FRIDAY, September the thirteenth, marked the opening of “Invasion Week-end”. There was a full moon and a high tide. The ports across the Channel were swarming with German soldiers, and the harbours crowded with flat-bottomed troop-carrying barges; this was Hitler’s last opportunity to launch an invasion before the equinoctial gales began. The British Navy doubled its watch-out patrols, the Army manned its guns, and the Air Force hammered at the enemy bases. England waited.

That same Friday, Knickerbocker and I drove down to Dover. We left London about eleven o’clock in the morning. Although the night blitz had been going on for nearly a week, we were surprised to find how little damage had been done to the main roads. On our way through the congested suburbs we were forced to détour only twice. We passed several houses looking like stage sets with the walls stripped off; workmen sweeping up the broken glass in front of a row of shops; and a group of people peering curiously down a crater in the middle of the street. But that was all. After the terrible pounding of the last few nights it seemed surprising that comparatively so little damage had been done.

Soon we were on the main highway with the country opening up around us. There was little traffic until we reached Maidstone; but from there to Dover—a stretch of about forty miles—the atmosphere turned into a military one. Army lorries, motor-cycles, Air Force camions and light tanks hurtled past us at top speed. Would this road resound to the tread of armoured German divisions as so many other unlikely roads had done in their time? We stared at the insignificant green fields stretching out on either side of us, wondering if men would soon be giving their lives to defend them inch by inch; if one day teachers would bring their pupils—perhaps to that small hill in the distance—to see a monument marking the place where one of the great battles of 1940 had been fought.

These were the things we were thinking on that bright September morning. Knick said suddenly: “Do you suppose one day we’ll be driving like hell along the road to Norfolk, Virginia, or to Portland, Maine, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, to cover an invasion?”

“You may, but I’ll be going in the other direction.”

“Well, it could happen. With the British and French fleets in the hands of Germany; with a hostile Japan; with South America and Canada under the Axis, it’s exactly what would happen. Can you imagine what it would be like? Can you see the Nazi mechanized columns rolling over those long straight roads of ours? Can you see the Fifth Columnists sabotaging the power plants and cutting the telephone wires? Can you see the evacuees streaming out of New York and Chicago? And the planes swooping down bombing and machine-gunning them? Can you see the panic? It’s happened everywhere else—why not America? By God, I think I’ll open up my lecture tour like that! What do you think of it?”

“Well, it ought to keep the audience awake …”

We stopped at Canterbury for lunch. Here the war seemed far away. The outline of the great cathedral took you back to another century, and even the food belied the fact that England was a besieged and beleaguered fortress. We had lobster mayonnaise, roast chicken, vegetable salad and ice-cream. Under the Sundaes we saw the heading: “Knickerbocker Glory.” Delighted, Knick asked the waitress how they  had happened to think of it. “Oh, I don’t know. We like to give our sweets fancy names.” Knick paid the bill with a five-pound note which called for a signature on the back. The waitress was not amused; she gave him an angry look, no doubt thinking it was an ill-advised American attempt at humour.

On the last fifteen miles to Dover we passed a good many barricades and camouflaged blockhouses. The fields on either side were cluttered with iron stakes, rolls of wire, and even old carts, to prevent German planes from landing. At one point we saw one which had landed by mistake—a twisted mass of steel with a swastika more crooked than ever. It looked like a Messerschmitt 109, but, not being an expert, I asked the sentry standing guard.

“Can’t say, miss,” he replied in a bored tone. “There are so many types scattered around here. It gets a bit confusing.”

I nodded understandingly and climbed back into the car. I thought of the remark some American journalist had made: “We mustn’t exaggerate. Kent is not knee-deep in planes: only ankle-deep.”

A few miles outside Dover the prohibited area began. A road patrol stopped us and we showed our papers. My car had been registered with the police several weeks before and the yellow strip on the windshield with a Coastal Defence number on it permitted us to drive into the town. From the top of a hill we saw the rugged outline of the castle on the cliff, the sleepy houses far below and the blue waters of the Channel stretching out beyond. In the distance it looked the same as it always had, but when we reached the waterfront we found that the lively atmosphere had given way to a sombre, melancholy one. The Grand Hotel, where we had stayed a few weeks before, was in ruins. Half its insides were spilt over the square and the roller-skating pavilion next to it had only the sky for a canopy. The balloon-barrage soldiers were still billeted in a house across the way. The windows had been blown out but the walls and roof were still standing.

We were walking around the square when O’Dowd Gallagher of the Daily Express and H. A. Flower of the Daily Telegraph drove up. They told us the bombing had taken place only a few days before and miraculously enough only two people had been killed. A couple of soldiers standing nearby said the bodies were still beneath the wreckage. Just then a bomber swooped out of the clouds, about a thousand feet above us. We looked at it, startled, but one of the soldiers said: “Oh, that’s a Wellington.” We went on talking. Suddenly I saw four small black specks falling from the undercarriage. They looked like a bunch of grapes and for a moment seemed to be hanging in the air.

“Bombs!” shouted one of the soldiers. “Get down!”

We flung ourselves, face down, on the pavement. I buried my head in my arms and waited. It seemed interminable. Then the earth shuddered violently: one, two, three, four. We picked ourselves up, our clothes covered with mud. The bombs had landed on the beach and in the water fifty yards away. The plane was a Wellington all right—but one the Germans had evidently captured in France.

We tried to resume our conversation, but twice more lone raiders came out of the clouds and twice more we took cover—this time diving into a small brick shelter in the middle of the green. I’ll never forget the fat girl with the black curls, who had been hanging around the square flirting with the soldiers, breathing heavily on my neck and saying: “Christ, it’s enough to ruin your digestion.”

It had certainly ruined mine. I decided I’d had enough of Dover Square. The men climbed into my car and we drove up to Shakespeare Cliff, where, three weeks before, we had watched the great air battles over the coast. We found Arthur Mencken, the photographer for Life, taking pictures of the harbour. There was a strong wind blowing and the Channel was flecked with white-caps. The coast of France looked clearer than usual and with the glasses I made out the lighthouse near Calais, the church steeple in Boulogne and the tall, thin monument which had been erected at the end of the last war in memory of the famous Dover Patrol.

“If only we could see some of those invasion barges!” said Knick. “What a hell of a good story it would make …”

“I know,” said Arthur. “Flash—As I was standing to-day on the rugged cliffs of Dover I saw the vast German flotilla hoisting anchor in final preparations for its death charge across the narrow straits …”

“Wait a minute,” said Knick, staring through his glasses. “Who’s that fat man I see over there with all the medals?”

“By God!” exclaimed O’Dowd. “And the little dark hunchback one standing next to him?”

“Yes!” said Arthur. “And the one with the crooked moustache?”

“You don’t think it can be Charlie Chaplin?” said Knick.

It was obvious the bombs had had their effect.

It was a strange forty-eight hours for a week-end which will probably go down in history as the week-end Hitler didn’t invade. Opinion among the naval and military experts with whom we talked was divided as to the likelihood of the attempt, but it was generally agreed that any plan to send flat-bottomed boats across the Channel would first be preceded by an intense air and land bombardment; then, simultaneously, an effort to land parachute troops several miles behind the coast to attack in the rear and ultimately connect with the sea-borne forces.

It was a strange atmosphere. Knick and I established ourselves in a country house only three miles from the coast, which a friend had lent us. After the London blitz the quiet was almost oppressive; no alarms, no droning planes, no burst of gunfire. Save for an occasional raider, or a few haphazard shells into Dover, the only display of fireworks was the show put on each night by the R.A.F. When the wind was right you could hear the bombs dropping across the Channel. One night we drove up to the sea-front and saw the sky lighting up with bursts of shrapnel and the red glow of parachute flares.

Even though the army slept with its boots on and the civilian population went to bed each night prepared to hear the church bells tolling to tell them the hour had come, no one had any fear as to the ultimate result. When you talked to the local inhabitants about it, they laughed and said: “Let him try it.” Although the countryside reverberated with the sound of lorries and motor-cycles and fields were alive with military patrols, the villagers carried on their normal routine as though they were far removed from the war. At any hour their farms and backyards might have been turned into a battlefield, yet you saw children playing in the dusty roads and farmers calmly ploughing their fields. Some thought it couldn’t happen; others thought it wouldn’t happen; others never thought about it at all. When the maid brought me breakfast in the morning she asked me about the bombing of London.

“It must be very alarming,” she said. “Did you come down here for a rest?”

In the meantime, Dr. Goebbels was informing his countrymen that the English were trembling in their boots—just as the Paris Moniteur of 1803 printed despatches from Fifth Column reporters, calculated to please: 

On Sunday, both in the morning and in the afternoon, the air was filled with the heavy roar of planes; it was that deep, throaty noise that meant volume; occasionally we heard the wail of an engine going into a power dive and the staccato rattle of machine-gun bullets, but low clouds prevented  us from seeing anything. Even from Shakespeare Cliff there was no break in the solid grey curtain. In fact the only plane we saw all day was a nuisance raider. That was in the afternoon when we went up to Dover Castle to talk to one of the Intelligence Officers. The man we wanted to see wasn’t there, but an elderly captain asked if there was anything he could do for us. When he heard Knickerbocker’s name he glared at him angrily. “You’re the man who says the Germans are going to try to invade here.”

“That’s the opinion in London.”

“Well, if that’s what we pay our politicians to think, we’d better change the whole lot of them. Invasion? Nonsense! The Germans won’t get over here unless we decide to build a bridge for them. Hitler’s one big bluff.”

We were standing on a small promontory which jutted over the cliff with the long sweep of the Channel below us. The captain had scarcely spoken his last words before a German raider dived out of the clouds and dropped a stick of bombs that seemed to whistle past our noses. Three hit the water and the fourth hit the end of the pier, about a mile away.

“I don’t think bluff is exactly the right word,” said Knick; the captain cleared his throat but made no comment.

Bluff or no bluff, no one was taking any chances, and for miles behind the coast towns and villages were honeycombed with troops. The three nights we were there Knick and I dined with some of the officers of the Queen’s Westminsters, who were billeted only a short distance away from where we were staying. Tom Mitford was the adjutant of the regiment and persuaded the proprietress of the neighbouring pub to let us come in and cook our own dinner. Knick and I spent hours buying tinned food—everything from baked beans and vegetable salad to pickled onions and Californian pears. The boys provided eggs and butter, and, with the confidence that all men seem to have in their ability to cook, crowded into the kitchen offering to mix the omelette and warm up the beans. It seemed strange to see the young men you had dined and danced with now members of a shock troop regiment, waiting to meet the Nazi invasion. They appeared to regard it as a comic situation themselves, and when one of them expressed doubts as to whether the Germans would ever make the attempt, Anthony Winn said brightly: “Well, if they don’t I’m going to resign before hordes of angry bombed-out civilians start handing us white feathers.”

On Monday the order came that they could take off their boots when they went to bed. Things were relaxing. Knick and I started back to London with “invasion week-end” fading peacefully into the background. What had happened? At the time it was difficult to draw any conclusions, but now, in the light of past events, the answer is more obvious. The Sunday we spent wandering about the streets of Dover buying our tins of baked beans and vegetable salad was September the fifteenth—the greatest day in the history of the Royal Air Force. The actions which took place were described by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons as “the most brilliant and fruitful of any fought upon a large scale up to that date by the fighters of the Royal Air Force”. The enemy lost one hundred and eighty-five aircraft.

This was the last big wallop the Germans took. When the score was chalked up on the night of the fifteenth, the Germans had lost 1,835 planes—over three-quarters of the total number they lost during the whole three months of their intensive daylight attacks.

That memorable day marked the turn of the tide. The back of the Nazi Air Force was broken and Germany had failed to establish the crushing superiority essential for a successful invasion. According to the pamphlet published by the Air Ministry, The Battle of Britain, Germany’s failure to destroy the British Fighter Force meant:

We left the peace of the English coast regretfully and headed back to London and the blitz once more. On the way, Knick said: “I’ve been thinking over what that sour-faced captain at the Castle said. I didn’t take to him any too well, but I’m beginning to think he’s right. Hitler really does need a bridge.”