If Britain Had Fallen (49 page)

¹
This refers to the famous ‘Newhaven experiment’, conducted by an American psychiatrist, in which a large number of American citizens, picked at random from the voters’ list, were asked in turn ‘in the interests of science’ to administer an apparently painful electric shock to an unseen partner in another room whenever he failed to answer a question correctly. When sternly ordered to do so by an authoritarian figure in a white coat the vast majority ignored the protests and even screams from the next room continuing, though grim-faced and reluctantly, to do as they were told. The suffering Victim’ was in fact a tape recording, the electrodes having, unknown to the ‘teacher’, been removed from the ‘pupil’ before his interrogation began.

¹
The television audience became larger than the radio audience soon after the coronation in 1953, though it was not until 1958 that the number of television licences surpassed the number of radio-only licences.

¹
In fairness to the Danish minister concerned, it should be pointed out that these accounts of the conversation come solely from the German side, but certainly views of this kind were then commonly held in Denmark, and the Danish government statement was indeed issued on 8 July in even more effusive terms than quoted here.

Chapter 20:
The end of the nightmare

We begin to think that we shall end our days in bondage.

Entry in the diary of a Guernsey farmer, July 1943

The cooperation (to use no harsher word) of so many in the occupied countries with the Germans does not, of course, mean that it would have happened in the British Isles, for it seems inconceivable that the British people would have accepted the philosophy of the hare (if not of the rabbit) practised by the Danes. But however bitter the aftermath of a successful invasion, sooner or later some form of civil government would have had to be set up in the conquered British Isles, and some method of working with the Germans would have had to be evolved, however reluctantly and however much those old enough to remember a time when there were no Germans in the streets longed for liberation.

But would liberation ever have come? The oppressed people of the British Isles, and the British government in exile in Canada or the Bahamas, would naturally have looked to the Commonwealth, but its resources were scattered about the globe and would have been totally inadequate for the unprecedented operation of landing a million or more men on a hostile coastline from the other side of the Atlantic. As the British Army had learned in France, air-cover was now vital to successful operations on land, but the fighter aircraft of the time had a range of no more than ninety miles, and this was also as far as most landing-craft could travel under their own power. Neither the men, nor the shipping, nor the aircraft for such a venture existed in 1940, nor would they have been available for several years to come. Nor was the United States in 1940 yet powerful enough to have come to a defeated Britain’s rescue, even if it had not been unthinkable—as Americans of that period from both parties now readily admit—that she would ever have made the attempt. If the American people were not prepared to become involved in a European war to help the British while they were still fighting, they would, the authorities are unanimous, not have dreamed of doing so when their would-be ally was already occupied and intervention could only be an empty, but costly, gesture.

So obvious did it seem to the British people in 1940 that Hitler had to be stopped, that the strength of non-interventionist sentiment in the
United States was never appreciated. The distinguished American historian, Arthur Schlesinger, an interventionist himself, looking back in 1972, believes that ‘President Roosevelt and his administration would have wished very strongly to do everything possible to assist the British resistance and would have continued regarding the government in Ottawa [assuming it had gone to Canada] rather than any Vichy-type government in London as the British government … .On the other hand, there would have been very bitter opposition to this view. Isolationism was very strong in the United States. The “America First” Committee and those who supported that view would have felt, first, that it was essential to come to an accommodation with Hitler and to accept this conquest of England … and second that we should abandon any interest in the rest of the world outside … the Western hemisphere, and try to make ourselves as strong as possible there. The power of isolationism’, Professor Schlesinger recalls, was such ‘that in the 1940 [election] campaign Roosevelt himself had to make concessions to it by promising that American boys would not be sent abroad to fight in foreign wars … . It would have become much stronger had Britain fallen. The bitterest debate I recall in my own lifetime in the United States … was the debate between the Isolationists and the Interventionists in 1940/41.’

To many Americans in those years, when inter-continental missiles had not been invented and no military or civil aircraft regularly flew across the Atlantic, those 3000 miles of ocean seemed very wide indeed. Many people, Professor Schlesinger recalls, ‘felt that Europe was very, very far away … . Others felt it would be possible to do business with Hitler; in no case did they feel that the conquest of Europe by Hitler represented so deadly a threat to the national safety as to make it worthwhile for Americans to get involved in the war against him.’ And there was, too, a great sense of disillusion in the United States at the results of American intervention in the first world war: ‘We’d entered the First World War to make the world safe for democracy’ and what had followed had in fact been ‘the rise of Fascism and the rise of Communism … . And the people who supported England did so not only because they had a sense of solidarity of political views but more fundamentally because they felt that the conquest of Europe would be a threat to the United States. Thomas Jefferson said, more than a century before all this, that the United States could not afford to have all the forces of Europe wielded by a single hand and it was this … belief that that force would move out into the Atlantic, into Latin America, and menace the United States … more than the desire to rescue democratic principles which led Roosevelt and his administration to believe that our interests were involved in stopping Hitler.’

Britain’s best ally in securing American aid had been Hitler himself, for he had blatantly violated his own professed policy of ‘America for the Americans’. President Roosevelt, explains Professor Schlesinger, ‘knew that the Nazis had been for some years systematically penetrating Latin America, using the German colonies in Latin America as their bases for Nazi propaganda; preparing radio networks and airlines and so on; that in 1939 they’d been quite active in Mexico, and he was under no illusions about the fact that Nazi victory was really creating a serious threat to America’. But there were many who preferred not to recognise the disagreeable truth in front of their eyes: the sizeable colony of Americans of German descent, and businessmen ‘who had cartel or other arrangements with German firms’, and who ‘thought Hitler was someone they could do business with, that he would discipline the workers and extirpate the communists and the like’. Ironically, too, as well as the ‘reactionary right’, the far left, then far more powerful in the United States than it later became, was opposed to intervention. Its members’ opposition to Hitler, like that of British Communists, only began when he attacked Russia in 1941. Finally Winston Churchill himself, although personally admired by many Americans, was violently distrusted by others, who saw him ‘as the embodiment of British imperialism … . There was great feeling at that time that America must not go to war to save the British Empire.’

Had Britain fallen in October 1940 such views would have been widely heard during the campaign which led up to the presidential election of the following month. The Republicans in fact chose, to challenge Roosevelt, Wendell Wilkie, an admirer of Britain whose views on foreign policy were not so far removed from his opponent’s. In a different situation, however, they might later have opted for a thorough-going isolationist—at least one had been a strong contender for the nomination—who ‘might well have taken a position that we should not alarm Hitler by continuing relations with the British exiled government and that it was to our best interests to accept the finality of the Nazi conquest, stop all aid to British resistance, and make the best terms we could’.

This somewhat pessimistic, though no doubt realistic, view of the prospects for an occupied Britain, is borne out by a then Congressman who was, and indeed still is, an unashamed non-interventionist, Hamilton Fish. The term ‘isolationist’, he insists, is ‘a misnomer. An isolationist is a person who doesn’t want diplomatic relations or trade relations or goodwill … . There was no such person in America’, only ‘honest to God American citizens who believed in peace and who did not want to become involved in European or foreign wars unless attacked’. This group, of which Congressman Fish was a leading spokesman, was not, he points
out, a small untypical minority. They represented all ranks and files, Democrats, Republicans, rich and poor of every denomination.’ The impression of pro-British sentiment visiting Englishmen gained from their contacts in New York and in the newspaper, radio and film worlds was misleading. ‘In New York there were a lot of very rich people … who’d intermarried with England or France and had business relations with them. Many of them were pro-war,’ points out Mr Fish, while other Americans stress that both the city of New York and the communications media contained a high proportion of people of Jewish origin, who were far more anti-Nazi than most of those around them. A truer reflection of the nation’s attitude was, he believes, given by a Gallup Poll which in the spring of 1940 showed 93% of the population opposed to America’s entry into the war, a figure which ‘the Roosevelt propaganda machine’ never, until America was actually attacked, managed to bring down below 85%. Ex-Congressman Fish still regards America’s involvement in the war as unfortunate. ‘If England had fallen’, he considers, ‘Hitler would have turned all his armaments against Russia and probably would have defeated Russia and crushed communism and … it would have been the greatest thing that could have happened’, freeing the world both from the postwar threat from Russia and the immediate danger from Germany, for ‘Hitler would have had a lifetime’s work putting it in order’. To British ears such a conclusion comes as a surprise, but it is true, as has been mentioned, that Hitler’s real interest lay in colony-making to the East.

Hitler eventually solved Roosevelt’s problem of persuading a reluctant nation to fight by declaring war on the United States in December 1941, at the same time as Japan attacked America’s base at Pearl Harbour. The United States, having begun to mobilise its full power, then decided to crush Hitler first, but, even with British help, it still took three and a half years. If Britain had in 1941 already been out of the war, it seems probable that Hitler would not have intervened—and even had he done so America’s first aim would clearly have been to win the war in the Pacific. Eventually, such was his ambition and the basic conflict between Nazi tyranny and American democracy, the two great powers must surely have come in conflict, but even then Britain might have had a long, long wait before her turn came to be rescued. One American general, concerned with strategic planning in 1940 and reappraising in 1972 the military problem involved, concluded that the task of reconquering the British Isles would have been so fraught with difficulty that almost any military authority would have advised against it. A base near at hand would, he believes, have been essential, and North Africa—which was in fact successfully
invaded by a powerful force sailing direct from the United States in 1942—would have been the obvious choice, but mounting from there a major expedition to southern England, beyond the range of friendly fighters and with shipping having to pass through the narrow and vulnerable defile of the Straits of Gibraltar, would have been an appallingly hazardous undertaking.

But lurking in the background, unknown to everyone except a tiny handful of those close to the seat of power, was the ‘Manhattan Project’, the codename for the manufacture of the atomic bomb, which reached its triumphant conclusion in August 1945. If British scientists, with their precious knowledge, had arrived at Los Alamos in 1940, as they did a little later, and Hitler’s researchers, as happened in reality, had failed to search out the secret of making an effective bomb, this vital weapon might first have been used against Berlin instead of Hiroshima. How long it would have taken to manufacture sufficient bombs to force Germany to surrender is a matter of guesswork, but in the bomb seems to have lain Britain’s best—if not only—hope of rescue.

And, as the liberating Canadians, Australians and Americans stormed or stumbled ashore, what sort of a Britain would they have found? Whether it was poor or prosperous, strife-torn or peaceful, would have depended on the resistance Hitler’s plans had encountered and the extent to which, with Russia in their grasp, the Germans had lost interest and relaxed their rule in the other conquered territories. But that the liberated islands would still have been British in spirit as well as in name seems certain. During five years, when it must often have seemed that they had been forgotten and that the war would last for ever, the loyalty of the people of the Channel Islands to their own race and their own country, their pride in its past and their faith in its future, had never wavered. On the mainland, too, it would surely have survived, to quote Churchill’s phrase, ‘if necessary for years, if necessary alone’. Let the final word be with Hitler, half-grudgingly, half-admiringly uttered in February 1942, eighteen months after the invasion and victory that never were: ‘The last thing these Englishmen know is how to practise fair play. They’re very bad at accepting their defeats.’