If Britain Had Fallen (29 page)

Nor was this the end of the hazards confronting an editor, for he was required to display in his columns any official announcement ‘in such a manner as may be specified’, although the space would be paid for. The Germans also arrogated to themselves a power for which many a misrepresented British politician or government department must often have sighed in vain. If any incorrect statement should appear, space had to be provided to carry a correction free.

Perhaps misled by the shady past of their own leaders, the Germans apparently believed that they had only to kick hard enough at the doors of British cupboards for sufficient skeletons to tumble out, not merely to discredit the aristocracy—everyone knew already what
they
were like—but even respectable trade union officials of impeccable working-class background. ‘Documents’ should be unearthed by the Gestapo when it reached England, urged a note prepared in Berlin on 26 August, ‘for internal political propaganda in England. The aim: hastening of internal collapse by “exposure” of the English upper circles, including the ambitious Labour leaders [for example, by] (publication of their shareholdings, estates, etc., e.g. Sir Stafford Cripps’ seat, “Goodfellow” in Filkins). Basis: Paper by Giselher Wirsing,
100 Families Rule the Empire
… Pillorying of prosperous trade-union leaders, such as Sir Walter Citrine and others.’ Another suggestion, following ‘discussions with people from Berlin, Munich, etc., who are knowledgeable about England’ was put forward a few days later. ‘Equip some groups with cameras’, advised its author, ‘as photographic reporting [is] important for propaganda. [Contrast] slums and distressed area of London, luxurious country seats and castles of the plutocratic Labour leaders, etc’—though no addresses were given for these mythical residences. And if the present generation proved scandal-proof at least their ancestors’ reputations could
be besmirched, material, it was suggested, being sought in the Public Record Office, but ‘above all [in] the family records, scattered over the stately homes of England and Scotland, e.g. papers belonging to the Chamberlains’. Curiously, although the Marlboroughs, like most ducal families, had had their share of scandals, no mention was made of Winston Churchill or his forbears.

Far more important to the British public than the press during the summer of 1940 had been the BBC which, during the war, enjoyed a prestige never equalled before or since, and the Security Services placed the taking-over of transmitters and broadcasting studios higher up their ‘cultural commandos’ ‘ list of duties than seizing the newspaper offices. Also, while journalists, subject to good behaviour, could retain their jobs, the appointment of ‘all radio announcers and all men and women holding a responsible position in the broadcasting system’ was subject to German approval, and they could ‘be removed from office … if such action seems advisable for any reasons, or when such official fails or refuses to conform to the Orders of the Military Commander’. If they had any more detailed plans for the BBC, these have not come to light; nor have BBC plans to cope with a German take-over. Presumably the British government would in the closing stages of a successful invasion have done its best to destroy both studios and transmitters, but before long it seems likely that some form of state broadcasting service would have been back on the air, with a German censor vetting every script; live broadcasting was in 1940 still the rule, though a few programmes were recorded on transmission for repeating later.

One man then serving in the BBC was Frank Gillard, an ex-schoolmaster who was soon to become nationally known as a war correspondent and later rose to be Director of Sound Broadcasting. ‘The BBC would still have been there, but under German direction’, he believes, ‘and many of the old familiar BBC voices … would still have been speaking to us. Great pressure would have been brought on many of the leading broadcasters and they might have had to make the agonising decision between collaboration with the Germans and suffering persecution, or even elimination – and perhaps their families, too. The Germans would have had it pretty much their own way, and it would have been very difficult indeed to resist them.’ He recalls colleagues remarking to him in 1940 that if the Germans arrived at Broadcasting House—whether in Bristol, where much of the BBC was then evacuated, or in London—they saw no option except to do what they were told.

This was a rational attitude. Perhaps in the early days a few heroes might have shouted patriotic slogans into the microphone before the
censor sitting in the central continuity suite or the studio control cubicle could take them off the air, but such gestures would have served little purpose. Once the country had been overrun, covert resistance was likely to be far more effective than open opposition, which, in this case, apart from removing one loyal Briton from the scene, might perhaps have led to broadcasting being closed down altogether for several days or weeks. This would have been a far greater deprivation to the British public than to the Germans, who would no doubt already have appropriated the best wavelengths for their own use, perhaps converting the second programme launched earlier in the year into the German Forces programme, with its own announcers and material, like the American Forces Network of later in the war.

The BBC would, Frank Gillard believes, have been the main instrument for making the population accept Occupation. ‘The Germans’ aim’, he considers, ‘would have been to brainwash us into a docile, utterly subservient nation, deeply aware of our faults, deeply contrite for them, and entirely responsive to the new leadership which the Germans were giving us. I once asked the editor of a totalitarian newspaper for his definition of news. And his answer was, “News is that which enables the will of the government to prevail”. And that’s exactly the principle on which the Germans would have worked. Every word, every line, every article that reached us would have been designed to serve their purposes. The old familiar newspapers and magazines and journals would have appeared just as they had done previously and authenticity would have been given to them, I think, by the fact that many of the old journalists would have continued to work for them, some perhaps because they genuinely believed in the German principles. After all we did have journalists before the war who wrote in praise of Hitler and Mussolini. Others would have worked for the Germans because they felt that the country had been through enough trials and tribulations already, and they felt it was their duty now to try and help us settle in the new regime. There would still have been the BBC—but under totally new control and totally new management … . It would all have been smoothly done, insidiously done and deadly deadly dangerous.’

One of the first
Orders
to be issued by the Military Government was for the surrender of all wireless transmitters, and the prospects that any effective alternative to the German-controlled BBC could have been put on the air from illegal transmitters seem extremely slight. Despite Hollywood films like
Freedom Radio,
in which heroic resistance men (and, this being Hollywood, attractive women) broadcast stirring calls to defy the invader, from under the very noses of the Nazi detector vans, no ‘under-ground’
broadcasting occurred in the Channel Islands or, on any significant scale, in any occupied country. Frank Gillard believes that ‘we would in Britain have seen the springing up of clandestine broadcasting stations using small mobile lash-up transmitters, moved from place to place, but my own belief is that, brave as the effort would have been, it would not have been very effective, because the range of these stations is only limited, their appearance on the air would have been only spasmodic and the Germans could easily have controlled them. A powerful occupying force, if it’s ruthless enough and determined enough, can suppress underground newspapers and underground broadcasting. In the course of the war the only use of underground radio in Europe I encountered was in Holland, where the resistance workers at Eindhoven built a high-powered broadcasting transmitter in different parts of the big Philips factory and on the day of their liberation they brought all these different sections together and joined them up and went on the air to speak to their fellow countrymen. But they couldn’t possibly have brought that transmitter into operation before the Germans had been cleared out.’ If there had been underground stations ‘coming on the air sporadically and then going off again’, they would, Frank Gillard is convinced, have amounted to ‘little more than a gesture of resistance’.

It has sometimes been supposed that the Germans would immediately have seized all the radio receivers, usually known then as ‘wireless sets’, in the country, but no such intention is mentioned in the Military Government
Orders
and such an act seems highly unlikely. All receivers were indeed impounded in the Channel Islands in November 1940, but this was a mass punishment due, one Guernsey man believed at the time, ‘to local people telling English-speaking Germans our news, who pass it on to their pals’, and the sets were returned after only six weeks, on Christmas Eve, ‘the pleasantest Christmas gift imaginable’. They were seized again, this time for good, in June 1942, after which possession of a set could land one, at the very least, in gaol for three months. The reason for the seizure, however, was that the BBC had announced that it would be giving people in the occupied countries instructions over the air on how to harass the Germans in preparation for the Second Front, which Hitler had always anticipated might begin in the Islands.

The situation in England if the Germans had occupied the British Isles in 1940 would have been totally different, for they would then have won the war and the BBC would have been under Nazi control. Many sets could, of course, pick up foreign stations and some even America—‘twiddling the knob’ and boasting of the results had been a popular prewar hobby—but reception, in the face of German jamming, would have
been poor, even if ‘free’ British transmitters were set up in Malta and Gibraltar. On the whole, therefore, it seems likely that the value to the Germans of having at their command such a powerful medium of propaganda, reaching the whole population, would have outweighed the knowledge that a minority would, if sets were not called in, listen to foreign stations. Later, if an attack by Commonwealth and American Forces had become a real possibility, the Germans might have confiscated sets, as in Jersey and Guernsey, though it would have been a formidable job, for apart from nearly nine million officially licensed there were probably at least another half-million licence evaders, of whose ownership of a set no record existed.

As with the press, the change required to produce radio programmes acceptable to the Germans would not, perhaps, have been as great as might at first be supposed. Prewar BBC broadcasting, at least until Sir John Reith’s departure in 1938, had been in spirit essentially ‘conformist’ to the attitudes of the then British government, it had largely avoided ‘awkward’ or controversial subjects, and its news and current affairs coverage had been, by later standards, both dull and inadequate. The outbreak of war had brought, after the disastrous first fortnight, immense improvements in every part of the output, and especially in the frequency and liveliness of news bulletins and news commentaries, while the old ‘stuffiness’ had gone for ever. If the Germans had taken over the BBC, however, they would not have found any insuperable difficulty in imposing upon the schedules that spirit of dull pomposity prevailing in their own broadcasting services. Many BBC programmes might well have continued. The news and ‘postscripts’ would still have been heard, though now based on German communiqués or delivered by German spokesmen, and there would certainly have been no lack of music, in whose virtues Hitler was a great believer. ‘Broadcasts to Britain’, he had advised at one time, ‘must contain plenty of music of the kind that is popular among Britons … . In this way, when their own transmitting stations starve them of music, they will acquire the habit of listening in more and more to the concerts we broadcast for them.’ The German-British Broadcasting Corporation, or whatever name the BBC would have been given under its new rulers, would not, one assumes, have been troubled by restrictions on ‘needle-time’ (the total number of hours of gramophone records which the musicians’ organisations allow to be broadcast each week) and the British music-lover would probably have been better off under the Occupation than before, especially if he enjoyed the work of composers on whom the Führer had conferred the accolade of personal approval, such as Bruckner, Mozart, and, above all, Wagner. Brahms would
probably have been heard less often as Hitler thought him overrated, while, on the basis of Channel Islands’ experience, Jewish composers, notably Mendelssohn, might have vanished altogether from the schedules.

A more marked effect of the Occupation on BBC programmes would have appeared in the field of light entertainment.
ITMA
could hardly have continued to be broadcast now that ‘That Man’ had triumphed and there were men speaking like Fünf, and nearly as stupid, in every Town Hall, while anti-German jokes, which in 1940 played so large a part in many variety programmes, would have had to be hunted down and deleted from every script. But, provided the Germans did not object to gags about rationing and shortages, the other staple comic subject of the time, the comedians could no doubt have managed without too much difficulty.

The departments responsible for
Music while you Work,
which would have been more necessary than ever if Britain had lost the war, being perhaps privately renamed by some exploited citizen
Music while you Work for the Germans,
and for commissioning dance bands to play on the air, would also have had to adjust themselves to the new conditions. In the Channel Islands guests attending a dance which ended in the singing of ‘We’re Going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ were arrested, but a local dance band managed to adopt as its signature tune, ‘The World is Waiting for the Sunrise’, without the Germans realising the double meaning, and a jazz version of ‘There’ll Always be an England’ was very popular, though this had of course to be a non-vocal number. Most of the titles popular in the autumn of 1940 were, as it happened, non-political, and even the Germans could surely not have objected to ‘If I had my way, dear’, or ‘A Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square’, though they might have raised objections, on account of its title, to a top tune of October 1940, ‘I’m Stepping out with a Memory Tonight’. Another hazard were songs that seemed to the Germans disrespectful to the military profession and in the Channel Islands ‘Kiss me goodnight, sergeant major’ was banned on this account. With patriotic titles forbidden, it seems possible that some non-political song might have been adopted as a substitute national anthem, though what it might have been one can only speculate. Perhaps some tribute to the English or Scottish countryside, such as ‘Linden Lea’ or ‘Loch Lomond’, might have been chosen, perhaps some totally frivolous song, like ‘I’ve Got Sixpence’, a veiled reference to the superiority of British coinage to German occupation marks, perhaps some traditional tune which had acquired unofficial words, like ‘Colonel Bogey’, which later in the war, if tradition is to be believed,
was whistled by British prisoners of war as a gesture of contempt for their Japanese captors.
¹