The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow
the rest would be relatively plain sailing. The Sixteenth Army, moving out of ports from Rotterdam to Boulogne in huge, difficult-to-manoeuvre barges (mostly commandeered from Europe’s canals), would wade ashore at Hythe, Rye, Hastings and Eastbourne. The Ninth Army, out of all ports between Boulogne and Le Havre, would attack between Brighton and Worthing. The beaches taken, using amphibious craft that could run up the shingle and the sand, bridgeheads would be established, the Luftwaffe’s Stukas hurtling down on enemy troops being rushed from further north to hold the coast. The two armies would then merge and sweep in a huge arc over the South Downs and make, as all would-be conquerors had, for London. Within an estimated seven days, the Wehrmacht would have established a line from Gravesend to Portsmouth. The Sixth Army, in reserve, would land in a third wave at Weymouth, to reinforce the rest.
Because none of this worked and Sealion was effectively abandoned by the end of September, it has assumed a fairytale quality, an exercise in futility and yet another example of the wishful-thinking ramblings of a maniac. All military historians today see the huge flaws in the plans of the General Staff, the shortcomings of all three services involved and the lack of clear-sighted preparation, all of which contributed to the venture being shelved. But it was not like that in the summer of 1940. Bizarrely, an increasing number of people were putting their faith in Churchill. They believed wholeheartedly his bulldog public appearances and were impressed by his speeches. But this was a man who suffered badly from depression – his ‘black dog’ as he called it – and, only three months earlier, his own party had cold-shouldered him in the Commons over the ousting of Chamberlain. He was no more infallible than anyone else, believing that there was a secret, if undirected, army of 20,000 Fifth Columnists walking Britain’s streets. And he had, after all, been at least partly responsible for the Norwegian debacle which had swept him to power.
The British army, frantically pushing untrained men into uniform, was woefully ill-equipped and understrength. On paper, they had twenty-nine divisions but they were scattered all over the country (including Northern Ireland) and were still shell-shocked from Dunkirk. Much of their equipment had been left behind there. The Local Defence Volunteers, who officially became the Home Guard in August, were a keen bunch but they were civilian amateurs and the Second World War was no country for old men. There were nearly 40,000 service personnel in Britain from other armies – Poles, Czechs, Free Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Belgians – but how useful they would be in an alien country with an alien language was debatable.
An American opinion poll was printed in The Times on 12 September. At the outbreak of war, 82 per cent of Americans expected Britain to win. By the time of the fall of France, that had dropped to 32 per cent. Joseph Kennedy, the ambassador to the Court of St James, who had Nazi leanings and was never impressed by Britain, used phrases like ‘when the Germans occupied London’, not if. A week before the poll was published, the American politician Cordell Hull reported to the United States cabinet, ‘England is undergoing a terrific attack. As a matter of fact, it has been getting worse and worse over there…’23
The stationers might sell placards to stick up in the windows of front rooms which read, ‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist,’ but, of course, they did. And the British high command knew it. Their infantry divisions were barely at half strength (11,000 all ranks). Of the sixteen in question, nine had reached a ‘fair’ standard of training, five had done very little and two none at all. The equipment available to them was almost laughable and, although the munitions factories were working around the clock to rectify this, it would hardly dent the first wave of the Wehrmacht. There were 54 anti-tank guns, which had already proved useless in France, 42 field guns, and 163 medium and heavy guns (with limited ammunition and some seriously old). There were less than 500 tanks and nearly half the available armoured cars were in Northern Ireland, making sure that the spectre of an Irish rising along 1798 lines never happened.24
It was estimated that there were 70,000 rifles in Britain in the summer of 1940. Thousands more were handed in by civilians to police stations but some of these were obsolete smoothbores with no suitable ammunition. Axes, golf clubs, assegais and packets of pepper to be thrown in Aryan faces were all on standby, just in case. The novelist Margery Allingham wrote, ‘All this looks childish written down, but it was a direct, childish time, quite different from … any other piece of life which I, at least, have experienced.’25
Churchill consistently, at least in public, played down the reality of invasion, even when he talked of fighting on the beaches. He also believed an invasion of the south coast was impractical, which is odd in a man who saw himself as an historian. In 1688, William of Orange had landed successfully at Lyme Regis; two hundred years earlier, Henry Tudor had come ashore at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire. William of Normandy’s ships made for Pevensey and Julius Caesar’s not far away. In fact, the only invaders who had not done this were Harald Hardrada’s Vikings in 1066, destroyed by the English at Stamford Bridge.
German radio propaganda was doing its bit to rattle the island defenders. William Joyce had been on the air since the war began but the plummy, over-the-top accent of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ was more a source of hilarity than the drip-drip of fear. The New British Broadcasting Station, beginning its broadcasts with ‘Loch Lomond’ and ending with the National Anthem, was altogether cleverer. It gave the impression of the enemy within, that perhaps there was a Fifth Column after all and that Churchill and his gang were increasingly clutching at straws. Workers’ Challenge, broadcast on 8 July, tried the hypocritical approach of a people’s revolution. Trade Unions had been banned in Nazi Germany, the Fascist Labour Front of Dr Robert Ley operating instead. That did not stop the broadcasters, in pseudo-Scots accents, urging the workers to overthrow their public-school-educated government. The ‘Christian Peace Movement’ had a go too, with equal hypocrisy, since the Nazis were interested in neither Christianity nor peace. The propaganda they all spouted was largely nonsense – but such is the way with propaganda. The Jews were giving the War Cabinet bungs to keep the war going. Foot and mouth disease was decimating the countryside. The banknotes in listeners’ wallets were forgeries. The tins of meat they opened were poisoned by agents working in Argentina. When the first German parachutists arrived, they could stay in the air for up to ten hours, choosing their landing grounds with precision – oh, and they took ‘fog pills’ which made them invisible. The only answer was to horsewhip Churchill and burn the property of the warmongering elite.
Unwittingly, the Invasion Warning Sub-Committee of the Combined Intelligence Committee was helping to create the sense of panic. It first met at the Admiralty on 31 May and its early meetings were dominated by the likelihood of Irish attacks backed by the IRA. On the other hand, seeing bogeys in bushes where there were none, was perhaps preferable to ignoring those that were obvious. When the RAF reconnaissance aircraft brought back clear photographs of a shipping build up at Kiel, the Committee believed that they probably had something to do with ‘mining or other temporary restrictions’. When the RAF snapped the transport barges massing at Ostend at the end of August, they were probably there to fetch iron, steel and textiles. When it became known that all Wehrmacht leave had been cancelled for 5 September, the Committee calmly reflected, ‘Any leave is stopped from time to time without special incident.’ Had the public known about these misconceptions and blatant ostrich behaviour, they may have asked whose side the Invasion Warning Sub-Committee was actually on!
Years later, Peter Fleming wrote of these bizarre months:
‘Would tanks, one day, come nosing through the allotments? Would tracer bullets flick across the recreation ground? Would field-grey figures carrying stick grenades and flame-throwers work their way along the hedges towards the flimsy pill-boxes opposite the Nag’s Head?’26
Had he remembered it, Fleming would already have had his answer. On 4 September, Hitler spoke to ranked thousands of his adoring subjects in the Sportpalast in Berlin, the scene of so many oratorical triumphs. ‘When people are very curious in