Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (45 page)

In fact, the evidence suggests that if the Germans had landed in Britain, though they might well have won the set-piece military engagements through sheer superiority of weaponry and battlefield tactics, they would have then been faced with the implacable, visceral enmity of a nation in arms - albeit fairly makeshift ones. To conquer a country, infantry have to occupy the towns and cities. An army confined to its tanks and camps is not necessarily victorious. From what we know about what happened in Britain in May 1940 it is clear that any German invasion, however ruthless, would have faced an extremely difficult task.

On 14 May, Anthony Eden, the War Minister, went on the wireless to call for ‘large numbers of men ... between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to come forward now and offer their services’ as Local Defence Volunteers. Even before he finished speaking, police stations across the land were inundated with calls. The next morning vast but orderly queues formed and within twenty-four hours a quarter of a million Britons had volunteered. By the end of May the War Office - which had only expected 150,000 recruits - was having to deal with 400,000, with no sign of the numbers tailing off. By the end of June no fewer than 1,456,000 men had volunteered to fight the expected invader.
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Over a third of them were First World War veterans.

To be sure, they were ill equipped. Often without waiting for instructions from higher authority, LDV units immediately began patrols, armed with farm implements, shotguns and homemade weapons. Only one in six men received a rifle. It was, of course, at this period in 1940 that Noël Coward wrote the Home Guard’s lament:

But, as was shown in the Spanish Civil War and the Warsaw Uprising, a population unconventionally armed can be a highly effective guerrilla insurgency force. In June, Ministry of Information posters on the Isle of Wight made it clear that the government intended to encourage every form of resistance: ‘The people of these islands will offer a united opposition to an invader and every citizen will regard it as his duty to hinder and frustrate the enemy and help our own forces by every means that ingenuity can devise and common sense suggest.’ The ‘Stand Fast’ leaflet also distributed at that time even had to discourage the overzealous : ’Civilians should not set out to make independent attacks on military formations. ’
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It would have been in the built-up areas that resistance would have been most effective. A recent ‘post-revisionist’ historian of wartime London has described how ’the population as a whole endured the blitz with dignity, courage, resolution and astonishingly good humour ’.
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Tom Harrison of the Mass-Observation movement, who almost made a career out of exploding wartime myths, nevertheless also believed that in the Blitz, ‘the final achievement of so many Britons was enormous enough. Maybe monumental is not putting it too high. They did not let the soldiers or leaders down.’
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There is no reason to suppose that they would have reacted to invasion and occupation any differently than to nightly bombing - indeed the vigour of their response was likely to have been all the greater. The aerial bombardment of London did not begin until September 1940, so morale would have been far higher than it was in Germany in May 1945 when German resistance finally collapsed after four years of bombing and one year of devastating Thousand Bomber raids.

For all his talk of dying in Downing Street, or in the Citadel bunker in Whitehall on the corner of the Mall and Horse Guards, Churchill himself would probably have met his end in the more prosaic Neasden. The ‘Paddock’ bunker on the northern heights of London, camouflaged to look like part of Gladstone Park, housed an underground city accommodating the War Cabinet and 200 staff. It was from the broadcasting studio there that Churchill would have rallied the capital’s resistance. As one newspaper put it when the place was opened to journalists in 1995, ‘Paddock would have seen Churchill’s last stand. ‘The extinction of the British Empire could have taken place here - as German tanks advanced up Dollis Hill Lane to overwhelm the defenders of the municipal putting green.’
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As Churchill wrote after the war, The massacre on both sides would have been grim and great ... I intended to use the slogan “You can always take one with you”.’

The Channel Islands, of course, do not provide the only possible basis for an argument by analogy about British behaviour under German occupation. In some ways, a comparison with France has more to commend it. Yet those who point to Vichy France as a model for what would have taken place here fail to appreciate the many and profound differences between the British national condition in 1940 and that of France. The Third Republic was far less able to command the allegiance of its citizens than the King-Emperor and Queen Elizabeth. Between 1924 and 1940 France saw thirty-five ministries come and go, Britain only five. On 6 February 1934, when the most contentious political issue in London was the introduction of driving tests, Paris saw fifteen people killed and over 2,000 injured in street fighting around the Place de la Concorde. The polarisation of French society and politics - at a time when in Britain Communists and fascists regularly lost their deposits - meant that in the 1936 elections 37.3 per cent voted for the left-wing Popular Front and 35.9 per cent for neo-fascist parties. No one in British politics said of Leslie Hore Belisha, as Charles Maurras of Action Française said of Léon Blum, that the Jewish minister ‘must be shot - but in the back’.
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Corruption, party rancour, demagoguery, anti-parliamentary leagues, anti-Semitism and a widespread opposition to the constitution itself were features of French politics in the 1930s in a way that they simply were not in Britain. In France, where the half-century-old divisions over the Dreyfus affair had yet to heal, a united national effort against Nazism was impossible. On 9 July 1940, André Gide wrote in his diary: ‘If German rule were to bring us affluence, nine out of ten Frenchmen would accept it, three or four with a smile.’
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Yet at exactly the same time Harold Nicolson was writing to his wife that he would be bringing a suicide pill (‘a bare bodkin’) down to Sissinghurst rather than live under the Nazi heel: ‘I am not in the least afraid of a sudden and honourable death.’
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Although pacifism had been widespread in Britain in the mid- 1930s, it had almost completely evaporated as a serious political force by the outbreak of war, as attested by the ill-attended meetings held during the Phoney War and the lack of pacifist sentiment within the Labour party. In any case, British pacifism was actuated by religious and moral principles, whereas in France refusal to serve often had nihilistic, amoral overtones. ‘Die for Danzig?’ was a popular headline in Paris in the summer of 1939. No British commentator could ever have written, as Roger Martin du Gard did in September 1936: ‘Anything rather than war! Anything! ... Even Fascism in France: Nothing, no trial, no servitude can be compared to war: Anything, Hitler rather than war!’
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In terms of political corruption, Britain had no equivalents of the Stavisky, Hanau, Oustria or Aérospatiale affairs.
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France, already twice invaded by Prussia in 1870 and 1914, and having suffered heavier casualties than Britain in the Great War, even had advertisements for houses which boasted that they were ‘far from invasion routes’.

It is true that the foremost focus for loyalty, and ultimate guarantor of the state’s legitimacy, the royal family, might have been forced by military circumstances to leave the country. Just as the BBC had Wood Norton Hall in Worcestershire as its refuge if Broadcasting House fell, so the royal family had earmarked four stately homes - principally the Earl of Beauchamp’s Madresfield Court, near Worcester - as their refuges should Windsor prove uninhabitable.
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From there it was assumed that they would have gone to Liverpool and thence to Canada to continue imperial resistance. The Crown Jewels, which had been taken to Windsor Castle wrapped up in newspaper in 1939, would have been unwrapped in Ottawa as symbols of King George VI’s continued legitimacy. A little-known footnote to the royal evacuation story might cast some doubt, however, on whether Ottawa or Government House, Bermuda, would have been their ultimate haven. On 25 May 1940, President Roosevelt heard from his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that the arrival of the King and Queen in Canada:

Roosevelt went so far as to mention this to Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington. Although it aroused Churchill’s ire at the time, American support for an eventual liberation of mainland Britain was so crucial that in the event, if the administration had insisted, the royal family might well have wound up in Bermuda, Delhi, Canberra or Auckland instead. It is worth noting that the Americans had no such reservations about the Bank of England’s gold and securities being transported to Canada. They started leaving Greenock on HMS
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on 24 June and over the next three months all Britain’s tangible wealth in specie was stored in a sixty-foot-square, eleven-foot-high vault three storeys under the Montreal office of the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, where it was guarded by two dozen Mounties.
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The British resistance in metropolitan Britain would have been spearheaded by Colonel Colin Gubbins, later of the Special Operations Executive. One of the war’s unsung heroes, Gubbins was organising the Auxiliary Units in May 1940. He would have been Britain’s Jean Moulin, as his was the ‘left-behind’ organisation intended to form the nucleus of the national resistance effort. Based at Coleshill House, near Highworth, Swindon, the 3,524 men and women were trained in explosives, ambushes, guerrilla tactics and short-wave communications. From their well-stocked hideouts in woods, cellars and even deserted badger sets, their patrols of three to five people would have emerged at night to harass the enemy behind his lines.
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Judging by the German occupation record in the rest of Europe, the Auxiliary Units - and perhaps millions of untrained supporters - would have suffered grievously. Savage reprisals against hostages would have been the norm. Hitler would already have had a quarter of a million hostages in continental POW camps after the fall of Dunkirk. Local dignitaries - mayors, county councillors, squires, rotary chairmen - would also have been taken to ensure good conduct by the rest of the populace, and shot on a ratio of ten to every German soldier killed. As Churchill said: ‘They would have used terror, and we were prepared to go to all lengths.’
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Undoubtedly, the threat of reprisals might have altered some people’s perceptions of the wisdom of continued resistance. This would have become more marked when villages like Shamley Green in Surrey met the same fate as Czechoslovakia’s Lidice or France’s Oradour-sur-Glane. Sir Will Spens, the Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence for the Eastern Region and a former Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, felt that once the Germans were victorious his first responsibility would have to be to the welfare of his civilian population. He threatened Gubbins’s Chief of Staff, Peter Wilkinson, that he would ‘arrest any [Auxiliary Unit] member found operating in his area’.
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Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Army Group Commander earmarked to rule Britain, signed the ‘Orders Concerning the Organisation and Function of Military Government in England’ on 9 September 1940. All firearms and radio sets were to be handed in within twenty-four hours of the British surrender, hostages would be taken to ensure good conduct, placard-posters would be liable to immediate execution and, most draconian of all, ‘the able-bodied male population between the ages of seventeen and forty-five will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be interned and dispatched to the continent with a minimum of delay’.
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Albert Speer would thus have been presented with a vast extra labour force for his construction projects. The officials of the Defence Economic Command would also have stripped the country of raw materials and strategic equipment. Strikers, demonstrators and anyone possessing firearms were to be summarily dealt with by military courts. As long as the war continued, this would have meant hunger and hardship; the worse conditions got, the French experience suggests, the greater support there would have been for resistance.

For the 430,000 British Jews, worse would have lain in store: the inevitable prospect of ‘resettlement East’ - that is, transportation to Polish extermination camps. Considering the length of journeys Jews from Crete and Southern France were forced to undergo to get to Auschwitz, it is unlikely that Himmler would have built gas chambers on mainland Britain. Madeleine Bunting assumes that the British people and police would have cooperated in the rounding up of Jews, or at least looked the other way.
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This ignores the fact that the British did not blame the Jews for the war or their social troubles in the same way that so many Frenchmen did. The relatively small size of the British Union of Fascists (which had only forty full-time staff members in late 1937 and never won a parliamentary seat) would also suggest that anti-Semitism was less widespread than in France. It is instructive that, despite the best efforts of MI5 and Special Branch to locate one, and even in some cases to conjure one up, there was no Nazi Fifth Column in wartime Britain.
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Examples of Britons protecting Jews - as working people did against Mosley’s thugs in the East End - would surely have outnumbered the cases of those denouncing them. Jews would have been identified as among the most committed anti-Nazis in the national resistance effort, and appreciated as such, rather as the Free Polish and Free Czech forces were during the Battle of Britain.