‘The invasion is hooey. Hitler is going east.’
(R. A. ‘Rab’ Butler, junior Foreign Office minister, to Cecil King, newspaper executive, 14 August 1940)
The British people, because they are in fact so safe, have for many years enjoyed a good invasion scare. And those who have wanted to stir them to martial or naval enthusiasm have enjoyed providing such tales. How pleasant to finish such a drama, close the book and go quietly to bed in our safe homes on our sea-girt island, sure that this disaster will never happen to us. The first modern version of this sort of thing must be The Battle of Dorking (1871), a pamphlet more than a book, by George Tomkyns Chesney. In this work, the Germans (tactfully unnamed, though it is obviously them) are for the first time portrayed as an invading enemy. It was written just after an astonished world had watched the utter defeat of France at the hands of Prussia, a blow as unexpected as the Blitzkrieg would be seven decades later. It is strange that this experience, then so recent, did not cause military experts of the late 1930s to doubt France’s strength in that era. But it appears not to have done so.
In Chesney’s book, the unidentified Germans win, partly because a large part of the British Army is in Canada defending it from the hostile and aggressive USA. This is itself an interesting reflection on the current belief in an eternal shoulder-to-shoulder friendship between Britain and the United States. Another sizeable British force is stuck in India putting down a rebellion. Using secret weapons, the Germans defeat a scattered and badly organised British fleet and march ashore, scornfully sweeping aside our pitiful army, a poorly armed Home Guard raised in a few frantic days. They then turn Britain into a province of serfs subjected to huge war indemnities and heavy taxes, strip us of weapons and war-making capacity, usurp our naval supremacy and dismantle the British empire. They give Canada to the USA, which is at no stage viewed as a potential saviour. Prophetically, the danger comes through choice. Britain is invaded because it has rushed voluntarily into continental war for an abstract principle, as it was actually to do in 1914 and 1939. Public indignation over the German annexation of Denmark and Holland leads, in Chesney’s fiction, to a British declaration of war on Germany. Only a few years before it was written, as noted above, Lord Palmerston had slithered out of just such a commitment to Denmark.
Chesney, at the time he wrote the book, was a captain in the Royal Engineers, but would eventually become a knighted general and the Tory MP for Oxford, so showing that frightening the public does not necessarily hold a man back in his career. He originally wrote the story anonymously, but his authorship quite soon became known. He had a practical aim – to warn of the poor levels of military preparation in the Britain of his day. His book was a sensation, and remained in print right up until 1914.
More potent, because it was serialised in the first Lord Northcliffe’s then all-powerful Daily Mail, was William Le Queux’s 1906 novel The Invasion of 1910. This was a solid piece of propaganda for conscription, much influenced by Lord Roberts’s National Service League and by those who wanted Britain to become a continental land power as well as a global sea power. This mismatch between Britain’s increasing continental ambitions and its feeble land army would recur over and over again in the years to come.
The Germans, once again, are the invaders, this time undisguised. Somehow they get ashore on the east coast, but are eventually defeated by citizen soldiers. This book was thoroughly mocked by P. G. Wodehouse in his 1909 satire The Swoop! Or How Clarence Saved England, in which Britain is invaded by seven different countries at once and then saved by the Boy Scouts. The invaders, for added comedy, include landlocked, perpetually neutral Switzerland. The catastrophe takes place in the middle of the cricket season and the newspapers are more interested in Surrey’s failure at the Oval than they are in a German landing. Clarence, a Boy Scout, succeeds (by various artifices) in getting the foreigners to leave. Wodehouse’s light-hearted view of the supposed invasion danger seems to have been more typical of public opinion than that of the alarmist writers. Conscription, the aim of those fear-mongering authors satirised by Wodehouse, never became popular and was eventually reluctantly imposed only after two years of war.
A few years before, in 1894, when Britain had yet to entangle itself in an informal alliance with France, Le Queux had written a rather different prophecy, The Great War in England in 1897, in which the invaders were our traditional French enemies, accompanied by the then-hated Russians. This version of national peril begins with French ships bombarding Brighton, reducing the Metropole Hotel to a gaunt ruin. But it ends in salvation when Germany and Italy come to Britain’s aid. These books illustrate the truth of the view that countries have no eternal friends (or enemies), and that this year’s menace may be next year’s saviour and vice versa.
Fiendish Cossacks (not many years hence to be our gallant allies) commit appalling atrocities. Russian soldiers in general get drunk on wine dragged from hotel cellars. They loot and burn. But they are beaten in the end. The victorious Anglo-German-Italian alliance rounds off the war by slicing large portions off eastern France and annexing them to Germany, awarding Algeria to the British empire and giving much of Russia’s Central Asian territory to Britain as well, so settling the Great Game once and for all.
Certainly Russia had long been deeply unpopular in Britain as a cruel tyranny. And a French invasion had been seriously feared in the 1860s. Visitors to Portsmouth may still admire the ring of landward-facing forts around the northern edges of what was once the most fortified city of the empire. These tremendous structures were designed to defend the Royal Navy’s chief port from an invading French force. This was expected to land some miles further east and attack the city from inland. Huge sea defences were also built on artificial islands and on the shore, as precautions against direct French naval assault. These fortifications remain as lasting monuments to a long-dead panic. Some are abandoned. Others perform modern tasks – one is a training college for the Secret Intelligence Service, another is a naval research establishment, others are now converted into luxury housing for solitude-loving millionaires. Those who nowadays mock the French for their Maginot Line would benefit from visiting these enduring monstrosities of brick and concrete, built according to the most advanced techniques of the time. Their builders were untroubled by the expense. The visitor may see this as he examines their enormous ammunition stores, gun emplacements and deep, deep cellars hewn out of the downland chalk by Welsh miners brought hundreds of miles for the task. These mighty relics will probably still be there, puzzling whoever looks at them, long after we have all gone and Portsmouth is once again a coastal swamp while the hills above it are grazed by wild sheep.
A more persuasive and intelligent invasion fantasy can be found in Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands (1903). In this still-enjoyable book, the invasion problem – that it is actually very hard to make an opposed landing from the sea – is solved by an ingenious plan for total surprise. But the knowledgeable reader, however much he is immersed in the adventure and the mystery, must know that the German attempt to rival Britain as a global naval power ended in the acknowledged defeat of Germany in 1911.
The most literary of these tales is When William Came (1913), a bitter story by Hector Hugh Munro. Munro is better known as Saki, the author of a series of brilliant if deeply cynical short stories which challenge Oscar Wilde for pure wit. His invasion fantasy says little about the actual defeat, described universally as the ‘fait accompli’. It dwells instead on the multiple humiliations involved in being a defeated people, from the need to fill in a police form when one has a visitor to stay, to the Hohenzollern insignia on British pillar boxes and the sight of German uhlans galloping along Rotten Row. Like Le Queux’s Invasion, it is pregnant with propaganda for conscription. Soon after the invaders are fully established, the kaiser issues an insulting decree saying that, as Englishmen showed no previous interest in the arts of war, they will henceforth be excused military service under their new rulers. Instead, they will pay a heavy tax, and all kinds of military activities will be illegal.
Two passages are especially sour. Both dwell on England’s shameful, rapid fall from its status as world power. In one, Munro describes ‘the grey ships of war riding in Plymouth Bay and Southampton Water with a flag at their stern that older generations of Britons had never looked on’. And then again,
There was the grey cold sea outside Dover and Portsmouth and Cork, where the great grey ships of war rocked and swung with the tides, where the sailors sang, in doggerel English, that bitter-sounding adaptation, ‘Germania rules t’e waves,’ where the flag of a World-Power floated for the world to see.
It was almost as if Munro was enjoying the humiliation of the shallow, demoralised and lazy ruling class he spent so much time mocking. It is also casually anti-Jewish, in the way in which many British people were anti-Jewish until this became impossible after the death camps were opened in 1945. Many of the former elite are shown up by defeat. They turn out to be worthless collaborators suspiciously ready to shrug off the tedious burdens of greatness and enjoy their new and irresponsible status. He dwells on the prevalence of a sly and cynical tune and song, popular in these times, the ‘National Anthem of the fait accompli’. The reader is left to imagine it, perhaps as something like the ‘cracked, yellow’ tune which leaks from the telescreens in the Chestnut Tree Café in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. The book is hard to find in Britain, except in anthologies. In France, where perhaps readers have a special reason to enjoy the description of a German-occupied England, it can occasionally be found in print as a book in its own right, Quand Guillaume Vint.
I do not know of anything similar published during the years between 1918 and 1939. Perhaps, in the seemingly peaceful 1920s and early 1930s, a German invasion seemed less thinkable than it had in the pre-1914 era. By the time it appeared possible, in 1940, it was too real a fear to be fictionalised. Though by 1942, when the danger was much reduced, the first Hitler invasion fantasy had appeared. Perhaps it was also because bombs were viewed as more of a threat than foreign boots on British soil. Nevil Shute’s novel set in Southampton, What Happened to the Corbetts (1939), was a highly prophetic and unsettling description of what it would be like for prosperous civilians in a modern country to suffer bombing from the air.
H. V. Morton, chronicler of the ‘Atlantic Charter’ meeting, imagined a Nazi takeover of Britain in 1944 in his 1942 short story ‘I, James Blunt’. This appeared long after the idea had faded from the minds of most people, including the mind of Hitler, and was little-noted. But after the war, as the story of Britain’s lone, heroic peril grew in power and importance in British imaginations, there were a number of invasion and defeat fantasies about what might have been. These include Kevin Brownlow’s 1964 film It Happened Here, and in the same year an ITV drama called The Other Man. In this drama the Germans build a channel tunnel using concentration camp labour, as appalled travellers discover when they pull the blinds away from the window of their train. There was also a 1978 BBC drama series An Englishman’s Castle, in which the Nazi occupation has become an accepted fact, its underlying ruthlessness concealed by a front of civilisation. Most graphic (and first published in the same year) is a novel by Len Deighton, SS-GB, in which, with typical attention to detail, Deighton describes a German-occupied London, demoralised and full of nasty compromises, not long after invasion. It has an unforgivingly realistic tone, in which perfectly decent people find that they must swallow their pride and collaborate to survive. This may have limited this clever book’s success. It may also have made the TV adaptation of it, shown in 2017, a flop. Like It Happened Here, SS-GB assumes an eventual American rescue, though Deighton is careful to pin this, credibly, on Washington’s self-interested desire to get its hands on British nuclear research.
These works are evidence that the belief in a planned German invasion of Britain in 1940 remains strong. But they are also evidence that it is a belief that began in wartime. Most are aware of the side effects of this invasion fear: the pointless issue of identity cards; the rule that church bells were only to be rung in the event of such an invasion; the affectionate reverence for the Home Guard. There is also some trace of it in the recent popularity of the rediscovered government poster, intended to be issued if the invasion took place, bearing the almost comically British message ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.
The German official name of the planned invasion, ‘Operation Sealion’, is widely known. The existence of the so-called Black Book of persons to be arrested when the Germans arrived is also quite famous, though the list is not one of genuine key figures, but in many cases celebrities. It has clearly been cobbled together by frantic diplomats under orders, probably from old copies of Who’s Who. It contains details of at least one person who had been dead for years, and many mistakes and repetitions. If there ever was a serious arrest list intended for use by German occupation authorities in Britain, this was not it.
Together with the belief that we were in mortal peril from invasion, another belief is also very strong in the national mind: the idea that the threatened invasion was narrowly prevented by British success in the Battle of Britain, in early September 1940. This belief is almost universal. But is it true?
The facts are mainly against it, or neutral. Seaborne invasions are extremely hard to organise and mount, especially if you have only a few brief months before winter gales begin to blow. As Dwight Eisenhower knew very well in 1944, a mistake over the weather, or a well-directed defence, could have destroyed and overcome even the gigantic and long-assembled forces he unleashed on Normandy in June of that year. Famously, he was so uncertain of success that he had prepared a letter confessing failure. It read:
Our landings in the Cherbourg–Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
Winston Churchill, unable to erase from his memory the failed landings at Gallipoli 29 years before, must also have wondered many times if this new invasion would succeed. He tried very hard to divert and postpone it, infuriating Stalin, annoying Roosevelt and repeatedly failing to find the ‘soft underbelly’ of German military power in the Mediterranean, which he claimed was a good substitute.
The Germans in 1940 were equally cautious. Despite their might on land, they did not at that time possess a single landing craft, as we understand the term. Their small navy had been devastated by the Norwegian campaign. In two battles at Narvik, the German fleet had lost ten destroyers, a huge share of their total strength (the Kriegsmarine had only 22 destroyers at the outbreak of war). They had also lost the heavy cruiser Blücher, sunk by Norwegian shore batteries as it approached Oslo. German naval staff were quite clearly anxious to avoid being responsible for an operation they were sure would fail. The other wings of the German armed forces were equally anxious to avoid responsibility for a likely debacle. And, as they squabbled, Hitler’s own interest in the project (never great in the first place) faded until it vanished.
Hitler’s famous directive of 16 July 1940 sounds menacing because of its use of the deeply shocking phrase ‘to occupy [England] completely’:
As England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, still shows no willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her. The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English mother country as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued and, if it should be necessary, to occupy it completely.
But look at it again. It is subtly cautious, when read carefully. It is plainly intended to persuade Britain to ‘come to terms’. The landing will only be carried out ‘if necessary’. And it also presciently sees Britain more as a base ‘from which the war against Germany can be continued’ (by whom?) and as the headquarters of the empire rather than as an active enemy in its own right.
Richard North’s extraordinary account of the episode, The Many Not the Few (2012), suggests that the invasion was never more than a fantasy, useful (as it turned out) to both Hitler and Churchill for propaganda purposes, taken seriously by neither. Sacrilegiously, North suggests that the Battle of Britain itself was not the decisive factor leading to its abandonment. It is probably because of this sacrilege, and defiance of the patriotic myth, that North’s rather chilly book has received so little attention amid the incessant stream of volumes rehashing long-revealed secrets and often-retold stories about the war. His argument is that Hitler encouraged a British belief in the proposed invasion only to bring about peace talks.
In fact, sustained efforts were being made by German diplomats during this period, mainly through Sweden and Switzerland, to get Britain to make terms. North frequently notes reports about them in foreign newspapers of the time, probably sourced from German leaks. To this day, these efforts are so sensitive in Britain that details of them are elusive and official papers remain sealed or unavailable. This is probably because they show that important and significant people in Britain, not just traitors and defeatists, did seriously consider negotiations with Hitler, whose true nature was still not fully recognised in 1940. They may also show that apparently reasonable terms might have been available had they done so. Since the whole edifice of modern British patriotism and pride is based upon the belief that Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace, and never contemplated any alternative, this is awkward for patriotic historians and politicians.
Be that as it may, North repeatedly shows that Hitler was cool towards the invasion plan itself. In his daily diary of the Battle of Britain weeks, North notes that on 14 August 1940 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder discussed the invasion with Marshal Hermann Göring. Raeder noted that Hitler ‘does not propose to carry out an operation whose risk is too great: he advocates the view that the aim of defeating Britain is not dependent on the landing alone, but can be achieved in a different way’. North notes that Hitler wished to keep up the threat of an invasion, so preparations for it had to continue, visibly and obviously.1 This was echoed, six days later, in a conversation between R. A. (Richard Austen, universally known as ‘Rab’) Butler, then a junior Foreign Office minister, and Cecil King, a senior executive at the Daily Mirror. King recorded in his diary that Butler had told him the invasion was ‘hooey’.2 There had never been sufficient concentrations of German troops in France for such a huge operation. Hitler’s armies, he correctly predicted, would be going east to attack Russia.
The background to Raeder’s complaints, and many similar conversations in German High Command, was a constant squabble between the German Army and Navy over whether the invasion should be on a broad front (as the Army wanted) or a narrow one (as the Navy wanted). The Navy feared that an invasion on a broad front could not be protected from British attack. The Army feared that an attack which was too narrow could more easily be thrown back into the sea when it reached land. Both concerns were quite reasonable, and the argument was never resolved. It was probably never meant to be. A few weeks before, Raeder had argued that U-boat and air attacks on shipping, and the aerial bombing of British industry, would be enough to bring about a British defeat. He had said at a conference in Hitler’s Berghof eyrie that he was wholly against an invasion.3 All through the summer, the German Navy quietly undermined the idea of an invasion, and the idea received little encouragement from Hitler’s generals either. A small number of barges were assembled, but these were canal vessels probably unfit for a sea crossing. Unlike the landing craft which the Allies used in 1944, and which Germany did not possess, the sea barges could not be swiftly unloaded if they ever arrived. Rehearsals of landings were farcical. There was another major difficulty. Nobody could come up with adequate plans for sweeping the minefields that Britain had undoubtedly laid in the way of an invasion force.
What Hitler had hoped was that demoralisation caused by air attacks all over the country, combined with economic damage, would bring about the fall of Churchill and the creation of a government willing to make peace. He saw the invasion, if it ever happened, as the completion of a defeat already achieved by aerial terror. On 17 September 1940 he finally abandoned this plan, and almost certainly any immediate hopes of a peace with Britain. He ‘postponed’ Operation Sealion ‘until further notice’.4 Almost nothing was ever heard of it again in Germany, except very briefly (see above) after US plans for a 1943 invasion of France were revealed in late 1941 by the isolationist American press. But Hitler’s briefly rekindled interest in invading the British Isles faded as soon as Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
The idea would, even so, live on in the minds of many in Britain. It was useful to plenty of people there. On 12 July 1940, Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, had heard the premier refer to ‘the great invasion scare’ in conversation with Generals Paget and Auchinleck.5 Churchill doubted whether the invasion was a serious menace but intended to give the opposite impression, speaking of long and dangerous vigils and so ‘keeping every man and woman tuned to the highest pitch of readiness’.6 He said the scare was serving a most useful purpose. Quite possibly Hitler thought so too. The Irish-born British fascist and German propagandist William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) broadcast on Berlin Radio on 6 August 1940, by which time Germany’s service chiefs had pretty much stifled the idea of an invasion,
I make no apology for saying again that invasion is certainly coming soon, but what I want to impress upon you is that while you must feverishly take every conceivable precaution, nothing that you or the Government can do is really of the slightest use. Don’t be deceived by this lull before the storm, because although there is still the chance of peace [my emphasis], Hitler is aware of the political and economic confusion in England, and is only waiting for the right moment. Then, when his moment comes, he will strike, and strike hard.7
Anyone skilled in the propagandist’s art can see that the key words in the broadcast are the suggestion that there is ‘still the chance of peace’, and that the purpose of the words is to frighten, demoralise and intensify the desire to have done with war and danger.
The truth remained, throughout all this period, that serious plans for a cross-Channel attack were sketchy, and that major forces were not being assembled or trained for such an enormous and risky operation. The day after Joyce’s broadcast, General Franz Halder – at a meeting with his naval counterparts at Fontainebleau – was spluttering that he utterly rejected the German Navy’s scheme for invasion on a narrow front. ‘I regard their proposal as complete suicide. I might just as well put the troops that have landed straight through a sausage machine,’ he expostulated.8 But appearances had to be maintained. In Berlin almost simultaneously, General Wilhelm Keitel issued the ‘Directive on deceptive measures to maintain appearance of constant threat of invasion of UK’.9 It argued that whether or not Germany invaded England, the atmosphere of menace must be maintained. ‘Individuals below a specified grade of the High Command who are concerned with the preparation are not to be informed that their tasks are aimed at deception [my emphasis].’ This clearly served the aim of bringing Britain to the negotiating table.
Hitler would need to have mounted a real invasion very swiftly to take advantage of the British Army’s temporary weakness after Dunkirk. Every week in which no invasion happened also aided the rearming of the trained British forces which had returned from Dunkirk without their equipment. Those forces also now had a much better defensive position to hold than the one they had been left with in May 1940. North concludes from a careful study of daily events in the summer of 1940 that Hitler hoped to get Britain to sue for peace by a combination of threats, economic damage and terror bombing of civilians. Like many Germans, Hitler had noted the severe effects that Britain’s economic blockade had had on Germany in the Great War. He was interested in doing the same to a Britain which was far from self-sufficient. This policy would grow and continue, and become the Battle of the Atlantic, the great struggle to defeat the U-boats and the only part of the combat that genuinely frightened Churchill.
Like most politicians of the time, Hitler believed that bombing attacks on civilian targets were disastrously demoralising and might bring about a peace deal. He assumed they would do this by terrifying or simply exhausting civilians in large numbers. He had a point. Bombing murders sleep. At one point in September 1940 a frantic British government proposed the issue of a million earplugs to try to overcome the widespread problem of interrupted sleep.
This attempt to make Britain so miserable it preferred surrender to further resistance was not as vain an idea then as it seems now. Such tactics had worked to some extent in the Spanish Civil War. They had also been employed in terrorising Holland into surrender in early 1940 – though the notorious Rotterdam raid which led to the Dutch surrender was greatly exaggerated at the time, by both sides. The Germans never objected to claims that their armed forces were terrifying and destructive. France and Britain were keen that the USA would see Germany as barbaric. The government of the Netherlands may have welcomed being given a good reason for their rapid capitulation.
But these air attacks, in Spain and the Netherlands, had been accompanied by land assaults. They had not relied on bombing alone to achieve their aims. The few short miles of sea between Calais and Dover meant that this combination could not be achieved in the war on Britain.
So, in the post-Dunkirk months, German actions included attacks on coastal convoys, on military industries and eventually on centres of population. These attacks were aimed at distressing the people and at doing serious damage to the already shaky British economy. At no stage does there seem to have been any concerted and sustained attack on RAF airfields, though these were frequently targeted in a random fashion. Had the Germans made such a concerted attack, they might have crippled the RAF. But this does not in fact seem to have been their aim. Similarly, the Germans made no concentrated or repeated effort to destroy British radar installations (they did make some attempts in August 1940), though they seem to have been aware of them and they were impossible to hide.
The bombing had limited effects on the war effort. This was partly because the Germans had never developed (and never did develop) a heavy long-range bomber that could deliver a large load of bombs. Their bombing planes had always been designed to operate in concert with troops on the ground, rather than as weapons in their own right. It was also partly because sovereign countries with well-organised civil defence and advanced economies (such as Britain was in 1940) can recover with remarkable speed even from apparently devastating air attacks. Britain and Germany would both find this out, as attackers and defenders, over the next five years.
But there were moments when the bombing threatened to do grave damage to morale, especially in London (though many other cities were badly damaged). As North records, the people of London were very weakly protected from air attack. The poorer they were, the worse their position was. On several occasions civilians fled in disorganised groups, seeking safety away from the capital. Some simply headed for the nearest mainline railway terminus and got as far as their money could take them. Oxford, 63 miles from London, found itself housing hundreds of refugee Londoners, for two whole months, in an enormous suburban cinema, the Majestic on the Botley Road (where a modern Waitrose supermarket now stands). Others sought safety in chalk caves at Chislehurst in Kent. Such unofficial evacuees were not always met with hospitality. Some, notably in Essex, encountered active hostility and violence.10
They had no special reason to be enthusiastic about a war that had, until then, been distant and not well understood. And they could well have been ripe for the anti-war propaganda of the Communist Left. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had turned the USSR and the Third Reich into something very like allies, the Communist Party of Great Britain had been ordered by Moscow to oppose the war (much against the instincts of its leader, Harry Pollitt). Many of its activists, like their French comrades, enthusiastically argued that the war was an imperialist quarrel in which the working class had no stake. They relished any chance to undermine the war effort and demoralise the population. The horror of air raids on slum districts gave them a great opportunity to campaign for what they called ‘peace’, and they took this opportunity. The British Marxist Brian Pearce, who was in a good position to judge, remarked, in his commentary ‘Marxists in the Second World War’, written under the pseudonym ‘B. Farnborough’, that ‘During the entire period up to the Fall of France the British Communist Party functioned as a propaganda agency for Hitler.’11
After the Fall of France, the Communists made any support for the war so conditional on revolution that it was not really support at all. In the December 1940 issue of the Communist publication Youth for Socialism it was explained:
No worker in this country wants to come under the bloody tyranny of Hitler. On the contrary he will fight against this with all his strength. But he cannot do this while Britain is capitalist; while India is in bondage; while the capitalist class controls the Army and the workers are unarmed.
In other words, he could not do it then, when the danger was present and immediate.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was uniquely strong and well organised in the very parts of London’s East End that were most heavily bombed, as they were close to the London docks. And so the CPGB was well placed to take advantage of discontent about poor air-raid precautions. Fortunately for Britain, the Germans were not clever enough to take advantage of this.
Harold Nicolson recorded in his diaries of September 1940 that Neville Chamberlain had told him that, if the Germans had had the sense to confine their bombing to the East End, there might have been a revolution. ‘Everybody’s worried about feeling in the East End,’ he wrote. ‘There’s much bitterness. It is said that even the King and Queen were booed the other day when they visited the destroyed areas.’
The Communist activist and future MP Phil Piratin had already led 50 East Enders, including some ragged and obviously poor children, into the luxuries of the Savoy Hotel, where he demanded that they should be allowed to shelter in the hotel’s well-protected basement. ‘If it is good enough for the rich it is good enough for the Stepney workers and their families,’ he proclaimed.12 Inevitably, the hotel gave way. There is no answer to propaganda master strokes of such brilliance, and there was no doubt that protection for the people of Stepney – and London as a whole – was feeble and inadequate. Slum housing was terribly vulnerable to bombs. The Anderson Shelter, a curved piece of steel laid over a ditch, was useless against a direct hit, amplified the noise of the raids and often filled up with water, leaving its owners the choice between shivering in a miserable ditch or seeking safety elsewhere.
Piratin was also responsible for a second and greater victory over the Churchill government. The Cabinet had originally insisted that the London Underground could not be used as an air-raid shelter because it was needed for transport. It was an absurd position, especially because of the genuinely desperate need for shelter among London’s poor. Piratin and his comrades besieged several major Tube stations. At one, Piratin rather carefully recorded later (using the passive voice), ‘Various implements such as crowbars happened to be available, and while the police stood on duty guarding the gates, they were very quickly swept aside by the crowds, the crowbars brought into action and the people went down.’13 It is remarkable that the government was so poorly prepared for heavy bombing, and so obdurate in clinging to a bad decision about the Underground. As a result, a small group of Marxist troublemakers and seriously misguided Stalin-worshippers could successfully make them look foolish and callous and force them to change their minds in public.
Had the War Cabinet not given way, and had the Luftwaffe not obligingly bombed Buckingham Palace and the wealthy West End of London soon afterwards, there might have been serious trouble, as feared by Neville Chamberlain and Harold Nicolson.
It is difficult even to record the dissent of other people from the great surpassing myth of the Battle of Britain. I have no quarrel with this myth myself, though I shall be accused of lacking patriotism for discussing this subject. Once again, it is necessary to state that those who fought in the air against the Germans were extraordinarily brave and accomplished. But was the battle which they fought as decisive or as important as we have come to believe? Richard North’s extraordinary account suggests otherwise. How much has this event become mixed up with the Royal Air Force’s desire to establish itself as an independent service, or with Winston Churchill’s verbal grandeur, or with the undoubted romance and chivalry of war in the air? How much of it is to help us to conceal from ourselves the fact that in the summer of 1940 Britain had sustained one of the greatest military, diplomatic and economic defeats in its history?
North’s account suggests a combat much less decisive and much less clear in its purpose than is generally believed. I recount this here because it is part of my argument that many of the events of World War II have been given a significance they sometimes did not deserve, as we have come to use that war to justify our present position and many of our future actions.
Put very simply, North argues that the Germans were not seeking to destroy the RAF to prepare for an invasion, but hoping to destroy the British will to fight and to wreck our economy, so as to force us to negotiate peace. He produces figures suggesting that the aerial combat (often, rather unsurprisingly, misrepresented by the media of the time) was much more equal than we made it appear. He also notes that many parts of the country were raided, very damagingly, by German bombers despite the (sometimes not very great) efforts of the RAF to stop them. He also makes a persuasive case that what people thought was happening at the time was largely influenced by newspapers who had adopted a narrative which also suited the government. But the actual course of war was strikingly different from what we now believe took place and what has been repeatedly recounted in popular films.
Let me be emphatic here. British pilots, and allies of many nations including Commonwealth countries, Poles and Czechs, fought with extreme bravery in the air in 1940. Their actions, reported as a kind of national drama by a highly patriotic Fleet Street, were essential to maintain national morale. We can only be grateful that the RAF was not compelled to throw these scarce aircraft and pilots into trying to save the French armies earlier that year, as the French government urgently desired. They would not have prevented a German victory and might have left us gravely undefended from the air through the dangerous summer of 1940. But what exactly was the danger? Was it invasion, or was it the seductions of a return to peace?
Fleet Street and the government, quite properly and normally, exaggerated the RAF’s successes and minimised their failures. The belief that it was an all-or-nothing struggle in which every sinew was strained is undermined by the fact that in early September 1940, 30 Hurricanes, with their pilots, were ordered to Khartoum in the Sudan.14 Indeed, Churchill’s overriding concern with North Africa, Egypt, the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean did not abate during these tense weeks. Also in September, the first-rate New Zealand division was placed on standby for service in the Middle East, and modern anti-aircraft guns (badly needed in the home islands) were sent to Malta.15 There certainly were failures. Several very serious German air attacks on British cities, ships and industrial targets were not reported or known outside the areas affected. In many cases the RAF was unable to do anything about them at all. Londoners, especially in the poor East End, suffered greatly because of the bombing of the docks. The lack of good shelters for London’s poor was a serious national weakness, and the decision to open the Underground was taken late and slowly by patrician politicians and civil servants who had little idea of how much it mattered. It is surely shocking that Communist troublemakers, whose only interest was to weaken the government, were able to take the initiative in campaigning for better air-raid precautions.
Far from being defeated, the Luftwaffe continued to bomb Britain by night long after the day in September 1940 when the Battle of Britain is generally said to have reached its turning point. The famous and barbaric attack on Coventry took place on the night of 14 November 1940, two months after the supposed ‘turning point’ in the air war. The sad truth was that the RAF, effective by day, was unable to mount serious operations by night at that stage of the war, whereas German scientists had already developed advanced techniques for finding targets in the dark. The RAF, by contrast, could hardly hit anything at all on its night raids over Germany, an embarrassing fact that would later lead to extraordinary consequences.
But it was in the minds of the people, and in the minds of their leaders, that the outcome of this conflict was decided. By mid-September 1940, worsening weather made even the idea of a cross-Channel invasion untenable. By the spring of 1941, British troops would be rearmed, reinforced and re-equipped so that they could have an even greater chance of repelling any such attack, if the idea were revived. Hitler’s forces were not equipped, designed or trained for long wars, but for swift overpowering assaults, which destroyed the enemy’s will to fight. The opportunity to do this to Britain had passed.
The German tyrant, beyond doubt, had been seeking a negotiated peace with Britain since the Fall of France, mainly through indirect contacts in Switzerland and Sweden, though there was probably one direct attempt at contact in Washington DC. We have little to go on apart from press speculation in neutral countries at the time, as the papers involved remain elusive or sealed. What Hitler hoped to achieve, by violence and bluster, was some sort of neutralisation of Britain. His underlying and highly realistic aim was to ensure that the USA would not be able to use the British Isles as a base. Churchill had already decided that his chief aim was to involve the USA, and he would endure almost anything while he waited for American help.
The idea of an invasion, never a reality, suited both men at the time. For Hitler it was a way of persuading a battered, unhappy British populace to press their leaders to give in. For Churchill, more successfully, it was a way to raise morale, production and military effectiveness by creating a constant atmosphere of tension and danger. To this day those who lived through that period will say that they feared such an invasion, and they are telling the truth. They trusted their government and believed its warnings. They had seen Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France fall to lightning attacks. They faced real personal danger from the air, and had no way of knowing that, by itself, air war could not destroy the national will to fight.
But those of us who come after, as the facts emerge, have no such excuse for continuing to believe a propaganda fiction. The only danger to Britain in the summer and early autumn of 1940 was that its morale might have collapsed. Perhaps, if Buckingham Palace had not been bombed, if the ragged children had been flung out of the Savoy Hotel and the London Tubes had been barred against poor Londoners seeking shelter, this disaster might have happened. But it did not, and there is no real evidence that it came near to doing so. The other danger, perhaps, was from some in the political establishment. These men, reluctant to relinquish our role as a Great Power, had sought what they thought was an easy way of ‘stopping Hitler’. They must have been dismayed to find German troops at Boulogne nine months after they so rashly declared war. They had made a terrible mess of things. Could they have been tempted by an ignoble peace? Perhaps. But it is to Winston Churchill’s eternal credit that he was not tempted, understanding very well what would happen to any nation which descended that particular staircase.
For any who grew up in the time after the war, the invasion has become a constant, comforting fantasy. We wallow in its fictional awfulness, much as we enjoy ghost stories and horror films – because they are not true and they make the safe, dull reality of real life more pleasant. We dwell on it in novels and in films, torturing ourselves with nightmares of what might have been and how we might have behaved. And so we have come to believe, quite wrongly, that it was a real menace, and one that lasted till 1944. This belief has become, alas, an excuse for actions that this country later took. These actions, especially the bombing of German civilians from 1942 to 1945, are often justified by the plea that our very existence was in peril, when in fact it was not. Hitler’s real aim, as Rab Butler truly said, was the East. We had always really known it, as we had shown in our doomed, disorganised and belated attempts to reach an agreement with the USSR in August 1939. But we had never been prepared to make a purely voluntary alliance with Stalin, which would have required appeasing him with territorial concessions, as we had appeased Hitler in 1938 (and as we would in the end appease Stalin, far more extensively, at Yalta in 1945). Yet our fate was to be decided in the USSR, and in the merciless and half-forgotten naval war in the Atlantic, not by a rash and risky invasion across the Channel. Had Stalin been defeated, we would once again have been the object of peace proposals from Berlin, though far less generous than what was (presumably) on offer in the summer of 1940. But this would have been, for Hitler, a mere tidying-up. He simply was not that interested in us, except as an ally of his main enemies, and did not care to risk a seaborne invasion for a prize he did not especially desire. Perhaps it is our smallness in the great scheme of things after 1940 that we find hardest to bear.