and 80s

Get Started Now: Download the App