If Britain Had Fallen
IF BRITAIN
HAD FALLEN
OTHER BOOKS BY NORMAN LONGMATE INCLUDE:
How We Lived Then,
A History of Everyday Life during the Second World War
The Real Dad’s Army, The Story of the Home Guard
The GIs, The Americans in Britain, 1942–1945
Air Raid, The Bombing of Coventry, 1940
When We Won the War, The Story of Victory in Europe, 1945
The Doodlebugs, The Story of the Flying-Bombs
Hitler’s Rockets, The Story of the V-2s
The Bombers, The RAF Offensive against Germany
The Home Front, An Anthology of Personal Experience, 1938–1945
(editor)
Defending the Island, From Caesar to the Armada
Island Fortress, The Defence of Great Britain, 1603–1945
King Cholera, The Biography of Disease
The Waterdrinkers, A History of Temperance
Alive and Well, Medicine and Public Health, 1830 to the Present Day
[i.e. 1970]
The Workhouse
Milestones in Working Class History
The Hungry Mills, The Story of the Lancashire Cotton Famine,
1861–1865
The Breadstealers, The Fight against the Corn Laws, 1838–1846
NORMAN LONGMATE
IF BRITAIN
HAD FALLEN
THE REAL NAZI OCCUPATION PLANS
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NORMAN LONGMATE
FRONTLINE
BOOKS
A Greenhill Book
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited
www.greenhillbooks.com
Reprinted in this format in 2012 by
Frontline Books
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright © Norman Longmate, 1972
New Introduction © Norman Longmate, 2004
ISBN 978 1 84832 647 7
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.
Printed and Bound
by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY
For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England
E-mail: [email protected]
Website:
www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
Contents
New Introduction
Foreword
1
Plans
2
Preparations
3
Anticipation
4
Bombardment
5
Assault
6
Break-out
7
Defeat
8
Wanted: a Quisling
9
The Merseyside spies
10
Whatever happened to Nelson?
11
To laugh at the Führer is forbidden
12
How long is a Crayfish?
13
Requisitioned
14
Deported
15
See Germany and die
16
Resistance
17
Collaboration
18
Which way to the Black Market?
19
The New Order
20
The end of the nightmare
A note on sources
Index
Illustrations
Between pages 64 and
65
1
Building a strongpoint, Trafalgar Square, May 1940
2
Weapon training for Members of Parliament, July 1940
3
Assault training for Southern Railwaymen, June 1940
4
Central London street scene, May 1940
5
Enemy aliens en route to internment, May 1940
6
A roadblock in Southern England
7
Home Guards erecting a wire trap across a road
8 and 9
Anti-air-landing obstructions, July 1940
10
A roadblock near the coast
11
The removal of place-names. A notice in the Bristol area, June 1940
12
A church notice board, Summer 1940
13
Anti-tank roadblock, July 1940
14
An anti-aircraft gun’s crew taking post, 1940
15
Sea-bathing on the south coast, 1940 style
Between pages 144 and
145
16
Invasion barges, as seen by the RAF
17
Oil defences being tried out on the south coast
18
German storm troops under training
19
The defenders. Winston Churchill and General Sir Alan Brooke on the south coast
20
The attackers. Hitler with General von Brauchitsch and Admiral Raeder, on their way to an invasion conference, June 1940
21
An invasion barge, during an exercise at Calais
22
Embarkation exercise at Dieppe, September 1940
23
A cliff-scaling exercise on the French coast
24 and 25
A German parachutist and a Panzer break-through (a British artist’s impression)
26 and 27
German motorised troops on manoeuvres and a river-crossing exercise, with rubber boats
28
A pontoon bridge in use in Luxemburg, May 1940
29
German troops occupying Luxemburg
Between pages 192 and
193
30
German troops on Guernsey
31
Guernsey Occupation Orders, July 1940
32
German troops in St Peter Port, Guernsey
33
German tanks on occupied Guernsey
34
A German military bank in the Royal Parade, St Helier
35
Guernsey cinema taken over by the Germans
36
Anti-invasion defences under construction at Anne Port, Jersey
37
A captured French gun being towed into position on Guernsey
38 and 39
A gas-driven van and a horse-drawn van on Jersey
40
Resident of Jersey collecting Red Cross food parcels
41
The Germans burying British servicemen with full military honours
42
The New Jetty, Guernsey, awaiting possible demolition
43
Parliament Square, July 1940
Maps
British Isles, showing possible German invasion routes
page
10
Acknowledgement is due for permission to reproduce the following plates:
Associated Press 26, 28; Central Press 3,13, 43; Frank Falla 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 42; Fox photos 15; Imperial War Museum 16;
Jersey Evening Post
34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41; Keystone 4, 23, 24; Radio Times Hulton Picture Library 1, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 19, 25, 27; Wide World 2; Reece Winstone 11.
The maps were drawn by Nigel Holmes. The illustration on page 123 is reproduced by courtesy of Rupert Hart Davis Ltd.
To
J.C.L
Who grew up in freedom, because we won
Since the first edition of this book was published in 1972 much has changed. At that time most of the population had lived through the war and the mere suggestion that Britain might have been defeated was widely regarded as an outrage. Today no one much under the age of seventy can have any recollection of the summer of 1940. Since the 1972 books and broadcast, programmes of the ‘What if…’ variety have become commonplace and alternative history is now respectable.
The military appreciation of how the country was supposedly defeated was not my work, though I fleshed out the experts’ narrative with my own fictional detail. The account of events still seems to be entirely plausible and all we learned later in the war suggests that the loss of air superiority would have been decisive.
On the subsequent pattern of occupation I think that I may have under-estimated the depredations that the country will have suffered, especially in the cultural sphere. I referred to the plundering of the great national collections, but experience in Europe, which still results in occasional court cases, makes clear that the major country houses would not have been spared and privately owned works of art might have been forcibly acquired, possibly for Nazi leaders, with art dealers being used to give the transaction a show of legality. One interesting point is that one official is quoted as favouring the return of ‘stolen works of art to their original owners’, instancing the Elgin Marbles, which a number of no doubt patriotic Britain have recently advocated.
The most sensitive chapters of the book dealt with the likelihood of collaboration and the emergence of a Quisling puppet government. Here, what happened in the Channel Islands is reassuring. A thorough investigation at the end of the war, though its findings were not made public until 1992, cleared the authorities in Jersey and Guernsey and the other islands of assisting the Germans more than was required to protect the civil population from worse treatment. The only charges brought against ordinary citizens were low-grade offences like working in menial posts for the enemy and even here the defendants could, and did, argue that they were acting under duress.
As for a British Quisling, a number of cases have come to light of prominent aristocratic or, occasionally, literary figures advocating friendship with Germany even after the war was visibly approaching or had begun, though their motives—honourable enough, if misguided—were to prevent at almost any price a repeat of the bloodbath of 1914–1918. A German invasion would probably have concentrated the minds of all but the most besotted, but there is one exception about whom, since his death in May 1972, much more has been revealed and all to his discredit. Wherever one looks, in Great Britain or the United States, the Duke of Windsor’s name emerges as the likeliest head of a pro-Nazi government. Only recently have we learned that Churchill was exasperated by the Duke’s reluctance to leave Europe when the war seemed lost. Not till November 1992 did an American journalist who interviewed the Duke in the Bahamas in 1940 reveal, as he claimed, the Duke’s strongly pro-German sympathies. There can be no question that the Germans regarded the Duke as sympathetic to the ‘new Germany’ and he unquestionably had Nazi sympathisers as friends and was, at the very least, indiscreet in revealing his opinion to visitors.