If Britain Had Fallen (10 page)

By 4 September a thousand German aircraft had already been shot down, although the British believed the total to be far higher, which made it all the more ominous that the attack did not seem to be declining in strength. That day another 300 fighters and bombers crossed the Channel to attack the airfields and aircraft factories on which the defence depended, and Hitler addressed a mass rally of Nazi supporters in Berlin. For the first time since his ‘peace offer’ back in July the Führer referred in public to the failure of his last surviving enemy to come to terms. ‘When people are very curious in Great Britain and ask, “Yes, why don’t you come?”,’ he told his wildly cheering audience, ‘We reply: “Calm yourselves. We shall come!” The hour will strike when one of us will break and it will not be National Socialist Germany. Our remaining opponent, Great Britain, the last island in Europe, will be broken!’

Hitler’s speech, the undiminished fury of the air war, the unmistakable build-up of troops and barges across the Channel and the approach of winter all pointed to an early invasion and on the evening of Saturday 7 September the growing tension erupted into a false alarm. The event had its origins back in the hectic days of early June when the Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, General Ironside, had prepared plans to bring his troops to a state of readiness to repel invasion by issuing a single codeword, ‘Cromwell’. Ironside himself may have chosen this highly appropriate word, making an oblique reference to his own name, for an admiring enemy commander in the English Civil War 300 years before had nicknamed Oliver Cromwell’s troops ‘Ironsides’. Or it may have been the choice of the Prime Minister, recalling Andrew Marvell’s poem on the Protector’s death:

Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse
Shall th’ English soldier, ‘ere he charge, rehearse,
Singing of thee inflame himself to fight
And with the name of ‘Cromwell’ armies fright.

Whoever was responsible, ‘Cromwell’ was certainly a more inspiring battle-cry than its predecessor, ‘Caesar’, for Julius Caesar had led the first
successful
invasion of the British Isles, but its meaning was by September largely forgotten. Its purpose was to warn the units who received it, but no others, that conditions were right for invasion and that they should move to their battle stations. It did not affect other units, or the Home Guard, and it did not mean that an invasion was actually in progress.
Since June, however, a great deal had happened. Units had moved, commanders had changed, and, on this Saturday evening, many senior officers were taking a well-earned night off after the frenzied activity of the past few weeks, leaving on duty junior officers who had only a hazy idea of the meaning of ‘Cromwell’, if they had ever heard the word before. Thus, when at 2007 hours (just after 8 pm to the civilian) the brigadier left in charge in London, while his two superiors were respectively touring the defences and attending a meeting, decided, very sensibly, to send out this preliminary warning, it caused consternation which in some places approached chaos. The vital signal took hours to reach some of the troops on the coast, who should have received it immediately, and many units which should not have been notified of it at all also received it and, though in the dark as to what they were supposed to do, resolutely decided to do
something.
Many rang the church bells, which had been silent since 13 June, being now reserved for use as a warning of invasion; some generously called out the Home Guard who, eager not to be left out and hearing the peals from distant churches, decided that it was their duty, too, to rouse the sleeping countryside and call their fellow-citizens to arms.

What happened in the Dorset village of Stoke Abbott, as recalled by the rector’s sister, was not untypical:

It was 11.45 pm when I was woken by the telephone in the room below mine. I dashed downstairs and had just lifted the receiver and heard Admiral F’s voice saying ‘Tell the rector to ring the church bell’, when my brother joined me. ‘That means invasion,’ he said, and hurried off to the church. My sister-in-law came downstairs and asked me to go and help him as she was afraid the effort might bring on his asthma. I still have a picture in my mind of our two pairs of hands pulling the great rope in the faint yellow light of a storm lantern set out our feet in the darkness of the church…. Then we heard other bells in the neighbourhood and … my brother went off in his car to fetch Home Guards from outlying farms and cottages. He told me afterwards that as he drove along the narrow lanes winding between steep banks and overhanging hedges, he kept wondering whether, round the next bend, he would run into a pack of grey-green uniforms. Meanwhile I returned to the house where my son, half awake, was stumbling downstairs fastening up his Home Guard uniform. He disappeared down the dark drive. My sister-in-law switched on the wireless, hoping to hear the midnight news, but it was over. Then she turned to me and asked, ‘What do I do ? I’m supposed to have a First Aid Post.’ Hastily thinking, ‘First Aid—treat for shock,’ I said, ‘Put on a kettle for hot drinks,’ to which she retorted, ‘Who for, the Germans ?’

About 5.30 am my son returned saying Admiral F had decided to send half the Home Guard company home to get some sleep, while the others remained standing-to. He was evidently beginning to think it was a false alarm.

To the Home Guard the sudden turn-out came as the climax to the hurried weeks of training and brought home to them, if nothing else had
done, the reality confronting them. One man farming on the Sussex coast near Lewes found himself manning a pillbox commanding the road from Newhaven. He knew the occasion must be serious for he had been issued with sixty rounds of ammunition instead of the usual five, and the post had been reinforced by two soldiers armed with a Browning machine gun, whose commander later arrived to announce, solemnly, ‘There is to be no retirement.’ Inland the Home Guard were not always so well organised -or so well armed. One Gallipoli veteran was warned, by a policeman at the door just as he was going to bed, that German parachutists were expected in the Midlands that night, and was soon manning his observation post near Northampton with only ten rounds of ammunition and the cheering admonition in his ears, ‘This is it.’

The Army, despite the tremendous progress made since Dunkirk, was sometimes even worse equipped. A young Territorial officer in charge of an Army workshop near Stockton-on-Tees had had to hand in his revolver for use elsewhere, along with his men’s rifles. On the arrival of a despatch rider with the dreaded code-word he armed them instead with the most formidable weapon his stores afforded, heavy spanners. Another wartime officer, defending the Ferrybridge power station on the Great North Road, was enjoying his first weekend for weeks with his wife, who had made a long cross-country journey to join him. I had got a room’, he later recalled, ‘in a little cottage in the village and … at four o’clock the next morning … there was a hammering on the door. I went down in my dressing gown and there was one of my soldiers, facing me with his tin hat on, with his rifle. I looked at him, he looked at me, and he said, “Sir, it’s Cromwell!” I… went back to our mess and … we spent the whole of the rest of that day sitting in the mess waiting for the invasion which never happened.’

Even the newest, most junior recruits were affected by the crisis. At an RAF maintenance unit near Radlett on the outskirts of London, newly-joined airmen found themselves turned out of bed to load machine-gun belts, while at Cromer, on the east coast, a young sailor training to be a signalman found his class transformed into Britain’s front-line defenders, unenthusiastically manning a trench and pillbox behind the beach, clutching Army rifles which most of them had barely seen before, and staring anxiously into the darkness of a cold but fine September night, waiting to hear the crunch of enemy barges on the beach. They heard instead an even more alarming noise, the faint thump of distant explosions, probably due to some over-eager sappers who were blowing up already-mined bridges, or perhaps to the explosions of mines laid prematurely on one East coast road, which killed some Guards officers, the only casualties of
that night. In Lincolnshire some minor road bridges were blown up, while in Lincoln itself an Army despatch rider set the bells of five churches pealing and two engineer officers informed the District Superintendent of the London and North Eastern Railway that they proposed to destroy the main railway yard, to prevent the Germans, when, in the near future, they arrived, using it to load troops and supplies. Fortunately he insisted on checking with his Control Centre before the explosives were actually detonated and Lincoln station was saved.

When daylight came and, rather sheepishly, troops and Home Guards retired to bed, while their commanders held an inquest on the whole affair, rumours abounded. The Germans, it was whispered, had attempted landing and been repulsed by blazing petrol which had set the sea on fire. In fact not a German had sailed and not a beach had burned, although experiments with oil defences had been in progress for some time. The Petroleum Warfare Department, since its formation in July, had indeed been trying to set the ocean ablaze, but with little success. It had, it was true, managed on 24 August, by pumping twelve tons of oil an hour into the sea through ten pipes and igniting it with flares, to create ‘a wall of flame of such intensity … that it was impossible to remain on the edge of the cliff and the sea itself began to boil’, but this happy result, it soon transpired, could only be achieved under ideal sea and weather conditions and at prodigious cost in labour and equipment, and by September not a yard of coastline was yet protected in this way.

The British Isles did, however, have some flame defences in the shape of ‘Flame Fougasses’, forty-gallon barrels of petrol and tar, intended to stick to a tank, which were mounted in batteries of four at the bends of roads and in the banks of sunken lanes over much of Kent and Sussex. A few places also possessed Static Flame Traps, consisting of concealed pipes down which petrol could flow to flood a low-lying stretch of road and be set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail, crates of which were now stacked near every Home Guard roadblock.

Hitler had not come on 7 September. When would he at last arrive ? Many people believed the invasion would begin on the 15 th, a date invested with the same mystic significance as in August, and in fact the original target date chosen by the Führer himself, though S Day had since then been pushed back. But even more important to the British commanders than
when
the Germans would arrive was
where.
The British were no longer short of men: with nearly one and a half million men under arms in the Forces (or at least in uniform) and as many again in the Home Guard, although this played little part in the generals’ calculations on either side, the British fighting units should comfortably outnumber the largest
task force, estimated by the Admiralty at
no
more than 100,000, which the Germans could get across the Channel before the Navy intervened. If, however, the Germans had a chance to build up their forces beyond this point, and especially to land several divisions equipped with armour and artillery, in which the British Army was sadly deficient, the outcome of the battle would be in doubt. General Ironside’s strategy had been designed, therefore, not to prevent a landing, since with 2000 miles of coastline in England alone to watch this was impossible, but to prevent any single assault building up to a major threat. He planned to achieve this by distributing his forward troops in a thin ‘crust’ covering all the threatened beaches, their job being to blunt and delay the first enemy onslaught and to give time for local reinforcements to arrive. If none the less the enemy succeeded in breaking out, he would, it was hoped, be further delayed by a series of ‘stop lines’ consisting mainly of anti-tank ditches and ‘dragons’ teeth’ obstacles, covered by blockhouses and pillboxes designed to make up in defensive strength what the Army lacked in fire-power, and to give time for the strategic reserve to be hurried to the danger point. The main stop-line ran from Yorkshire to the Wash, then westwards to the outskirts of London, and from Maidstone in Kent to the Bristol Channel, with in front of and behind it small divisional stop-lines, all designed to slow up the enemy attack and prevent enemy forces, as had happened in France, roaming the countryside almost at will.

Ironside’s plans made good sense at the time of appalling weakness when it was drawn up, for then sandbags and concrete were plentiful but weapons and trained troops were scarce. By late July, with arms, though still short, less desperately scarce than in June and the scattered units recovered from Dunkirk rested and regrouped, the first emphasis on thinly spread forces manning fixed defences was replaced by a demand for mobility, to enable a strong enough force to be assembled to crush any serious attack that developed. Churchill was haunted by the fear of large numbers of men tied up in sandbag emplacements and slit trenches, rather as the French had been in the Maginot Line, while the real battle was being decided elsewhere. He was shocked on visiting a young up-and-coming general, Bernard Montgomery, who had done well in France and now, from headquarters at Lancing College, commanded the 3rd Division, entrusted with the defence of the Brighton area, to find that his men were dispersed along thirty miles of coastline instead of being held back for use in force once landing had occurred. ‘The battle will be won or lost,’ wrote Churchill to the Chiefs of Staff, ‘not on the beaches, but by the mobile brigades and the main reserve.’

This belief in ‘mobile offensive action’ was shared by General Sir Alan
Brooke, who had also distinguished himself during the great retreat in France, remaining calm when confusion reigned and all had seemed lost, and whom Churchill appointed to succeed Ironside at the end of July,
¹
Brooke had at his command far greater resources than his predecessor -nearly 500 anti-tank guns by September in place of 170, 350 medium tanks insteady of eighty, 500 light tanks instead of 170, and nearly fifty per cent more artillery - and on his orders many men were withdrawn from the beach defences, but the main reserves were moved forward and the ‘stop-lines’ were stripped of troops, leaving them to be manned by whatever troops were available when the need arose. It was still essential to concentrate rapidly to throw back any serious challenge, for in a battle on anything like equal numerical terms the Germans were likely to win. Of Brooke’s twenty-seven infantry divisions only four were fully equipped and fewer than half even had sufficient transport, while assembling forces for the counter-attack and transporting them across the Thames estuary or through the vast labyrinth of London, would be extraordinarily difficult especially if, as in France, they were under constant attack from the skies.