If Britain Had Fallen (8 page)

Another booklet published that summer admitted that the keen Home Guard was also up against a difficulty not encountered in less peaceful lands: ‘Unfortunately our history, having been very different from that of the Spanish, gives us very little information on the tactics of street fighting. In Spain almost any villager can tell you the exact street corner where barricades have always been raised in the past.’ However, there was sometimes an unexpected repository of knowledge in the district, as a third paperback book suggested: to obtain information on the use of cover, ‘ask your local scouts’, having first, presumably, ascertained that they were not Germans in disguise. ‘Don’t be ashamed to learn from some cocky kid! This is not your personal life only; it is everyone else’s.’ The same author offered instructions on how to make an anti-tank grenade as casually as if advising his readers how to prune their roses: ‘Take an eight-ounce stick of ordinary commercial blasting glycerine …’ it began. To hold up enemy vehicles he recommended broken glass, boards studded with nails, and a blanket slung from a rope across a narrow street, to blind an enemy tank or force a patrol to slow up and become a more vulnerable target. The writer summed up: ‘Your weapon may be a tin can of explosive or a shotgun that will only hit at fifty yards. Treasure it until you have a
good chance to kill a German. Even if you only get one, you have helped to beat Hitler.’ Such publications were private ventures and the government was not enthusiastic about private armies outside the regular forces or the Home Guard, conducting campaigns of their own with weapons more likely to harm their users than the Germans. The most useful contribution the ordinary civilian could make to victory in an invasion, the authorities urged, was more passive, to stay where he was, to leave the roads clear for military traffic and to avoid becoming a refugee, spreading panic and hindering the defending forces. As a first step, all those living in coastal areas of Kent and Sussex were advised to move inland, being given practical help and a warning that, if they stayed, they might later have to go compulsorily at a few hours’ notice. Many schools and businesses evacuated to the South-East had already moved, now that so much of Southern England was within easy reach of German bombers, and in June every household in the country received a leaflet,
If the Invader Comes,
which, besides some barely needed patriotic exhortation—’Think always of your country before you think of yourself—insisted that ‘Your first rule … is
IF THE GERMANS COME
,
BY PARACHUTE
,
AEROPLANE
,
OR SHIP
,
YOU MUST REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE
.
THE ORDER IS
“
STAY PUT
”.’

To stay put, with roads blocked and supplies cut off, every community would need to be fed, and arrangements were hastily made to establish dumps of food in every village, the rectory, which usually had ample space and a trustworthy occupant, being a favoured spot. While the boxes of biscuits, corned beef, tinned soup, sugar, condensed milk, margarine and tea, were being stacked in attics or outhouses, the invaluable women who were the backbone of every local fête or flower show were called in to plan emergency feeding arrangements. A woman who attended one such meeting, in Smarden in Kent, recalled later how ‘Mrs R, a famous voluntary local caterer, was asked if she would undertake the organisation of public meals. She looked seriously at the chairman and said, “Well, everyone must wash up their own knife and fork.” Good old Mrs R. Germans or no Germans, down to the practical details in a moment!’ Mrs R’s morale was also unshaken as the same witness discovered. ‘I asked her later: “What would you do if a German soldier appeared at your back door?” ‘ Her answer: ‘I should say to ‘im, I should say, “What are you a-doin’ of’ere ?”.’ At Cranbrook, in the Weald of Kent, the older children were pressed into service. ‘When the Germans came everyone was to stay in their houses as much as possible,’ one schoolgirl later remembered, ‘and each side of the village street had an emergency food dump. Our job was to go round the backs of the houses, over walls and through hedges and make sure all was well with the inmates and take food and medical supplies to any in need.’ Their prize item of equipment was an enormous tin opener labelled, a little ironically, ‘Made in Germany’.

Despite all its requests to ‘stay put’, the government realised that there would still be an exodus from some of the invaded districts, by people whose homes had been destroyed, by those in whom the instinct to flight was irresistible, and, most commonly of all, by residents ordered by the British military authorities to leave an area about to become a battleground. The then Chief Constable of Essex remembers that, to prevent these retreating evacuees becoming entangled with the (one hoped) advancing British forces, a map was drawn up for ‘yellow roads’ to be used by refugees, and ‘red roads’ to be used by the Army. It became something of a joke within the police force, who had to see that the two streams of traffic were kept apart, that the authorities’ preparations had not extended to ordering sufficient coloured ink. A note on the map they received explained that ‘yellow roads’ were in fact shown in purple, as no yellow had been available.

Another experienced police officer, then serving in Kent, in the very front line of the expected invasion, was personally involved in drawing up plans to deal with the expected flood of refugees. Some places were in fact to be evacuated, such as ‘nodal points, which were going to be subjected to all-round defence and in those cases all “useless mouths”—women and children and the aged—would be compulsorily removed. The ‘Stay Put’ order applied everywhere else. ‘The idea was, of course, that they should remain where they were, but,’ he admits, ‘I don’t think we were so naive as to expect that they would. Certainly some of them would have bolted and the whole idea was that they should be kept away from main routes which the defence forces might be expected to use and they should be headed off into woods and more remote villages, and there looked after as best we could by putting them in village halls, churches and that sort of thing. It was our purpose to turn them away from those areas where they could do any harm until the battle had rolled over them and then to try to get them back whence they came.’

It would, he believes, have been a difficult and, of course, unfamiliar job for the police, but not impossible. ‘Crowd control’, he points out, ‘is usually a question of having enough policemen…. It would have been a question of having officers at suitable strategic road junctions and ensuring that they followed the routes that we wanted them to.’ Occasionally, he admits, peaceful persuasion might not have been sufficient. ‘If you get a difficult person who simply won’t go the way you want him to well then you have to shove him the way you want him to go. And I suppose if the
worst comes to the worst, you have to knock him down and hand him over to someone else to cart off.’

Prewar governments had sometimes dreamed, in the days when the reality of air attack and the capacity of the ordinary citizen to resist it were both unknown, of bombed cities having to be ringed by an armed cordon to stop the inhabitants fleeing in terror. By September 1940 such fears had subsided, although a good deal of thought had been given to arming the police, not to keep order among the civilian population (though conceivably in an emergency it could have come to that) but, since they were already well organised, uniformed and disciplined, to serve as a kind of second-line Home Guard. Churchill was an enthusiastic advocate of this policy, which he proposed at his first Cabinet meeting on 11 May, and ten days later the Cabinet agreed to it ‘as far as the arms available permitted’ an important qualification, since at that time the Army and LDV had first claim on any firearms that could be found.

During the next few weeks ministers returned to the question on several occasions, and it was even suggested at one meeting that the ‘police should become part of the Armed Forces’ in the event of invasion, though it was then pointed out that some were over military age and that this essentially civilian body could not be transformed ‘as a whole and automatically into a combat force’. A good deal of anxiety existed within the Cabinet about the role of the police during an invasion if they were not to be combatants, and the Home Secretary tried to reassure his colleagues on 10 July by explaining that the police had been instructed that ‘
until
the enemy had obtained effective control of an area it was their duty to fight and to treat the enemy as miscreants’, a phrase which conjures up a suggestion of some stalwart village bobby rounding up a German soldier who had strayed on to his ‘patch’ as though he were a Saturday-night drunk. But, Herbert Morrison added, ‘should the police … find themselves behind enemy lines, they had orders to give up their arms and to look after the interests of the civil population’.

The thought of British policemen carrying out the orders of Nazi officers in some conquered corner of the country still troubled the government, and on 26 July the Cabinet was told that news of it had leaked out and ‘become known in very misleading forms. It was suggested that it would be preferable if the police were instructed in this contingency to act at their own discretion and not, in any event, to afford assistance to the invader.’ Some ministers felt that ‘in no circumstances should the police be responsible for keeping order in an area which had been overrun by the enemy; such a task should be performed by the enemy’. Finally, on 5 August, the existing instructions were confirmed, to the effect that ‘if any
elements of the civil population remained in an enemy-occupied area, the rearguard of the police should also remain behind, and the Senior Officer of the police should offer the assistance of the police in maintaining order, any arms not previously handed over to the military authorities being surrendered’. Once again ‘objection was raised to the idea that the police should put themselves under the enemy and give them any help whatsoever’, but by now these fine professions of principle were being tempered with realism. These rules, it was explained, ‘applied only to the rearguard, and … if steps were to be taken to ensure that civilians stayed put, and did not obstruct the roads, some police must stay behind until the enemy occupation became effective’.

The original decision to arm the police was never formally rescinded, but the first weapons ordered for the purpose did not arrive from the United States until 19.41. A scattering of weapons still remained in police stations for use against criminals, but the overwhelming majority of policemen in 1940 were, and remained, unarmed. If any refugees had poured out of the coastal towns of Kent and Sussex that autumn, they would not have found their way barred by some grim-faced gendarme flourishing a gun, but by a familiar, blue-helmeted figure armed with nothing more lethal than persuasion, cajolery and, as a last resort, a truncheon, reciting that often heard litany, This way please.’

The police, then, had their orders: To get out if they could, to keep order for the Germans if necessary, but not to collaborate. What of the ordinary civilian ? Some people admitted, even at the time, that once the Germans had arrived they would do what they were told without question. A few talked of killing themselves and their children rather than allow them to grow up in a Nazi country, though the temptation to postpone such an irrevocable act would probably have proved almost irresistible. A number did, however, plan to make the Germans’ arrival as disagreeable as possible. One wealthy woman in Buckinghamshire proposed to invite the officers in for champagne, privily dosed with weedkiller, and thus ‘poison the lot’, while even the normally kind-hearted ladies of the Women’s Institutes, which officially took no direct part in the war effort, pondered how the home-made jam, for whose manufacture they were famous, should be denied to the enemy. At Langton Matravers in Dorset the best method of jam-interdiction was seriously debated: ‘Was it’, the women wondered, ‘wise to hide one’s store of jam under the floor … or imitate a Jael-like housewife who kept a hammer ready for a last-minute smashing, in hopes of the dire effect of powdered glass on jam-starved Germans ?’

¹
In fact, both this woman’s father and brother, after being well treated, were released the same day and with the arrival of troops in the area the business was soon booming again.

²
A similar fear of secret signals to aircraft infected the Germans on Guernsey, who suspected that tomatoes had been planted in some fields to point towards hidden gun batteries.

Chapter 4: Bombardment

The air war over England increases day by day and hour by hour. It is like a howling crescendo.

German radio commentator, 7 September 1940

The policy of ‘No surrender’, announced in the House of Commons, was, hard though the Germans found it to believe, no mere public gesture. In private, too, the government had determined to sell their lives dearly, as one minister learned when, on the afternoon of 28 May, the senior members of the new coalition government were summoned to meet the Prime Minister.

He said, ‘I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man’. But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out…. ‘And I am convinced,’ he concluded, ‘that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the floor.’ There were loud cries of approval all round the table.

The defence of the United Kingdom against invasion first came before the Cabinet on 30 April, when the Secretary of State for War reported that the Chiefs of Staff were considering the subject, and the last meeting of the Chamberlain Cabinet on 9 May had before it a warning from the Chiefs of Staff that a landing might come anywhere between the Wash and Newhaven, though the Secretary of State for War, enjoying, though he did not know it, his last day in office, observed reassuringly that an attack on the South Coast was unlikely. When, twelve days later, the Cabinet returned to the subject, it was in an atmosphere far removed from the earlier complacency, the Home Secretary being instructed to consider collecting firearms in private ownership. There was, too, that day a quaint echo of an earlier war. The Cabinet discussed whether the Kaiser, who had fled to Holland in 1918 to escape the vengeance of the allies and the wrath of his fellow-countrymen, should be given asylum in Britain if he asked for it. It was decided that he should, but the request was never made.