If Britain Had Fallen (41 page)

If, of course, the Germans had carried out their policy of rounding up for deportation all the men from seventeen to forty-five, this would have settled the matter, at least for those in this age-group, for they would have had nothing to gain by surrender and would have been too conspicuous to settle back again into civilian life. It seems likely, too, that as others immediately threatened by the Germans—Jews, Communists, leading politicians, left-wing journalists—went underground the Auxiliary Units men would have found themselves, whether they wished it or not, as the spearhead of a larger resistance army, forced to cope, against their will, with an influx of untrained, unskilled and probably unsuitable recruits, who might well have been more a hindrance than a help. What would have happened after that one can only speculate, but certainly the experience of every country in the world has been that an internal resistance movement cannot by itself defeat an occupying army though it can give valuable assistance to a liberating one.

Independently of the Auxiliary Units, a few selected Home Guard officers and others were involved in preparing caches of weapons, which would not have been surrendered when the Germans arrived but kept hidden against some future need. In one Kent churchyard dummy graves were dug, containing not bodies but rifles and shotguns, The construction was undertaken personally by the foreman of a local firm of monumental masons, while the paving and curb stones were supplied, with no questions asked, by a local councillor from the council’s road-mending stores. Here, too, near the Thames estuary, ammunition and grenades were buried in sealed watertight containers, the design being based on standard Admiralty lockers, easily assembled in the dockyard. These were sunk in the mud, the sites being marked by small buoys which floated at high tide—the subject of some future ‘fishing expedition’ for which even the exhaustive German regulations had not provided.

An even more dangerous and lonely job than that of the Auxiliary Units would have been undertaken by a few men who would have stayed ‘above ground’ and pretended to collaborate with the Germans while in fact spying on them. The official name of the organisation to which they belonged, and even the fact of its existence, have never been disclosed, but to the few members of the Auxiliary Units who were in the secret it was known as ‘the other side’. Even to them the identity of the individuals concerned was never revealed and the Auxiliary Units knew only that messages about possible targets might be left for them at certain selected
spots, though they had no means of contacting their unknown informants.

One area where ‘the other side’ would have been active was around Sheerness, near the mouth of the Thames, on the Kent bank, facing across the river towards Southend and Canvey Island on the Essex shore. Around Sheerness lies the Isle of Sheppey, a mainly flat, rather run-down area, flanked on one side by the Thames, on another by the narrow tidal inlet known as the Swale, and on a third by the River Medway, running inland to Chatham. The island was linked with the mainland only by a single road and rail bridge across the Swale, while the other broad and shallow channels surrounding it on the landward side were impassable except at very low water, and then only by those familiar with the area.

Sheerness had been one of the assembly points from which the ‘little ships’ had sailed to Dunkirk and it was a key base during invasion summer for the ‘V and ‘W class destroyers patrolling the Channel and guarding the river approaches to London, while its fall, by blocking the exit from the Medway into the Thames, would have rendered the docks at Chatham useless. The defending commanders had, therefore, recognised that the area was likely to be one of the Germans’ first targets and might well be overrun, but its early recapture was regarded as vital, both to secure the dockyard and to regain the use of the airfield on the island, and one local Home Guard officer found himself approached, in a way which seemed fanciful then, but has become familiar in espionage trials since, to organise a signals network which could continue to function under the very noses of the victorious Germans, to warn the British forces on the mainland of the enemy strength and dispositions. This potential agent had the type of background which made him both a particularly valuable recruit, and one whose bona fides, as a disgruntled British citizen, the Germans might readily accept. After joining the Army as a boy soldier and serving for many years as a regular in the Royal Signals, he had left the service after a disagreement with his superiors and had joined the Post Office Telegraph Department. Here he had fallen foul of the law over a fraud involving faked postmarks on football pool coupons and had served a short period in prison, but by 1939 had rehabilitated himself so successfully that he was employed on responsible contract supervision work by the Admiralty at Sheerness. After the formation of the LDV, later the Home Guard, in 1940, he had been one of the first to be commissioned (although military ranks were not formally introduced until later in the war) and seemed to have put the past behind him—until, with invasion threatening, it suddenly caught up with him. One night that summer he was visited by a mysterious stranger, apparently a civilian, who identified himself by reference to various mutual acquaintances in the Army and
then asked his surprised host if he were willing to do something dangerous for his country. When this officer agreed he was told he would be contacted again, and was assigned the codeword ‘Wormwood’, to which the counter-sign was ‘Woodworm’, these being chosen, it was explained, because the Germans found great difficulty in pronouncing their ‘W’s.

Sure enough, while attending a Home Guard parade at the Drill Hall in Sittingbourne, he received instructions to go to a local public house, The Bull, and, on leaving this in the darkness, he was stopped by a girl who whispered the codeword, and then drove him to a large country house, strictly guarded, where he was shown into a dimly lighted room and found himself facing three men he had never seen before. They explained to him that if and when the Germans arrived word would be leaked to them that he had no reason to love the British authorities, and it was hoped he could ingratiate himself with the invaders and pick up useful information. Seeing that it reached the proper quarter, however, would be far more difficult than collecting it and he was asked to devise some system that could still be used to convey information from the Isle of Sheppey, even if normal communications with the mainland were severed. He would, he was told, later receive another visitor to whom he should pass on details of the scheme he had worked out.

By then he was ready with his plan. Conventional communications equipment of all kinds was desperately scarce at that time, and a radio transmitter operating on the island would, he believed, rapidly be located by enemy direction-finders, but there was a method of signalling which cost nothing, could be operated by totally untrained staff and had at least a good prospect of going undetected—the homely domestic clothes line. In those pre-washing-machine days, he remembers, much of the district seemed to be almost permanently covered by clothes hanging out to dry, so that the few vital lines which carried a secret message concealed amid the surrounding shirts and petticoats would have been in little danger of detection. On a clear day—and most days that summer
were
clear—a signal could be read through a telescope from as much as twelve miles away, though the system was, of course, useless in bad weather or after dark.

Although all those in charge of the operation would have been men, it was felt that any male seen hanging out a basket of damp clothes would look distinctly conspicuous, so a number of women—mainly the wives of serving officers—were let into the secret, and the Germans, who firmly believed women’s place was in the home, might well have smiled on them approvingly as they trudged about the garden pegging out the washing, refusing to allow a mere invasion to upset their regular domestic routine.
These ‘operators’ needed no training or special equipment, the duty of the first in the chain being merely to hang out the garments she was told, in the order specified, while all the later ‘stations’ merely had to hoist the same pattern of articles on their line, until it had been copied in turn by the next. They did not need to know what message they were passing on, and it was probably better, considering the risk of capture and torture, that they should not, this being known only to the Home Guard major who originated it and some far-off recipient miles away inland.

The basis of the code was the Morse alphabet, with a large article like a sheet or tablecloth signifying a dash, and a smaller item, such as a towel or a tea-cloth, a dot. Nappies would clearly have been excellent, as a whole row flying in the breeze would have attracted no attention (provided there was a baby in the house), but anything smaller, such as a handkerchief or pair of underpants, was not large enough to be ‘read’ at a distance, though acceptable if the receiving station was not far away. The articles forming each letter were hung close together, with a larger space between letters or words, and, by prior arrangement, other refinements could be incorporated, such as a prop part way along the line to indicate the start of a new message.

The major who devised the system also made use of the conventional abbreviations familiar to every Army signaller or civilian telegraphist, who knew, for example, that ‘X’ meant ‘This message is not for you but is to be passed on’, and that ‘A’ stood for 1 o’clock, ‘B’ for 2 o’clock and so on, with further letters signifying the minutes. Such experts could readily interpet a line of, say, a sheet hung between two pillow-slips (dot, dash, dot), two tea towels and a tablecloth (dot, dot, dash), and two groups close together, each of two bath-towels and a hand-towel (dash, dash, dot, repeated twice), which spelt out ‘R U GG’, as ‘Are you going … ’. As in naval flag signals, single letters could stand in the codebook for short standard messages or single words, and by flying a coloured garment at the start of the message a whole additional range of variations was possible, blue, for example, signifying a single ship, one company of troops or a flight of aircraft, and red indicating a naval flotilla, Army battalion or Air Force squadron. The alphabet was similarly divided up to indicate the type of enemy forces, ‘A’ to ‘F’ meaning various kinds of ship, from destroyer to pocket-battleship, ‘G’ to ‘L’ being used to signal the approach or presence of fighters, fighter-bombers, gliders and other aircraft, and ‘M’ to ‘R’ being reserved for land forces, with ‘N’ warning of armoured cars, ‘O’ of heavy tanks and ‘Q’ of transport vehicles.

Like so much else that summer, signalling by clothes-line was an echo of the Napoleonic wars, when, from a semaphore station on the roof of
the Admiralty in London, messages had rapidly been flashed all the way to the coast via a network of similar stations, on hills and high buildings, each consisting solely of long wooden arms mounted on a post, though in this case there had been no need for secrecy. It would be pleasant to think that one day that summer the long-distance clothes-line mounted at the water-pumping works on Southdown Hill on the Isle of Sheppey and designed to be read on the mainland, might have flown Nelson’s classic message before Trafalgar, ‘England expects … ’, but the brutal truth is that in 1940 there would probably have been no time for romantic gestures of this kind.

Psychologically there were resemblances between the atmosphere of the Channel Islands and that which would have existed in an occupied Britain, but in most ways conditions were not comparable, for the Islands had been formally disarmed and legally surrendered, the normal civil authority was still in being, and there had been no bloodshed to embitter feelings on either side. On Guernsey and Jersey, due to Hitler’s belief that they were to be the allied stepping stones back into Europe, there was, however, nearly one German to every two inhabitants and sometimes even more, by far the highest proportion in any occupied country. Even in London, where there would have been most German troops, the numbers would have been relatively much smaller, and outside it many places might have gone for weeks or months together without seeing a single enemy soldier. A garrison of at most 500,000 and more probably of half that number, would have had to be spread over a population of forty-eight million, or at least thirty-five million even if all those in the Forces and in the threatened age groups had in fact been carried off to the Continent.

Lord Coutanche still firmly believes that ’we couldn’t have done any more to help the major cause’ through more violent opposition to the Germans. He and his colleagues, he recalls, ‘neither encouraged nor discouraged “pin pricks” against the Germans’, though these, he points out, can be prompted almost as much by boredom as by patriotism. ‘Bear in mind here’s a population with no coal, no gas, no electricity, no heat, the only thing to do is to go home and go to bed, when its dark. They must have something to think about and there were small bands of people who decided to paint V signs or decided to cut telephone wires. We neither discouraged it nor encouraged it. I respect their patriotism but frankly I didn’t think then and I don’t think now that it did any good to anybody.’

The cutting of telephone wires was the most serious sabotage which occurred on either Guernsey or Jersey, and the Germans dealt with it by
ordering the residents of the affected districts to provide nightly guards for local telephone lines. 1 think’, says Lord Coutanche mildly, ‘the people who were compelled to leave their houses … to stay up all night guarding a telephone wire which went from nowhere to nowhere in particular … thought it was rather a waste of time.’ Others on the islands were also critical of this particular gesture. One Jersey policeman remembers going to see a suspect in his office, who ‘lifted up a carpet and showed me a piece of the wire. I said, “You’re a damned fool, because it only means the public are going to suffer for that; you’re not hurting the Germans. If and when the British land you can cut any telephone wires, that’s up to you, but not at this time.” That’s the kind of thing that I didn’t approve of at all. It was purposeless.’