The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow
to command armies in the field and make military decisions they were rarely qualified to do. After Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussians at Jena in 1806, the Germans set up the Kriegsakademie (War Academy) under Carl von Clausewitz, one of the foremost military authorities in Europe. Under the hugely impressive Helmut von Moltke in the middle of the nineteenth century, the General Staff prepared for war with any European country, collecting data of all kinds, drawing maps and investing in technology. By the time a united Germany came into being in 1871, the General Staff was the most efficient and organised in the world. The French, by comparison, rested on their laurels as the country that had bred Napoleon (he was, actually, of course, a Corsican) and paid the price of that arrogance at Sedan when they were smashed by Otto Bismarck’s Prussians. As if to point up the disparity between the combatants, the Germans took their troops to the front along twenty-six railway lines; the French had one!
Under the terms of the treaty of Versailles, the General Staff was banned but, even under the liberal Weimar government in the 1920s, it re-emerged under the euphemism Truppenamt (Troop office), run by the military reformer Hans von Seeckt. In 1935, with the Nazis in power, the old Kriegsakademie re-emerged. Despite its defeat in 1918, the German army was a formidable organisation – Hitler’s introduction of conscription and the oath of allegiance to him personally in 1934 also meant that it was growing enormously. Its officers were still largely conservative and traditionalist and, in 1940, not many of them were committed Nazis. They disliked the ‘little corporal’ who now ran Germany and were disquieted by the street gangsters of the SA (Sturmabteiling), which, at one point in the Thirties, outnumbered the Wehrmacht. By the outbreak of the war, the army had less influence than it had enjoyed in 1914, partly because of the rise of the Luftwaffe as a strike force and because there was no crony in the army as close to the Führer as was Goering for the air force.
Since before 1914, the major strategic problem for Germany had been the war on two fronts. If Russia were to join forces with Britain and France (as happened at the outbreak of the First World War) then Germany had to split her forces. The answer in 1914 was the Schlieffen Plan, which was to knock France out quickly while the ponderous Russians, with their nine million man army, were still mobilizing. In 1939, the same realpolitik no longer existed because, until Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, there was no threat to Germany from the east. The Axis powers could concentrate all their resources on Britain.
On Agler Tag, the OKW issued its invasion plans. They were divided, in terms of information gathering, into three sections. Part 1 dealt with an introduction to a country that relatively few Germans would ever have visited, including weather and climate, the industrial infrastructure, transport and, most tellingly for this book’s purposes, population and social conditions. Part 2 broke down individual geographical areas in terms of strategic and military importance. Part 3 went further with this and included the sort of information found today in tourist guide books. Model questions included, ‘Which is the shortest way to…?’ and ‘What is the name of this town?’ One of the most bizarre was, ‘Where is the next tank?’ Bearing in mind that citizens had already been told to say nothing in response to questions from the invader, it is debatable how useful this section was!
Portfolio A, the country’s general description, contained photographs and maps. The latter were widely available from HMSO bookshops and were standard Ordnance Survey. The concentration of Britain’s industrial areas was more diverse than Germany’s Ruhr. Coal and steel were centred in Tyneside, Lancashire, Yorkshire and South Wales. The aviation industry was clearly labelled, as was shipbuilding and ‘explosive products’. Individual cities, marked with road and rail linkages and key installations, included London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Coventry and Bristol. All of these would be targeted in the Blitz which began in September, but other areas were included in the Invasion Plan. South Shields was there, as were Sunderland and Bradford. Derby featured too and, most bizarrely, Oxford. The city was the home of the Morris-Cowley car industry, now converted to war production, but it was also the home of the country’s oldest university and Hitler, thinking in terms of invasion, did not intend to damage that or Cambridge. They would become the great Anglo-German centres of Reich learning in the future.
Portfolio B focused on London. As the capital, the cities of London and Westminster held a special place in the country’s history. They were symbols of power and national resistance since the time of the Roman invasion. The government was based here, from the royal family at Buckingham Palace to the mother of parliaments at Westminster and a labyrinth of executive offices along Whitehall. In the East End, the largest docks in the country were a tempting target for Goering’s Luftwaffe. The maps here were overlaid with an artillery grid.
Portfolio C was devoted to potential landing places along the south-east coast. The planners of 1940 ignored the fact that the only two successful invasions had hit single, narrow areas and had fought their way inland. Aulus Plautius and his legions landed at Rutupiae (Richborough) and marched on London. William of Normandy’s ships ground into the shingle near Pevensey and he faced Harold Godwinson’s English a little to the north of that before, again, making for London by a circuitous route. In 1940, an attack in Kent was ruled out. The whole nature of warfare was different now and the Medway was a barrier which the defenders could hold for a prolonged period. The original idea was to land on a broad front from the Isle of Wight in the west (with a reserve at Bridport) to Ramsgate in the east. These units would have converged and could cut London off from the rest of the country. The south-east was agriculturally rich and could provide easy billeting of troops once the Wehrmacht was on dry land.
The invasion of Britain was given the codename Lion (Löwe), later changed to Sealion (Seelöwe), perhaps by Hitler himself. The initial plans had been worked on by the Kriegsmarine soon after the outbreak of war, if only because it would be their responsibility to get the Wehrmacht ashore. The initiative came, as we have seen, from Admiral Erich Raeder, who raised it with the Führer at various meetings in June and July. This does not mean that he was a gungho commander anxious to sail into glory – in fact, as time went on, he realised how suicidal the whole venture was. It was merely that he was a supreme professional and needed as much time as possible to get his battleship ducks in a row. It has to be said too that the German navy was playing third fiddle in 1940 to the air force and the army. The Wehrmacht had just won spectacular victories east and west, astonishing everybody by the speed of their advance. The Luftwaffe, too, had swept aside the opposition of the Polish and French air forces and Goering had come to believe his own advertising about the almost magical brilliance of his fighters and bombers. The navy had been useful off Norway but the Graf Spee had gone and the Bismarck had yet to be commissioned (24 August 1940), although she had been launched in February 1939. Raeder had to get it right.
The plan was for the Kriegsmarine to create a narrow ‘corridor’ across the Channel, supported by long-range artillery firing from Cap Gris-Nez, flanked by minefields to keep the Royal Navy away and to prowl the area with U-boats. Through the corridor, the army would be landed in two waves – the first of 100,000, the second of 160,000 men – under the overall command of von Runstedt. He would eventually set foot on British soil, in Bridgend, South Wales, as a prisoner of war in 1945. Halder, as Chief of Staff, demanded forty divisions to take the various bridgeheads of the south coast. Four of these had to hit Brighton and there needed to be a significant presence in the Deal-Ramsgate area. Raeder alone seems to have understood the impracticalities of this. His European harbours would be too cluttered with shipping to accommodate all the men involved and no one seemed to grasp the need for speed to avoid the bad weather of late September and the fogs of October. No one not wearing the uniform of the Kriegsmarine had any grasp of tides at all. For all the German war machine was supremely mechanised by 1940, it still relied on the arbitrariness of the weather, and the Wehrmacht planned to bring several thousand horses with it, to haul artillery and equipment.
Doubts and arguments raged in the weeks and then months after Dunkirk. The number of troops was reduced; forty divisions became thirteen. An essential prerequisite was the knocking out of the RAF’s Fighter Command, whose Group 11 in the south-east was on constant readiness in what would come to be known as the Battle of Britain. Goering promised Hitler he would do that in four days; the entire RAF in four weeks. Until that was achieved, no army crossing could be