The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (100 page)

With the tragedy of the fall of France, the offshore islands of Great Britain were facing a hostile coastline of 2,000 miles. The most likely prospect was that she would be the next to be overrun by a regime which tortured and murdered anyone who got in its way or displeased it. Hitler assumed that Britain would make a separate peace, as the US ambassador to London, Joseph P. Kennedy, had predicted.

But Hitler had mistaken her nature. Ever since the invasion of Holland and Belgium, Britain had been led by a man who for a decade had been warning the world about the need to resist the evils of Nazism. During the Second World War Winston Churchill’s superhuman energies could be used to the full. At last a real fighting spirit had become prime minister, ready to remind the British that this war was not ‘a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man.’

Had Chamberlain remained prime minister, it is possible that Britain would have given in; certainly some of the Cabinet had thoughts of a negotiated peace. With German planes and boats on the north coast of France and the whole of northern and western Europe overrun by German armies, logic would suggest that a country which was so highly dependent on imports for food should simply do a deal. Italy’s entry into the war guaranteed that at any moment the tiny British armies in Egypt (36,000 men) and the Sudan (9,000) would be confronted by 200,000 invading Italians from their north African empire.

Nevertheless there were still the Dominions and colonies and their manpower ranged round the world, all of which had declared that they would support the empire. Many exiled governments, including those of Norway, Holland and Belgium, found refuge in Britain; their fellow countrymen would start resistance movements from within their occupied countries. Moreover Churchill, who began negotiating with the US president Franklin D. Roosevelt almost immediately for matériel and above all credit, was hopeful that one day America would join the war.

Ever since Churchill had taken over the government on 10 May, the same day that the German invaders parachuted into Holland and Belgium, a new spirit had been infused into England. The acute national danger and the collapse of the Norwegian campaign made the House of Commons realize that it could no longer put up with Chamberlain’s well-intentioned muddling. Now Britain had Churchill, an extraordinary public speaker and her most inspirational wartime prime minister. As he would so stirringly broadcast to the nation on 4 June 1940 after Dunkirk, Britain would never give in: ‘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.’ What has been called the bulldog spirit, a grip that refuses to let go even in its death throes, was epitomized in this magnificent, short, fat, bald Englishman. Although his generals often found him maddening, owing to his love of amateur strategy, Churchill’s inventiveness, his refusal to accept defeat, above all his extraordinary eloquence roused the British people in their country’s darkest hour. He said on his appointment, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, but it was enough. In his siren suit, cigar clamped in his teeth, fingers in a V-sign for victory, he represented hope.

In the mid-1930s Churchill’s reputation had suffered as a result of his opposition to Indian self-rule and his support for Edward VIII. He was not popular among the Conservative grass roots thanks to his habit of changing parties. But in the Second World War his being above party was a huge asset. He immediately created a coalition ministry, bringing in four Labour ministers (Attlee was Lord Privy Seal) and one Liberal, as it was important to draw the nation together during such a crisis. While Churchill was orchestrating all parts of the war effort with the sort of bravura Lloyd George had shown in the First World War, Labour was left in charge of home affairs and began drawing up plans for social reform. Churchill was more of an official war leader than Lloyd George had been, he was less of an intriguer and he had better relations with the armed services. Moreover, by assuming the title minister of defence in May 1940, he had operational command of the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet.

One of Churchill’s most important appointments was the flamboyant Canadian newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook as minister of aircraft production. Under the tycoon’s influence, production of aircraft increased threefold, though a shortage of trained pilots would prove a serious problem. The manufacture of arms also had to be dramatically increased after Dunkirk. If the Germans had landed in Great Britain at any time in the month after the fall of France the British would not have had the munitions to defeat them.

Seeking refuge in London was General Charles de Gaulle, a distinguished soldier who had escaped from France to carry on the struggle abroad. He made himself what he called the leader of the Free French forces and was thus a potential leader for all the French colonies. What was left of the Third Republic was a rump French state centred at Vichy in the south ruled by Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun in the First World War. The rest of France was occupied by the Germans. Many of the French felt betrayed by Britain. They believed that she could have lent them more fighter planes before the fall of France. And they were furious when, to prevent it being used by the Germans, the British navy sank the French Mediterranean Fleet at Mers El Kebir in July 1940 and killed 1,300 French seamen.

Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, had refused to yield to the French pleas for aircraft because he had carefully calculated the number of planes needed to defend Britain. The Battle of Britain, which began about ten days after Churchill rejected a separate peace with Germany in August, was, to borrow from the Duke of Wellington, ‘the nearest run thing’. Like Waterloo it resulted in a decisive victory for Britain.

When it was made very clear by the eloquent roar of Winston Churchill in August 1940 that Britain was continuing the war on her own against Nazism, Hitler decided to invade. This was Operation Sealion. All French Channel and southern North Sea ports from the River Scheldt to Boulogne became choked with invasion barges containing grey-uniformed soldiers waiting for the Luftwaffe to soften Britain up first. People began to fear that, as in the rest of western Europe, stormtroopers would soon be overrunning Britain. The Germans had occupied the Channel Islands on 30 June and established a concentration camp on Alderney. The Churchill government announced that Britain was about to be invaded. But first the Germans would have to dispose of the Royal Navy guarding the Channel–and those warships were protected by the Royal Air Force.

The Battle of Britain opened on 13 August 1940. That day the Luftwaffe made 1,485 sorties over Britain’s south-eastern airfields. Day after day they flew in over Kent and Sussex dropping their deadly loads. Fortunately their effectiveness was greatly impaired by the secret use of radar, invented by Sir Robert Watson-Watt and developed by British research scientists between the wars. Radar stations set up at intervals all over the south and east coast of England from 1936 onward gave early warning of approaching planes, enabling RAF fighter pilots to rush to their machines and meet the foe in the air. On 15 August the RAF conclusively defeated a massive force of almost 1,800 German aircraft which could have wiped out the fighter aircraft which had been allowed for to defend southern England. The battle over the skies of England that hot August day was crucial in averting the invasion.

Nevertheless, if the German planes had continued to bomb the fighter airfields and aircraft factories, they probably would have done for the British in the end. But Hitler and the Luftwaffe leader Hermann Göring were infuriated when the RAF dropped bombs on Berlin in retaliation for the Germans mistakenly bombing London. Instead of continuing the assault on the airfields they ordered the attacks on London known as the Blitz. On 7 September, to the surprise of Londoners 900 German aircraft (300 bombers escorted by 600 fighters) roared overhead in broad daylight at about 4.30 in the afternoon, flying from the east in tight formation up the line of the Thames. Having bombed the Docks, they turned over central London and, like a monstrous flock of geese, flew back over the East End and down over southern England to France again. Then, at about 8.30 that evening, the night bombing began. Wave after wave of bombers came over until 4.30 in the morning. By then the whole London skyline seemed to be on fire, and about 2,000 people had been killed or badly injured. The East End and the Docks were ablaze. Meanwhile from the ground the searchlights of the anti-aircraft batteries–London’s defences–raked the sky looking for German planes.

The number of German troop carriers in the Channel was growing daily, but the risk to Britain was over. Though in September a few church bells in southern villages were rung as an invasion warning, Germany was being defeated in the air. The boats in the Channel never disgorged their ferocious occupants to bring blood and death to England’s quiet beaches. Although London continued to be bombed for fifty-seven consecutive nights, by 17 September the Battle of Britain had been won. Hitler was forced to postpone the invasion of Britain indefinitely, or at least until the following spring. By then his attention had turned to the conquest of Russia, and once again, as during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain remained free against a continental tyrant, a toehold from which the long struggle to overthrow him could begin.

At a cost of 900 aircraft, young British pilots–aided by gallant Poles determined to avenge the loss of their homeland–had fought off the Luftwaffe, downing about 2,000 enemy planes. The Battle of Britain was the first setback Nazi Germany had encountered anywhere since the war had begun a year before. Churchill would sum up the national mood in his tribute to the airmen: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

Even so, with brief respites the night attacks went on until May 1941. Many Londoners made use of the Tube network to take shelter until the all-clear was sounded; an official count on 27 September 1940 showed that 177,000 men, women and children spent that night sleeping in the Underground stations. Between September 1940 and May 1941 some 18,800 tons of bombs fell on London. But London was not alone. There were Blitzes on other cities. A thousand people were killed in Coventry on 14–15 November. There was heavy bombing of Birmingham on 29 November, and of Liverpool that same night and in early May 1941. Southampton and Plymouth were bombed on 30 November 1940; Bristol on 2 December, Manchester on 22 December; Glasgow on 18-19 March 1941, Belfast on four nights in April and two in May. Between 23 April and 6 June 1942 there were the so-called Baedeker raids on cities of historic interest in revenge for attacks on Lübeck; in these raids Exeter, Bath, York, Norwich and Canterbury suffered.

But Great Britain did not have just herself to defend. She had her Middle Eastern interests to consider, particularly Egypt and the route to India. The British stopped a pro-Axis group against the Iraqi regent in May 1941, and in an operation from Palestine with the help of Australian, Indian, British and Free French troops overran Syria and the Lebanon, where the Vichy-controlled administration was replaced by the Free French. The Italian troops in north Africa made a campaign there necessary. Britain also wanted to encourage any neutral states in continental Europe to turn away from the Axis. From the end of October 1940 there was a window of opportunity for the allied cause in the Balkans.

Mussolini, who had already seized Albania in May 1939, attempted to invade Greece in October 1940. Despite that year’s Pact of Steel alliance between Italy and Germany, Hitler (who had already partially dismembered Romania to control her oilfields) was challenging Italy’s natural hegemony in the Balkans, where Mussolini planned to extend his empire. The Greeks ejected Mussolini’s forces, and by December 1940 they held part of Albania. A build-up of British troops began in Greece. But German forces were rushed across the Balkans to rescue the situation, and the window of opportunity began to close. The following March 50,000 British soldiers who had been enjoying a series of triumphs in the Western Desert of north Africa under General O’Connor and had almost succeeded in throwing the Italians out of north Africa–were suddenly diverted to Greece. In April Hitler attacked both Greece and Yugoslavia, which had declared against the Axis after a coup by General Simovi$$$. By mid-May it was all over–both countries were occupied by the Germans.

The British forces had to be evacuated to Crete, the island at the foot of the Greek mainland. On 20 May almost 30,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops were defeated by another airborne invasion, of German soldiers. The allied troops had almost no air cover and, though they fought with great courage, they were evacuated as soon as possible. Not just north-western but southern Europe were now in German hands.

North Africa, which could have been clear of Italians by early 1941, was once more a desperate battleground. Because O’Connor had not been able to finish the job, there had been time for Hitler to ship his most brilliant general Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps tanks across the Mediterranean to help out the Italians, just as he had helped them out in the Balkans. Rommel drove the British out of Cyrenaica east along the coast and began menacing them in Egypt. Only Ethiopia remained secure. There British soldiers, Kenyans and other African peoples fought together to capture 200,000 Italians and restored the emperor Haile Selassie to his throne.

The Balkans campaign had been a failure for Britain. Yet it had an unlooked-for but crucial consequence. It delayed Hitler’s invasion of Russia by six weeks while Germany overran Greece and Yugoslavia. Those six weeks were the invasion’s undoing, because they ensured that it was not completed before winter set in. The German army was thus at the mercy of that powerful Russian ally, General Winter. For by March 1941 Hitler had begun planning for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion that summer of his ally Russia. As it had been for that other would-be world conqueror, Napoleon, Russia was where Hitler’s campaign foundered irretrievably. Curiously enough, the Führer’s invasion began on 22 June, the day before that of Napoleon had started in 1812. Operation Barbarossa put an end to the threat of invasion for Britain and pegged down German armies for years.