The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow
overrun by the Germans had been caught napping; that could not happen to the British and everyone must be ready.
There must be no panic – no clogging of roads and public transport in a frantic effort to get away: ‘You must remain where you are. The order is “Stay Put”. If not, you are bound to be machine-gunned from the air.’
The naiveté of this is extraordinary. Machine-gunned on the blocked roads or buried under the debris of your house did not, to most people, make much difference. Point 2 talked about the Fifth Column – the sneakiness of the Germans in spreading confusion and panic. Most people knew their local bobby and ARP warden: ‘You can also tell whether a military officer is really British or only pretending to be so. [?] Use your common sense.’
When the house you live in or the school your children go to is being flattened by bombs, when Guderian’s tanks are crashing through your back garden, taking with them the walls and the washing, how much ‘common sense’, people must have wondered, was it possible to muster?
If anyone saw anything suspicious, they were to report it at once to someone in authority. Astonishingly, even the Home Guard had this instruction. They were not to tackle a potential spy themselves (there were a few isolated and unfortunate shootings in this respect as tensions rose that summer) but to find a policeman. The fact that the police, especially in the Metropolitan area, were stretched to breaking point seems to have passed the Ministry of Information by.
Next in the MOI’s leaflet came the terror of the skies, the parachutist. With more hope than experience, the government told its readers that such men would not be ‘feeling at all brave’. They would not know where they were or where their companions were and they would have no food. The experience of airborne troops who preceded D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe in June 1944, was exactly the opposite. Units were indeed scattered by the wind and navigational errors in the drop zones, but the parachutists came down in clusters and easily linked up with each other. They had rations for three days. How brave they felt depended very much on the individual but the esprit de corps of the Wehrmacht and committed Nazis easily matched Europe’s liberators of four years later.
‘Do not give the German anything,’ the MOI insisted. People were expected to hide their food, their maps and their bikes. If they had a car, the rotor arm must be removed to make it useless. The fact that the Wehrmacht could simply help themselves to most of those commodities, with or without the owners’ permission, was another little irrelevance in Whitehall’s corridors of power.
Today, owners of companies are buried in a welter of regulations about employment, health and safety, insurance and so on. In 1940, they were expected by the government to defend their premises. Everyone in such companies must know who is in charge and how orders are to be transmitted. Ex-officers and NCOs were naturally the best people to turn to in this situation.
The leaflet ended, ‘Remember always that the best defence of Great Britain is the courage of her men and women. Here is your seventh rule – Think before you act. But think always of your country before you think of yourself.’
Peter Fleming paints an amusing picture of the model citizen that summer. He always carried his regulation gas mask (which, of course, was never needed and had an asbestos lining to the filter). He carried his National Registration Identity Card (which, if he lost it, could lead to a fine or imprisonment). He carried a ration-book with coupons that allowed him so much food and comestibles per week (not fully abandoned until eight years after the war ended!). If he worked for a company, large or small, he had to have a security pass to get him in. If he owned a car (unlikely in 1940 – car numbers have been estimated at well below ten per cent of the adult population), it could not have a wireless set and its headlights had to be dimmed by a grille. The house he left to go to work every morning (and, astonishingly, bearing in mind the need to work for the war effort, there were still nearly a million unemployed that summer) had sticky tape over the windows to minimise the risk of flying glass. There were sand and water buckets in all major rooms to put out the fires of air raids. He could not hoard food (a punishable offence) but he had to make sure that his household was provided for. He would already have handed in his shotgun and his binoculars. His wife had long ago dispensed with half her pots and pans because that nice Lord Beaverbrook needed them to make Spitfires and Wellingtons, Blenheims and Hurricanes. His children, after 6 July, could not fly kites or balloons, presumably in case they had any connection with signalling to the enemy. He must never shoot carrier pigeons – how could he, since the local constabulary had his gun? He must replace his begonias with carrots and turnips, ignore malicious rumours and never doubt for a moment that Mr Churchill had everything in hand.
‘The reader,’ wrote Fleming, his tongue well and truly in his cheek, ‘will scarcely need to be told that this paragon did not, in his totality, exist.’31
Some people got out, their nerves shredded by it all. The official line from the United States government was that its citizens should leave. Hundreds did. One group that did not formed the American Squadron of the Home Guard in London, with a red eagle flash on their shoulders once they actually had uniforms to sew them onto. There was another move to evacuate children from the cities but it was much more half-hearted than at the outbreak of war. The vast majority of those children had drifted back and little boys in particular watched the dog-fights of the Battle of Britain, hoping to find bits of crashed aircraft or even, in their wildest dreams, being able to capture a German airman! Those who left were reduced to a trickle after 17 September, when the City of Benares, carrying ninety such children, was sunk by a U-boat. Only eleven survived.
There were demands for peacetime pastimes to stop. Horse-racing, dog-racing and cricket matches were among those frowned on and even the serious business of Bridge was being disrupted by air raids as the Bridge Correspondent of The Times told a disbelieving world on 3 September. There was a mild panic in London when the Zoo was hit. Poisonous snakes and scorpions had been destroyed when the war began but other animals flourished, watched over by a tiny cadre of snipers in case a dangerous one got out. A few of the birds did but the only quadruped escapee was a zebra, recaptured in the Zoo’s grounds later.
The show, despite tension, had to go on. The Windmill Theatre, with its chorus girls and risqué reputation, never closed, despite an official order that it must, and other theatres followed suit by the end of September. Concerts were held at noon in the National Gallery. Ballet dancers strutted their stuff in the Arts Theatre Club and Donald Wolfit, then arguably the nation’s leading ‘luvvie’, wowed his office-worker audience with soliloquies from Hamlet and Macbeth.
Rumours, despite the MOI’s order that they should not be spread, flew. In August, the Channel was said to be ‘white with bodies’ of a failed German invasion. Even Churchill believed this one because it had good propaganda value; if the British public believed that an invasion had been beaten back, that could only work wonders for morale. The government, in turn, formed the ‘Silent Column’ in June, pledging to shutting down rumour by prosecution. Since Duff Cooper of the MOI was its figurehead, they came to be known as Cooper’s Snoopers. Defeatism was a crime; so was being foreign. In that same month, a Dane and a Swede were arrested in Liverpool for ‘their foreign appearance’ and fined £15 each. And, according to the Daily Mail of 9 June, Dr J. J. Paterson, Medical Officer of Health for Maidenhead, had his house turned over by the police because, before the war, he had travelled widely in Germany. Everywhere, Mr Knowall, Miss Leaky Mouth, Mr Pride in Prophecy, Miss Teacup Whisperer and Mr Glumpot were all being listened to, plotted against, fined and imprisoned. It was a miserable time. And it was exactly the kind of discord that Adolf Hitler, still planning his invasion, was hoping for.
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On 20 June, the day before Hitler crowed over the French surrender at Compiegne, the thriller writer Dennis Wheatley had lunch at London’s Dorchester Hotel with Sir Louis Greig, an RAF Wing Commander, Lawrence Darvall (same rank) and J. S. L. Renny, a Czech arms manufacturer. They met to discuss a paper that Wheatley had written which was of interest to the chiefs of staff – and would have been of more interest, almost certainly, to the OKW.
Wheatley was