Dark days, but light at end of the tunnel
WAR COMES TO NORTH EAST – BUT 1940S END WITH CAUSE FOR MORE OPTIMISM
IT’S hard to imagine how we pampered folk who live in 2018 would have coped during the dark years of World War II.
With husbands, sons and fathers away fighting a fearsome enemy, deadly raids by German bombers, and massive day-to-day hardship on the home front, it really was the most desperate of times.
The early 1940s saw parts of Tyneside and Wearside feel the full force of Hitler’s bombers.
As our pictures show, major damage was inflicted as the Germans continued to try to hamper the region’s industrial contribution to the war effort.
Interestingly, newspaper reports of the time were usually circumspect with air raid details.
The Chronicle would, for example, simply report that “a North East town” had been bombed.
Clearly, we didn’t want to give too much information to the enemy.
While at home Britons were asked to bathe in no more than five inches of water and exist on subsistence rations, war raged in Europe and the Far East.
But with America entering the fray, the hand of the Allies was strengthened; 1943 saw the RAF’s brilliant and audacious “Dambusters” squadron score a major victory while, in 1944, the tide slowly began to turn.
The momentous D-Day landings were the beginning of the Allies’ final encirclement of Hitler’s forces.
The enemy remained dangerous, however, as new V1 and V2 rockets began to pound London; the North East, at least, was out of range of these deadly new weapons.
With the Newcastle Home Guard being stood down in December 1944, it seemed that danger on the home front
was subsiding. After five years of hell on earth, 1945 would bring salvation. The war was won, but the peace would also bring its own challenges, with rationing and austerity lasting well into the 1950s.
The post-war, nuclear world was very different to the one which had existed before 1939.
Britain would no longer be a major global power, with the opposing mighty superpowers, the USA and USSR, descending into a new ‘cold war’.
Meanwhile, at home, Clement Attlee’s new Labour government introduced the NHS and ‘welfare state’ which did much to improve the day-to-day life of many Britons.
As the end of the 1940s approached, absolute poverty had almost disappeared from Britain, and unemployment was low.
Bring on the 1950s.