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

       CHAPTER TWO

       THE WAR THAT WAS TO BE – AUGUST 1940

      When Winston Churchill talked of the experience of invasion that the British people had not known for a thousand years, he was talking about 1066, still regarded by many as the best-known date in British history. There have only been three identifiable foreign invasions in recorded history, not including drifts of demography by the Celts, Saxons and Vikings.

      The first was the arrival of Julius Caesar – twice! – in 55 and 54BC. This was more of a fact-finding mission than an attempt at conquest and was part of Caesar’s far more ambitious campaign in Gaul. The second was the appearance of Aulus Plautius and his four legions in 43 AD. Although it is not possible to be accurate in terms of numbers, Plautius’s full strength would have given him about 20,000 men; perhaps double that if we factor in the auxiliary units that the Romans habitually used.

      William of Normandy’s invasion of 1066 was a much less impressive venture. Rome was a super-power, dominating the Europe of the ancient world; Normandy, by comparison, was a small, obscure duchy with little to recommend it. Again, numbers are hazy but it is likely that the Normans had no more than twelve thousand men, some estimates going as low as eight thousand.

      The Roman invasion worked, not only because of the superb qualities of the Roman fighting machine, but because Britain, at the time, was a rag-bag of independent tribes; the Romans picked them off, one by one. In 1066, the English king, Harold Godwinson, had to fend off an invasion in the north before turning south with an exhausted army to face William at Senlac (Hastings). It would all be very different in 1940.

In pondering the task before the Germans in the Spitfire summer, Joachim von Ribbentrop, former ambassador to London, believed it would be a walk in the park. ‘English territorial defence is non-existent. A single German division will suffice to bring about a complete collapse,’ he told Mussolini in Rome. But then, the ex-champagne salesman was not a military man and his gaffes, in public and private, were legendary. At a royal reception in 1937, he had greeted George VI with a Hitler salute instead of the bow and handshake he ought to have given. He reported to Hitler that the British were lethargic and paralysed and would never go to war over Poland. Most of his peers had nothing but contempt for him. The far more able Josef Goebbels, for instance, wrote, ‘Von Ribbentrop bought his name, he married money and he swindled his way into office.’20 William Keitel, by contrast, was far more realistic. Recently promoted to Field Marshal, the man was old-school Prussia – tall, erect, with a monocle flashing over his left eye. As the war went on, the independence he still showed in the summer of 1940 disappeared. He became known, behind his back, as ‘Lakaitel’ (flunkey) and ‘the nodding ass’. On trial for his life at Nuremberg after the war, he said, ‘I was never permitted to make decisions, the Führer reserved that right to himself…’21

      Keitel may have been aware that two other planned invasions of Britain had come to grief, in both cases because of command of the seas or, rather, lack of it. In the summer of 1588, irritated by English privateers raiding his silver convoys and giving aid to Dutch protestant rebels, Philip II of Spain unleashed his Armada against England. One hundred and thirty ships carrying 18,000 soldiers and manned by 8,000 sailors sailed up the Channel to link up with the Duke of Parma’s force in the Spanish Netherlands – another 30,000 men. By sixteenth century standards, this would have been a formidable force and England had no standing army to stop them. In the event, naval clashes off the south coast were inconclusive and it was the weather that destroyed the Armada, the ships battered on the British coast and scattered as far west as Ireland.

The threat of 1804 was, in many ways, greater. At Boulogne, that summer, was camped L’Armée d’Angleterre – the army of England – 200,000 regulars commanded by the ‘god of war’ who crowned himself emperor in that year. This time, England did have a regular army but it was scattered far and wide in defence of its colonies and the recently raised militia and yeomanry forces were untried and badly trained. Against them would have come Napoleon’s ‘grognards’ (grumblers), who had achieved phenomenal success against all the powers of the ancien regime. Once again, it was the weather that came to the rescue. The French could not get their huge army across the Channel, either in conventional transports or on the vast rafts built for the purpose – Nelson’s navy was there to stop them. And stop them it did, off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. Even before that, Admiral St Vincent, First Lord of the Admiralty, understood the situation perfectly – ‘I do not say they [the French] cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea.’22

      But if Philip II and Napoleon Bonaparte could not do it, perhaps Adolf Hitler could. The men responsible for planning the invasion of 1940 were the staff officers of OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) in collaboration with OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres). The genesis of both, overlapping, organisations, was the Prussian General Staff, which morphed into the Great General Staff (Grosser Generalstab) under the Kaiser. In Napoleon’s day, military success rested above all with the ability of army commanders. The Prussian Frederick the Great had been brilliant. So was Napoleon.