The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow
the Admiralty.
Minutes after the Prime Minister’s announcement and before the cabinet assembled, the tell-tale whine of an air-raid siren wailed over London. It was a noise that would strike terror to millions over the next six years. Churchill and his wife Clementine went up to the roof of their town house. They saw, in the hazy midday sun, thirty or forty barrage balloons, floating like huge beached whales in the sky. Then, with the sang froid that he would show for the next six years, Churchill made for the nearest air-raid shelter ‘armed with a bottle of brandy and other appropriate medical comforts.’7
The raid was a false alarm. Churchill’s shelter was the basement of a house with no sandbags and the all-clear sounded after fifteen minutes, followed by someone walking along the street calling out the same. No doubt the famous British sense of humour kicked in – ‘Is that all they’ve got?’ ‘Typical – late for their own war.’ Many people would learn to laugh at death in the coming months.
At 5pm on that Sunday, France, whose own ultimatum to Hitler over Poland had not yet expired, followed Chamberlain’s lead and declared war on the old enemy. And then …nothing.
The strange lull before the storm that the West experienced has been called ‘the bore war’ because it was so dull. The French knew it as drôle de guerre (the funny war). The Germans, who were, in fact, busy in the East, called it sitzkrieg (the armchair war). The British coined the expression of an American journalist based in London and the ‘phoney war’ was born. Even that first weekend, there was a peculiar sense of time standing still. Most football matches on the previous day had been cancelled because of a shortage of players. By the time of Chamberlain’s broadcast, many of the West Ham team were already wearing their itchy new battledress khaki, scanning the empty skies with the Essex regiment’s searchlight section.
Behind the scenes and unbeknownst to the British public, the government had set up Code Yellow and Code Black, mass movement unprecedented in history. People were on the move to safety. The BBC closed down its infant television station at Alexandra Palace, right in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon (unlike Nazi Germany, which continued to broadcast throughout the war). Realising the vital need to keep radio going and to provide news, the rest of ‘Auntie’s’ operatives moved to Bristol and Evesham. The Bank of England abandoned Threadneedle Street and became the Little Old Lady of Overton, Hampshire. The National Gallery began the huge task of moving its art exhibits, of the sort that Hermann Goering was fond of collecting, to caves in a slate quarry in Wales.
But the biggest movement of all was of children. The horrific experiences of the town of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War two years earlier had brought a new word and a new concept to warfare – blitzkrieg.8 A reporter who was there told a disbelieving world:
‘I saw a priest in one group … His face was blackened, his clothes in tatters. He couldn’t talk. He just pointed to the flames, still about four miles away, then whispered, ‘Aviones … bombas … mucho, mucho.’ In the city, soldiers were collecting charred bodies. They were sobbing like children. There were flames and smoke and grit and the smell of burning human flesh was nauseating.’9
The ‘aviones’ were the Heinkel IIIs, the Dornier 17s and the Junkers 52s of Germany’s Condor Legion, the pride of Goering’s Luftwaffe, and Guernica was their dummy run for the war that was to come.
To avoid this unimaginable horror, on the last day of August, vast numbers of London schoolchildren had been marshalled by adults as bewildered as they were. They carried toothbrushes, sandwiches and one favourite toy, taken to their schools by tearful mothers and then by bus or Underground to the nearest mainline station. Their faces all stare out of grainy black and white snapshots today, clutching all that was left of their world. Journeys by train took hours and there were often no corridors. Toilets overflowed. Children were sick, with excitement and fear. They missed their families already and they had no idea where they were going. The whole thing was chaos. Large hotels in the country waiting to receive their cohort got no one. Tiny village cottages were swamped with siblings who refused to be separated. Many of them were crawling with lice and fleas. They had rarely seen soap and did not own a comb. To many of these townies, seasons and cows were just words that their teachers sometimes used.
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The land war may have been ‘phoney’ but the story at sea was different. The Kriegsmarine had fifty-eight submarines (U-boats), thirty-nine of which were at sea by early September. Although not a new weapon, the U-boat was regarded with apprehension by everyone. Until sonar (underwater radar) was perfected, a submarine was a silent killer, able to strike anywhere and disappear in minutes. Surface shipping, including that of the Merchant Navy and civilians, was at serious risk. Fifty-three such ships had been sunk by 3 September and it was not until four days later that the first British Atlantic convoys set out with destroyer escorts. On paper, the Royal Navy had the edge over the Kriegsmarine, although the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935 had allowed Hitler to build warships openly and four years of hectic arms manufacture had produced impressive results. The aircraft carrier Courageous was sunk on 17 September in a routine submarine patrol and, after that, the carriers were withdrawn. They were too important and too expensive to be squandered.
Most notorious of the Kriegsmarine’s fleet was the pocket battleship Graf Spee, which sank nine ships between September and December. By the end of October, 196,000 tons of Allied shipping had been lost, at the expense of five U-boats. The biggest blow, however, fell on 14 October, when U-boat commander Gunther Prien took his U-47 into the naval base of Scapa Flow and sank the Royal George. Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment had a field day. The next month, on 23 November, the merchant cruiser Rawalpindi was blown out of the water by the Scharnhorst. What no one realised at the time was that the Kriegsmarine were able to intercept British codes and plan their strategy accordingly.
What was the mood in Britain? The people only knew what they were told by the media, and both the BBC and the mainstream newspapers were soon tightly controlled by the government’s Ministry of Information. The paranoia of the period believed that there was a Fifth Column operating across the country, in constant touch with Nazi Germany and prepared to undermine morale in a thousand ingenious ways. Given this situation, the Ministry behaved not unlike Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, exhorting people to ‘Be like Dad – keep Mum’, ‘Tittle-Tattle Lost the Battle’ and ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. The public could only see things through official channels and those channels, naturally, tried to put a brave face on things. Spreading alarm and despondency was the last thing anyone wanted to do. Today, a number of historians believe that, in general, the media told the public the truth. I dispute that. On 10 May 1941, in the heaviest – and last – of the Luftwaffe’s Blitz on London, the Air Ministry claimed to have shot down twenty-eight German aircraft. In fact, the figure was seven and that was scant recompense for the terrible punishment that London had taken. The BBC reported it nonetheless.
Harold Nicolson provides a fascinating candid snapshot of reaction to the news. He was a National Labour MP for West Leicester when war broke out and would serve as a Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information from May 1940 to July 1941. Despite his ‘establishment’ status, his diary was written strictly for private purposes, not publication and the highs and lows of international developments give him a rather schizophrenic aura – suicidal in the morning, gung-ho in the afternoon (or vice versa), depending on the situation.
He had grasped the situation clearly by 6 September: ‘If we insist upon the continuance of battle, we may condemn many young men to death. If we urge acceptance, we are ending the British Empire.’10
In those early days of the war, Anthony Eden was seen as the hawk of the Commons, broadcasting to the nation. Nicolson’s schizophrenia is shown by his diary entry for 11 September: