The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain. Mei Trow
(the List’s W38), carried away with the emotion of it all, sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and, all around the chamber, shouts of ‘Go, go, go, go!’ filled the Prime Minister’s ears as he left.
The next few days were turmoil in the corridors of power. ‘Germany,’ wrote Marie Vassiltchikov, ‘has marched into Belgium and Holland.’ Harold Nicolson saw the same newsstands as he caught the London train from Brighton. The rumour machine followed him, with stories of the bombing of Lyons and an imminent invasion of Switzerland. On his arrival in the capital, he was immediately in the thick of politics. In the light of the news, some people contended that Chamberlain must stay. Samuel Hoare refused point blank to leave the Air Ministry. What about, some wondered, a triumvirate of Chamberlain, Churchill and Lord Halifax, the tall, stately Foreign Secretary? News from the Continent, arriving by the hour, was grim and there was panic in Whitehall. What made it all worse, Nicolson remembered, was the gorgeous spring day, with bluebells and primroses everywhere. He was back home in Sissinghurst by nine o’clock that night, in time to hear Chamberlain’s tones, still plummy, still out of touch, but now desperately tired, offering his resignation. There was to be no triumvirate. There was to be no Halifax at Number Ten.
Marie Vassiltchikov wrote, ‘It comes as a shock as this means the end of the “Phoney War”…Paris is being evacuated, Chamberlain has resigned and Churchill is now Prime Minister. This, probably, kills any hope for peace with the Allies now.’
When Churchill appeared in the House for the first time after he had kissed rings at the Palace, he got a rousing cheer from almost everyone except his own party. He would have to use his prodigious energy to win friends, and quickly – the same negative advice was being drip fed into his ears, as it had been into Chamberlain’s. Basil Liddell-Hart, arguably the most influential independent military adviser in the country, had said in March that the only solution was to ‘come to the best possible terms as soon as possible …we have no chance of avoiding defeat.’13 Lord Beaverbrook used his Express Newspapers fortune to create a realistic team of peace candidates in the House. Halifax, who had actually turned down the premiership because, sitting in the Lords, he felt out of touch, also thought that coming to terms with Hitler was the only way forward.
The Dominions were not happy either. At the start of the war, Canada had waited a week before declaring war on Germany. In South Africa, it had taken a change of government in Johannesburg for that to happen. Now, Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, told his High Commissioner in London that Churchill was a publicity-seeker and that the real enemy was not Nazi Germany but Bolshevik Russia.
And it was to get worse. On 10 May, Fall Gelb was launched, a simultaneous attack on the Netherlands, Belgium and France. In the north, Field Marshal Bock’s twenty-nine divisions of Army Group B moved against a pitifully weak Dutch defence. The flat nature of the Netherlands offered very little in the way of natural barriers to slow the Wehrmacht down. In the centre, Army Group A, under von Rundstedt, marched confidently into Belgium from the West Wall. This was the major thrust of the campaign, forty-five divisions, crashing through the forest of the Ardennes with a speed that bewildered everyone except Heinz Guderian, whose panzers now came into their own. Against them, the Belgian army was feeble. The Dutch and Belgian reserves were based in the west, nearest to the coast. The Germans had forty-two divisions in their reserve, stationed in the north but ready to reinforce the line wherever needed.
In the south, Wilhelm Leeb’s Army Group C stretching from the Swiss border near Basel to Luxembourg, faced the French Maginot Line. Much has been written about these fortifications and the ‘defence mentality’ that they bred. The French Army Groups 2 and 3 manned it, under Generals André-Gaston Prételat and Antoine-Marie-Benoit Besson. Further north, along the French border, the 1st Army Group under General Gaston Billotte had twenty-two divisions. Further north still, along the Somme of bitter First World War memory, Field Marshal John Gort’s British Expeditionary Force had nine divisions and at the coast near Dunkirk, General Henri Giraud’s seven divisions included two motorised and one light mechanised.
On paper, the sides seemed evenly matched but the reality was very different. While Leeb feinted in the south, Runstedt simply bypassed the Maginot Line and pressed forward between Luxembourg and Aachen. The advantage that the Germans had was that the three army groups were co-ordinated by von Brauchitsch at OKH, the Army High Command. Against that, there was less co-operation than there should have been, certainly in the planning stage, between the Dutch, the Belgians, the French and the tiny British force involved. They had all had eight months since the outbreak of war to prepare for this moment but the possibility of establishing peace with Hitler, arrogance and inertia had combined with fatal results.
The French command was especially weak. General Maurice Gamelin, the commander-in-chief, did not have the confidence of the government or many of the officers under him. He was too old to appreciate the situation facing him. Even by the end of the first day’s fighting, everything had gone to the Wehrmacht’s plan and the Dutch and Belgians were struggling to hold out. In the air, the Luftwaffe’s superiority was clear – 3,000 combat aircraft to 2,000 of the Allies. It prompted the question from many disgruntled British squaddies in the days ahead, ‘Where the bloody hell was the RAF?’
Two days later, the Wehrmacht marched into Sedan unopposed. The French army retreated, determined to hold the Meuse with their heavy artillery. As Queen Wilhelmina and her advisers left for England to become another government in exile, Giraud’s Seventh Army was in full retreat, pushed back by Guderian and, another rising star in the Wehrmacht galaxy, Erwin Rommel.
That was the day that Churchill made one of his most famous speeches in the House. ‘I have nothing to offer you,’ he said, ‘but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’
Rotterdam was flattened by aerial bombing on 14 May and the Dutch were staring surrender in the face. In Britain, the Local Defence Volunteers were formed. Subsequently mocked as ‘Dad’s Army’ it was a last-ditch defence organisation composed of old men, teenagers and those with various disabilities. Without uniforms, guns or, at first, a structured command, they seemed as desperate as the times. The Dutch surrendered on the next day and the French First Army pulled back. The German commanders were at the front with their men, spearheading attacks as the Germans had for centuries.
In Britain, Air Marshal Hugh Dowding persuaded Churchill’s War Cabinet not to send any more fighters to France. They would simply be swallowed up in the German advance and Britain had neither the planes nor the pilots to spare. Instead, Bomber Command was given the green light to target the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, to damage war production. This may seem an obvious decision but it was directly at odds with the opening weeks of the war. Then, only leaflets were dropped because, after all, the factories in the Ruhr were private property!
Churchill flew to Paris on the 16th. He learned that the French Reserve had virtually ceased to exist. Minions in government offices were already burning top-secret papers and a radical shake-up in that government effectively removed Gamelin two days later. Marshal Phillipe Pétain, the hero of the First World War at Verdun, became deputy prime minister under Paul Reynaud, and General Maxime Weygand took over the supreme command. With hindsight, the aged Pétain was a poor choice; he had little faith in his own army and was overawed by the speed of the blitzkrieg that they faced.
In the case of the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), Gort was increasingly uneasy about the situation. He had the right to refuse French orders if he felt his own units were compromised but exactly when to pull out was difficult. At home, Harold Nicolson had been asked by Churchill to step up to the plate. In the Prime Minister’s own words, ‘Harold, I think it would be very nice if you joined the government and helped Duff [Cooper] at the Ministry of Information.’ Nicolson was like a schoolboy in his ‘sunny little room’ in a building belonging to London University, with pins and coloured wool showing troop positions across the Channel. By that day, Guderian’s panzers had carved a twenty-mile corridor from the Ardennes to the French coast. As he played with his pins, it may have dawned on Nicolson that the Third Reich was just over one hundred miles from him and getting closer every day.
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