If Britain Had Fallen (19 page)

As one division after another signalled its position to him as the advance halted for the night, von Rundstedt realised that, though their reports were couched in the cautious, formal terms which the German Army enjoined upon its officers, he had achieved a great victory, even though the casualties were heavier than he had expected. The time had come to move forward, nearer to the front, and, while his signallers were conveying the news of his success to von Brauchitsch, the rest of the headquarters staff were busily packing up for the move to the riverside hotel at Maidenhead earmarked for their use. Before the convoy of staff cars and command vehicles could set off, von Rundstedt received a far-from-welcome reply to his signal. The Commander-in-Chief, Army, had decided that he should now take command in England, as von Rundstedt’s Army Group A would soon be reinforced by General Busch’s Army Group B, brought over from France to occupy the rest of the country, while the troops already there carried out mopping-up operations. For the present his headquarters were to be in Sussex in a beautiful country house at Glyndebourne, recommended (though this von Rundstedt was not told) by a music-lover on his staff with a passion for Mozart.

That evening was also a time of frenzied activity in Whitehall, as the
small key sections of the few ministries still left prepared to withdraw to the north, the way westward now being blocked. The Civil Servants left behind, not always with much regret, selected for destruction the files of minutes and reports that might assist the Germans and would now go unread for ever, before settling down to sleep in the ministries’ air-raid shelters and in beds lining basement corridors. Soon after midnight the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, who had spent most of the day in the secret war room beneath Whitehall, went in search of the Prime Minister and found him standing, preoccupied and unspeaking, in the Cabinet Room. The next German move, General Sir Alan Brooke warned him, was likely to be to cut off London from the north and he must formally advise the Prime Minister that he could not guarantee to hold the railway line linking London with the Midlands for more than the next twelve hours, although he hoped the line which ran further east, from King’s Cross to York and Edinburgh, might remain open a little longer.

Already the Cabinet had agreed on the action to be taken in this eventuality. The governments-in-exile from the countries overrun by Germany, who had already fled once from the Germans, must, everyone agreed, cross the Atlantic to refuge in Canada, and with them must go the ambassadors already accredited to them and the royal families of Norway and Holland. ‘But,’ insisted Churchill, ‘the British government stays in the British Isles’, although he had already ordered a few ministers, much against their will, to leave with the foreign governments, to provide the nucleus, if necessary, of a British government-in-exile. A number, whose departments were already evacuated to Lancashire or Wales or the West Country, had now gone to join them and some, whose departments would cease to be necessary when the Germans arrived, had begged for and been granted permission to attach themselves to the Palace of Westminster Home Guard, or had left to organise resistance in their constituencies. Their last decision, duly recorded in the Cabinet minutes which were even now being carried to safety in Canada, was to reaffirm that there would be no capitulation. The pledge of ‘No surrender’ given by him in the House of Commons could not be broken under any circumstances, for not merely—the Prime Minister’s voice swelled with indignation—would it be dishonourable in the extreme, but it would expose members of the ‘Auxiliary Units’ still fighting to the risk of being shot as partisans. The time might come when an armistice must be sought, but it would not be by this government. As for himself, it was useless for the general to try to persuade him, as others had done, to go to Canada, or even to some other part of the country. ‘The enemy has already laid impious hands upon Chartwell,’ explained Churchill, ‘the place closest, after Westminster,
to my heart, an act of impertinence for which in due course he will be made to pay a heavy price.’ Now, beyond question, his place was here, at the heart of the Empire, where he hoped to die like a hussar and an English gentleman.

‘What about His Majesty?’ asked the Commander-in-Chief. King George had wished, explained the Prime Minister, to put himself at the head of an underground resistance movement, like King Alfred leading the Saxons against the invading Danes. But reluctantly they had decided the risks were too great. So long as the King was known to be free, on friendly soil, the illegality of any puppet government set up in the British Isles would be apparent, while the events which might follow the King’s capture were almost too appalling to contemplate. The barbarian invaders, direct descendants of the Huns of old, might try to bargain his life for concessions by the British government-in-exile or exhibit him in chains in the enemy capital. Already arrangements had been made for the royal household, with the other groups he had mentioned, to leave the country and the moment to put these plans into action had arrived.

Prompt at 11.30 the following morning, Wednesday 16 October, the first of the special trains pulled out of Liverpool Street station, routed, to avoid the advancing Germans, via Cambridge and York and thence to Edinburgh and Glasgow. The King, in admiral’s uniform, was clearly deeply moved as he climbed aboard with his wife and daughters, escorted by the station-master resplendent in frock-coat and top-hat. For security reasons the Chiefs of Staff had insisted that no publicity should attend his departure but one concession had been made to the King’s desire not to leave his country without some ceremonial, and from the footplate of the engine flew a small royal standard. The Prime Minister, who had come to see his sovereign leave, was in tears as the train slowly steamed out of the station, then, turning to the group of ministers, police and railway staff, who stood watching it disappear in the distance, he pulled himself to attention and took off his hat. Without a sign being given the little group struck up the national anthem, its words echoing oddly beneath the high roof of the now empty platform.

Despite the precautions, the news that the King was travelling north spread ahead of him, after the train had been briefly held up at Cambridge and someone had recognised the slim, dark-haired figure looking sadly from a window. For the rest of his way north, the King’s journey resembled a triumphal progress rather than a flight into exile. Everywhere, at small wayside halts and from little rows of houses backing on to the railway line, Union Jacks flew, many of them at half mast, and crowds waved farewell, though there was little cheering. At Edinburgh a civic
reception awaited the royal train at the station and, though the King refused an invitation to drive through the streets to bid farewell to his Scottish capital, the Scots were not to be cheated of their moment of emotion. As the train pulled away, a band of Scots pipers, in kilts and full regalia, burst into the sad strains of ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’, the words being taken up by the waiting crowds, until the great volume of sound drowned even the noise of the departing carriages. Then, sadly, the citizens of Edinburgh went home to look to their shelters, or reported at the offices set up on the outskirts of the city, where volunteers for digging defence-works were being enrolled.

That night the party from London embarked at Greenock in two waiting cruisers. Already in the Clyde were two other cruisers, twenty-five destroyers and the aircraft carrier
Furious,
almost the sole survivors of the once mighty Home Fleet, and as darkness fell the whole convoy set sail on the first stage of its voyage, making for Iceland where the destroyers were to refuel. It went unharmed. The Germans’ thoughts were all on the closing battle in the south, and they had no ships left to pursue it and no aircraft with the range needed to harass it. A week later the whole force was met by ships of the Royal Canadian Navy, escorting it on the last stage of its journey to the West Indies. That night, while the swastikas were already flying over much of the British Isles, the same small, smoke-stained, slightly torn Royal Standard that had travelled with the royal party from London was hoisted over Government House, Nassau.

With the King gone, a strange silence fell over London. Those commanders and ministers who had not, on Churchill’s orders, left with the King had done all they could. From within the massive walls of the Citadel fronting the Mall the Admiralty had issued its orders to the surviving units of the fleet. The five surviving British submarines were proceeding independently to Halifax to serve in a combined Commonwealth Fleet now being formed, and all other British squadrons anywhere in the world, except in the Mediterranean, where the fate of Malta and Gibraltar had not yet been decided, were to join them at the earliest opportunity. Orders had been given for the four large aircraft carriers, five battleships and many smaller craft now under construction in British yards to be destroyed. Some particularly precious items, likely to be invaluable in the long struggle ahead, had also been ordered to Canada, among them the prototype jet engines, on which development had recently begun, a mass of heavily guarded equipment escorted by key scientists and technicians from the radar research establishment in Swanage, and, their contents and purpose known only to a few, mysterious crates of chemicals and instruments
from a secluded basement at Imperial College, London, and a research establishment in the Midlands, accompanied by a small group of physicists and chemical engineers. Already the Foreign Office had warned British missions overseas that, after a certain signal had been sent to them from London, the codebooks would be destroyed and further orders purporting to come from the Foreign Secretary should be disregarded. British heads of mission must use their discretion as to how to behave in what the Foreign Office, with typical understatement, called ‘the exceptionally difficult situation now developing’, but, as a last resort, could put their staff and papers under the protection of the nearest United States embassy or legation. Nearer home the Regional Commissioners had been warned that once communications with London had been cut they must take over the administration of their areas, as planned before the war, avoiding useless sacrifices but not hesitating to use their life-and-death powers when necessary.

With the British apparently decisively beaten in the Battle of the Chilterns and his superior, von Brauchitsch, already in England and showing increasing signs, like every Commander-in-Chief, of wishing himself to take over the conduct of operations, von Rundstedt saw no reason for delay. On 16 October he allowed his forces, who had suffered heavily in the previous day’s fighting, to rest and regroup, a lull taken advantage of by many patriotic British citizens to carry out the instructions given in
If the Invader Comes,
to attempt to deny the Germans anything useful to them. Everywhere in the south of England, and even farther afield, factory workers were smashing their machines or setting fire to their factories, while more than one fire brigade found itself suddenly called to a serious blaze at a garage, where the desire to prevent the Germans acquiring any petrol had led to underground storage tanks being set on fire. There were a few incidents in newly occupied areas, where panicky sentries opened fire at cyclists who failed to stop or even at passers-by who stared at them too aggressively, but in most places the streets were quiet and the population stayed indoors, as if occupiers and occupied had tacitly agreed to ignore each other’s existence. Few civilians were any longer in much doubt, however, about what the end would be and when the BBC announced that its services would cease to be broadcast on the normal wavelengths, and that henceforward the population would be informed of what was happening through a network of small, local stations, many with a radius of only a few miles, this was taken as proof that not merely Broadcasting House, but, far more important, the great transmitters at Droitwich and Daventry and elsewhere would soon be in enemy hands. It certainly, a few cynical citizens eager to find
something to smile at even in this dark moment agreed, made the recent BBC series,
Napoleon couldn’t do it,
look rather silly.

On 17 October von Rundstedt resumed his advance, sending his forces on a great left hook round London, and severing its connections, as General Brooke had foreseen, with the north, for every road and railway from Windsor, twenty-three miles to the west, to Chelmsford in central Essex, thirty-two miles to the north-east, was now in German hands. This was as far ahead as the
Sea Lion
planners had looked and Phase II of the operation, devised by von Rundstedt’s staff since their arrival in England, now began. Its aim was to dominate the Midlands up to and including Liverpool and Manchester by a show of strength, and with six divisions available, four from those landed in the early stages of the operation and two from the follow-up troops landed since then, there was no shortage of men for the purpose. Two main thrust lines were drawn on the headquarters map, one running towards Liverpool, via Oxford and Birmingham, the other towards Sheffield, via Northampton and Nottingham, the two most formidable formations, the 8th and 4th Panzer Divisions, being earmarked for Liverpool and Manchester, while the infantry divisions were also to occupy Derby, Rugby and Coventry. Five days later, on 23 October, Phase III of the operation to occupy the British Isles began. To dominate the northernmost counties of England and to seize Scotland where British forces were few but where nature, at least in the Highlands, favoured the defence, von Rundstedt assigned no fewer than two armoured divisions, two motorised divisions and two infantry divisions, plus his solitary parachute division, its reputation high after its brilliant success in capturing Folkestone and securing the right flank of the original invasion. The parachutists, he decided, should drop in the lowlands of Glasgow and Edinburgh, for both of which the Scots could be expected to fight hard, while the ground forces would continue along their existing axes, one force pressing on from Manchester to Blackburn, Carlisle and thence to Glasgow, where it would relieve the parachute troops, the other advancing from Sheffield to Leeds, Darlington, Newcastle and Edinburgh. With the cities behind them secure, 7th Parachute Division would be stationed along the line from the Clyde to the Forth, ready to move if necessary into Stirling, Perth, Inverness and the Highlands, but the Germans had no intention of tying down a large force in these thinly populated areas if they could avoid it.