If Britain Had Fallen (35 page)
There is no reason to suppose that the rest of the British Isles would have escaped any more lightly had the Germans landed, indeed the elaborate plans made by the Germans suggests that they would have been pillaged even more thoroughly. The only compensation would have been fixed by the Germans themselves, and disbursed through the local authority, who would in the first instance have had to find the money from rates, though perhaps able later to recover it from central government funds earmarked for Occupation purposes. The Germans seem to have assumed that, under the armistice treaty to be signed once their armies were victorious, the British government would have agreed, like the French government, to pay a large sum in reparations, as well as handing over war material of many kinds, including the British fleet. Later expenditure, for example on building roads and barracks for the German forces, or in compensating the owners of requisitioned premises or goods, would be charged against the ‘Occupation account’, in other words the British taxpayer would pay for the privilege of having German troops on his soil. This was the policy followed in the Channel Islands and the effects on the island’s budgets were seen at once. On Jersey income tax shot up from 9d to 4s od in the pound, on Guernsey it rose from 1s 6d to 5s od, though this was still a long way below the British rate, which by the end of the war had reached 10s od. With the war apparently lost, of course, one huge item of government expenditure, on munitions and other military needs, would have vanished overnight, though Britain might still have been expected to meet the heavy cost of maintaining the two and a half million members of its former armies in captivity. As the Germans’ demands seem likely to have grown rather than diminished the bill laid upon the British taxpayer as some new factory or industry began producing largely for enemy use, it seems certain that the British taxpayer would have faced a grim future, though if he had been left a reasonable share of his earnings there would have been little on which to spend it.
Happily the Germans never did cross the Channel, but in reflecting what their occupation of the British Isles would have meant one image remains in the mind, recorded in his diary by a Guernsey man in 1943: an old woman in her seventies trudging wearily for miles along a road carrying a heavy can of tar, the only fuel she could now obtain, while requisitioned cars and lorries driven by healthy young Germans roared past choking her with dust. Such scenes would have become a daily commonplace in the lanes of Devon and Yorkshire, of Angus and Inverness, of Carmarthen and Merioneth, had Britain fallen.
By order of higher authorities, the following British subjects will be evacuated and transferred to Germany … .
Notice
signed by German Commandant on the Channel
Islands, 15 September 1
942
The German plans for Great Britain were in one respect far harsher than those applied in any other occupied country. ‘The able-bodied male population between the ages of 17 and 45 will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling’, ran paragraph 5 of the Commander-in-Chief’s
Directive for Military Government in England,
‘be interned and dispatched to the Continent with the minimum of delay.’ The effects on the life of the country if this brutal instruction had been carried out would have been enormous. There were in 1940 around eleven million in these age groups in a male population of twenty-three million and a total population of forty-eight million, so almost overnight nearly half the men in the country and nearly one in four of all its citizens would have disappeared. The nation’s working life would have been, for a time at least, almost paralysed, since in 1940 the mobilisation of women for employment in factories, and the replacement of men by women in a vast range of occupations, from dockyard crane-drivers to bus conductors and plumbers’ mates, had hardly begun. Although there were already two and a half million men in the Forces, and the total, at its peak in June 1945, reached more than four million, even then nearly two out of three men of military age were still in civilian life, a few because they were medically unfit but the vast majority because their work was regarded as vital to the war effort. The Germans’ deportation orders would have started lower down the age scale than the British government’s call-up, which began at eighteen, and reached far higher, for though in theory by the end of the war any man under the age of fifty-two could be called up, very few over forty-one were in fact recruited. At the same time, a high proportion of the men in the forces were stationed in the United Kingdom, or later Europe, and were able to come on leave at regular intervals. There would from a German prison camp have been no 48-hour passes and no way out except to the gas-chamber.
If the internment policy had been applied in its full rigour, daily life for those remaining, apart altogether from the loss of their sons’ and husbands’ company and anxiety about their fate, would have become a
travesty of civilised existence. Goods of every kind would have become desperately scarce as industries were swept bare of their labour force. Coal, gas and electricity supplies would have dwindled rapidly, as all the most active miners and the key technicians and engineers left unconscripted by the British government disappeared to fell trees or build fortifications in some German forced-labour camp. Business of every kind would have been almost at a standstill as the few younger men in key positions who had been deferred from call-up were crammed into the railway cattle-trucks which the Germans favoured for transporting their helpless captives—before the railways themselves virtually ceased operation as their essential workers, too, were dragged into slavery. Food production would have been even harder hit for farm workers of every type had been one of the largest single groups exempt from military service, while the import of food from abroad would have suffered as the younger dock-workers were themselves loaded on to transports (perhaps the very barges which had brought the invading troops across) for shipment to the Continent. Everywhere the surviving civilian turned the loss of men would have been apparent: the doctor, the chemist, the clergyman—the Germans had no plans to spare any of these. The phenomenon noticed after the first world war, that there seemed to be few younger men about, would have repeated itself on a far vaster scale.
The country, it was often remarked, had never recovered from the loss of almost a whole generation of its ablest, bravest and healthiest citizens. The results of a German round-up in 1940 of all those aged from seventeen to forty-five would have been infinitely more serious and would have led, before the end of the century, to the virtual disappearance of the whole population of the British Isles. The word ‘genocide’, for the murder of a whole race, had not then been coined—it needed German treatment of other communities to add it to the world’s vocabulary—but this is what the policy proposed for the United Kingdom would have meant. The retention in captivity as prisoners-of-war of only two million Frenchmen for five years made an immediate mark upon the French birth-rate, which in the British Isles by contrast, after a dip in 1940 and 1941 when it was the lowest ever recorded, rose rapidly, so that the total number of children born during the war was about four and a half million, more than replacing the 1,800,000 civilians who died during those six years and the 300,000 servicemen and merchant seamen killed on active service. If all the young men in their late teens, twenties, thirties and early forties had been removed, few would have been left to father the next generation, for most men in their late forties and upwards were married to women past the age of child-bearing. The only children of British parentage to be born would
have been those of the few men who had somehow escaped the great round-up, or who had married wives substantially younger than themselves.
The total lack of British men, not merely as husbands but as boyfriends, must have had a traumatic effect upon social life, especially if the Occupation had dragged on year after year, so that memories of former companions and consorts faded, and it began to seem inconceivable that they would ever return. The ordinary woman would therefore have faced the agonising choice of never fulfilling her deepest instinct, to bear a child, or of seeking solace in the arms of some older man (whose social horizons would have been transformed by the sudden disappearance of all younger competition) or one of her country’s hated enemies, accepted first, perhaps, merely as a companion but ultimately as a lover and perhaps even as a husband. Even in the Channel Islands, where most of the men remained, several hundred illegitimate children were born to Channel Island women and German soldiers, although the details, and even the final total, were hushed up. Inevitably in England, too, some of those lonely, or worthless, women later known expressively as ‘Yank-bashers’ might have become ‘Jerrybags’ instead. One can predict even more confidently that, had the Germans issued in England the order they posted in Guernsey in October 1942, it would have had equally little effect: ‘Sexual relations either with the German soldiers or with civilians are strictly forbidden during the next three months’—one instruction which was universally defied.
The consequence of the mass deportation of the male population would have been so far-reaching, and the mere physical effort of rounding up and transporting eleven million men would have been so enormous, that one wonders if it would have been attempted. Certainly it was not in any other occupied country, even those such as Poland and Czechoslovakia where the Germans behaved with exceptional brutality. Nor in the only British territory they occupied, the Channel Islands, was there deportation on this scale, or of this particular category. If, of course, the Germans had, as they also planned, robbed the British Isles of virtually its whole productive capacity, then it would have made sense to take the workers with their factories but, as suggested in the last chapter, wiser counsels would probably have prevailed, in which case the deportation policy, too, would surely have stayed unimplemented. Even if some plants could have been bodily removed, three industries at least, and possibly more, could not have been uprooted and replanted in Germany and these contained more men reserved from military service than any others. The Germans could not have carried away the British landscape, with its crop-bearing
fields and pastures needed to support cattle and sheep. They could not have removed the coalmines, which alone meant leaving nearly 900,000 men where they were. Iron and steel smelting plants might perhaps have been dismantled and carried off, but their real value lay in being sited close to the source of their raw materials. Finally, the humblest German Economic Officer would have known that, though the generators of British power stations could be removed to Duisburg or Dortmund (although these places had sufficient power already), common sense and economic geography dictated leaving them where they were, on the coalfields which supplied them. For all these reasons the Germans would, it seems likely, have decided to ‘forget’ the internment order. Even as originally drafted it included a major escape clause, deportation being required
‘unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling.
This in many if not all parts of Great Britain is precisely what the local situation
would
have demanded.
A wholesale seizure of the younger male population might perhaps have occurred in districts where there had been resistance to the Germans, either by ‘auxiliary units’ or sabotage, or by workers who had gone on strike or ‘worked to rule’, thus enabling the Germans to get rid of the actual and potential troublemakers and provide a warning of what would happen elsewhere if the population were uncooperative. Deportation of all the men would, in other words, probably have been suspended over the British Isles as a permanent threat to would-be dissidents which, with the exceptions to be mentioned later, is what happened in the Channel Islands. One Guernsey man, well placed to judge and later himself sent to prison in France, recalls how ‘throughout the German Occupation the biggest blackmail threat held over us by the enemy was that, in the event of the civilian population offending them, the Germans would “deport from the island all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years”. The Nazis knew the effect this would have on everyone so they played it as their trump card.’
The knowledge that he might be carried off to work for the Germans abroad was also a strong inducement to every citizen to do as he was told, since anyone marked down as a ‘troublemaker’ was likely to find his name at the top of the list when ‘volunteers’ were required to join the Todt organisation, the vast mobile labour force the Germans moved about Europe to build factories, roads and fortifications. For the same reason it was dangerous to be unemployed, and one Jersey man, active in the resistance, remembers that after losing his job he ‘refused to register with the local labour authority because I might have been sent to work for the Germans and I spent three years of the Occupation wandering round on a
commission basis collecting overdue library books’. Although no British citizens seem to have been enrolled into the slave-labour force, the people of the Channel Islands had ample opportunity to see how its members were treated, for large numbers were employed on Jersey and Guernsey, building pillboxes and underground strongholds, and Alderney was taken over as a combined prison and camp for them. While many local people, as will be mentioned later, did their best to help these unfortunates, most were not unnaturally scared of these half-starved, ragged, wild-looking men, rendered desperate by the brutality with which they were treated, and having before them only the choice between being worked, or beaten, to death by the Germans, or being shot for stealing from the civil population. Fear dissolved in compassion, however, on occasions like that in 1942 when British deportees were being loaded on a boat at St Peter Port and a bucket of soup was knocked over on the ground, causing the slave-workers nearby to throw themselves on hands and knees to try to scoop up the precious puddles with their hands.