If Britain Had Fallen (21 page)

They had faced a similar problem once before, in Norway, but here a puppet prime minister in the shape of a name soon to become notorious, Major Vidkun Quisling, had been ready to hand. Quisling, a former Minister of War, had been leader of the extreme Norwegian Nationalist Party and had been active for years in encouraging friendship with Germany. He had helped to plot the invasion of his country, and when the Germans did arrive in April 1940 had, to the consternation and fury of his countrymen, announced on the radio that he had now formed a pro-German government, though many officials refused to serve under him, and the King and properly elected government of Norway later fled to London.
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Did Great Britain possess a potential Quisling? It seems unlikely. The British Cabinet anxiously considering this question on 22 May 1940, at the height of the Fifth Column scare, were unable to point to any individual who seemed ripe for treason. Two officers of MI5 who had been studying the British Union of Fascists had failed to discover any evidence that it was engaging in subversive activities, although they did conclude that a quarter to a third of its members would ‘be willing, if ordered, to go to any lengths’. The Cabinet decided on that occasion that the existing Defence Regulation 18b should be amended to give the Home Secretary power to order the detention without trial of anyone belonging to ‘an organisation having hostile associations subject to foreign control’, but on 21 November, with the immediate danger past, the Cabinet was informed that though 750 known Fascists were now under arrest, two thirds of these were not dangerous and could be released. This decision was almost certainly correct. Many Fascists, though undoubtedly anti-Jewish, opposed to the war, and sympathetic to the ideals and methods of Nazism, would have claimed that it was only a patriotic desire to see their own country restored to her former place in the world, and to free her from alien influences, that had carried them into the Blackshirt movement. The parallel with Quisling, who was actively pro-German and had plotted his country’s downfall, was therefore false.

The leading British Fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, was still only forty-three in September 1940 and must have seemed to the Germans (wrongly it will be seen) an excellent candidate to rule the country for them. Mosley, born into a wealthy and well-known family, had had a classic upper-class education at a preparatory school, Winchester and Sandhurst, and showed
many of the attributes the Germans most admired, from skill in fencing to physical courage; he served both as an airman and as a cavalry officer during the first world war, and was wounded in action. After the war he became a very successful young Conservative MP and, after ‘crossing the floor’, a highly promising Labour minister until he had resigned in disgust at the government’s failure to tackle either unemployment or the country’s long-term economic problems. Mosley, like many British politicians, had met both Hitler and Mussolini and he had made no secret before the war of his desire for peace with Germany, even at the price of returning the former German colonies. After war had broken out he had advised his followers to obey the law, while still hoping for a negotiated peace, taking the line that it was pointless Britain giving guarantees to a country like Poland which she could not protect. Many people between September 1939 and April 1940 still hoped for peace (not perhaps excluding the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain), but Mosley always insisted that, while Britain was mad to fight for other countries, she had every right to defend herself. If the country were invaded, he told public meetings at this period, ‘we would immediately stop our peace campaign and fight the enemy’, and on 9 May 1940 the British Union of Fascists officially declared that ‘every one of us would resist the foreign invader with all that is in us’.

But the government was not impressed. On 22 May the Cabinet decided, as already mentioned, on a wholesale round-up of Fascists and German sympathisers, and the Home Secretary advised his colleagues that Sir Oswald Mosley, ‘though a most mischievous person, was too clever to put himself in the wrong by giving treasonable orders’. The next day Mosley was arrested, along with many of his followers, and two other public figures, a former extreme right-wing Conservative MP, and an ex-admiral deeply involved in the highly-dubious Anglo-German friendship organisation,
The Link.
No other individuals of any standing were considered dangerous enough to detain. Misguided Fascists, admirers of Hitler, even some anti-Semitic thugs, there undoubtedly were in Britain, but Quislings there were not.

In making plain the illegality of any regime set up by the Germans in Britain, the establishment of a British government-in-exile responsible to the man described in the Coronation service three years before as ‘your undoubted King … head of the Commonwealth’, would have been of crucial importance. In time of peace the sovereign might have been a mere figurehead, a convenient focus for sentiment and loyalty; in the hour of defeat he would have been the symbol of all his subjects’ will to resist oppression and achieve ultimate victory. The British government
would undoubtedly have done all it could to send the royal family to safety, and the obvious refuge for His Majesty was Canada, nearest, oldest and most powerful of the white dominions. Australia and New Zealand were far weaker and too far away to be able to influence events in Europe, as well as already preoccupied with the threat from Japan, while South Africa, apart from being 6000 miles by sea from England, was less wholeheartedly committed to the allied cause.

Yet, distressing though it would have been to the beleaguered British had they known the fact—and indeed to many Canadians—the Canadian government, both Canadian historians and those closely involved at the time now admit, was not at all anxious that King George should set up his court within its borders. Canada had by 1940 established herself as a world power in her own right, a position which would inevitably have been jeopardised had the government from London, or its shattered remnants, set up its headquarters in Ottawa. Although Canada had been a self-governing dominion since 1867, she had in 1914 automatically become involved as soon as Great Britain had declared war on Germany, and there had been ample evidence of what a Canadian observer later described as ‘the attitude of rush over to help the motherland, where Britain goes we go’ By 1919 the relationship had already begun to change. The Canadian government had insisted on being a party to the Treaty of Versailles in their own right and were not content to allow Lloyd George to sign it on their behalf. In 1939 Canada had freely chosen to join Great Britain in the struggle against Hitler, but she could, had she wished, have stayed aloof. A Canadian division had been sent to England and its members would, had Britain fallen, have become prisoners of war, but it had served under its own commanders. There were many in Canada who, while still deeply attached to the motherland, recognised that economically Canada’s future was linked to the United States and that, politically and militarily, too, the goodwill of her immensely powerful neighbour on the North American mainland must be the decisive factor in all her planning.

The Canadians might wish to rescue the homeland from German oppression, but with only one fully-trained division left in Canada, with conscription only just introduced, with only a small Navy of their own, and few aircraft that could fly the Atlantic even one way, and none at all that could fly to Britain and back without refuelling, there was little they could do alone. The Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, although intensely loyal to the British crown and, like most of his colleagues, full of admiration for the British Prime Minister and the British people’s stand against Hitler, had to recognise, too, that there
were divisions within his own country. A sizeable minority of Canadians spoke French as their native language and still felt some loyalty to France, and now that France had made peace the temptation to profess willingness to fight for their own country, but not for a distant, occupied island, was clearly more powerful.

Mackenzie King’s government had another reason, too, to regard with mixed feelings the possibility that Winston Churchill and his surviving colleagues might arrive in Ottawa to set up a government-in-exile. As Mr M. J. Coldwell, then deputy leader of the Canadian opposition party, the Co-operative and Commonwealth Federation, has recently pointed out, If members of the British Cabinet had come we would still have expected our own government to continue as the extreme authority in this country’, but if the King, the official head of the Commonwealth, and Winston Churchill, by far its most forceful and most important minister, had both been resident close by, the relationship would obviously have required enormous diplomacy on both sides. By upbringing and instinct Winston Churchill was essentially a Victorian, who thought in strictly imperial terms, rather than self-governing dominions. As Mr Coldwell says, he ‘often referred to the overseas countries as though they were possessions of Britain’. The British government, had it come to Canada, would, he points out, have been ‘in exactly the same position that the governments of Norway and Denmark and Holland were in Britain, they were governments in exile and they had no part in the government of the country in which they found themselves … . We had through the years obtained our freedom from the domination of Downing Street. We had no desire to return to it.’ The relationship between the Canadian government and this forceful figure, chafing at his position as a Prime Minister without a country and a Minister of Defence without an army, was bound to be uneasy. With the King there as well, it could rapidly have become intolerable. A large old house not far from the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, known as Earnscliffe, was, many Canadians believe, earmarked for the British government’s use. As for King George VI and his family, if they had arrived in Canada, ‘they would’, believes Mr Coldwell, ‘have been received right royally and have been treated with the utmost respect and consideration, but we were glad they didn’t come’.

There was, finally, a more powerful reason, even more difficult to acknowledge in public, why the royal family would probably not have gone to Canada. The liberation of the British Isles rested ultimately on the willingness of the United States to become involved in the war, and with isolationism still rampant, and a presidential election only, in
September 1940, two months ahead, the American government was anxious to prevent any development which might provide fuel for the anti-colonial feeling that was never far below the surface in parts of the United States. Although the Prince of Wales had been rapturously received there before the war, no reigning British monarch had visited the United States since they had gained their independence from British rule only 164 years before, a short period in the history of national prejudice. Divided on much else, the Americans were united on one point, that they did not want a monarchy, and in 1867 when Canada had become self-governing the term originally contemplated of ‘kingdom of Canada’ had actually been altered to ‘dominion’ out of deference to American anti-royalist sentiment. At a meeting as early as 25 May, while the British Expeditionary Force was still fighting in France, President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, had already discussed with Mackenzie King what should become of the British sovereign if Britain were defeated. Roosevelt, according to a Canadian historian, ‘started to say that the King might come to Canada. He hesitated and Mr Hughes [Cordell Hull] intervened to point out that this would have an adverse political effect in the United States. They agreed that it would be used by political opponents of the administration to accuse Mr Roberts [President Roosevelt] of “establishing monarchy on the North American continent”. They further agreed in suggesting that the King might take refuge temporarily at, say, Bermuda without arousing republican sentiment in the United States.’

And this, it seems probable, is what would have happened. There was already in the Bahamas one former British sovereign, King Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor, compelled to abdicate in 1936 and appointed Commander-in-Chief and Governor of the Islands in August 1940 after his escape from France a few weeks earlier—an undemanding post which kept him safely out of reach of the Germans, who might have tried to use him as a hostage. In the Autumn of 1940, therefore, by a curious quirk of fate, King George VI might have found himself living as his own elder brother’s subject, unless he had taken over the Duke’s appointment from him, which seems unlikely, for the title of ‘King-Emperor and Governor of the Bahama Islands’ sounds distinctly incongruous. However this constitutional problem was resolved, his court, though not the headquarters of the British government, would, it seems likely, have been set up at Government House, Nassau, a long, low, white building, built in 1801 in the heyday of the ‘colonial’ style of architecture. Mount Fitzwilliam, on which it stood, was manifestly not Constitution Hill; George Street, which led up to it, was not the Mall. But the gardens at least were magnificent,
filled with vegetation far more lush and exotic than anything which Central London could provide.

And as the King tried to wile away the years of exile, wandering up and down those immaculate paths, between their beautifully kept lawns and flower-beds, or perhaps filling in long hours on the superb course of the Nassau golf club, which would certainly have offered him honorary membership, what would have been happening in London? The Canadians, like many people in Britain, believed that the Germans would have tried to set up a new government under Sir Oswald Mosley, though Mosley himself believes that, before he could have been approached, some undercover security agency might have arranged for him to be killed. In fact, he insists, he planned, had the Germans arrived, to escape from prison to become a resistance fighter. ‘I had’, he has said, ‘had marksman standard in the Army. I would have put on my old Army uniform and fought to a finish and no doubt have been killed, which would have settled the problem.’ Had he still been in Brixton it seems inevitable that the Germans would have arrived to offer him at the very least some senior position in a new administration, but his answer, Mosley says, would have been clear. ‘While there was a single German soldier on British soil, I would play no part whatever, refuse to do anything at all … . When you’ve withdrawn, if and when you do withdraw from Britain leaving British people, British soil and British Commonwealth intact, then, and not before, by commission of the crown and by election of the people, I will, if I am asked to, form a government.’ Rather than accept office on any other terms, he insists he would have committed suicide and ultimately, he believes, the Germans would have recognised him as an uncompromising opponent, so that he might have found himself back in Brixton, with German gaolers instead of British ones.