If Britain Had Fallen (20 page)
Simultaneously with the drive to the north would come the main offensive to the south, for which two armoured divisions and three infantry divisions were available. Here, too, the forces available would be divided into two, one group taking the southerly route from Salisbury to
Exeter and thence to Plymouth and Falmouth, the other moving further north, towards Bath, Bristol and Gloucester. The two Panzer divisions were destined here, also, to occupy the major ports and largest cities, Plymouth and Bristol, for which the remaining British forces might be expected to fight hardest, while other towns tentatively selected for garrisoning included Stroud, Totnes and Truro. For the occupation of Wales and Northern Ireland von Rundstedt had at this stage made no plans. They must wait, he had decided, till the rest of the British Isles was secure, producing, he hoped, a wholesale capitulation which would give him those troublesome areas, the one mountainous and the other only accessible by sea, without a fight.
But here von Rundstedt had, in the German proverb, reckoned without his host. There was, either then or later, to be no general capitulation. On Friday 18 October, a gloomy day of lowering skies and poor visibility, for which the British would have been grateful a week earlier, the advances towards the north which formed Phase II of von Rundstedt’s plans began, meeting as little opposition as he had expected, for most of the fighting formations had already been drawn south. All day the tanks and lorries and company after company of infantry moved closer to London, and one after another the headquarters from which until recently the RAF had fought its battle fell into their hands. Bomber Command at High Wycombe, Coastal Command at Northwood and—the finest prize of all—Fighter Command at Bentley Priory near Stanmore, echoed to the footsteps of German soldiers. As the Germans had foreseen, nothing of value had been left. Telephone cables were ripped out, plotting boards and screens stood blank and empty, and only a blackboard on one wall, on which were chalked details of the last mission of some squadron now destroyed, recalled the recent conflict. The buildings were deserted except at Bentley Priory where the Germans found one pilot officer, with his arm in a sling, wandering rather aimlessly about. He had, he admitted, somehow been overlooked when the last lorries left. When formally called on by a somewhat pompous Luftwaffe colonel to surrender the headquarters, he laughed aloud. There were, he explained, no headquarters left and, even had there been, a mere pilot officer had no right to surrender as much as a drawing pin.
The government had long planned to conduct the defence of the country, if Central London were threatened, from an emergency underground headquarters at Dollis Hill in north-west London, but the German decision to advance from that direction instead of, as anticipated, from the south across Westminster Bridge (admirably commanded by a machine-gun sited in Mr Speaker’s dining-room and manned by an enthusiastic
group of Home Guard MPs) caused this plan to be abandoned. The Dollis Hill headquarters was overrun long before the Germans drove into London down the Edgware Road and Haverstock Hill, but the unit which captured it proved only a little more fortunate than their comrades at Fighter and Bomber Command, finding it manned by a few telephonists and clerks and a distinctly disgruntled junior officer left in charge in case it should be needed after all. When asked what had happened to the Prime Minister and the Commander-in-Chief, he replied, with perfect truth, that so far as he knew they were, like himself, in their usual places.
October 19 was another misty morning, but the skies over London were clear enough for the Luftwaffe to launch one of those sudden raids against undefended targets which Hitler was fond of calling ‘terror attacks’, the target, according to German radio, being ‘the government quarter’ around Charing Cross. Several ministries were hit, and some Civil Servants, putting the final touches to the destruction of government records, killed. When the bombers had gone and the dust from the wrecked buildings had settled, the smoke still rose from a great pile of burning files in the middle of Horse Guards Parade and another, smaller one, in the garden of No 10 Downing Street. At first there was a strange quiet, recalling to more than one listener the two minutes’ silence which descended upon Whitehall every Armistice Day, and one watcher on the roof of the Admiralty claimed he could hear the cries of the seagulls on the river a hundred yards away and even the flapping of the wings of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, which had risen in a great white cloud when the bombs fell nearby but had already returned to their usual haunts.
Towards midday, when the sound of gunfire was heard in the distance, followed by the rattle of small arms and the sudden loud ‘plop’ of distant mortar bombs and grenades, the signallers still busily operating the teleprinters and morse keys within the massive red walls of the Citadel overlooking the Mall, and in the underground Cabinet Office headquarters stretching from Storey’s Gate, near Parliament Square, almost to Downing Street, sent their final messages and began to destroy their equipment. While one officer, also following previous instructions, began to gather up the maps in the war room for burning, the Prime Minister led the small team of men manning it—the women had, on his insistence, already been sent to rejoin their units—up into the grey October daylight. He was dressed in his favourite dark blue siren suit, with a massive revolver in a holster strapped to it, and paused briefly to address his staff”. They had done their duty nobly, he told them, and they must not think they had failed. This was the end of a chapter, but some of them, though not himself, would live to see the start of a different story. Those who wished to
try to escape and carry on the fight elsewhere must feel free to do so. For himself he proposed to stay and fight it out here and any who cared to remain were welcome to join him. ‘We have,’ he remarked with a flash of his old humour, ‘a distinguished commander. I refer not to myself, though I once did the state some service on the battlefield, but to the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, who has, I regret to say, defied my orders to leave the country and is still here beside me, as he has been through all the last anxious days.’
From their right there came the sound of machine-gun fire. The clerks from London District headquarters now manning the sandbag emplacement under Admiralty Arch had opened up on an enemy patrol advancing down the Mall from the direction of Buckingham Palace, and the Germans scattered and took cover in St James’s Park, preparing to resume their advance.
It is, I think, Prime Minister,’ said General Brooke, with a slight smile, ‘a case of action this day.’ He led the little group towards a sandbag barricade at the top of the steps leading from Downing Street into the park, where already several soldiers were absorbed in aiming their rifles and firing at the Germans now crawling forward below. At a gesture from the general, another soldier set up a Bren gun and Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief settled down behind it, the one to fire it, the other to pass up more magazines as each one was emptied. As he took aim, Winston Churchill seemed to several of those watching him to look suddenly younger. The cares and anxieties of the past months had fallen from him. In spirit he was again the subaltern who had charged the dervishes on horseback at Omdurman, or the battalion commander touring the trenches on the Western Front. When in a brief pause in the battle one of his private secretaries, looking absurdly out of place in his dark jacket and striped trousers, recalled the former occasion to him, the Prime Minister, while keeping his eyes on the field of fire ahead, shook his head. ‘Gordon selling his life dearly on the steps of the residency at Khartoum would be a more appropriate parallel,’ he suggested.
‘Yes, sir,’ agreed the Civil Servant. ‘They beat us then, too, but we won in the end.’
Later that afternoon, with the Germans already in Trafalgar Square and advancing down Whitehall to take their position in the rear, the enemy unit advancing across St James’s Park made their final charge. Several of those in the Downing Street position were already dead, among them the Commander-in-Chief, and at last the Bren ceased its chatter, its last magazine emptied. Churchill reluctantly abandoned the machine-gun, drew his pistol and with great satisfaction, for it was a
notoriously inaccurate weapon, shot dead the first German to reach the foot of the steps. As two more rushed forward, covered by a third in the distance, Winston Churchill moved out of the shelter of the sandbags, as if personally to bar the way up Downing Street. A German NCO, running up to find the cause of the unexpected hold-up, recognised him and shouted to the soldiers not to shoot, but he was too late. A burst of bullets from a machine-carbine caught the Prime Minister full in the chest. He died instantly, his back to Downing Street, his face towards the enemy, his pistol still in his hand.
The sound of various minor engagements still being fought on the south bank across the river, as the Germans attacked the units posted there from the rear, could still be heard as the general in command of the leading division arrived at Downing Street in search of someone to surrender the city to him. He found awaiting him, however, only a somewhat sheepish group of senior officers, captured after a defence of the War Office, all denying with every appearance of sincerity that they were in any position to capitulate. With the King gone—if German radio were to be believed—the Chiefs of Staff nowhere to be found, and the Prime Minister and C-in-C dead, no one, they suggested, not without satisfaction, had authority to surrender.
Finally in his room overlooking Horse Guards Parade, where he had withdrawn to await events, a solitary brigadier was discovered who agreed, reluctantly and in the interests of saving life, to make a formal request for a cease-fire on behalf of the troops in London. But, he pointed out, he had no authority over troops in other parts of the country. After prolonged negotiations, a compromise was arrived at. Other commands could be notified of the fall of London, but the signal should be marked Tor information only’. Whether local commanders then chose to capitulate, or to fight on, must be left to them.
The announcement of the surrender of London, followed by the news of the Prime Minister’s death and then, belatedly, the revelation that the King had left the country, caused those British still fighting to lose heart. Was there now any point in getting oneself killed? Would it not be better to look after one’s family and secretly prepare for the day when the Germans could be driven out? Through mile after mile of the Midlands next day the German lorries rolled forward with barely a road mined or a shot fired, while in their secret hideouts, dug into lonely hillsides or hidden in isolated woodlands, the men of the ‘Auxiliary Units’, the nucleus of Britain’s resistance army, listened unspeaking to the faint voice on their radio. Henceforward, they knew, it was up to them.
The fictional part of the book ends here. The remaining chapters describe not merely what
might
have happened, but what
probably would
have happened since they are based on the known plans of the Germans, on the way in which when faced with similar problems, they behaved in other countries, and on an assessment of the likely course of events by those in a position then or now to judge what would have occurred.
The Ordinances of the Military Commander shall have the force of law and on publication shall be recognised as such … by the authorities of the occupied country.
German Occupation
Ordinances,
1
940
By September 1940 the Germans had already had extensive experience of imposing their rule upon conquered countries. An unimaginative, law-abiding, somewhat pedantic people, they placed in all the activities of life great emphasis on ‘going by the book’ and ‘the book’ concerning the occupation of Great Britain, or England as the Germans usually described it, was already a very substantial volume. In addition to the private documents prepared by the Security Service, and the detailed ‘shopping lists’ already drawn up by the ‘Defence Economic Staff for England’, who were to seize the country’s resources for German use, the Army, which was responsible for maintaining order, had an impressive paper armoury of its own. On 9 September General Halder had drafted on behalf of von Brauchitsch an elaborate set of
Orders concerning Organisation and Function of Military Government in England
which, with appendices containing internal directives and public proclamations, ran to nearly twenty foolscap pages, but also in draft were scores of regulations or
Ordinances
on a vast variety of subjects which, when collected together in the following year, formed a book ninety pages long.
On first moving in the local commander would usually proclaim martial law, which gave him unlimited powers, including the right to shoot civilians after the most cursory trial. Soldiers in every army, however, dislike entanglement with non-military concerns and the stage of martial law was likely to be succeeded before long by ordinary occupation, with the Army, while retaining the right to deal with any signs of ‘armed resurgency’, working through the existing civil authorities who were required to enforce the large and daily growing body of occupation regulations. The Germans, in every country they occupied, tried to rule through an existing peacetime government, as in Denmark or the Channel Islands, or one which had come into existence specially to treat with them, as in France, or through a puppet regime, as in Norway, and it was here that the first difficulties in England were likely to arise. The King, the official ruler of Great Britain, would, by the time the first German staff cars drove into the courtyard of Buckingham Palace, have been safely beyond the Germans’ reach and if, as also seems likely, the members of the British
government were either dead or in hiding, or had escaped overseas, the Germans would have been hard put to it to sign a cease-fire, much less negotiate a full-scale armistice agreement.
