If Britain Had Fallen (9 page)

Throughout the next few weeks the tempo of preparation mounted and the civil population were soon feeling the effects of many of the measures agreed, from the obstruction of football grounds where aircraft might
land to the rounding-up of enemy aliens. Of other subjects discussed the public had no inkling, such as the Prime Minister’s plea on 22 May that ‘We should not hesitate to contaminate our beaches with gas if this … would be to our advantage. We had the right to do what we liked with our own territory.’ In fact, though the Cabinet was not told this, one bomber squadron was soon busily practising ‘crop spraying’, dropping a pink powder, representing mustard gas, from tanks slung beneath the wings.

Recognising the eagerness of many citizens to teach a lesson to any German impertinent enough to land on British soil, the Cabinet was worried as to how far they could go without being shot
as
franc-tireurs,
or partisans. The Minister of Home Security, Herbert Morrison, a former pacifist, comfortingly informed his colleagues that ‘there could be nothing wrong in civilians helping to block roads under the orders of the military’, but ‘there was a clear distinction between defence measures taken in advance of invasion, which were perfectly legitimate, and action taken by civilians after the enemy were in effective control of an area, which were not legitimate. He was also advised that action by civilians against individual parachutists and Fifth Columnists was legitimate.’ They could, it seemed, shoot first and ask questions afterwards.

On 21 May, General Tug’ Ismay, Military Head of the War Cabinet Secretariat, submitted to Winston Churchill a formal warning that ‘the grave emergency is already upon us’, and that it must be assumed that the Germans had planned the invasion of the United Kingdom ‘to the last detail. We can be sure that Hitler would be prepared to sacrifice ninety per cent of the whole expedition if he could gain a firm bridgehead on British soil with the remaining ten per cent.’ Even the accepted doctrine that Hitler would need to capture a port was now questionable, for German air superiority might enable the enemy to land tanks and artillery across open beaches. Hence ‘not a moment should be lost’ in preparing demolitions to block the way inland.

During the next few hectic weeks, the Cabinet devoted much time to the problem of Ireland which, it was feared, might be seized by the Germans as a base for an assault on the British Isles from the rear. Eamon de Valera, the Prime Minister of Eire, insisted that the Irish would defend their independence, but the Chiefs of Staff believed that his country might easily fall to an airborne assault, perhaps by no more than 2000 determined men, or to a seaborne attack from men concealed in merchant ships, as had happened in Norway. The British government offered to help defend Eire if asked but the Irish, like other small countries before them, insisted that they could remain neutral or, if necessary, defeat
a German attack. De Valera refused to come to London to discuss the danger in which his country and his own person stood (for the British government believed the Germans might shoot him to facilitate the takeover of Eire) and when a British emissary went to see him he refused outright all British help. Some ministers, with the whole future of the British Isles in jeopardy, favoured Britain seizing the Irish ports needed to protect her western approaches, to forestall a German landing, but wiser, or at least milder, counsels prevailed, for this, it was felt, would convert Eire from an uneasy neutral to an active ally of Germany. Plans for an All-Ireland Council came to nothing and a British division, badly needed in England, remained tied up in Northern Ireland, but it was estimated that no fewer than ten would be needed to garrison the whole of Ireland with a hostile population south of the border.

If Eire was a disappointment to the British government, so, too, was the United States, the Americans being clearly more concerned about the long-term threat to themselves than the immediate threat to Great Britain. Half a million old rifles, 2000 sub-machine guns, even some ancient artillery, they were willing and able to provide, but Winston Churchill’s request for the loan of fifty old destroyers, first made in May, met with no success until August, when Britain offered in exchange a lease of various bases in the West Indies and Newfoundland, and was not finally settled until 5 September, far too late for them to arrive in time to affect the outcome of the daily-expected invasion. The American attitude was understandable. Their ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, was pouring across the Atlantic a stream of pessimistic predictions and, as will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter, the United States contained many people opposed to involvement in Europe. The most that President Roosevelt could promise was ‘all aid short of war’, and this seemed unlikely to be enough. Essentially, the United States faced the same dilemma as had confronted Great Britain when asked to send fighters to shore up the crumbling front in France: she might be throwing good money after bad and good money, furthermore, which would soon be desperately needed at home.

The American government’s real anxiety all along was about the future command of the Atlantic, a fear shared with their Canadian neighbour, and on 24 May the American Secretary of State asked the Canadian government to send some reliable representative to Washington to meet the President privately, to discuss ‘certain possible eventualities which could not possibly be mentioned aloud’. This meeting duly took place and others followed in an equal atmosphere of mystery, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, being thinly disguised in telephone conversation
as ‘Mr Kirk’ and President Roosevelt as ‘Mr Roberts’. Mr Roberts, it soon appeared, despite his cordial response to Winston Churchill’s overtures, believed that France would collapse and that it would then not be long before the United Kingdom would be ‘forced to sue for peace’, and presented with the choice of total destruction or the ‘surrender of the Empire and handing over of the British fleet’. Roosevelt believed that ‘the temptation to buy a reasonably “soft” peace will prove irresistible’ and the American government was desperately anxious that, once the battle was lost, ‘the remnants of the British fleet should be sent out to South Africa, Singapore, Australasia … the Caribbean and Canada’. The Americans, the Canadian emissary reported, were comfortably philosophic about the consequences of this unselfish act. ‘The people and government of the United Kingdom’, they recognised, ‘will probably be terribly punished for taking these steps but they will be no worse off than previous victims of German aggression and their suffering will have a real objective in that it will make possible the ultimate triumph of civilisation.’

Kinship now proved a more powerful force than mere neighbourliness and a common language. To King it seemed, at least ‘for a moment… that the United States was seeking to save itself at the expense of Britain’, and Roosevelt was told, politely but firmly, that if he wanted Britain to sacrifice herself for the benefit of the United States he must make the request direct. But the Canadians, being of British stock themselves, knew Winston Churchill and his countrymen better than the Americans. If Britain had to choose between a ‘hard’ peace if she sent the Fleet to safety to fight another day, and a ‘soft’ one if she surrendered her warships, Roosevelt was told on 29 May, she would opt for suffering—and honour. Ten weeks later the British Cabinet formally resolved to tell the Americans that, Ambassador Kennedy’s doleful predictions and President Roosevelt’s forebodings notwithstanding, they had no intention of surrendering. It was, the Cabinet agreed, ‘of the utmost importance to make it absolutely clear to the United States that it was our firm resolve to fight it out here, and that even if, contrary to our belief, we should find ourselves being overwhelmed, we should retain entirely unfettered the right to decide when (if ever) we should send the Fleet away from these waters to defend our kith and kin overseas’.

While the Americans were already concerned about their own defence, to some British people the United States seemed a haven of refuge. A few inglorious poets and actors had already, as the current joke had it, ‘gone with the wind up’ across the Atlantic, and now many well-meaning and well-off people began to send their children to friends and sympathisers
there. The government was reluctant to ban such evacuation altogether but the Prime Minister had little time for it. The flight from the British Isles, he told the Cabinet, ‘encouraged a defeatist spirit, which was entirely-contrary to the true facts of the position and should be sternly discouraged’. It was, too, unpatriotic, tying up shipping needed for more useful purposes, and, even more serious, had given rise to the ridiculous rumour that the two Princesses had been sent to Canada and that the King and Queen, escorted by the government, were even now preparing to follow. ‘These rumours’, the Cabinet agreed, ‘must be scotched’, and in the event only 2000 children went to the United States and 3000 more to the dominions.

But if people could not decently leave the threatened island, it made sense to deny to the Germans the funds that would enable Britain to carry on the fight overseas and on Sunday 23 June two special trains, planned in deep secrecy and heavily guarded – the origin perhaps of the rumours about the Princesses’ departure – left London for Greenock with an undisclosed cargo. The next day the cruiser
Emerald
set sail for Canada, laden with 9000 gold bars and 500 boxes stuffed with documents - negotiable securities which could readily be sold on the world’s markets. She was followed on 8 July by a task force which could ill be spared from the defence of the homeland, the battleship
Revenge,
the cruiser
Bonaventure
and three requisitioned liners, escorted by four destroyers, and other smaller convoys followed later in the summer. By late August £637 million-worth of gold, including some historic and valuable eighteenth-century currency, and £1250 million-worth of securities which had required seventy miles of tape to tie into bundles, had crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Canada without a coin or a share certificate being lost. The securities ended their journey in the vaults of the Sun Life Insurance Company in Montreal, and the gold was sent to Ottawa after being unloaded at the port of Halifax, as some Royal Canadian Navy recruits stationed there for basic training had cause to remember:

Very early one morning we were told to get out of our hammocks, put on our coveralls and report outside the barracks. There we were loaded into trucks, taken down through the city of Halifax to the dock area. We arrived to find one of the docks very well guarded by Royal Canadian Mounted Police carrying sub-machine guns. There were Canadian National Express cars inside the shed. We were taken to the dockside and detailed off, some of us on the ship, some of us on the dockside, to carry heavy wooden boxes from the ship to the railway cars. Naturally somebody got very curious, and accidentally or otherwise let one of the boxes drop back into the magazine where it broke open. And he leaned over and said ‘Just as I thought, it’s gold!’ Down in the hold a voice replied, ‘B … the gold, watch my head!’ … We finished unloading the ship, after several hours’ work, and we were warned in no uncertain terms that we were to say nothing to anyone about what we’d been doing the night before. Next morning we were back on the parade ground as if nothing had happened.

While the later consignments of Britain’s gold reserves were still being ferried to Canada, the attack on the homeland had begun in earnest. Both sides knew that mastery of the air was the key to victory and the Luftwaffe general given the preliminary task of clearing the Channel of British ships and aircraft set up his forward command post in an old bus on the cliffs of Cap Gris-Nez, close to a statue of Blériot whose achievement in 1909 in flying the Channel had led to the premature observation that Britain was no longer an island. The opening shots in the Battle were fired on 3 July, when a Dornier dived suddenly out of a cloud, killing one man on a training airfield at Maidenhead, and on the following day twenty Junkers bombed Portland. From 10 July to 7 August it was the convoys in the Straits of Dover and the Channel ports which were the main target, supported with scattered sorties over many parts of England after dark, but Göring’s men had been eagerly waiting for fine weather for
Eagle Day,
when the all-out offensive against the British mainland was to begin, and, after several postponements, it finally came on 13 August, when the Germans flew nearly 1500 sorties. This time the target was the RAF: aircraft factories, the Royal Aircraft Research Establishment at Farnborough and, above all, Fighter Command’s airfields. Forty-five German aircraft were destroyed, largely the ‘Stuka’ dive-bombers which had done so much execution in fact, and even more by repute, in Holland and France, but which were appallingly vulnerable unless the skies were clear of enemy fighters.

Two days later the Battle reached is first climax and on a day of bright sunshine every available German aircraft rose into the air to press home the attacks on airfields all over the British Isles. From Norway and Denmark in the north to the Pas de Calais in the south the Junkers and Heinkels, Dorniers and Messerschmitts mounted a seemingly endless stream, and almost continuously from dawn until darkness some part of the British Isles was under attack. Several aircraft factories were badly hit, but far more serious was the damage done at one airfield after another. Vital bases like Mansion, where Fighter Command squadrons were permanently stationed, forward landing grounds like Hawkinge and Lympne, whose role during an invasion would be vital, were badly damaged and some were put out of action, but even more serious to the defenders was the knocking out of several of the radar stations on which early warning, and hence interception, depended. Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, had already been silenced, leaving a gap in the centre of the protective chain covering the South-East, now others at such key spots as Rye, Dover and Foreness were temporarily ‘blinded’ as their electric power was cut off by broken cables. All over Fighter Command aerodromes resembled a battlefield, as indeed they were, with hangars destroyed, wrecked and smouldering aircraft littering the dispersal areas, workshops and barrack buildings damaged and, worst of all, runways pitted with craters and control rooms knocked out. The British public, hearing that 182 German aircraft had been shot down for the loss of thirty-four British, were jubilant, and news-vendors’ posters proclaimed the casualty figures as though they had been scores in a cricket match. The Luftwaffe High Command, knowing that in fact they had lost only seventy-five bombers and fighters - serious enough but not crippling - assumed that the figures for RAF losses were also inaccurate. The RAF, they believed, though not yet beaten, was now fighting desperately for survival. At Fighter Command headquarters, and in the Cabinet room, there was less rejoicing than in the press. The Air Marshal and ministers knew how badly the RAF had been hit and that the German tactics of concentrating on airfields and radar stations were potentially fatal to the very survival of the RAF, and hence of the country. Throughout the last two weeks of August, while civilians in Southern England became accustomed to seeing the white vapour trails waving in the sky above them and to hearing the distant clatter of machine-gun fire or the sudden rattle of spent bullets falling to earth, the sinister pattern of the attack continued. Croydon, Kenley, Redhill, West Mailing, Biggin Hill - the list of airfields knocked out or heavily damaged mounted. The supply of spare fighters from the factories and repair plants was still flowing well, but many arrived to be destroyed on the ground, and not enough experienced pilots were coming forward to replace those killed or wounded in action, for novices from the training units often rapidly became casualties. The shrinking band of veterans who taxied and took off along the crater-pitted runways were desperately tired. The spontaneous gaiety of June and July, the ready chivalry of early August had long since vanished. Fighter Command was fighting for its life; if its members had known that one Luftwaffe pilot, shot down near Canterbury, had arrogantly sent a Home Guard to the nearest shop to buy him some ‘State Express 555’ cigarettes - no other brand would do - they would not have been very amused; if they had known that one German airman, clambering unharmed from the wreckage of his bomber on the beach at West Wittering, had instantly been shot they would not have been shocked. And, despite the fervent patriotism of BBC news bulletins and the press headlines, not everyone in England was dedicated to winning the war. Two WAAF officers who toured the village of Biggin Hill in search of
billets for bombed-out airmen had more than one door slammed in their faces. It was, they were told, all the RAF’s fault that the area was constantly being attacked.