Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (44 page)

It is true that Hitler was thrown by the British declaration of war; but it would be wrong therefore to regard his subsequent offers of peace as sincere. As he told von Brauchitsch and Halder two days after his offer of peace in October 1939: ‘The German war aim ... must consist of the final military defeat of the West.... This fundamental aim must be adjusted from time to time for propaganda purposes.... [But] this does not alter the war aim itself ... [which is] the complete annihilation of the French and British forces.’
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Even the decision to attack Russia had an anti-British objective: as he put it on 31 July 1940, only twelve days after offering peace with Britain:
‘Russia is the factor on which Britain is relying the most.... With Russia shattered, Britain’s last hope would be shattered
.’
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The fact that Hitler repeatedly changed his tactics, mingling racial goals of
Lebensraum
with his own version of grand strategy, has tended to confuse historians as to his ultimate intentions. The simple reality is that from 1936, if not earlier, Hitler regarded final confrontation as inevitable, even if it was regrettable on racial grounds, and came five years too early. The idea that a peace could have been struck with ‘That Man’, as Churchill called him, which would have preserved the British Empire and Conservative power is fanciful. Had Britain not fought over Poland; had Britain sought to make peace in May 1940 or before Barbarossa; had Britain been brought to its knees by the force of 300 U-boats which Admiral Dönitz had recommended - whichever alternative scenario one considers, the consequence would have been the same: subordination to the Third Reich.

Churchill was therefore right. When, on Wednesday 5 October 1938, he swam against the tide of popular euphoria by denouncing the Munich agreement in the House of Commons, he put his finger on the essential truth:

Yet Churchill was not contemplating the worst possible scenario when he spoke of Britain falling into Germany’s ‘power, orbit and influence’. There was another still worse possibility which also needs to be considered: an outright German invasion and occupation of Britain.

On Friday 24 May 1940, General Heinz Guderian’s 1st Panzer Division reached the Aa canalized river south of Gravelines in France, and in fierce fighting secured bridgeheads across it. They were only ten miles away from 400,000 exhausted Allied soldiers pinned down on the Flanders beaches. Then, just as the greatest tank commander prepared the greatest mechanised unit for the greatest military coup of the twentieth century, he received an order to halt. Despite his protestations, three days later the order was still in force. In the meantime the perimeter was fortified and over the next nine days 338,226 Allied troops were evacuated to Britain in Operation Dynamo.

Guderian always believed that Hitler’s order - issued despite Chief of Staff General Franz Halder’s and Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch’s opposition - was ‘a mistake pregnant with consequence, for only a capture of the BEF ... could have created the conditions necessary for a successful German invasion of Great Britain’.
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Historians have long debated the reasons it was issued, but they have rarely asked what would have happened if the BEF
had
been captured wholesale; or if, during Dynamo, the 1,400-yard-long, 5-foot-wide wooden pier at the East Mole, down which a quarter of a million Allied troops walked to safety, had been destroyed by the Stukas which spent over a week trying to hit it.
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Grand Admiral Erich Raeder first discussed invading Britain with Hitler on 21 May 1940, having already instructed his staff to investigate the possibility on 15 November the previous year.
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Hitler was unenthusiastic, and by the time of their next talk on the subject, on 20 June, he seemed more interested in discussing resettling Jews on Madagascar. By that time the vital moment had passed and although Hitler was to issue Führer Directive No. 16, entitled ‘Preparations for a Landing Operation against England’ on 16 July 1940, the ideal time to strike had passed.
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The target date of 15 September set by Hitler at the end of July was contingent on the destruction of Britain’s naval and air defences, which it proved impossible to achieve. The invasion was postponed three times and by December 1940 preparations for it had become mere ‘camouflage’ for the planned attack on the Soviet Union (which Hitler saw as less risky than a cross-Channel invasion).
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But what if Hitler had been planning Operation Sealion for years at the Armed Forces High Command (OKW) level rather than just as a half-hearted, last-minute initiative by the Naval Staff? What if the vast amount of shipping - 1,722 barges, 471 tugs, 1,161 motor boats and 155 transport vessels were estimated as being needed - had already been earmarked and were sailing towards the Maas and Scheldt estuaries in late May? What if the plan of General Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe to drop 5,000 parachutists on the seven vital RAF sectors in south-east England with a mission to rip out the heart of Fighter Command had been adopted rather than rejected by Goering? What if London, rather than Paris, had been Hitler’s goal?
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Most of the many historical and literary analyses of German invasions of the British Isles assume one coming in August or September 1940 or even later. But a German arrival in late May 1940 would have faced, not the recently returned BEF, but the minimal forces left behind.
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The 483,924 First World War Springfield rifles which equipped the Home Guard did not arrive from America until August 1940, and many of the 18,000 pillboxes constructed across southern England did not have their concrete foundations put down until mid-June.
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South of London at that time there were only forty-eight field guns, and fifty-four twopounder anti-tank guns. As General Günther Blumentritt of the OKW was to lament after the war, ‘We might, had the plans been ready, have crossed to England with strong forces after the Dunkirk operation.’ Instead, in Halder’s words, the invasion was ‘a thought [Hitler] had hitherto avoided’.
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If the initial thirteen crack German divisions had forced their way ashore across a broad front on the English south coast, they would, it is true, have had 1,495 tons of First World War surplus mustard gas dropped on them from low-flying aircraft. But this was an eventuality for which they were nevertheless prepared and trained.
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If they had managed to cross the twenty-two miles of English Channel it is doubtful that any artificial or natural obstacles - such as the Rye-Hythe Royal Military Canal - would have long impeded their drive north. According to Field Marshal Gerd von Runstedt’s ‘Forecast of Early Fighting on English Soil’, issued on 14 September 1940, ‘small but complete Panzer units will be included at an early stage in the first assault’.
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Had the RAF not had the advantage of the recently deployed radar, or had the Luftwaffe’s codes not been cracked - or had General Kurt Student, the Commander-in-Chief of airborne troops, managed to neutralise the key sectors of Dowding’s Fighter Command - the war in the air too might well have gone differently.

In fact, it was not until 20 July that General Alan Brooke took over General Ironside’s command as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces. He immediately moved the few tanks he had closer to the coast. An attack in late May, however, would have found much of the British armour defending a makeshift defence line far further back inland, effectively conceding the bridgeheads on the south coast. The Germans themselves - for all their generals’ postwar protestations that Sealion was, as von Runstedt told his captors in 1945, ‘a sort of game because it was obvious that no invasion was possible’ - were hoping to reach Ashford in Kent at an early stage in the engagement.
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Although they were expecting fierce resistance at the beachheads by mid-September, the Germans might have been pleasantly surprised had they attacked in May. As the official historian of Britain’s defences, Basil Collier, points out: ‘The vital sector from Sheppey to Rye was manned by 1st London Division with 23 field guns, no anti-tank guns, no armoured cars, no armoured fighting vehicles and about one-sixth of the anti-tank rifles to which it was entitled.’
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Those places which were well defended, such as the six-inch gun emplacements at Shoeburyness, could have been bypassed as easily as was the Maginot line.

Would the Luftwaffe and German navy have been able to neutralise the Royal Navy for the crucial twelve hours necessary to transport the first wave across the Channel? With a gamble of this nature, the Germans would have had to commit virtually their entire naval forces to the operation. On the other hand, a very short period of time - half a day - would have sufficed to get the invasion force across. Moreover, it is important to remember that nine out of the fifty destroyers taking part in Operation Dynamo had been sunk and twenty-three damaged. In June 1940 the Royal Navy had only sixty-eight operational destroyersagainst a 1919 total of 433. It is certainly not impossible to see how the first successful invasion of Britain for 874 years might have been effected.

What would occupation have meant? In the next chapter, Michael Burleigh deals separately with the horrendous implications of a German victory in Eastern Europe. It is clear that the experience of Western Europe - a more appropriate model for Britain - was very different. In France, The Netherlands and other parts of occupied Western Europe, racial policy did not become paramount in the way that it did on the Eastern Front, with the exception that Jews were sent eastwards to the extermination camps irrespective of their nationality. Otherwise, the model of exploitation in Western Europe was more economic than racially based. France in particular was run as a kind of milch cow for the German war effort, with many thousands of French POWs being held as working hostages in Germany to provide labour and guarantee the good behaviour of the Vichy regime.

It has recently become fashionable to argue that the response of the British people to invasion and occupation would have been no different from that of the French, Czechs or Luxemburgers. It is an issue which, of course, goes to the heart of British national self-perception. In her book on the wartime Channel Islands, published in 1995, the
Guardian
journalist Madeleine Bunting argues that because ‘the islanders compromised, collaborated and fraternised just as people did throughout occupied Europe’ it follows that their experience ‘directly challenges the belief that the Second World War proved that [Britons] were inherently different from the rest of Europe’. She believes the Channel Islands experience between 1940 and 1945 weakens the hold of ‘the myth of the distinctiveness of the British character from that of continental Europeans’. In the light of her research, the ‘narrow, nationalistic understanding of the war’ needs to be replaced with ’a recognition of the common European history of those tumultuous years’.
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Reviewing her book, the playwright John Mortimer described the Islands as ‘the ideal testing ground for the British character and British virtues under stress’. He concluded that ‘the British were put to the test and behaved no better or much worse than many people in Europe’.
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Even the journalist Anne Applebaum, writing in the conservative
Spectator
, has argued that ‘in the event of Nazi occupation, Britons would have behaved no better and no worse than other defeated peoples’.
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Other authors have imagined a Britain in which ‘slowly a relationship of sorts began to develop between the British people and members of the German armed forces ... and many a child in hospital was given presents by a Father Christmas with an unfamiliar accent’.
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Another historian believes that ‘great numbers of ordinary decent Britons would have begun to cooperate with the Germans in putting down the Resistance just to bring about a sort of peace’.
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All these commentators have failed to appreciate the profound differences between the situation of the Channel Islands and that of mainland Britain. Firstly, the Islands had been ordered by the War Office
not
to resist the invader as their strategic importance was minimal; whereas in Britain Churchill was exhorting the people to ‘fight on the beaches’ on 4 June. St Helier could hardly, as Churchill said of London, have swallowed an entire German army. Secondly, the Islands had been evacuated of one-third of their population, including all their able-bodied men of military age (10,000 of whom served with distinction in the war). The 60,000 who were left were guarded by no less than 37,000 Germans - a ratio which, if translated to mainland Britain, would have required the Nazis to station thirty million troops! Thirdly, the Channel Islanders cannot be equated with the British as a whole, for all the Surrey-like nature of their architecture. Guernsey-men still call Jerseymen ‘crapauds’ and in 1939 Norman French, the Islands’ original patois, was still widely spoken.
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At 0.1 per cent of the mainland population, the Islands anyhow represent too statistically insignificant a sample to be of any meaningful use as a political barometer for the rest of the United Kingdom. The geography and society of the Islands also precluded useful resistance. Flat, densely populated, with a higher proportion of Germans per square mile during the war than Germany itself, with no political parties, trade unions or obvious centres for resistance, the Islands cannot provide any indication as to how the East End of London, the mining valleys of South Wales, the factories of the North-east or the slums of Glasgow would have reacted to the advent of the Nazi jackboot. Even Bunting acknowledges that ‘the islands had no tradition of opposing authority. They were rigidly hierarchical, conformist societies’.
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