Churchill's Wizards (33 page)

In November 1940, Waugh wrote to his wife that she need have no misgivings about his status. ‘Everyone in the army is competing feverishly to get into a commando … The officers are divided more or less equally into dandies and highly efficient professional soldiers.' In Waugh's comic novel
Put Out More Flags
, the army commandos became the inevitable destination not only of the adventurous cad Basil Seal but of his dim and decent friend Sir Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington:

From amateurish beginnings, the commandos grew into a professional force, raiding north to Spitzbergen and south to the shores of Libya. Following raids on Vaagso, Bruneval, St Nazaire and Dieppe, they became such an irritant to the Third Reich that Adolf Hitler issued an edict in October 1942 ordering all commandos to be shot out of hand, without parley or pardon.

By then, Dudley Clarke was otherwise engaged. On 13 November 1940, General Haining summoned Clarke to say that the CIGS had had a personal signal from General Sir Archibald Wavell, commander-in-chief, Middle East, saying that he wanted to form ‘a special section of intelligence for deception of the enemy' in Cairo, under a General Staff officer, grade 1, and asking specifically for Lieutenant Colonel D. W. Clarke.

The British people mobilised not just to work in mine, field and factory or Dig for Victory, but also to fight. ‘The one desire of all the males and many women was to have a weapon,' wrote Churchill. By the end of May 1940 there were 400,000 men in the Local Defence Volunteers, and 1.4 million registered by the end of June, nearly half of whom had served in WW1. Yachtsmen and motor boaters joined in too: the Upper Thames Patrol guarded 125 miles of river. Young men aged 18 to 19½ who were too young for national service could join the Home Defence Companies, and there was also a Non-Combatant Corps (nicknamed the ‘Norwegian Camel Corps') where conscientious objectors could do useful work with pick and shovel, brush and trowel. Some went into bomb disposal, so ‘conchies' were certainly not cowards. On 5 June all these Home Forces were bolted together with the Field Army and the Anti-Aircraft Units into what were briefly called the ‘Ironsides', who used, among other things, Bren-gun-carrying armoured motor cars bodged out of boilerplate. The idea was supposed to be linked to Oliver Cromwell, the Protector of England, as ‘Ironsides' had been his Roundhead nickname, and the new commander-in-chief, Home Forces, was also called Sir Edmund Ironside. On 5 June 1940,
CROMWELL
became the code word for all troops to take up their battle stations.

In the days when the threat came from Napoleon, only the ‘fencibles' or the volunteer militia near the coast would have rallied. But the advent of the parachutist in Hitler's war meant that every village in England might be endangered, and every citizen had to be
en
garde
. In June, at General Ironside's instruction, a massive campaign of deception at a local level began. All direction and road signs across the country were taken down so as not to aid
Fallschirm-Infanterie
dropping from the sky. Tradesmen's vans and shop signs were painted
over. The names on railway station platforms were reduced to three inches high, which made arrivals and departures on crowded, jerky, smoky train journeys even worse. Lost military drivers learned to nip into red Gilbert Scott telephone boxes, whose address might still be written down inside by the 999 instructions, or to navigate by the corporation names on manhole covers.

By June, church bells could only be rung to warn of enemy landings, and all bank holidays were cancelled. Travel to within twenty miles of the coast from the Wash to Portland was prohibited, while a new evacuation moved thousands of children back away from the shores. For the few who had cars then, petrol was already rationed to essential use. ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?' posters appeared. Even telephoning was discouraged. The country was concealing itself, crouching down.

Britain was locking up, too. From 1 September 1939, German and Austrian males between the ages of 16 and 60 had been required to register with the police as enemy aliens, and most had been put in Category C: sympathetic to Britain, to be left at liberty. But now, between 12 May 1940 and the end of July, some 27,000 ‘friendly aliens' (including 4,000 Italians after 10 June) were rounded up and interned on the Isle of Man or deported by sea. After the British ship
Arandora Star
was torpedoed by Günther Prien's
U-47
on 2 July en route to Canada, killing over 700 German and Italian internees, 450 traumatised survivors were brought back and then immediately shipped off again to Australia on the
Dunera
. The prison camps became mini-universities, centres of art, music and learning, because many internees were anti-Nazi Jewish refugees, including scholars, scientists and intellectuals who had been fleeing Hitler over the last seven years.

All this came from a moral panic about the possibility of enemy deception on a grand scale. Was there a ‘Fifth Column' of hidden traitors and spies lurking ready to dash out and help enemy parachutists? The term Fifth Column came from early in the Spanish Civil War, when Franco's Nationalists had four military columns besieging Madrid but also claimed to have a fifth one, operating clandestinely inside the Republican defences. In mid-May, the
Daily
Express
and
Daily Telegraph
were claiming that such deceptive agents or ‘Quislings' had opened the gates of Norway and Holland to the
invading Nazis. Were there similar people here in the UK – foreign women, refugees, dissidents, blackmailed Jews – perhaps waiting to assist Germans parachuting down dressed as policemen, vicars or air-raid wardens? Heath Robinson was having none of it. His cartoon in the
Sketch
of 3 July 1940,
The Sixth Column at Work: Here they
come. Disguised parachutists receive a warm welcome
, shows hordes of patient Englishmen in flat caps and hats cycling about with large tubs and baths of hot water ready to catch parachuting beldames and bishops as they float to the ground.

This moment of national alarm and emergency felt rather like 1914 again. Ordinarily sane people became obsessed by carrier pigeons, strange chalk marks on telegraph poles (actually left by ‘bob-a-job' scouts and guides indicating where they had visited), mysterious lights, buzzing wirelesses, suspicious conversations, funny-looking strangers. General Ironside's diary of 31 May records ‘Fifth column reports coming in from everywhere. A man with an arm-band on and a swastika pulled up near an important aerodrome in the Southern Command…' Following these reports, he posted pickets everywhere. ‘Perhaps we shall catch some swine.' General Ironside was a source of alarmism, but he was also the victim of an alarmist whispering campaign that linked him to the British fascists. The British authorities' problem became how to separate innocent from guilty amid rising hysteria. ‘Collar the lot' was the view of Major General Sir Vernon Kell, Director General of the Security Service, MI5, which, while trying to keep tabs on real German spies, was drowning in erroneous information about possible subversion by Communists, Fascists, Indian Nationalists, the IRA and Pacifists.

At the end of the day, the only deception was self-deception. There was no evidence of any plans for espionage, sabotage or ‘Fifth Column' activities among the foreign internees. If there was an enemy within, it was native, not foreign; noble, not
arriviste
. Too many highborn Britons were attracted to the ideology of the vigorous if vulgar Nazis; even the abdicated King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, was not immune to the flattering blandishments of Hitlerism – the Windsors had visited Nazi Germany in September 1937 and were photographed, smiling, with the Führer.

Parliament passed a new Treachery Act in May 1940 under which grave cases of espionage and sabotage carried the death penalty, and
after the discovery inside the US embassy of a right-wing spy, Tyler Kent, passing secret documents to Italy and Germany, the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, overcame his sceptical liberal scruples to take action. On 23 May, under the hurried amendment 1A (adding mere associates and sympathisers to those criminalised under 18b of the Defence Regulations for ‘execution of acts prejudicial to the security of the State'), the Metropolitan Police raided the London headquarters of the British Union of Fascists and arrested thirty-four members, including the Blackshirts' leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, who had been insisting this was ‘a Jews' war'. Two more noted anti-Semites and pro-Nazis, John Beckett of the racialist British People's Party and Captain Maule Ramsay, president of the Right Club and Conservative MP for Peebles, were also taken into custody in Brixton prison. Around 750 fascists were detained. Aristocratic appeasers like Lord Tavistock, the Duke of Buccleuch and the Duke of Westminster who had once been involved in the Nordic League and the Anglo-German friendship association, The Link, now ducked their ducal heads and went to ground on large estates. On 28 May, Churchill appointed Lord Swinton as head of the Home Defence (Security) Executive ‘to co-ordinate action against the Fifth column'. General Kell, who had founded and led MI5 for thirty years, was retired. In the House of Commons on 4 June Churchill said:

On that day, three
Evening Standard
journalists, Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard, finished a swiftly written 40,000 word polemical attack on the appeasers, disarmers and
Chamberlainites of the 1930s whose folly and sloth had led to the disaster of Dunkirk. It was published a month later by Victor Gollancz under the title of
Guilty Men
by ‘Cato'. Even though it was not available in W. H. Smith's chain of shops it became notorious and sold 200,000 copies.

Yet by the middle of August 1940, Churchill was declaring to the House of Commons that he ‘always thought' the Fifth Column danger ‘was exaggerated in these islands'. If that was true, he had nevertheless put the ‘Fifth Column' idea to most effective propaganda use.

On 10 June, scenting wounded prey, Fascist Italy boldly declared war on the Republic of France, and promptly captured 200 yards of the Riviera. Paris was declared an ‘open city', which was a formal statement that it would not be defended. Now it became a ghost town as shops, offices and hotels closed, traffic vanished and the government slipped away from the advancing Germans. Sefton Delmer was one of the last reporters left in Paris, with Edward Ward of the BBC, Robert Cooper of
The Times
and Walter Farr of the
Daily
Mail
. By lunchtime on 14 June, the swastika was fluttering from the radio mast on top of the Eiffel Tower and
Kavallerie
were trotting down the Champs Elysées. Reynaud then resigned, and the new Prime Minister, white-moustached Maréchal Pétain, spoke on 17 June: ‘It is with a heavy heart that I say we must cease the fight,' adding, in another broadcast three days later, ‘Not so strong as twenty-two years ago, we had also fewer friends, too few children, too few arms, too few allies. This is the cause of our defeat.' France had fought and lost, with nearly 100,000 dead, 120,000 wounded, and over a million and half soldiers captured.

On 21 June, in the Forest of Compiègne, Hitler in his grey uniform relished the ritual of French abasement. Bill Shirer of CBS watched the Führer strutting among toadies, ‘his face afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph'. Generaloberst Keitel read out the Nazis' propagandist, self-righteous preamble, clearly written by Hitler:

‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over,' Churchill had said on 18 June. ‘I expect that the Battle of Britain is abouttobegin … Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.' The mood became even more exalted and grim. Upper-class Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West prepared suicide potions, but ordinary people felt strangely exhilarated, even liberated. The playwright and broadcaster J. B. Priestley felt a new mood in the country, of courage and hope: ‘Our people began to show the world what stuff they're made of, and the sight was glorious.' Churchill commanded some of that mood with superb morale-boosting language: ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.” ' It was great rhetoric. But how was Churchill himself behaving under the strain? At times he was impatient and inconsiderate. There is only one letter extant between Winston and Clementine Churchill in all 1940, dated 27 June, a loving wifely letter telling him something she feels he ought to know, that ‘there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner'. She confessed to noticing ‘a deterioration' in his manner; ‘you are not so kind as you used to be'. She could not bear

It was time for writers, artists and film-makers to man the propaganda barricades. ‘Arm the people,' wrote George Orwell pugnaciously to
Time and Tide
on 22 June, urging the distribution of hand grenades, shotguns and all the weapons in gunsmith's shops. The
author of
Homage to Catalonia
had just joined the Primrose Hill platoon of the 5th (London) Local Defence Volunteers battalion, but his letter to
Time and Tide
sounds as if he were still in the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista militia with whom he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Later, Orwell saw June 1940 as a revolutionary moment: