If Britain Had Fallen (15 page)

The few British civilians left in the occupied area kept largely out of sight. So far the enemy commanders had been too busy with more urgent matters to impose the formal machinery of military government. There had been no formal requisitioning. Units had taken what they needed from the civilian population under the simplest and most effective authority of all, a machine-carbine or automatic rifle pointed at the owner of the goods in question. In the centre of Folkestone one man who had foolishly charged towards a German patrol, shouting abuse and waving his only weapon, a walking stick, had been shot and his body had been left where it had fallen—a warning to other would-be heroes; an elderly woman, flourishing a carving knife at the officer who had announced he proposed to billet himself in her house—why she had not been evacuated no one knew—had been disarmed, and had thereupon spat in his face, at which she had been knocked down by an escorting sergeant and told to behave herself. She was now wandering about the house, muttering darkly, but the Germans had decided to ignore her. ‘Correctness’, they knew, was the official policy towards civilians.

Already some Germans were discovering with surprise that the British, whom they had assumed to be little different from themselves, seemed to expect them to behave like barbarians and savages. A German Medical
Officer who had entered a small private nursing home at Hythe, revolver in hand for fear of enemy soldiers, to set up a casualty-clearing station had found that the nurses, left behind to look after a few patients too ill to be moved, had assumed that he had come to shoot them. One had yelled defiance at him, one had cringed and pleaded for her life, and the others had merely stood and stared at him sullenly, determined not to kow-tow to a German. This last group had seemed more embarrassed than relieved when he had explained that murder was not the German way, and soon British nurses and German orderlies were working together to unload the patients, and German wounded and the few captured British soldiers were occupying adjoining beds.

During the day German engineers and naval experts had inspected the port installations at Dover, Folkestone, Newhaven and Rye and had discovered with relief that, though the entrance of Rye harbour was totally blocked and Dover was unusable until the blockships at the entrance had been lifted, Newhaven would be ready for use in twenty-four hours and Folkestone in forty-eight. Thus even if the weather deteriorated there need be little fear of the task force being cut off from its bases and starved of supplies. By S+2 tanks, bridging equipment, anti-aircraft guns, heavy artillery and ammunition were all being unloaded at Folkestone and Newhaven, and further troops were still coming in across the captured beaches. By black-out time (far less rigorously observed by the Germans than by the British, it was noticed, but they of course had little fear of air attack) on Friday 27 September, the Germans had already well over 200,000 men encamped on English soil, with many thousands of lorries, bicycles and horses.

The use of horses had come as a surprise to the defenders and some squeamish soldiers had at first hesitated to shoot them, though many were killed and injured by mortar bombs, but the sight of the animals being harnessed to field guns and ammunition limbers, as in some scene from a first-world-war film, soon caused the defenders to overcome their reluctance. To animal-lovers far from the battle-front, however, such insensitivity seemed an outrage. Although using these noble animals to serve their evil purposes was yet one more proof of the wickedness of the Germans, ‘Horsewoman’ wrote to
The Times,
there was no reason to suppose that, even if they were German by birth (and many had no doubt been requisitioned in occupied countries and could be considered slave labour) they had wanted to take part in the invasion. Could not there be a special ‘animals armistice’ with the Germans being asked to hand the horses over for safe-keeping until the end of hostilities on the understanding the English would make no use of them ? She was answered by a
military correspondent writing from ‘somewhere in Southern England’ who remarked dryly that he found it as disagreeable being shelled by a horse-drawn gun as by any other type of artillery and, personally, he hoped if the Germans were going to hand over anything, he would prefer them to surrender their tanks. The correspondence provided, however, a little light relief at a grim time and was much referred to, usually under running headlines such as ‘A horse laugh’ and ‘A mare’s nest’, in the popular papers.

By now most British troops in the forward area were very tired and ammunition for their artillery, which regularly pounded every German position as fast as it was identified, was running short. General Brooke and his advisers, while eager to stem the German build-up, were in a quandary. They had, they knew, only sufficient supplies for one major counter-attack and if it were launched prematurely, before the enemy’s intentions were clear, there would be little in hand for a further effort. London, clearly, would be the target but would the thrust come from the Ninth Army, holding the coast from Rottingdean to St Leonards, or the Sixteenth Army, which controlled it from Hastings to Dover?

By now the lull which had followed the first day’s hard fighting was coming to an end. The German commanders reported that night after night their patrols were making deep penetration into the countryside in front of them. The British were, it seemed, preparing to counter-attack in force and had largely withdrawn their troops to regroup and prepare. Although, von Rundstedt knew, the mere possession of ground was not necessarily an advantage, the existing lodgement area was undoubtedly too small to allow much freedom of manœuvre, and ever since August it had been agreed that Army Group A’s ‘initial task’ was to reach a line a good deal further inland than that so far occupied. He accordingly ordered an advance, during the night of 29 September and the following day, of up to ten miles to occupy a new line running from Margate, on the coast on his east flank, through Canterbury, Ashford, Etchingham, Hadlow Down and Uckfield and then back towards the sea on the west flank near Falmer, since Brighton itself was still in British hands.

Up to now, although both sides had fought hard, the rules of war had not been too grossly violated. A few men trying to surrender after a hard battle had been shot, some houses from which missiles had been thrown had been set on fire by the Germans, and one vicar, who had tried to stop a unit roaring into his town by standing in the road with hand held up as though halting the traffic, had simply been run down. (He was in fact trying to warn them that in England it was the custom to drive on the left but this was never discovered.) On the whole the Germans, according
to their own not too exacting lights, had behaved correctly. Too few-civilians had been left in the coastal strip to offer serious resistance, and the Home Guard, despite all Hitler’s threats, had when captured, though very few were, been treated as ordinary soldiers. The chief inconveniences suffered by the Germans in the towns they had occupied had been broken milk bottles and nails scattered at road junctions, with no clue to the culprits, and – an annoying and at first even frightening trick recommended earlier that summer in a British magazine – the removal of manhole and coalhole covers after dark. More than one member of the Wehrmacht had, as a result, slipped and broken his leg and a few, either exceptionally slim or exceptionally unfortunate, had found themselves suddenly and painfully precipitated into a cellar, usually more astonished than hurt, incidents which their comrades above ground had tended to find amusing rather than proof of the existence of British saboteurs.

During the move forward, however, it was different. Although the troops and Home Guard had largely withdrawn, occasional suicide squads still stayed behind, hiding in roadside coppices and behind walls, and leaping up to fling Molotov cocktails at every tank and lorry that came within range, although the Germans soon found the missiles were singularly ineffective, for they either failed to catch fire or burned out harmlessly yards away from their target, while more than one, the startled cries from cover revealed, had gone off prematurely. In one narrow street in Ashford a blanket had been hung on a clothes line stretched between windows on opposite sides of the street, apparently to blind any oncoming driver, but the soldier in the first lorry to reach it had simply stood up, torn it down and folded it up into a cushion for himself and his neighbour, making a gesture of thanks in case the donor were still watching. Such incidents apart, the real trouble came from road-blocks out in the country, which the troops encountered round every bend, but by now they had a well-developed technique for dealing with them. Some convoys were led by a heavy recovery vehicle, which easily pushed all but the most formidable aside, or by a truckload of engineers who leapt out and pulled to pieces any home-made barriers or blew up those which it would take too long to demolish. Roadblocks, both British and Germans were realising, were little use unless they were defended, and most of the British troops had now withdrawn, but occasionally Home Guards manning a slit trench refused to give in, and a section had to be despatched to deal with them with grenades and automatic weapons. Some pillboxes, too, which seemed unoccupied, came suddenly to life as the advancing Germans drew within range. But the men who had smashed through the Belgian forts were not to be held up by block-houses on which the cement was
barely dry, or sandbag emplacements from which the sand was often already leaking or so unstable that a single shell nearby could set the whole unsteady edifice tumbling.

And so, stopping often, fighting occasionally, but mostly moving, the trucks spaced out in accordance with the usual convoy rules, the men marching in single file, with sections posted on alternate sides of the road in the march discipline common to every army, the Germans moved forward. The tank commanders cursed the narrow English roads, the infantry cursed the staff cars which roared past them spraying them with dust, and the British farm carts and tractors which trundled past, often forcing them into the ditch, not perhaps to the regret of the driver, who stoutly refused to let a mere invasion interfere with really important matters like preparing the fields for next year’s crops. More than one stalwartly insular civilian narrowly escaped a collision when, driving as usual on the left, he found himself making straight for a head-on collision with a German Army driver keeping, as all over Europe, to his right. Already the Army Group commander had issued an order that the German rule of the road would be observed in ‘Occupied Territory’, as he rather grandiosely called the few square miles of Kent and Sussex so far surrendered by the British, but there had as yet been no opportunity to enforce the new law and for the moment the Germans relied on pressing ruthlessly on, leaving the few civilians still on the roads to get out of the way.

The infantry had largely been assigned the minor roads, leaving the ‘A’ roads, as the British called them, free for the tanks and heavier transport, and for many men it was little more than a pleasant walk through the autumn countryside. The day was fair, though cloudy, and the English landscape, they reflected, looked prosperous and not so very different to the countryside they knew at home.

Some units, however, had no time to spare for such frivolous thoughts, and outstanding among these was one battalion, described on the Germans’ ‘Order of Battle’ as ‘Elements of the SS “Das Vaterland” Division’, but now attached to the 34th Infantry Division. The ‘Waffen SS’ were the military wing of the security service controlled by Heinrich Himmler, Minister of the Interior. Most of the SS were civilian policemen, though of a particularly brutal and vicious kind already notorious throughout Europe, but the SS had also contributed some divisions of regular troops to the Wehrmacht. They consisted of tough, crack battalions of dedicated Nazis, who rarely took prisoners and who were only too happy to undertake any ‘pacification’ operations that might be required in occupied territory. Killing was their trade, torture their recreation, brutality their hallmark, whether it was practised, as it was by their civilian brothers, in
underground torture chambers or, as by the SS in military uniform, on the battlefield. No SS division had been assigned to take part in the invasion of England, but Himmler, with his rival Göring’s Luftwaffe so deeply involved in the operation, had been anxious that his men, too, should play some part in it. The result was the SS battalion, now pushing forward through the lanes of mid-Sussex from Hellingly towards Horam.

By midday the battalion had already met more than its share of obstructions. The battalion commander, a lieutenant-colonel whose cruel face was made even harsher by duelling scars, was eager to show his efficiency by reaching the divisional objective precisely at the estimated time if not before. He gave short shrift to anyone, soldier or civilian, who got in his way. The Home Guards manning one roadblock, having surrendered on finding themselves surrounded, had been ordered to pull it down, barbed wire and all, with their bare hands and, having done so, had been shot out of hand. A little further on the battalion had suffered another annoyance, though a minor one. Three boys aged about twelve had ignored their mothers’ orders to stay indoors while the Germans went by for it was a mild day and, the one good thing about the invasion from their point of view, the village school was closed. They had at first practised football and fought each other in the playing field adjoining the main road in the centre of the village and had clambered about the swings and slide intended for small children until, growing bored, they began to shout insults, in which the Germans could make out only the words ‘Hitler’ and ‘Churchill’, at the passing traffic. Finally, disappointed at the lack of response from the Germans, one boy had begun to throw stones at the lorries and the others, when these were ignored, followed his lead. One lucky throw struck a soldier sitting in a troop-carrying lorry smartly on the shoulder and just at that moment the truck halted, the line of traffic in front having stopped. The soldier who had been hit said not a word, but got to his feet in a leisurely, almost casual, way, selected a stick grenade from his belt and flung it at the little group. It exploded just above them, killing one outright, blinding another, and inflicting terrible injuries on the third. It took the villagers, summoned by the noise of the explosion and the resulting screams, a long time to get across the road to help the boys, for the convoy had moved on as suddenly as it had stopped. By that time the bright green of the grass was discoloured by a large red stain; the injured boy had bled to death.