If Britain Had Fallen (27 page)

16
Invasion barges, as seen by the RAF

17
Oil defences being tried out on the south coast

18
German storm troops under training

19
The defenders. Winston Churchill and General Sir Alan Brooke on the south coast

20
The attackers. Hitler with General von Brauchitsch and Admiral Raeder, on their way to an invasion conference, June 1940

21
An invasion barge, during an exercise at Calais

22
Embarkation exercise at Dieppe, September 1940

23
A cliff-scaling exercise on the French coast

24 and 25
A German parachutist and
a Panzer break-through (a British artist’s impression)

26 and 27
Opposite: A river-crossing exercise, with rubber boats and German motorised troops on
manœuvres

28
Attack: A pontoon bridge in use in Luxemburg, May 1940

29
Defeat: German troops occupying Luxemburg

The Gestapo posed for its investigators a number of unanswered questions, which confirm that much of its information on Great Britain was sadly out of date. ‘Is the Société des Amis de l’Espagne still connected with the Anglo-Spanish Society?’ it asked. ‘Is the Society Asiatique in Paris still connected with the Royal Asiatic Society, London?’ and what was the status of the School of Oriental Studies, a notorious centre of pro-British propaganda during the first world war? These anxieties perhaps reflected a growing interest in Nazi circles about the Far East, possibly even some foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on British possessions there which came a year later. Another Gestapo document dating from this period had referred to the large number of Japanese in England and ‘the possibility of Japanese espionage in England via the embassies’. The number of Japanese in the British Isles was, in fact, small—only 2300 at the last census in 1931—but they included one group making a vital contribution to the British livestock industry by practising the arcane craft of chicken-sexing, in which few Englishmen were qualified. Perhaps the Gestapo were unaware of this little-known fact of English agricultural life. Or perhaps, since they proposed to loot most of the country’s food, they felt that this tiny Asiatic task force would soon have its own unique contribution to make to the breakfast and dinner tables of the Third Reich.