If Britain Had Fallen (2 page)
I believe that the Duke might have convinced himself that it was his duty to interpose himself between what had so recently been his People and the Germans and thereby reduce the worse effects of occupation, especially if the Germans had offered such inducements as the return of British prisoners of war and the survival of the British Empire.
The role of the Duchess, a grotesquely vain and self-centred woman with whom the Duke remained infatuated, would have been crucial. The Duke’s great quarrel with the British government and the royal family had been their joint refusal to grant his wife what he regarded as her proper status and refer to her as ‘Her Royal Highness’. If the Germans were, as they clearly would have been, willing to adopt this style it could have tipped the scales for the Duke and from ‘Your Royal Highness’ it would have been a small step, for both partners, to ‘Your Majesty’.
As for his chief minister, Sir Oswald Mosley remains the obvious candidate although there is no proof of his intended disloyalty. He too might well have persuaded himself that it was his duty to take office and to convince the nation that further resistance was futile and could only lead to bloody reprisals. Peace and prosperity as part of a single European economic unit lay, he might have argued, in co operation with Germany. And what alternative, with no prospect of liberation, was there?
In the long term, I suspect Hitler would have attacked the United States, with Wernher von Braun having by now have developed inter-continental missiles. If Germany still lacked the atom bomb the Americans might have won, and with aid of the dominions the New World would have set out to restore the freedom of the Old. This is the conclusion that I reached back in 1972 and it still seems valid.
N.R.L.
2004
A possible German invasion and occupation of the British Isles is a subject that has attracted many previous writers. Some, like Erskine Childers in
The Riddle of the Sands,
first published in 1903, have been concerned solely with the preparations for an attack; some, like ‘Saki’ (H. H. Munro) in
When William Came
(1913), have dealt solely with life under German rule; some, like C. S. Forester in
If Hitler had invaded England
(published posthumously in 1971), have concentrated on the actual landing and the subsequent military campaign. This book is different from these distinguished predecessors, and from various others less distinguished, in that it covers the whole subject, from the initial planning, through the assault and later operations, up to the German seizure of power and daily life under enemy occupation. It is, I believe, the first book to do so, and it also differs from earlier works, which have included at least one play and two films, in that it is based on fact. The first four chapters, describing German preparations and the British reaction to them, are wholly factual, while the last thirteen describe, in an entirely non-fictional way, what German occupation would have been like, by reference to captured documents and by the record of how the Germans actually behaved in other countries, especially the one small corner of Britain they did occupy, the Channel Islands.
Thus of twenty chapters only three deal with imaginary events, and even these are very far from being mere fiction. The military formations taking part on both sides are those which actually existed at the time, and the places where the invaders landed are those they selected for the purpose. The course of the battles which would have followed is inevitably a matter of speculation, but I have been guided by the conclusions reached by a panel of high-ranking military advisers to the associated television programme, who studied the problem at length, and by the narrative of the likely course of events prepared by the military historian, Mr Basil Collier, who is the author of the relevant volume of the official government
History of the Second World War
and an acknowledged authority on the subject. I have added a good deal of description and a few incidents to the factual skeleton, but have included nothing that could not have happened. The massacre of civilians by German troops, for example, did actually occur, though in 1944 in France and not in 1940 in the Sussex village where I have set it, and to which I have given the only imaginary place-name in the book.
Any historian must feel some diffidence about mixing fact and fiction, but I finally decided that, provided the three fictional chapters were clearly signposted as such, the technique was in this case legitimate, partly because, as mentioned earlier, such accounts have a long and respectable ancestry, but, more important, because the preceding events would directly have affected the nature of the occupation following them. Denmark, which capitulated without a struggle, had a far easier time than Norway, which put up a gallant fight, and life in occupied Britain, after weeks of bloodshed and with no government in being, would clearly have begun in a very different atmosphere from that of the Channel Islands where not a shot was fired and the civil authority was still in being.
The book has its origin in the television programme of the same name, but it is something more than the ‘book of the programme’, not least because a volume of this size can include more material than even a three-hour television programme. Although I have had the benefit of discussions with the producer about his intentions, and have had access to the documents assembled for the production and the transcripts of the interviews recorded for it, I had when I wrote the book seen neither a complete script nor any part of the final programme, which was then still being edited. Much of the material I have used is based on my own research and does not appear in the programme. Although on the military side I have closely followed the conclusions of the experts, my own military service, as a private in the Home Guard and an NCO in the Army, having been at less elevated levels, I have felt free to dissent in minor matters, and the account of the form occupation would have taken is wholly my own.
While writing the book I have constantly had cause to feel grateful that the whole of my military service, after preliminary training, was spent in studying, though in a very junior capacity, the problems of an occupied country, first from outside and then on the spot. From August 1944 to May 1945 I worked in London in the Supreme Headquarters Mission to Denmark, moving with the Mission to Copenhagen at the end of the war, and remaining there until I was demobilised in September 1947. It was, I now appreciate, a valuable experience to see the intelligence reports coming out of one occupied country during the final months of the war just as it was an exhilarating one to be among those cheered in the streets as liberators (not very deservedly, since we had taken no part in the fighting) in May 1945. Later, working as I did in an office formerly used by the Germans, and meeting every day people who had taken part in—or been sceptical about—the Resistance, I gained, I believe, some understanding of the meaning of Occupation, both to the occupiers
and the occupied. I have allowed myself the small indulgence of including the training battalion in which I served among those which play some part in the fictional section of this book, although I suspect that it did not in fact exist in 1940.
When the BBC’s plans to produce the programme of
If Britain had Fallen
were first disclosed a number of people expressed misgivings, apparently considering that even to acknowledge that this country could have been defeated in 1940 was unpatriotic. This reaction, even when not based on a complete misunderstanding of the programme’s intentions, was, in my view, wholly misplaced, revealing in those who displayed it a surprising ignorance of recent British history. Almost every leading statesman in 1940, not excluding Winston Churchill himself, at least admitted the possibility that Germany might successfully invade Britain, and many eminent figures, such as President Roosevelt, actually expected this to happen. Nor were the generals then in command optimistic, at least in private, about a British victory; indeed, considering what had recently happened in Norway and France, and was soon to happen in Malaya, they had little reason to be. The authorities on both sides agreed that the success or failure of an invasion depended upon command of the air, and the desperately narrow margin by which this was retained, and the Battle of Britain won, has often been described and never disputed. In other words, we could well have lost the war in 1940, and most ordinary people who lived through that time will probably admit that, at least in their innermost hearts, they harboured such fears at the time, while some people at least openly voiced them.
I must record my thanks to Mr Michael Latham, the producer of the television programme
If Britain had Fallen;
to the staff of the BBC Reference Library, who dealt with many queries on minor points with their customary efficiency; to Mrs Sheila Bailey, who typed the manuscript at record speed; and to my secretary, Miss Judith Went, who was consistently helpful in my research into events that occurred long before she was born. The responsibility for what appears in the text remains entirely my own.
N.R.L.
Since England, despite its hopeless military situation, still gives no sign of any readiness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare for invasion of that country.
Adolf Hitler, Directive No. 16, 16 July 1940
In the Summer of 1940 it was a fine thing to be a German soldier. Even the most pacifically-minded ex-civilian, reluctantly called up a year before, could hardly fail to feel proud of his uniform as he looked back on the long, unbroken series of victories achieved by the Army in the past few months. It was an even finer thing to be a member of the German High Command, and thus one of the architects of these triumphs, but, curiously enough, the officers concerned felt less confidence in their abilities than the men they led. The British expected Hitler’s generals at least to attempt an invasion; the German soldiers and regimental officers expected it to succeed. But those on whom the actual responsibility rested were by no means so optimistic, largely because this was one contingency for which they had never been asked to plan. Hitler had always maintained that he had no real quarrel with England. What possible concern was it of the British what happened to German-speaking Austria, or Germany’s artificially created neighbour, Czechoslovakia, or her historic enemy, Poland ? None of these states were within five hundred miles of Great Britain, but all lay on Germany’s borders.
Hitler waited patiently, by his own standards, for the first peace overtures to come from Great Britain and finally, a month after the armistice with France, with no word from England except of defiance, himself extended the olive branch. It almost caused him pain, he told the Reichstag on Friday 19 July, the anniversary, had he known it, of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, to be responsible for bringing down a great Empire ‘which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm….I can see no reason why this war must go on … I… appeal once more to reason and commonsense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished begging favours, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.’
For Hitler this was indeed unusually mild and the reception of his ‘peace offer’ in England confirmed his worst misgivings about the unreasonableness of the British. The government largely ignored it, and when, in August, copies of the speech under the title
A Last Appeal to Reason
were dropped from German aircraft they were auctioned for war
charities and torn up for toilet paper in front of the newsreel cameras. In private Hitler did not conceal his disappointment at the rebuff. He was, he insisted, sincere in wanting to avoid a battle which he believed would be ‘hard and bloody’, but the British left him no alternative, and planning, which had only begun in earnest two days before his Reichstag speech, was now pressed ahead.
Although the German command system placed final power in Hitler’s hands as Führer, the Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) was Field-Marshal Keitel, whose immediate subordinate was General Jodl, Chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff. They, or Hitler direct, issued orders to the Army High Command (OKH) under Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Naval High Command (OKM) under Grand Admiral Raeder, and the Luftwaffe High Command, headed by Reich Marshal Goring, who was also Minister for Air. Hitler himself, and the staff of OKW, at first doubtful whether an invasion was necessary, eventually became convinced that it could be successfully achieved—given adequate naval and air support. The German Navy was always far more pessimistic and acknowledged frankly that it could not unaided achieve the necessary command of the sea; the Luftwaffe, under Goring, was more hopeful but during the following weeks their continuing failure decisively to defeat the RAF made the value of his opinions suspect. No one in fact was really enthusiastic about the invasion, and even as the preparatory work for it began the men at the top still hoped that Great Britain might be driven to seek peace by an air and sea blockade alone.
