If Britain Had Fallen (6 page)

We challenge the lion of England
For the last and decisive struggle
We sit in judgment and we say,
An Empire breaks up.
Listen to the engine singing, Get on to the foe!
Listen, in your ears it’s ringing, Get on to the foe!
Bombs, oh bombs, on England!

The song-writing division was not the only part of the Propaganda Ministry busy during those weeks. Recognising that ‘on the day’ everyone would be too busy to pose for the cameras, and that poor light and enemy fire might lead to inferior pictures, Goebbels’s men filmed in advance a full-scale invasion exercise on the French coast, which they proposed to pass off, on cinema audiences in Germany and throughout the world, as the real thing, once
Sea Lion
had been launched. In this pre-scripted version of events, German soldiers were seen cheerfully embarking on their assault craft and leaping bravely into the surf off the ‘enemy’ shore, German casualties, wounded in photogenic places, were shown lying, uncomplaining, on stretchers, and British prisoners were filmed surrendering in droves and being marched off to captivity. It all looked remarkably convincing, but was a total fake. Only the shots of the prisoners were real, and they had been taken during the retreat to Dunkirk.
¹

By now summer was giving way to autumn. The leaves on the trees in the Bois de Boulogne and in the fields of the Pas de Calais would soon be turning brown. Already the golden days of May and June during which the Army had ‘swanned’ through the Low Countries and France seemed only a memory. The weather was still mainly fine and warm, but there were occasional showers and in the evenings it was chilly, as a reminder that winter was not so far away. The troops marched and trained and embarked and disembarked. But still they didn’t set sail.

¹
This memorial production was never shown to its intended audience and vanished, not even catalogued, into the vaults of the German film archives, where, thirty years later, it was unearthed by researchers for BBC Television. Ironically, therefore, its first-ever showing was to a British audience.

Chapter 3: Anticipation

The English fear of an impending German military invasion is weighing like a huge nightmare on the inhabitants of the British Isles.

German radio commentator, 18 July 1940

Great Britain really began to prepare to resist an invasion on 10 May 1940. At dawn that morning Germany began her great offensive in the West -but early that evening, on the far side of the Channel, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Henceforward, even if the means to fight were still lacking, the spirit was not. When, at the end of May and during the first days of June, the British Expeditionary Force, driven back from the Belgian frontier to the sea, had to abandon all its equipment and take to the boats to escape capture, it seemed to the German generals and the German people a great victory. To the British the sight of their retreating soldiers, lacking weapons, uniforms awry, weary, travel-stained and apparently decisively beaten, far from spreading gloom merely seemed to generate resolution. The reaction observed by one woman in Kent was typical:

We lived near the railway line from Dover to London. One day we noticed, from our field, a trainload of very tired, dishevelled-looking soldiers. Then another and another, day after day, night after night. Lots of people came from the village to stare. It was very hot, and we took out bottles of water and handed them up…. They wanted to know whether we had been bombed. ‘Not yet.’ At the next station, Headcorn, three miles away, arrangements had been made for feeding them. Local residents worked day and night, cutting sandwiches in an old barn, strings of sausages, hundreds of cans of tea. We did two or three nights and still the trains piled up along the line. The station was littered with tins and paper. It was intensely dramatic—the eager work in the dim lantern light in the old barn, us with our backs to the wall, and the fleeing army crowding back….

More alarming as a reminder of what might be in store for the country, for the British troops were now at least back in their own country and no longer reliant on untrustworthy allies, was the arrival of boatload after boatload of civilian refugees, driven from their homes, and finally from their country, by the irresistibly advancing Germans. One thirteen-year-old Dorset schoolgirl now saw for herself what invasion could mean:

Weymouth was one of the main ports for the refugees and my mother was in charge of cooking for them, in a park called the Alexandra Gardens. She had six wash boilers for coffee, six for tomato soup, and a working party of about a dozen matelots to help her. They stirred the soup with cricket bats and were tireless and gentle with the babies…. My job was to wander around finding anyone who needed clothes for themselves or their babies, and taking them backstage in the theatre to fit them out…. One lady held a tiny baby, and the severed hand of a toddler. She had bent over the baby when the bombs fell, and the blast had killed and taken away the toddler. We could not take that gruesome hand away from her and she had to be sedated and taken to hospital…. The refugees were all trying to dry their photos from home, and one little Parisian was trying to sort out his photos near the heat of one of the boilers. He was an incredibly handsome man and looked so funny in his bloomers, but he wouldn’t let go of one of these photos, it was all he had left of Paris.

In London, too, the arrival of the refugees made a deep impression. One woman, working all day at Victoria on 27 May as an interpreter for the Belgians flooding in from the Continent, found the policeman beside her growing more and more silent. At last he voiced what was in his mind, a fear almost unthinkable to someone living in a country not invaded for nearly a thousand years: ‘Why, Miss, this is really serious…. This may happen to us.’

Already, too, some residents of Great Britain were being uprooted from their homes, as the government reluctantly bowed to public pressure and began to round up male Italian citizens, to join in captivity the Germans detained since the start of the war. To at least one family, living in Londonderry in Northern Ireland, the realisation that they were now technically ‘enemy aliens’ came as an appalling shock.

When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, my parents were already in this country for thirty years. We, the family, were all born here…. It was a shock to us, to be declared enemy aliens, to be awakened at 6 am on the morning of 11 June, by a dozen or more policemen, who told my father, regretfully, that they had come to detain him, my brother and a young relative who lived with us. We were called from our beds and came down to find the place surrounded by policemen. We were in the catering business, cafés, ice cream and fish and chip saloons. Each door was guarded by a policeman, the back gates were similarly guarded, while others swarmed over the house and cafés, searching for ‘enemy’ signs. You can imagine our bewilderment, my mother’s distress, our tears as we watched my father, brother and cousin being led away by police escort to the barracks. Shortly afterwards the phone started ringing, my sisters in other towns told us of our uncles and various friends who had also been detained. By this time, the news had spread all over the city. ‘The Italians have been arrested’, and as we opened our shops that morning we did not know what to expect. But we were soon to find out. People who walked past stared in, some even stood and jeered, and I saw several who spat in our doorway. Our hearts were heavy as we noticed that none of our usual customers came in. One young office junior, who came every morning for milk and biscuits for the office across the way, and paid at the end of each week, told us sheepishly that they would not want anything else after this weekend…. I answered him sharply that he need not wait until the end of the week to finish with us, he could finish right now…. It was painful indeed to stand in our empty cafés, to watch our one-time customers outside, warning others not to go into ‘enemy’ shops. For some weeks this upheaval in our lives continued, our houses were searched, our car and radio confiscated; we were suspect…. Customers of years’ standing, whom my parents had seen growing from childhood to manhood, ignored us and forbade others to come into our cafés…. And we were lucky that we did not get our windows smashed, as happened in many other places.
¹

Since no one liked to admit that they had been beaten by orthodox means, the myth that the defeat of Belgium, Holland and France had been due to mysterious and underhand tactics was readily accepted, and between May and September 1940 tales of the achievements of the dreaded ‘fifth column’ of traitors, lurking undetected within the garrison like wolves in sheep’s clothing, or soon to be dropped by parachute in a variety of cunning disguises, spread from mouth to mouth The vice-admiral in command of Dover warned the Admiralty on 31 May that there were indications of numerous acts of sabotage and fifth-column activity’, though the only overt sign was ‘second-hand cars purchased at fantastic prices and left at various parking places’, the supposed spies apparently being too honest simply to steal a car if they needed one. Five days later the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, soon to be replaced, warned a conference of LDV commanders: ‘We have got examples of where there have been people quite definitely preparing aerodromes in this country…. We want to know from you what is going on. Is there anything peculiar happening ? Are there any peculiar people ?’ Apart from a few harmless bird-watchers, holiday-makers sketching beauty-spots, and over-eager aircraft-spotters, lurking near aerodromes, all of whom were detained at various times, no ‘peculiar people’ were forthcoming, but the hunt for them continued. One schoolmistress, on holiday in a Dorset village, assisted the local mounted Home Guard unit, which patrolled the area on horseback, to search for ‘arrows supposedly acting as pointers for incoming German bombers … cut in the middle of areas of standing corn’, which, it was believed, an observer on horseback could detect more easily than anyone at ground level. She made no more exciting discovery, however, than a courting couple, meeting secretly because of parental disapproval.
²

The really suspicious figures at this time, however, were nuns, it being
widely believed that Holland had been captured by battalions of tough storm-troopers descending from the skies dressed as members of religious orders. The Dutch foreign minister, who started the story, also told a press conference in London in May of invaders arriving disguised as nurses, monks and tramcar conductors, but these categories never enjoyed the same popularity as fifth-columnists. Before long everyone knew someone who had encountered a nun in a train who had worn heavy jackboots beneath her skirt, or when trodden upon had uttered a manly oath, though why the Germans, with so many alternatives to choose from, should have selected a form of fancy dress that was both conspicuous and impractical was never explained. As one woman, involved in anti-invasion preparations in a remote village in Essex, remarked, any nun arriving there even in peacetime and by bus, let alone parachute, would have set the villagers speculating for days.

Among the measures taken to frustrate the knavish tricks of fifth columnists was the taking down of all the signposts in the country, ordered on 31 May, and the removal of milestones, station nameboards, place names on war memorials, and any other sign that could enable a town or village to be identified, a measure that could not have caused more trouble to the defenders, and less to the potential invaders, if it had been the inspiration of Hitler himself.
Punch
reflected the traveller’s problems when it published in late July a cartoon showing a small boy telling a group of obviously lost staff officers, clutching maps, ‘I’ll tell nobody where anywhere is’.

Other restrictions, like the ban on carrying a car radio, caused less concern and one change introduced in May 1940 was positively popular, the identification by name of announcers reading the news, prompting many ponderous imitations by humorists declaring with an exaggerated, supposedly German accent: ‘Hier ist ze news and hier ist Alvar Lidell reading it.’ The possibility was, however, less fanciful than it seemed to the general public for (although the British government did not wish to advertise the fact) already four ‘black’, i.e. unacknowledged, German radio stations were bombarding the British Isles with misleading information, each claiming to be operating ‘underground’ as part of a secret resistance movement against the British government. The New British Broadcasting Station, which used as its signature tune ‘The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’, had been broadcasting since February, and it was followed in July by Workers’ Challenge, which depicted the war as a capitalist ramp, Caledonia, appealing to nationalist sentiment with a Scottish accent and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and the Christian Peace Movement, pleading for an armistice on pacifist grounds. The stations also did their best to spread
fear by describing air-raid injuries in horrifying detail, and by prophesying the use of such secret weapons as a death ray and artificial fog, under which airborne troops could drop unseen. As the appointed date for the invasion drew nearer the stations grew more frenzied, urging their supposed fellow-countrymen to hiss Churchill when he appeared on the newsreels and break the ‘warmongers’ ‘ windows. The broadcasters also did their best to confuse the British commanders by mentioning a whole range of possible targets for an attack, Glasgow, the Black Country, South Wales and Ireland all being suggested, and, since its omission would have been suspicious in itself, South-East England. By early September the stations’ warnings were becoming increasingly strident: ‘Invasion’, listeners were told, ‘may come any day. The time is fast approaching.’ And this at least was true.