Read If Britain Had Fallen Online

Authors: Norman Longmate

Tags: #History, #Military, #World War II

If Britain Had Fallen

BOOK: If Britain Had Fallen
11.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

IF BRITAIN
HAD FALLEN

 

OTHER BOOKS BY NORMAN LONGMATE INCLUDE:

 

 

 

How We Lived Then,
A History of Everyday Life during the Second World War

The Real Dad’s Army, The Story of the Home Guard

The GIs, The Americans in Britain, 1942–1945

Air Raid, The Bombing of Coventry, 1940

When We Won the War, The Story of Victory in Europe, 1945

The Doodlebugs, The Story of the Flying-Bombs

Hitler’s Rockets, The Story of the V-2s

The Bombers, The RAF Offensive against Germany

The Home Front, An Anthology of Personal Experience, 1938–1945
(editor)

Defending the Island, From Caesar to the Armada

Island Fortress, The Defence of Great Britain, 1603–1945

King Cholera, The Biography of Disease

The Waterdrinkers, A History of Temperance

Alive and Well, Medicine and Public Health, 1830 to the Present Day
[i.e. 1970]

The Workhouse

Milestones in Working Class History

The Hungry Mills, The Story of the Lancashire Cotton Famine,
1861–1865

The Breadstealers, The Fight against the Corn Laws, 1838–1846

 

 

 

NORMAN LONGMATE

 

IF BRITAIN
HAD FALLEN

 

THE REAL NAZI OCCUPATION PLANS

 

 

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NORMAN LONGMATE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FRONTLINE
BOOKS

 

A Greenhill Book

 

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited
www.greenhillbooks.com

Reprinted in this format in 2012 by
Frontline Books

an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

 

Copyright © Norman Longmate, 1972
New Introduction © Norman Longmate, 2004

 

ISBN 978 1 84832 647 7

 

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

 

Printed and Bound
by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

 

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England
E-mail: [email protected]
Website:
www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

Contents

New Introduction
Foreword
  
  1
Plans
  
  2
Preparations
  
  3
Anticipation
  
  4
Bombardment
  
  5
Assault
  
  6
Break-out
  
  7
Defeat
  
  8
Wanted: a Quisling
  
  9
The Merseyside spies
  
10
Whatever happened to Nelson?
  
11
To laugh at the Führer is forbidden
  
12
How long is a Crayfish?
  
13
Requisitioned
  
14
Deported
  
15
See Germany and die
  
16
Resistance
  
17
Collaboration
  
18
Which way to the Black Market?
  
19
The New Order
  
20
The end of the nightmare
A note on sources
Index

Illustrations

Between pages 64 and
65

  
1
Building a strongpoint, Trafalgar Square, May 1940
  
2
Weapon training for Members of Parliament, July 1940
  
3
Assault training for Southern Railwaymen, June 1940
  
4
Central London street scene, May 1940
  
5
Enemy aliens en route to internment, May 1940
  
6
A roadblock in Southern England
  
7
Home Guards erecting a wire trap across a road
  
8 and 9
Anti-air-landing obstructions, July 1940
  
10
A roadblock near the coast
  
11
The removal of place-names. A notice in the Bristol area, June 1940
  
12
A church notice board, Summer 1940
  
13
Anti-tank roadblock, July 1940
  
14
An anti-aircraft gun’s crew taking post, 1940
  
15
Sea-bathing on the south coast, 1940 style

Between pages 144 and
145

  
16
Invasion barges, as seen by the RAF
  
17
Oil defences being tried out on the south coast
  
18
German storm troops under training
  
19
The defenders. Winston Churchill and General Sir Alan Brooke on the south coast
  
20
The attackers. Hitler with General von Brauchitsch and Admiral Raeder, on their way to an invasion conference, June 1940
  
21
An invasion barge, during an exercise at Calais
  
22
Embarkation exercise at Dieppe, September 1940
  
23
A cliff-scaling exercise on the French coast
  
24 and 25
A German parachutist and a Panzer break-through (a British artist’s impression)
  
26 and 27
German motorised troops on manoeuvres and a river-crossing exercise, with rubber boats
  
28
A pontoon bridge in use in Luxemburg, May 1940
  
29
German troops occupying Luxemburg

Between pages 192 and
193

  
30
German troops on Guernsey
  
31
Guernsey Occupation Orders, July 1940
  
32
German troops in St Peter Port, Guernsey
  
33
German tanks on occupied Guernsey
  
34
A German military bank in the Royal Parade, St Helier
  
35
Guernsey cinema taken over by the Germans
  
36
Anti-invasion defences under construction at Anne Port, Jersey
  
37
A captured French gun being towed into position on Guernsey
  
38 and 39
A gas-driven van and a horse-drawn van on Jersey
  
40
Resident of Jersey collecting Red Cross food parcels
  
41
The Germans burying British servicemen with full military honours
  
42
The New Jetty, Guernsey, awaiting possible demolition
  
43
Parliament Square, July 1940

Maps

British Isles, showing possible German invasion routes
page
10

The south-east in 1940
page
14

Acknowledgement is due for permission to reproduce the following plates:

Associated Press 26, 28; Central Press 3,13, 43; Frank Falla 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 42; Fox photos 15; Imperial War Museum 16;
Jersey Evening Post
34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41; Keystone 4, 23, 24; Radio Times Hulton Picture Library 1, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 19, 25, 27; Wide World 2; Reece Winstone 11.

The maps were drawn by Nigel Holmes. The illustration on page 123 is reproduced by courtesy of Rupert Hart Davis Ltd.

 

 

 

To
J.C.L

 

Who grew up in freedom, because we won

New Introduction

Since the first edition of this book was published in 1972 much has changed. At that time most of the population had lived through the war and the mere suggestion that Britain might have been defeated was widely regarded as an outrage. Today no one much under the age of seventy can have any recollection of the summer of 1940. Since the 1972 books and broadcast, programmes of the ‘What if…’ variety have become commonplace and alternative history is now respectable.

The military appreciation of how the country was supposedly defeated was not my work, though I fleshed out the experts’ narrative with my own fictional detail. The account of events still seems to be entirely plausible and all we learned later in the war suggests that the loss of air superiority would have been decisive.

On the subsequent pattern of occupation I think that I may have under-estimated the depredations that the country will have suffered, especially in the cultural sphere. I referred to the plundering of the great national collections, but experience in Europe, which still results in occasional court cases, makes clear that the major country houses would not have been spared and privately owned works of art might have been forcibly acquired, possibly for Nazi leaders, with art dealers being used to give the transaction a show of legality. One interesting point is that one official is quoted as favouring the return of ‘stolen works of art to their original owners’, instancing the Elgin Marbles, which a number of no doubt patriotic Britain have recently advocated.

The most sensitive chapters of the book dealt with the likelihood of collaboration and the emergence of a Quisling puppet government. Here, what happened in the Channel Islands is reassuring. A thorough investigation at the end of the war, though its findings were not made public until 1992, cleared the authorities in Jersey and Guernsey and the other islands of assisting the Germans more than was required to protect the civil population from worse treatment. The only charges brought against ordinary citizens were low-grade offences like working in menial posts for the enemy and even here the defendants could, and did, argue that they were acting under duress.

As for a British Quisling, a number of cases have come to light of prominent aristocratic or, occasionally, literary figures advocating friendship with Germany even after the war was visibly approaching or had begun, though their motives—honourable enough, if misguided—were to prevent at almost any price a repeat of the bloodbath of 1914–1918. A German invasion would probably have concentrated the minds of all but the most besotted, but there is one exception about whom, since his death in May 1972, much more has been revealed and all to his discredit. Wherever one looks, in Great Britain or the United States, the Duke of Windsor’s name emerges as the likeliest head of a pro-Nazi government. Only recently have we learned that Churchill was exasperated by the Duke’s reluctance to leave Europe when the war seemed lost. Not till November 1992 did an American journalist who interviewed the Duke in the Bahamas in 1940 reveal, as he claimed, the Duke’s strongly pro-German sympathies. There can be no question that the Germans regarded the Duke as sympathetic to the ‘new Germany’ and he unquestionably had Nazi sympathisers as friends and was, at the very least, indiscreet in revealing his opinion to visitors.

BOOK: If Britain Had Fallen
11.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Alphabet by Kathy Page
Protect and Serve by Kat Jackson
Gumption by Nick Offerman
Angel Fall by Coleman Luck
Tied to a Boss 2 by Rose, J.L
Birthdays of a Princess by Helga Zeiner