If Britain Had Fallen (7 page)

More open attempts to undermine British morale were made by the chief broadcaster of the German service in English, William Joyce, universally known as ‘Lord Haw Haw’, who openly broadcast as a spokesman for the enemy, but his efforts were far less successful than during the winter of the ‘phoney war’. The government paid Haw Haw the compliment of an advertising campaign urging people not to listen to him and even created an imaginary ‘Silent Column’ of citizens pledged not to pass on the rumours he tried to launch, a short-lived body which soon collapsed, being aimed at a danger which did not exist. Apart from an insignificant minority of Fascists, pacifists and other traitors preaching defeatism or non-resistance, no one in Great Britain even contemplated surrender.

Spirits almost everywhere were high that summer. The reports which reached the Germans telling them, as one did, ‘Workers fed up … Troops not keen… Churchill not popular’, could not have been wider of the mark. Morale, already solid in May, was sky-high by September, sustained by the sense of purpose with which the new government had infused the country, by the rescue of the Army by the ‘little boats’ at Dunkirk, by the losses being suffered by the Luftwaffe, and by the visible signs of preparation to meet an invasion. Most important of all were the speeches of Winston Churchill. When on 4 June, the day the last troops left Dunkirk, he made the famous declaration in the House of Commons: ‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender’, it seemed to the Germans mere empty oratory; by the British it was taken as a plan of action and a pledge.

The French decision to ask for an armistice, reported to the nation in
the one o’clock news on Monday 17 June, produced not the desire to stop fighting the Germans had expected, but the universal resolve, voiced in a famous cartoon of the time, ‘Very well then, alone’. Some people hoped for divine intervention. ‘That week people were praying everywhere,’ one Welsh miner noticed, ‘on the pit top, underground, in factories, as well as in places of worship.’ With its conquest an imminent possibility, people everywhere that beautiful summer began to look at their familiar landscape with newly-opened eyes as one Scotswoman remembers:

Nobody who lived through it can forget the effect of the news of the fall of France. I remember going immediately after having heard it to change my library books. It was a slack time for traffic, and it seemed as if a hush had descended on the whole world, and that I was walking in a vacuum, the last person left alive….Later in that week of wonderful weather, my brother, who was recovering from an illness, took his first outing to call on my mother and me, and we sat for a time on the terrace behind the house. Across the valley, the road northwards to Edinburgh wound round the hill, and over it came a convoy of army vehicles. I at once thought with a pang, ‘What would it be like if ever a stream of German armour appeared in that loop of road ?’ Apparently the same thought had occurred to my brother for he said, out of nowhere: ‘If I had a machine gun I could enfilade that road awful nicely.’ (He was a gunner in the first war.)

The ease with which small forces of Germans had roamed about France and the Low Countries, often behind the front line, causing chaos and demoralisation out of all proportion to their numbers, had deeply impressed the opposing generals and to prevent this happening in the British Isles an elaborate system of roadblocks was set up to slow down and contain any German advance. As the summer wore on the first impromptu obstacles of farm-carts, old cars, empty tar-barrels filled with earth, builders’ rubble, broken bedsteads and discarded mattresses, were largely replaced by properly built, if not always well sited, barriers of ‘concertina’ wire, massive concrete blocks and, sufficient to delay a motor cyclist or a single lorry, tree trunks mounted on a pivot which could be wheeled into position at strategic points. The first ingenious expedients, like the plan at Margate to seal off the beaches with ancient bathing machines filled with sand, were now supplemented by the biggest programme of fixed military defence works since the Roman legions had built Hadrian’s Wall. Soon every river or crossroad of any size in the South of England and East Anglia had its tank trap, consisting of concrete blocks or cylinders the size of a large barrel, and during July and August an army of 150,000 labourers toiled in the sunshine, stripped to the waist, to build the blockhouses and pillboxes which, it was hoped, would enable even lightly armed units to give a good account of themselves.

The British government’s main anxiety was about the threat from the air, for, misreading what had happened on the Continent, where airborne forces had played only a minor role, they had a disturbing vision of parachutists being scattered about the countryside, capturing strongpoints and generally wreaking havoc, and of whole planeloads of tough German infantry descending upon unprotected fields far behind the front line. To cope with these dangers, between late May and early September every open space on which an aircraft might land was covered with obstacles – sections of sewer pipe, farm machinery, wigwam-like tripods of posts. (In one place ‘fire ships’ of old cars loaded with explosives were contemplated but they proved impractical.) To stop gliders swooping down on wide roads, vast hoops of metal were erected over them like those which in happier times formed processional arches. The commonest type of obstacle was a simple wooden post, well planted in the soil, and one volunteer left behind him a detailed account of the effort involved in making this vital, if unspectacular, contribution to the nation’s security:

Having helped a number of local men to obstruct one meadow I came to the conclusion at the end of one day’s work that even a butterfly would crash if it attempted to land on that field…. The work was extremely hard…. You could not let up … because that gave the man digging the next hole a chance to get ahead and triumphantly to thrust his old railway sleeper, or young pine log, into the earth and begin on another…. This business of digging a hole four feet six in depth, and not much more than eighteen inches in diameter, may sound simple enough until it is tried. The first two spits may be dug out without complication; but after that, difficulty increases unless you have made a narrow trench for your feet…. A dry summer had made the earth cement-like … but, apart from this, a flinty stratum immediately under the tough matted turf made plain digging impossible and called for a pick and shovel. After eighteen inches of this a semi-rock layer had to be delved through, a slow and strenuous process owing to lack of space in the deepening hole…. At four-thirty … we dropped our tools and enjoyed excellent cups of tea and neat little buns … [brought by two local women]. The work was hard, but it exerted a powerful fascination. At last we were permitted to do something for the country.

The Germans did their best to encourage the preoccupation with parachutists by dropping on the night of 13 August instructions on their conduct in the forthcoming invasion to imaginary agents in the Midlands and Scotland, confirmatory evidence being provided by haversacks containing maps, wireless transmitters and high explosive, though many of the parachutes landed in standing corn, which had clearly not been disturbed by the foot of any spy. The government had, however, already taken active steps to combat the threat from the skies with the formation on Tuesday 14 May 1940, following a broadcast appeal for recruits by the Secretary of State for War, of the Local Defence Volunteers. The LDV,
which two months later was renamed the Home Guard, consisted of volunteers aged, officially at least, from seventeen to sixty-five, who had offered to serve as unpaid, spare-time soldiers, becoming full-time when enemy troops actually landed. Their purpose, stressed Mr Eden, was to cope with parachutists; a seaborne invasion was not mentioned. But, however the enemy came, the readiness to challenge him was unmistakable. By the end of the month 300,000 men had enrolled and by the beginning of September a million and a half, if not under arms for arms were still scarce, were at least on the units’ nominal rolls.

Many of the earliest recruits, as the government had hoped, were ex-servicemen, like one who was now a Whitehall Civil Servant living in Berkshire:

I think that none of us will forget our first LDV route march. On it a quarter of a century slipped away in a flash. There came memories of the Menin Road, of loose, shifting, exasperating cobbles, of the smell of cordite and the scream of shrapnel, of the mud and stench and misery of Flanders…. Our first route march was a silent one, with each of us busy with those thoughts of the past, trudging a Berkshire road with that almost automatic one-ness of movement which the old soldier can never lose…. I remember too, that none of us fell out, although more than one of us badly wanted
to.

Here was a spirit that Hitler, himself a veteran of the first world war, might have envied, but his spokesman on German radio preferred instead to abuse the new ‘murder bands’, which, he threatened, would be treated as civilian partisans and shot out of hand when captured. Sometimes these tirades were replaced by mockery of the new force and this, had the Germans realised it, was a far more effective tactic. More than one recruit, disillusioned by being put to guard a roadblock equipped only with an armlet and a home-made club, resigned in disgust, and others’ visions of martial glory faded fast when set to doing arms-drill with a broom-handle. It was also deflating to patriotic spirits to be chased off the municipal lawns by a park-keeper when training, or when practising grenade-throwing with a brick on a patch of wasteland, to be urged by the small boys playing cricket there to ‘Go away and play somewhere else, mister, ‘cos we was ‘ere first’.

Yet the Germans made a mistake in simply ignoring the Home Guard. In May and early June it had been, perhaps, a militarily negligible force, though already doing useful work in scanning the skies for parachutists and guarding bridges and power stations, but by September, although many units were still virtually unarmed, the situation over the country as a whole had been transformed. The newly-formed battalions of ‘Sunday soldiers’, as their critics disparagingly called them, were now integrated
into the defence plans for every locality. Most men now had a uniform of some kind, even though it was usually only ill-fitting denims topped, if at all, by a steel helmet that was too small, and rounded off with boots far too large; the Army, ordered to hand over its surplus stores, had, naturally enough, disposed of the sizes of which it had no need. The key factor, however, both in morale - the will to fight - and in fire-power - the ability to fight - was a unit’s weapons and here the months of waiting had been well used. Even in May most of those who had gone on the first patrols in the coastal areas of Kent and Sussex had been armed, though very little ammunition was available, but the arrival of half a million old American rifles in mid-July, though at first with only ten rounds of ammunition apiece, made an enormous difference, and 20,000 more revolvers and shotguns trickled in as a result of the appeal which had already attracted Dr Goebbels’s amused attention. If, as the British feared, the Germans planned to drop marauding parties of parachutists far inland it might go badly with the Home Guard for weapons. Away from the coast not merely in the Home Guard but in the Army weapons were still desperately few. In the South-Eastern counties, however, few men, whether regular soldiers or Home Guards, whatever their other deficiencies of training and equipment, would have had to confront their country’s enemies totally unarmed.

Already by September the original conception of the Home Guard as a small force of part-timers, concentrated in rural areas and designed only to deal with lightly armed airborne troops, had been forgotten. It was now far larger than the government had at first intended, much of its strength lay in built-up areas, and it might well have had to cope not merely with motor-cyclists and parachutists but with enemy tanks. Since there were far too few anti-tank weapons to equip even regular units with them, the Home Guards had to do the best they could from their own resources, and many entered eagerly into the manufacture of Molotov cocktails, which consisted of bottles filled with petrol, with a wick through the cork, lighted just before the bottle was thrown. The value of this dangerous device was highly questionable and one veteran of the Spanish Civil War considered that ‘if lobbed on the top of a tank… they merely warm it slightly’, but any weapon to halt the Panzers seemed better than none. A captain in one Kent company toured his village one Sunday morning with a farm cart collecting several hundred whisky and soft-drink bottles – beer bottles were considered too hard to break easily—and then set up his own private filling plant in a wood, where a mixture of warm tar and petrol was poured lovingly into each container, the wives of his men obligingly making canvas carriers for the bottles from old mattress
covers and sackcloth. Other devices had an even more desperate air. The news that one inventor had converted an ARP stirrup pump into a flamethrower, discharging inflammable dry-cleaning fluid, and that a Hampshire unit was equipped with its own cannon, consisting of a metal tube filled with gunpowder, fired by hitting it with a hammer, was more likely to have struck joy into Doctor Goebbels’s heart than terror in Field Marshal Keitel’s.

The loyal Englishman could buy at the station bookstall on his way home that summer a variety of books on irregular warfare, written by experts who had already fought the Germans in Spain, and much of the advice given was sound and easily followed. One author recommended that men manning roadblocks should be posted ‘all on one side of the road, in case they fire on each other at moments of excitement’, and there was a simple way of dealing with a dive-bomber: It is said to be a good idea to swear at it; even if you cannot hear what you say, you know the meaning of the words and thus get psychological relief.’ Although still warning against clergy and - inevitably—nuns who were parachutists in disguise and even, a new tenor, ‘adolescent enemy agents … dropped in the uniforms of Boy Scouts or Sea Scouts’, the writer urged a reasonable measure of caution, which had rarely been mentioned in the first hectic days back in May: ‘The business of the Home Guard is to be soldiers first and heroes afterwards and … live heroes are usually better than dead ones.’