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

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

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

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they were too few to do much damage and the French general Billotte was killed in a car crash. Walter Monckton, Director-General of the Press Bureau of the Ministry of Information, heard a loud laugh at the Foreign office that morning – ‘a sound which I have not heard for a week’. It was probably hysteria. Hitler held a high-level conference in Berlin that same day. This was the moment when Admiral Erich Raeder suggested to his Führer that it may be necessary to invade Britain.

      In the House, the Emergency Powers Act was passed, giving sweeping new authority to the magistracy, the police and the emergency services, which would have been unthinkable in peace time, and a new army of ‘little Hitlers’ threw their weight about in a society ever more afraid for its own safety.

      Harold Nicolson was expecting the worst. He advised his wife, the novelist Vita Sackville-West, to fill the tank of her Buick with petrol, grab her jewels and a twenty-four-hour food supply. ‘I should imagine that the best thing you can do is to make for Devonshire.’ He was not talking about invasion yet, but the need for the government to get out of London. If the Luftwaffe’s bombers were to be based on the French coast, then the British capital was well within their range.

      The Royal Navy was now in action in the Channel, firing in support of Allied troops pinned in at Calais and Boulogne. Under Defence Regulation 18B, Oswald Mosely, the British Fascist Leader and Captain Archibald Ramsay, chairman of the Right Club, were interned along with many others. In the rising tide of panic, anyone with obvious German or Austrian connections was rounded up and placed under lock and key, including, ironically, several who would appear on Walter Schellenberg’s List in a few weeks’ time.

      On 24 May, in a move that surprised everyone at the time and has been debated ever since, Hitler ordered a halt to the attack. Goering was demanding a more central role for his Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht’s tank crews certainly needed rest. Whether he deliberately soft-pedalled in his advance against the British in an effort to bring about peace talks is still argued today; but if he did, he reckoned without Winston Churchill.

      Beaverbrook’s Daily Express could scream in its banner headlines on 11 May, NOW WE’RE AT THEIR THROATS! but the reality was that we were David throwing pointless rocks at Goliath and the story was not turning out as it did in the Old Testament. On 4 June, Churchill made what is probably his best-known speech in the Commons:

      Operation Dynamo was the name given to the evacuation from Dunkirk that began on 26 May. Thanks to Churchill’s genius as a rhetorician, the phrase ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ entered the English language and a victory was born. In fact, as most people realised at the time, Dunkirk was a defeat and an embarrassing one at that. First Norway, now France; the much-vaunted British army had been well and truly beaten twice. Photographs of the Tommies returning home to Dover give a false impression. Their grins are those of relief, not pride. Some of these men were jeered in the streets. A few were spat at.

      The ‘little ships of England’, privately owned motor boats, made the dangerous Channel crossing more than once. They could carry few men, however, and virtually no equipment. These were transferred to Royal Navy transports and warships at a suitable distance from the coast. The rows of dispirited men, in battle bowlers and greatcoats, sleeping exposed on the Dunkirk beaches, were sitting ducks for the fighters and dive bombers of the Luftwaffe. On 31 May, they had thirty-eight planes shot down by the RAF, who themselves lost twenty-eight. It was all too little, too late. By the next day, 64,429 men had crossed the Channel but four British destroyers were sunk and five others seriously damaged. On 2 June, the last British units left, a little before midnight.

      The evacuees included 112,000 Frenchmen, who would form the Free French army in exile under General Charles de Gaulle in London, itching for a chance to renew the conflict on their own soil. Eighty ships had been lost and the navy’s resources were now seriously depleted. Of the 180 destroyers in the navy list at the start of the war, only 74 were still fully operational. Eighty of Dowding’s RAF pilots had been killed – altogether a more expensive commodity than Gort’s BEF ground troops and more difficult to replace. As if to add insult to injury, five days later, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisnau, marauding along the coast of Norway now that the British and the Norwegian royal family had abandoned it, came across the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious with two destroyers as escort. All three British ships were sunk.

      ‘And now comes Italy,’ moaned Harold Nicolson. ‘What a mean, skulking thing to do…They are like the people who rob corpses on the battlefield …. The Greeks had a word for it.’

      In fact, it would be another six days before Benito Mussolini officially declared war on Britain and France, and both he and his country’s military effort were to become, in the months ahead, an acute embarrassment to Hitler. At the time, of course, this was not the point. Mussolini, who became the Fascist dictator – Il Duce – of Italy in 1922, was very much the senior partner in the totalitarian stakes. Germany and Austria were Fascist, so was Italy. So, too, was Spain, although, exhausted by her civil war, she took no active part in the Second World War. It made sense for Italy to throw in her lot with Germany, and the Pact of Steel now created sent a shudder through the corridors of Whitehall. The Italian army was not first rate and the economy would find it difficult to sustain a prolonged war. The navy, however, was formidable, with state-of-the-art battleships nearing completion and the largest U-boat force in the world, 116 strong. The British possessions of Gibraltar in the west of the Mediterranean, Malta in the centre and Cyprus in the east, could all come under serious threat of invasion.

      Immediately, in Britain, people with Italian surnames or connections were rounded up under Regulation 18B. Ice-cream parlours vanished overnight. And, with the signposts taken down from roads and barbed-wire entanglements embedded into the beaches, it was not going to be a wonderful summer! ‘What makes me gnash my teeth,’ Nicolson wrote to his wife on 12 June, ‘is that Hitler said he would be in Paris by 15th June and I think he will meet that date, thereby increasing his mystic legend.’

      Nicolson was anaesthetised by the situation. Convinced that Britain would be bombed and invaded in three weeks, he and Vita had taken steps to commit suicide with cyanide capsules – the ‘bare bodkin’, as he calls them – ‘I am quite lucidly aware that in three weeks from now Sissinghurst may be a waste[land] and Vita and I both dead.’

      The very last of British and Canadian troops were evacuated from France by 18 June. Churchill hit exactly the right note again in the Commons, broadcast to the nation later: