If Britain Had Fallen (5 page)

As the troops lounged in the sunshine on the beach that August, or paraded by the estuaries and harbours of France and Holland, there was plenty for them to watch as the barges were manœuvred into place by the ubiquitous tugs, and the motor-boats which were to ferry troops ashore from the larger ships steamed urgently about on exercises. The finest spectacle was provided, if one were fortunate enough to see it, by the high-speed landing-craft, driven by an aircraft-engine, which it was
hoped would roar across the Channel and charge up the enemy beach like racing-boats. Unhappily, however, the
Truppentransporttragflachenschnellboote
proved to have a more impressive title than performance and very few sailed except on the air-waves of the ‘black’ German radio, which darkly referred to them on 10 September as one of the reasons why England should make peace.

The approaching invasion was already providing inventors on both sides of the Channel with a field day, and with the need to obtain tactical surprise in mind the German authorities were unusually receptive to new ideas. As early as April Professor Gottfried Feder, no mere crank but a senior official in the Ministry of Economics, had prepared plans for
his
contribution to what he called ‘the great war aim’, the destruction of England, the ‘war tortoise’ or ‘war crocodile’. This consisted of a large hollow slab made of reinforced concrete, ninety feet long, twenty feet wide and twelve feet high, powered by an engine which would either drive it through the water, just below the surface, or, as it touched bottom, operate caterpillar tracks. The sight of these monsters, nearly the size of four buses placed end to end, crawling up the beach of Folkestone or Bexhill, might well have caused surprise among the defenders, and the 200 armed men, or detachment of guns and tanks, which each would disgorge would, Feder hoped, strike terror in their hearts. Like most inventors he had an answer to every objection; the craft’s bulk, he believed, would guarantee its seaworthiness, while production presented no problem since the German concrete industry had easily coped with the demand for blockhouses for the Siegfried line. Rather surprisingly, discussions were held between the Army and the Navy (which was sceptical about it) on the feasibility of the new weapon, but no ‘crocodiles’ were ready by September.

Designed to serve much the same purpose, but far more practical,were the amphibian and submersible tanks on which the Germans were already working. Both types consisted basically of ordinary armoured vehicles which had been waterproofed, but the former were designed to float in the sea while the latter were virtually small submarines, which crawled along the sea-bed, steered by periscope and obtaining their air through a tube fixed to a floating buoy, not unlike the ‘Schnorchel’ device later fitted to U Boats. A successful demonstration in front of the German Armaments Minister was held on 25 June, and the conversion of existing tanks was pressed ahead so rapidly that by late August 262, sufficient for a whole armoured division of four tank battalions, were ready for use, 210 of them being medium tanks of a submersible kind, and the remainder light amphibians designed to float. By late September even larger numbers would be available, though already Field Marshal von Brauchitsch had
been supplied with more adapted tanks than he had asked for. The only delay came from instructions, issued in mid-July, to keep in France a number of Mark III and Mark IV Panzers, earmarked for return to Germany to be modified, so that they could lead the planned Victory Parade through Paris. But they went after all, for plans for the big parade were abandoned after someone had courageously reminded the Führer that the RAF might turn up as an uninvited guest.

Such anxieties were the officers’ concern. For the ordinary soldier life was agreeable enough in between training sessions, as he lay on his back in the sunshine and watched the Junkers 88s and Heinkel IIIs streaming over the Channel with their protective swarms of Messerschmidt fighters buzzing about them, and every night the radio boasted of the great victories won that day in the skies over England. On the camp notice boards were appeals for volunteers with experience of handling boats and a few men who had boasted of sailing a small boat in peacetime, or of canoeing holidays with the Hitler Youth, proudly gave their names in, and departed to a new unit, with many a joke from their comrades about hoping one would not be sent to face the Tommies in a boat
they
were manning.

Although they had not yet been generally distributed, the enterprising individual could also obtain without too much difficulty, from the heaps stacked in the camp office, a
Bildheft,
or picture book, prepared for issue to the invading forces to explain what sort of country they were about to occupy. From the pictures it seemed that England was a country of picturesque little harbours (like Mousehole, pronounced Maushohl, in Cornwall), romantic ruins, like Tintern Abbey, and spacious country houses. There seemed to be little industry and nothing like the German Autobahnen, unless one counted the Mersey Tunnel (of which the official opening in 1934 was shown), though the pictures of Blackpool Tower and beach proved that the English did sometimes enjoy themselves.

For officers a good deal more information was available. The really enthusiastic had already pored over the set of seven maps of the British Isles, showing its population, transport and other features, prepared by the German Intelligence Branch, and some had looked curiously at the street-plans (based, had they known it, on those prepared by the Automobile Association) of towns like Dover and Hastings. At divisional headquarters the staff might be seen earnestly studying a solid handbook,
Military-Geographical Data about England,
which made it clear that East Anglia and Salisbury Plain were the areas to which the keen tank-man must hope fortune took him, while the narrow lanes of Devon were to be avoided. The more pessimistic meanwhile studied the helpful lists of
the number of beds in the main hospitals of Southern England. Attempts at speaking the English sentences contained in the glossary were always good for a laugh in the mess at night, like ‘Where is the next tank?’—not ‘Vere’, the booklet stressed—and there were such helpful phrases as ‘War Office’ (not ‘Vor Ofiz’), ‘sewage works’, lunatic asylum’, and, a little ominously, ‘the bottom of the sea’, or ‘bot’tim ov dhe sie.’

Off duty, for all ranks, there was no lack of entertainment. French wines, brandy and champagne were cheap and plentiful and the initial surliness of many Frenchmen was beginning to wear off, as it became clear that the invaders would pay for what they wanted. The French girls, disdainful at first, were proving, at least in private, to be all that soldier’s legend had claimed for them; there were, it was clear, advantages in occupying what Dr Goebbels had so often described as a degenerate country. Victory had brought, too, some unexpected spoils. The English had left behind, among their medical stores, box upon box labelled ‘Sheaths, protective, i gross’, each containing, for some curious English reason, not a sensible Germanic round number but the odd figure 144. Already everyone who had taken advantage of this unexpected gift reported that this was one British product vastly superior to the standard Wehrmacht issue.

The resulting pleasantries at the expense of the absent English were especially welcome when, as so often happened, one was turned out of bed in the small hours by an air raid alarm, while the Wellingtons and Blenheims bombed the barges and harbours on the coast, and occasionally the planes dropped leaflets, though there were orders that these must be handed in if found. They seemed at first, under the familiar heading
Wir Fahren Gegen Engelland,
to offer a number of helpful phrases in German, French and Dutch, but all proved on closer inspection to have a distinctly pessimistic ring: ‘Was that a bomb—a torpedo—a shell—a mine?’; ‘We are seasick. Where is the basin?’; ‘How much do you charge for swimming lessons?’; and, most upsetting of all, in view of the rumours about British plans to set the sea on fire, ‘See how briskly our captain burns !’

But the waiting Armies were reassured by the programmes which they, and the listeners at home, heard over the national radio network, now retransmitted in France. The Germans were a highly wireless-minded people; a higher proportion of people owned sets, and more people listened to each set, than in almost any other country in the world, and from their first seizure of power the Nazis had exploited the propaganda possibilities of radio to the full. Little outright propaganda was needed that summer for Germany’s victories spoke for themselves, and German radio relied largely on quotations from the world’s press to drive home
the message of Britain’s impending downfall. When foreign newspapers failed to come up to expectation German radio commentators filled the gap, especially the Propaganda Ministry’s star performer, Hans Fritzsche, later head of its Radio Division. In thirteen talks between the beginning of August and the original target date for
Sea Lion,
mid-September, he assured his hearers that the British were doomed to defeat, either—the commonest reason quoted—because they were inefficient and unsoldierly, a greater crime perhaps in German than in British eyes, or because they were immoral and ‘overage’, meaning apparently that the British Empire had been there a long time.

The Propaganda Ministry was sensitive to the suggestion that perhaps the Germans were not going to invade England at all. The British, suggested German radio on 13 August, had invented the story that Hitler had boasted that he would be dining in Buckingham Palace by the 15 th, this being their ‘old trick’ of announcing the date on which Hitler proposed to celebrate victory so that they could say ‘The Germans have again missed the bus’. It was, announced the same broadcaster on 3 September, briefly elevating his own boss to a position he had never claimed, ‘Dr Goebbels and the Führer’, not the British, ‘who would decide the decisive hour’.

Most of the bulletins which the soldiers heard that summer, however, were concerned with the air war, and every day yielded some new superlative: the recent attacks were ‘the worst’, ‘the longest’, ‘the heaviest’ that any country had ever undergone. ‘While German bombers stream uninterruptedly towards England, our motor torpedo boats assure a sea rescue service in the Channel’, boasted a reporter, allegedly posted on the French coast on 27 August, a little tactlessly. Another favourite theme throughout the summer was the supposed demoralisation of the British people. The ‘most fashionable sickness’ in England, the radio commentator assured the Fatherland, ‘was parachutist fever’, while English plutocrats, a favourite if vaguely identified group in German propaganda, ‘soothe their feverish nerves by indulging in wild orgies’. On the same day, 27 July, it was claimed that ‘a lady coming from one of the very best families told a reporter that it was easier to die when drunk than sober’. The radio speakers mocked any suggestion that the British might give as good as they got. ‘The conception of the Fortress of England was invented by Churchill personally’, Radio Berlin assured its audience. When a public appeal was made for arms for the LDV the Germans were delighted, drawing the all too accurate deduction that Britain must be desperately short of weapons, and the gift of several shotguns from the King’s gunroom at Sandringham caused their commentator particular glee.
Obviously, he suggested, King George would not be needing them since he and his government were now packing their bags to leave for Canada. Music of every type had always made a strong appeal to the Germans and all over conquered Europe
Deutschland
über Alles
and the Nazi Party anthem, the
Horst Wessel Song,
were heard constantly that summer, alternating with other songs of lesser musical merit. Loyal Dutchmen or Danes might hurry away when a German band, playing in the park or a public square, struck up
Wir Fahren gegen England,
the best and oldest of these works of musical propaganda, but to anyone within earshot of a radio it was difficult to get away from it, although like most soldiers’ songs it was more popular with the civilians at home than with the men in the field. Significantly, German radio played it on 21 June, at the end of its report on the French armistice negotiations, and it was heard again on 6 July after a description of the Führer’s return through the flower-strewn streets of his capital to the Chancellery - Berlin’s Buckingham Palace - where he appeared on the balcony to greet the hysterically applauding crowds. As he strode forward to acknowledge their ovation, the girlish voices of a choir of the Bund Deutscher Mädchen, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth, sang out (although they were far too young to fight anyone, and also the wrong sex):

Our flag waves as we march along.
It is an emblem of the power of our Reich.
And we can no longer endure
That the Englishman should laugh at it.
So give me thy hand, thy fair white hand,
Ere we sail away to conquer Eng-el-land.

Soon afterwards it was the turn of Field Marshal Goring, never one to be left out of the act. The Luftwaffe’s first entry into the popular music field was not perhaps a very happy one:

We fly against England
How red the roses bloom.
We fly against England
And with us flyeth doom.

But the Reich Marshal’s song-writers made amends with the far more successful
Bombs on England,
played for the first time at the end of the edition of the regular programme
Front Reports
on 7 September, in which it was announced that the Air Minister and Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief had arrived on the French coast to direct operations personally. Thereafter it became the programme’s closing signature tune and was heard daily: