The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow

       CHAPTER THREE

       WHEN THE INVADER COMES

London thought that Hitler was coming at 5.30 pip emma on Saturday, 7 September. 300 bombers, with a 600-strong fighter escort, roared over the Kent and Essex coast, making for the capital. This was part of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s 2nd Aeroflotte from Denmark and Norway and was designed to force Fighter Command to commit its carefully protected Reserve so that it could be destroyed. No one in the RAF was ready for this change of tactic and the results told their own story. The Luftwaffe, still with a huge numbers advantage lost forty-one aircraft; the RAF twenty-eight, with considerable damage to more. As darkness fell, Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, commanding another Air Fleet, unleashed 250 bombers to hit London by night. In this situation, the RAF could play no part;27 dog fights in darkness were pointless suicide missions. Only the searchlight batteries and the ack-ack guns on the ground could hope to stem the tide.

      The assumption was made that the invasion would be preceded by a massive aerial bombardment, rather as formal battles in the past had been opened up by cannon fire before the infantry advanced to grapple with each other. The Deputy Chief of Staff at GHQ Home Forces sent out the codeword Cromwell soon after eight o’clock, as Sperrle’s leading bombers were circling to go home. It was sent initially to Eastern and Southern Command, IV and VII Corps (the Reserve) and HQ London District.

      The very word Cromwell caused all kinds of confusion. The original code, Caesar (which made some sense historically in terms of invasion), had been changed on 5 June to that of the Lord Protector, who had only ever invaded Ireland by sea. Many of the night-duty officers, juniors with limited experience, had no idea what Cromwell meant. Some units jumped to it with the speed expected. The Home Guard in particular (‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’) rang church bells furiously. Since the outbreak of war, these had been silent, much to the annoyance of campanologists and the sound of them now, in villages and towns all over the south-east, caused a frisson of confusion and panic. Telephone operators refused to handlenon-military calls. Road blocks of carts, furniture and lumps of concrete were dragged across roads from which signposts had long since disappeared. With his typical British sang froid, Harold Nicolson wrote calmly:

      ‘At Sissinghurst, we have tea and watch the Germans coming over in wave after wave. There is some fighting above our heads and we hear one or two aeroplanes zoom downwards. They flash like silver gnats above us in the air.’

Denis Richards, the RAF’s official historian, writing years later, summed up the situation perfectly, ‘the brute fact that the world’s largest air force was now within an hour’s flight of the world’s largest target.’28 To those caught on the ground, it mattered little that the Luftwaffe had only about twenty-eight minutes’ time over London before they had to turn tail to refuel. The damage was done in seconds. Angus Calder, in The People’s War, makes the point:

‘… the bombs poured chiefly on Stepney… where nearly two hundred thousand people lived… on the tailors of Whitechapel; the factories, warehouses and gasworks of Poplar; the woodworking firms of Shoreditch; the docks of West Ham and Bermondsey…’’29

      And that, of course, was just the start.

      In the night attack, only one bomber had been shot down and a shell-shocked London emerged, blinking into the sunshine of Sunday, 8 September. T. H. O’Brien, writing in 1955 when there was no longer any need to minimise the grimness of the situation, wrote that the docks had been very badly hit. Woolwich Arsenal, so crucial to the war effort, was a smoking ruin. So were Beckton Gas Works, West Ham Power Station and street after street of the City and the West End. In one photograph taken that morning, a double-decker bus is lying on its end, the driver’s cab pointing to the sky. The front bumpers are resting on the shell of an imposing Victorian house. On the ground, bewildered men in tin hats and shirtsleeves are doing what they can to clear the debris. The entire population of Silvertown had to be evacuated by river. There were nine ‘conflagrations’ (the vortex created by fires merging into one that would destroy Dresden three years later), fifty-nine large fires and over one thousand smaller ones. It was vital to put these out quickly, not just to reduce further damage but to deny the next night’s raid an illuminated pathway to follow. On the second night, 412 people were killed and 747 badly hurt. Every railway line to and from the south was out of action.

      As it turned out, this was the start of the Blitz, an attempt, futile as it turned out, to so terrify and demoralize civilians that all systems would collapse and the government would be forced to sue for peace. The change of tactic gave Fighter Command – Churchill’s ‘Few’ – a chance to regroup and rest their shattered nerves. It also gave time to build more aircraft and train more men.

On Monday morning, as if to illustrate the fact that ‘London could take it’ and it was ‘business as usual’, The Times reported that a great crested grebe had been found in an air-raid shelter in Euston! Despite the veneer of calm, however, the prospect of invasion was still starkly, terrifyingly real and the government acted accordingly, the Ministry of Information going into overdrive to exude calm mixed with defiance. Harold Nicolson was largely responsible for the most famous sheet, issued in June. It was called If the Invader Comes and by 8 September that could easily have read When. The first sentence was bold and confident: ‘The Germans threaten to invade …. If they do so they will be driven out by our Navy, our Army and our Air Force.’30

      This ignores the fact that the air force could be presumed to have been destroyed by the time the Wehrmacht came ashore, that the army only had twenty-nine weak Divisions and that the navy’s use, once invasion was a reality, would be very limited.