Читать книгу Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45 - Duff Hart-Davis - Страница 13

This fortress built by Nature for herself,

Against infection and the hand of war.

Shakespeare, Richard II

Big, black capitals stand out starkly from the Ministry of Information’s poster: ‘If the INVADER Comes’. When the Phoney War ended, with the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk at the end of May 1940 and the capitulation of France in June, fear of a German invasion increased sharply. Within days of the fall of Paris on 14 June Hitler’s armies were on the Channel coast and starting to mass for Operation Seelöwe (Sealion), the assault on Britain. In his Directive No. 16, issued on 16 July, the Führer stated his intentions with characteristic subtlety:

As England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, still shows no willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her. The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English mother country as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued, and, if it should be necessary, to occupy it completely.

His Army Commander, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, who was to take charge of Britain if the invasion succeeded, had clear ideas about his treatment of the conquered people. In his Directive No. 5 he proclaimed: ‘The able-bodied male population between the ages of seventeen and forty-five will … be interned and dispatched to the Continent with a minimum of delay.’ There were also rumours that all young British men were to be sterilized. In his Proclamation to the People of England von Brauchitsch stated: ‘I warn all civilians that if they undertake active operations against the German forces, they will be condemned to death inexorably.’

After the first evacuation of the cities in September 1939, many people had trickled back to their homes; but as Hitler’s forces massed across the Channel, fear reasserted itself and another emigration took place. Driving about the south coast, the American reporter Vincent Sheean got the impression that it was the better off who went first, boarding up their houses and moving further inland. In St Margaret’s, near Dover, a woman whom he had known before the war stood in the door of her cottage and told him ‘how it was’:

‘The gentry’s all gone away,’ she said, her eyes twinkling with some enjoyable malice. ‘It was the same in the last war. I never did ’old with going away the minute there’s a bit of trouble.’

‘For the second time the war is coming nearer, looming up large and threatening,’ wrote the author Frances Partridge (a pacifist and conscientious objector) in her diary on 3 April.

Air raids, invasion, refugees. One’s whole body reacts with a taut restlessness, as though one had a lump of lead for stomach and sensitive wires from it reaching to toes and fingers.

As a second exodus from cities took place, villages were flooded once more. Between 13 and 18 June about 100,000 children were evacuated from London and ‘invasion corner’ – the towns on the south coast. Some 17,000 went to the West Country and South Wales, in blazingly hot weather, and by the time one trainload reached Plymouth the young passengers were gasping for water. When drinks were administered by sailors waiting on the platform, some quick-witted young fellow called out, ‘Blimey, we must be near the sea!’

Frances Partridge was one of a reception committee in Hampshire, standing by in a village:

The bus came lumbering in … As soon as they got out, it was clear they were neither children nor docksiders, but respectable-looking middle-aged women and a few children, who stood like sheep beside the bus looking infinitely pathetic. ‘Who’ll take these?’ ‘How many are you?’ ‘Oh well, I can have these two but no more,’ and the piteous cry, ‘But we’re together.’ It was terrible. I felt we were like sharp-nosed housewives haggling over fillets of fish. In the end we swept off two women of about my age and a girl of ten … Their faces began to relax. Far from being terrified Londoners, they had been evacuated against their will from Bexhill, for fear of invasion, leaving snug little houses and ‘hubbies’.

By the end of June another 100,000 people had left the South East, and the population of some towns in Kent and East Anglia had shrunk by 40 per cent. The north country author and broadcaster J. B. Priestley recalled a visit to the ghost town of Margate:

In search of a drink and a sandwich, we wandered round, and sometimes through, large empty hotels. The few signs of life only made the whole place seem more unreal and spectral. Once an ancient taxi came gliding along the promenade, and we agreed that if we hailed it, making a shout in that silence, it would have dissolved at once into thin air.

With this second influx, the rural population again rose sharply. The village school at Thurgarton, in Nottinghamshire, which had taken in twenty-two children from Sheffield the previous autumn, now received another eighteen from Southend. The school became so crowded that some lessons took place in a barn next to the pub, the Coach and Horses. Among the evacuees was Gladys Totman, then seven, who remembered her foster-home, Hill Farm, as ‘sheer paradise’.

There was always something going on – new calves and lambs, pink silky piglets in an old galvanised bath in front of the kitchen range, hunting free-range eggs and picking plate-sized field mushrooms or blue buttons on late autumn mornings. We were all included in the farm activities such as hay-making, harvest, potato-picking, gathering blackberries, sloes and hazelnuts. At harvest time there was a school holiday, and we all joined in; we rode on the huge carts … we carried big baskets of bread, cheese, apples and cold tea in quart beer bottles up to the men who worked in the fields well into the dusk. Acorns were collected by the sackful to supplement the pigs’ diet, and rose hips to make syrup for vitamin C.

This time hundreds of people brought their domestic animals with them, so that the countryside was freshly inundated with cats and dogs which had survived the initial massacre; many dogs were destabilized by the sudden change of habitat, or by loud noises, and bolted when let out. Their arrival exacerbated the problems of farmers, who accused them of worrying sheep or killing chickens. Some were recovered after frantic hunts by their owners; others disappeared for good, and a few demonstrated uncanny powers of direction-finding, making their own way home over long distances. Later, there were reports of dogs sensing the distant approach of enemy aircraft and beginning to whine or bark long before humans picked up any audible warning of an air raid.

Spy fever became ubiquitous. It was assumed that if enemy agents were dropped by parachute, they would surely aim for the countryside, where they might come to earth unseen, rather than urban areas, where they would be spotted and apprehended. For this reason the land became rife with suspicion. Official orders issued to country people, should a parachutist be discovered, included the instruction: ‘DO NOT GIVE ANY GERMAN ANYTHING. DO NOT TELL HIM ANYTHING. HIDE YOUR FOOD AND YOUR BICYCLES. HIDE YOUR MAPS.’

Challenges at road blocks caused travellers untold irritation, for nobody could move across country at night without being stopped and questioned; rumours spread like fire, and there were countless false alarms – none more ridiculous than one which started when a young man with a furtive manner and a strange accent was discovered wandering about in Oxfordshire. Because the Canadian soldiers who found him could not understand what he was saying, they arrested him. When questioned, he gave an address that quickly proved false; and when taxed with being a German agent who had descended by parachute, he said he was exactly that. Moreover, he gave the name of a well-known local farmer, claiming that this man was the chief German agent in the area, to whom he had been ordered to report. To the chagrin of the farmer, and the disappointment of the authorities, the entire story proved a fabrication: the stranger was Welsh, a parson’s son who had once worked for the farmer, but now had deserted from his anti-aircraft unit – a crime for which he was sentenced to two years in gaol. It was purely his accent that had foxed the Canadians.

In that febrile atmosphere spy mania flourished. All strangers were suspect. A man walking along a lane with a pack on his back was obviously a spy – until he turned out to be a farm worker on his way to a distant field. Scratches which appeared on telegraph poles were waymarks incised by agents to guide the German infantry when they invaded. Arrow-shaped flower beds in cemeteries had been deliberately planted with white flowers so that they pointed towards ammunition dumps. A farmer who covered a field with heaps of white lime was suspected of deploying them in a pattern that would indicate the direction of a railway junction to a pilot overhead.

The population was warned against impostors. ‘Most of you know your policemen and your ARP wardens by sight,’ ran an official pamphlet. ‘If you keep your heads, you can also tell whether a military officer is really British or is only pretending to be so.’

Particular suspicion attached to nuns – or to people dressed like them – who were almost certainly enemy spies in disguise, with weapons hidden under their habits. Amateur sleuths followed black-clad figures eagerly, only to be disappointed when the fugitives turned round and revealed themselves as elderly women. One day on a train the writer Virginia Woolf insisted to her husband Leonard in a stage whisper that a woman who had got into their carriage was a German spy. In fact she was an embarrassed and innocent nun.

In fact a few spies were arriving, some by parachute, some by ship or submarine. In the autumn of 1940 twenty-odd German agents came to Britain, but all were so incompetent or amateurish that they were quickly rounded up, mainly because the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park had cracked the wireless code used by the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service) and were reading messages between Berlin and its outstations. Forewarned and forearmed, the British arrested the new arrivals one after another – all except one man who escaped and shot himself. After interrogation, five of the prisoners were executed, fifteen were gaoled and four were taken on to become double agents.

A leaflet issued by the Ministry of Information gave civilians detailed instructions on how to behave if the Germans arrived. Just as in 1803, when fear of invasion by Napoleon’s armies was widespread, the inhabitants of Hastings had been advised to stay at home ‘for the preservation of their lives and property which would be much endangered by any attempt to remove from the Town’, so now people were told: ‘You must remain where you are. The order is to “stay put” to avoid clogging up the roads and being exposed to aerial attack … Think always of your country before you think of yourself.’

Individual motorists were ordered to immobilize their cars by taking the rotor arm out of the distributor whenever they left them; the police were empowered to remove some essential part of the mechanism from any vehicle they found inadequately crippled, and to leave a label on the car saying that the part could be recovered from a police station. Another Government order prohibited the use of ‘wireless receiving apparatus’ in all road vehicles.

A leaflet reminded farmers that their first duty was to ‘go on producing all the food possible … Unless military action makes it impossible, go on ploughing, cultivating, sowing, hoeing and harvesting as though no invasion were occurring.’ ‘Plough now! By day and night’ exhorted one of the Ministry’s posters. Farmers also received instructions for putting their tractors out of action if there was a danger that the enemy might capture them.

Parish Invasion Committees were formed ‘to draw up precise inventories of things available likely to be of use – horses, carts, trailers, wheelbarrows … crowbars, spades, shovels … paraffin lamps etc’. The Ministry of Information issued a short film, Britain on Guard, only eight minutes long, with script and narration by J. B. Priestley, which included an excerpt from Churchill’s ‘we shall fight on the beaches’ speech, and the stirring declaration that Britain was responsible ‘for the future of the civilised world’. Along the south coast farmers made plans to move their cattle and sheep inland, their overriding aim being to ensure that neighbours did not manage to annex any of their animals during a sudden, unseasonable transhumance.

With nerves on edge, people began to agitate for permission to take up arms to defend themselves. From their redoubts in the Home Counties superannuated colonels dropped hints in letters to the press: ‘Retired men over the age limit are of course a confounded nuisance in wartime, but’ … ‘Parachutists? The great army of retired-and-unwanted at present … can all use the scatter-gun on moving objects with some skill.’ The newspaper tycoon Lord Kemsley suggested to the War Office that rifle clubs should be formed as the basis of a home defence force, and the Sunday Pictorial asked if the Government had considered training golfers in rifle shooting, to pick off German parachutists as they descended. The Home Office, worried that private defence forces might start to operate outside military control, issued a press release laying down that it was the army’s task to engage enemy parachutists: civilians were not to fire at them. In the House of Commons an MP asked the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, whether, ‘in order to meet the imminent danger of enemy parachute landings’, he would sanction the immediate formation of a corps of older, armed men ‘trained for instant action in their own localities’.

Together with senior military officers, the Government had been putting together a plan, and on the evening of 14 May, after the nine o’clock news, Eden came on the radio with a stirring announcement:

We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain as are British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to come forward now and offer their services in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the Local Defence Volunteers. The name describes its duties in three words. You will not be paid, but you will receive uniforms and will be armed.

Anyone might join, said Eden, simply by handing in his name at the local police station. The result was phenomenal. Men were heading for their nearest station before he had finished speaking, and within seven days 250,000 too old or too decrepit to fight in the armed services, or already in reserved occupations, signed up for the LDV. On the day after Eden’s broadcast the War Office announced that volunteers would be issued with denim uniforms and field service caps – and these had to suffice until serge khaki battledress and armbands became available.

Such was the enthusiasm that in July the number of volunteers rose to 1.5 million, but at first the organization of the new force was chaotic, as different factions had different ideas about its role. Almost at once it became known by its alleged motto: Lie Down and Vanish. Was its purpose merely to act as an armed constabulary, observing the movements of any German troops who landed, or was it to be more aggressive, and attack invaders whenever possible?

Within days the embryonic organization had a new title. Churchill, disliking ‘Local Defence Volunteers’, which he found uninspiring, changed its name to the Home Guard. Enthusiasm was particularly strong on the south coast, where any invasion force was most likely to land. When a company was formed in Worthing, with platoons in the town and outlying villages, two local benefactors each offered £1000 for the purchase of arms and equipment, and a theatre was taken over as a headquarters.

One of its first units was established at Storrington, a village north of Worthing, where recruits set up their headquarters in an evacuated monastery and began to patrol the South Downs on the lookout for paratroopers, besides guarding a railway tunnel against sabotage. Little did they know how quickly they might have become engaged with German forces – for in the final version of Hitler’s invasion plan, after a landing between Brighton and Eastbourne some units would have swung westwards along the line of the Downs, and Storrington would have lain directly in their path.

If anyone sought to ridicule the new organization, there were plenty of spokesmen to defend it. ‘It is no mere outlet of patriotic emotion that we are endeavouring to recruit,’ said Lord Croft, the Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for War, in the House of Lords, ‘but a fighting force which may be at death grips with the enemy next week, or even tomorrow.’

Another leading advocate of the need for a people’s army trained in guerrilla warfare was Tom Wintringham, the Communist writer and editor who had visited Moscow in the 1920s and commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, during which he was twice wounded. In the summer of 1940 he set up a private training school in Osterley Park, Lord Jersey’s stately home in Isleworth, teaching street fighting and the use of explosives; but because of his Communist background, the War Office did not trust him. Having first tried to close the school, they took it over in September 1940, setting up training establishments of their own. Wintringham himself was never allowed to join the Home Guard, since membership was banned to Communists and Fascists.

Twenty-eight years later the Home Guard would be immortalized (and ridiculed) by the BBC television series Dad’s Army, which became one of the nation’s favourite programmes. At the outset in 1940 much about the organization was ridiculous, not least its weapons, which included wooden rifles, pitchforks, pick-handles, ancient revolvers, swords, daggers, stilettos, clasp knives and coshes made from garden hosepipe filled with lead. The force’s initial low rating derived partly from a remark by Churchill, who told the War Office that ‘every man must have a weapon of some kind, be it only a mace or a pike’. Taking him at his word, the War Office ordered 250,000 metal poles with surplus rifle bayonets welded to the ends – a move much resented by the volunteers, as it made them sound idiotic, and no more use than bystanders in the production of a Shakespeare comedy.

Other objects of mockery were their ill-fitting denim overalls, which had a revolting smell when new. When squads started marching about on their evening parades, little boys would run after them, derisively calling out the sizes from the tickets on their backs and trousers, and comparing them unfavourably with the physique of the wearers.

A good deal about the nature of the organization is revealed in The British Home Guard Pocket-Book, a small volume which first appeared in October 1940. Its author, Brigadier General Arthur Frank Umfreville Green, had fought in the Boer War and First World War. In 1940 he was sixty-one, and his rank and seniority made him an obvious choice for the commander of some Home Guard unit; but he preferred to let junior officers exercise control, while he went round teaching his own special subject, musketry. He was also something of a writer, with two published novels to his credit, and clearly had a robust sense of humour. His pocket-book, though primarily an instruction manual, was so engaging that it sold 22,000 copies in its first year and was reprinted five times before going into a second edition in 1942.

The text – 150 pages of detailed advice on leadership, training, weapons, battle drill, reconnaissance, patrolling, digging trenches, creating obstacles, handling explosives and many other topics – was both outspoken and intensely practical, and his first chapter set the tone:

As I see it, our only excuse for existence is to look out for Germans and to help the military to kill them, or – better still – kill themselves.

Discipline does not consist merely in smartness on parade – it consists in all working as a team and obeying a permanent or temporary Leader promptly, vigorously and intelligently …

Duds, Dead-Weight and Passengers – are they of any use to H.G.? What are we to do with malcontents and subversive individuals and inefficient men? The answer is easy. As Mr Middleton [the radio gardener] teaches us to prune roses, so can we prune our duds. ‘Ruthlessly’ is the operative word. We are at war, and there is no time to spare. If you see dead wood or anything unhealthy – cut it out.

Rank. Are we to salute or not? Whom shall we salute? If, for example, a tradesman with no military prestige … has in his unit an Admiral and a couple of Generals, the question they ask is ‘Who salutes whom?’ My answer is clear. If I am a Volunteer in a section or a patrol commanded by a General or a Blacksmith or my own Gardener, I do what he orders to the best of my ability. And on parade I salute him.

Stirred up by General Green and others, many countrymen handed in their shotguns for use by the Home Guard, and these were tested by experts for their ability to fire single-ball ammunition. Later the volunteers were properly armed with British .303 rifles and American P17 .300 Springfields, and they quickly became less of a joke then than now. Captain Mainwaring and his ramshackle crew provoked great hilarity in the television audiences of another generation, but it is easy to forget that 1600 members of the Home Guard were killed on duty during the war.

Many absurd incidents did take place. One moonlit night there was a call-out in Shropshire, when somebody claimed to have seen a parachute descending. Norman Sharpe, gamekeeper on the Apley Hall estate, remembered how he and his fellow volunteers rapidly took up prearranged positions:

The night wore slowly on, with everyone becoming increasingly bored and tired. Suddenly a shot rang out! Action at last! Everyone was electrified. Complete with escort, the Company Commander strode away in the direction of the shot.

A sentry had been posted along a narrow lane, and he was asked, ‘Did you fire that shot?’

‘Yes Sir.’

‘What at?’

‘A rabbit, Sir.’

‘You absolute so-and-so.’

‘Yes Sir. But I did as you instructed. I said halt but he came on. I said halt again and he took a few more hops forward. I challenged a third time and still he came on, so I shot him.’

Much of the recruits’ time was spent training. Nineteen-year-old Charles Bond, at forestry school in the Forest of Dean, beyond the Severn in Gloucestershire, was actively involved, and many an entry in his diary recorded Home Guard activities: ‘HG exercise in morning … HG parade … rifle range drill, distance judging … HG lecture on Sten gun, practice at moving in extended order through woods … Posting night sentries.’ But a questionnaire issued by headquarters in Inverness to all Zone Commanders, Group Commanders and Battalion Commanders, and kept under lock and key, suggests that in March 1941 instruction was still at an early stage: ‘How do you distinguish between enemy and friendly (a) parachutists (b) troop carriers? … Do you and your men understand map references? Have you a map? … Have you fired your rifle? If so, what result?’

The amateur soldiers studied maps, gave orders to the platoon in drill halls and went on exercises at weekends, often in pairs, guarding railway lines and bridges, and defending beaches against practice attacks by units of the regular army. Indoors, they stripped their rifles with the lights on and reassembled them in the dark. For live firing on the ranges, they were supervised by regular soldiers. At first ammunition was so scarce that men were allowed to fire only five rounds a day. All the same, target practice took place not just on designated ranges but also in old quarries and chalkpits, where any vertical wall or cliff-face served as a stop-butt and minimized the chance of casualties among the local population.

For country boys on the loose, such places were a delight, for they yielded treasures such as empty cartridge cases, fragments of grenades and even the occasional live round. Spent .22 bullets were highly prized, even if crumpled up by impact on metal or stone, for they could be melted down, fashioned into arrow-heads and fitted to home-made shafts of hazel or willow. Better trophies still were intact heavy-calibre machine-gun bullets found dumped, presumably because they had failed to fire; and thunderflashes, which simulated grenade explosions. Sometimes these big, thick fireworks were accidentally dropped during night exercises and could be found lying about in the morning – but they needed careful handling, for a premature detonation could easily blow off fingers. Even bits of bomb casing were much valued.

Ian Hacon and Peter Lucas, two boys who lived near Ipswich, were much given to riding around the countryside on their bikes. When they discovered an ammunition dump which was guarded during the day but not at night, they several times climbed over the barbed wire and helped themselves to cartridges, which they sold to school friends for 2d each. Schools, of course, made it illegal to collect such desirable souvenirs, and boys found secreting them were punished, usually with the cane; nevertheless, collectors keenly swapped and traded items, not least the silver paper dropped by enemy aircraft to confuse radar.

In the words of the historian Geoffrey Cousins, ‘Although defence was the stated object of the exercise, every man who answered the appeal [to join the Home Guard] was captivated by the idea of being on the offensive.’ That opinion was seconded by Captain Clifford Shore, an expert on guerrilla warfare and sniping, who reckoned that the creation of the force had a marked effect on morale: quite apart from its practical use, it gave men a positive way of serving their country. To him it was ‘a marvellous organisation’, and did a tremendous amount of good. ‘I am sure it prolonged the life of many men, taking them away from a life of total sedentary [sic] and lack of healthy interest. Thousands of men discovered the delights of shooting for the first time.’

Among the part-time soldiers was Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984. Having failed an army medical, he joined the Home Guard and became a sergeant in the St John’s Wood platoon – only to be incensed by closer acquaintance with the army, and in particular by the futility of a lecture from some general:

These wretched old blimps, so obviously silly and senile, and so obviously degenerate in everything except physical courage, are merely pathetic in themselves, and one would feel rather sorry for them if they were not hanging round our necks like millstones … The time has almost arrived when one will only have to jump up on the platform and tell them [the rank and file] how they are being wasted and how the war is being lost, and by whom, for them to rise up and shovel the blimps into the dustbin.

Soon after the creation of the Home Guard – and as a protest against the exclusion of women – the Amazon Defence Corps was set up by ladies with hunting, shooting and deer-stalking experience. In Herefordshire the redoubtable Lady Helena Gleichen took the lead. British, but the daughter of Prince Viktor of Hohenlohe-Langeburg (and so a grand-niece of Queen Victoria), she had abandoned her German titles during the First World War and worked with distinction for the British Red Cross in Italy. Later she became a well-known painter, particularly good at depicting horses. Then in 1940, aged sixty-seven, she formed her estate workers and tenants into an unofficial observation corps, the Much Marcle Watchers, eighty-strong and armed with their own weapons. But when she applied to the Shropshire Light Infantry for rifles, ‘plus a couple of machine guns, if you have any’, she received a dusty answer.

Her initiative reflected the tension gripping England by the middle of May 1940: it seemed possible that the invasion might start at any moment. Hitler’s forces had stormed through France to the coast only twenty miles from Dover at such a speed that it was easy to imagine their momentum propelling them on across the Channel. Particularly in the country, where paratroops were most likely to land, everyone was on edge. Margery Allingham described how many people in her village were overcome not by any particular grief, but by cumulative emotional strain.

Government posters were plastered up everywhere: ‘Dig for Victory’, ‘Lend a hand on the land’, ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ ‘BEWARE’ shouted one of the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ series, with a crude caricature of half Hitler’s face in the top corner:

Whether alone or in a crowd

Never write or say aloud,

What you’re loading, whence you hail,

Where you’re bound for when you sail.

ABOVE ALL NEVER GIVE AWAY

THE MOVEMENTS OF H.M. SHIPS

Although most members of the Home Guard lived in towns, their real role was on the land, where they felt they were defending their own territory. As J. B. Priestley put it in one of his immensely popular Sunday evening Postscript broadcasts in June 1940, describing a night vigil:

Ours is a small and scattered village, but we’d had a fine response to the call for volunteers … I think the countryman knows, without being told, that we hold our lives here, as we hold our farms, upon certain terms. One of these terms is that while wars still continue, while one nation is ready to hurl its armed men at another, you must if necessary stand up and fight for your own … As we talked on our post on the hill-top, we watched the dusk deepen in the valleys below, where our women-folk listened to the news as they knitted by the hearth … I felt too up there a powerful and rewarding sense of community, and with it too a feeling of deep continuity. There we were, ploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk, turning out at night, as our fathers had often done before us, to keep watch and ward over the sleeping English hills and fields and homesteads.

Of course, rivalry sprang up between neighbouring units, each hell bent on defending its own patch, and reluctant to help anyone else. In Devon a man whom the poet Cecil Day-Lewis tried to recruit came back with the retort: ‘We don’t want to fight for they buggers at Axmouth, do us?’

Small detachments were posted to man lookouts, some of them on the tops of church towers; they struck aggressive poses when photographed, but, in spite of the all-round enthusiasm, recruits were often scared of their own weapons, and numerous accidental discharges took place. One man put an M 17 round through the flat roof of a golf clubhouse which had been identified as an ideal Home Guard observation point. The bullet tore a large exit hole in the roof, missing the watchman above by inches. Another stray round went through the driver’s door of an Austin Seven, deflated the cushions in both front seats and passed out through the passenger door, leaving a neat hole.

People supposed that if German parachutists landed they would try to hide in woods, where, at close range, a shotgun would be a handier weapon than a rifle. Unofficial experiments were therefore conducted to make shotguns more lethal – for instance, by opening up cartridges and pouring molten wax into the pellets to form a heavier and more solid single missile, with greater killing power. There was a risk that the procedure would bulge or even split the barrel of the gun; but its efficacy was proved when someone fired a doctored 12-bore cartridge at an old barn, and the whole door collapsed in a cloud of dust and splinters.

In their attempts to grow more corn, farmers were seriously impeded by military plans for protecting the countryside against the possibility of enemy airborne landings. All over the South East fields were disfigured by new defences. Anti-tank lines of reinforced concrete cubes, each weighing a ton or more and cast in situ, were strung out across fields, often two or three rows deep. Where firing lines were cleared through woodland, the trees were felled across each other and the stumps were left high.

In June the Ministry of Agriculture encouraged farmers to build their hayricks in the middle of fields – especially flat fields suitable for glider landings. All open spaces should be obstructed (the directive said), and some fields should be trenched diagonally. In Wiltshire and Gloucestershire broken telegraph poles were dug into the ground upright and festooned with networks of wires. In other fields trees were felled and laid across a glider’s most likely line of approach. To protect standing corn from incendiaries, farmers were advised to cut ten-yard-wide strips across any large field, aligning the firebreaks with the prevailing wind, while the crop was still green. The immature cut corn could be used as fodder or made into silage, and when harvest approached and the remaining crop was dry the danger of a major blaze would be reduced.

Along the coast entanglements of barbed wire, with one coil laid on top of two others, blocked the beaches, which were also protected by minefields and miles of anti-tank scaffolding. Some possible landing places were stocked with barrels of pitch, which could be set on fire to incinerate troops trying to come ashore, and in other bays oil was pumped out underwater so that it could be released to form pools on the surface, which could be ignited. Concrete pillboxes sprouted on the cliffs and vantage points, some sunk into the ground, some showing above it. Areas of Romney Marsh were flooded, in the expectation that they might be used for a landing, and thousands of sheep were driven inland to deny the enemy any chance of seizing them. Swarms of barrage balloons swung in the sky, not only above and on the outskirts of conurbations, but round individual factories.

In the rush to collect scrap metal for munitions, iron railings round parks disappeared. Churchyard gates and railings – many of them beautifully designed – went the same way. Metal objects – even hairpins and combs – vanished from the shops. To confuse enemy trying to travel by road, signposts were removed from junctions, railway crossings and stations. Old milestones with names carved on them were dug up and taken into safe keeping. If the names of towns and villages appeared on shop fronts, they were painted over. All this was irksome for country people and anyone trying to move around on legitimate business: if a motorist pulled up at a crossroads to ask for directions, locals were forbidden to answer his questions. As the American Vincent Sheean remarked, ‘The barricading of roads was going on all through the country, and you did not have to travel far down any one of them to see the sudden feverish construction of tank traps and airplane obstacles … The threat of invasion had suddenly risen like a dark cloud over the whole island.’

The aim was not so much to stop an enemy advance as to delay it until strong British forces could muster further inland, and ships of the Royal Navy could steam down from Scapa Flow, where they had been sheltering, to knock out the German fleet in the Channel and cut off the invaders’ supplies of fuel, ammunition and food.

On shore, the general plan was to move vital assets away to the west, as far as possible from likely landing points and lines of advance. The King and Queen – the jewels in the crown – were furnished with a personal bodyguard consisting of one company of the Coldstream Guards, known, after its commander, Lieutenant Colonel J. S. Coats, as the Coats Mission. With their four armoured cars and some civilian buses, the little force stood by to whisk the royal family out of danger, particularly in the event of an airborne landing by enemy forces.

Their initial rendezvous would have been Madresfield Court, a huge, redbrick house, part-Jacobean, part-Victorian Gothic, with more than 130 rooms, standing out in the plain at the foot of the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. The home of the Lygon family for eight centuries, the house is now inextricably associated with Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, which was inspired by his fascination with the Lygon girls, Lettice, Maimie, Coote and Sibell, with their brother Hugh, whom he knew at Oxford, and their notorious father, the homosexual Lord Beauchamp, whose excesses eventually forced him to live abroad (his brother-in law, the Duke of Westminster, who loathed him, referred to him as ‘my bugger-in-law’).

Brideshead and its landscape, as Waugh described them in 1945 – the house set in a valley above a lake, among rolling hills – bore no physical resemblance to ‘Mad’ and its pancake surroundings; but the author had been entranced by another immense house, Castle Howard, near York, and made that his model for the home of the Flyte family. On that and his love of the Lygons he built a dream world, and there is no doubt about the twin sources of his inspiration: Brideshead is a version of Castle Howard, but Sebastian Flyte, the central figure in the novel, is Hugh Lygon in all but name.

In 1940 Madresfield, with its sixty acres of gardens, its carp-haunted moat and four glorious avenues, would never have been remotely defensible, furnished though it was with a token guard force. Nevertheless, large quantities of non-perishable food were imported and stored in the basement, and much of Worcestershire was fortified as a kind of redoubt. The Severn, Avon and Teme rivers were designated ‘stop lines’, with crossing points defended by camouflaged gun emplacements, tanks parked in copses, pillboxes, road blocks and lines of trenches. Worcester itself, Kidderminster and Redditch were marked out as anti-tank islands, to act as centres of resistance, and the aim was to retard any German advance until regular home forces could regroup.

On the eastern side of Worcester another great house – Spetchley Park – was earmarked as a refuge for Churchill and his Cabinet if the invasion took place or London became too dangerous. The grand Palladian building belonged (and still belongs) to the Berkeley family, and before the war was a haunt of the composer Edward Elgar, who often stayed in the Garden Cottage and told his hosts that parts of The Dream of Gerontius were inspired by pine trees in the park.

If the Germans had landed, the transfer to the west would have taken place in two phases: in Yellow Move, non-essential staff from Whitehall would have led the way, followed, in Black Move, by the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and the royal household. The city of Worcester would have been invaded by armies of civil servants, and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon would have housed Parliament. Luckily for the owners, in the event neither Madresfield nor Spetchley was needed for senior evacuees from London; but later in the war the US Eighth Air Force took Spetchley over as a recuperation centre for pilots, and added to its amenities by building a squash court.

Two other grand houses, further north, were also considered as possible royal retreats. One was Pitchford Hall in the wilds of Shropshire, a wonderfully romantic, black and white Tudor mansion in which the King and Queen had stayed (while Duke and Duchess of York) in 1935. The other was Newby Hall, home of the Compton family, an eighteenth-century redbrick house set in splendid gardens at Skelton-on-Ure in North Yorkshire.

While the King and his Government stood fast, Nazi propaganda took to the air by way of the New British Broadcasting Station, which sent out messages intended to intimidate the population of the United Kingdom. The broadcasts, purporting to emanate from dissident elements within the country, sought to portray a nation in disarray and ripe for takeover. ‘Disunity, demoralisation, hatred of its leaders and a passionate yearning for peace were the distinguishing characteristics of this cloud-cuckoo land,’ wrote one historian.

Everybody knew that not only Churchill and his friends but even Socialist Cabinet Ministers were being bribed by Jews to continue the war. Sabotage was rife, and so were foot-and-mouth disease, faked Treasury notes and tins of meat poisoned by German agents in the Argentine.

More concrete attempts were made to unnerve the population. On the night of 13/14 August 1940, German aircraft staged an Abwurfaktion (throwing-down or dropping action), in which ‘pack assemblies’ were released by parachute over various parts of the Midlands and lowland Scotland. The packs contained maps, wireless transmitters, explosives, addresses of prominent people and instructions to imaginary agents about their roles in the imminent invasion. The aim was to suggest that the attack would come from the east coast, and that a Fifth Column of Fascists and Nazi sympathizers eager to undermine the regime was established all over the country, ready to receive the invaders. Farmers, in particular, were sceptical: they pointed out that documents purporting to be those of parachutists who had landed in standing corn, but had left no trails when they moved out of the field, must have been carried by men with exceptional powers of levitation.

There was much talk of Fifth Columnists, but most people thought that, if any existed, they were harmless. On the contrary: in the words of the historian Ben Macintyre, ‘There was an active and dangerous Fifth Column working from within to hasten a Nazi victory … motivated in large part by a ferocious hatred of Jews.’ Not for seventy years did the release of secret files reveal that during the war a large network of crypto-Fascist spies in Britain had been run – and neutralized – by one extraordinarily skilful and courageous agent working for MI5, who posed as a member of the Gestapo. He was known as Jack King, until, in 2014, his real name was revealed as John Bingham. His contacts thought he was working for the Nazis, and happily revealed their treachery to him, but none of them was ever prosecuted, partly because they were doing no real harm, and partly because any action taken against them might have broken Jack King’s cover.

On 13 June 1940 the Government imposed a ban on the ringing of church bells, except to warn of imminent air raids or invasion – in which case they would play the role of the beacon fires which signalled the approach of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Even in an emergency they might be rung only by the military or the police. Senior clerics protested, and the restriction caused displeasure among many villagers, who felt that an important part of their lives had been suppressed, and that, in the event of an attack, the invaders might single out churches for retribution, on the grounds that they were part of the defenders’ warning system. Prophesying doom, The Ringing World denounced the ban as ‘a stunning blow to ringing, from which, even when the war is over, it will take a long time to recover’. On the other hand, some people who lived near churches were delighted, and hailed the silence on Sunday mornings as one of the few blessings brought by the war. As the threat of invasion waned, the restrictions were gradually lifted, but not until VE Day in May 1945 were full peals allowed again.

Country priests and members of congregations did what they could to protect their churches from bomb damage. At Fairford, in Gloucestershire, the vicar, the Revd Francis Gibbs, supervised the removal of the outstanding medieval stained glass from the windows of St Mary’s Church and had thousands of pieces buried in a vault beneath a large memorial cross in the grounds of Fairford Park, outside the village. In a similar but even bigger undertaking, the twelfth-century stained glass was removed from the great window in the south-west transept of Salisbury Cathedral. Three effigies from the Cathedral were wrapped up and taken to East Quantockshead in Somerset, where they were hidden in the cellar of St Audrey’s School; the transfer was supposed to be deadly secret, but pupils in the school saw the bundles arriving, thought they were bodies, and alarmed their parents with lurid stories about casualties or plague victims.

As the bells fell silent, new airfields were being laid out all over the country, especially in East Anglia, some with grass strips good enough for fighters and light bombers, others with asphalt or concrete runways for heavier aircraft. Hangars and Nissen huts made from curved sheets of corrugated iron (for accommodation and storage) sprouted at their edges. To the irritation of people living close by, footpaths across these new bases and other military areas were closed for the duration.

Besides the genuine airfields, numerous decoys were created in the hope of luring Luftwaffe pilots away from vulnerable targets. Daylight airfields, known as K sites, were furnished with inflatable or wooden aircraft, usually with wings but only a skeleton fuselage. To add verisimilitude, redundant training aircraft, old bomb tractors and other service vehicles were parked in the open and moved around to new positions during the night. On dummy night airfields, known as Q sites, there was often a runway flare path made from small burning lamps, and lights that went on and off at various points to give the impression of vehicles moving. Experiments were made with various kinds of fires, including drums of burning creosote, designed to simulate activity in railway yards or factories.

The decoy fields began to attract attention immediately after the withdrawal from Dunkirk. One successful K site was at East Kirkby in Lincolnshire, where wooden Whitley bombers were trundled around from day to day by the local RAF contingent: their efforts evidently paid off, for German planes bombed the airfield several times. The Q sites in East Anglia and Lincolnshire were the most frequently targeted, and during June thirty-six Q raids were recorded in England as a whole.

All farming became more difficult and dangerous, especially in the south and east of the country as, out of sheer spite, stray German aircraft began to attack obviously civilian targets before they headed for home. One Luftwaffe pilot provoked a volley of sarcastic comments on the ground in Kent when he bombed a hayrick and then came in on another low pass, riddling the stack with his machine guns. As the farm workers had already taken shelter, the only casualties were a few sheep.

Some countrymen went to extraordinary lengths to safeguard their property. Colonel Charles Owen, who had been involved with the development of camouflage during the First World War, lived in a house called Tre Evan on a hill outside the Herefordshire village of Llangarron, near Ross-on-Wye. There he went up and down a ladder to paint the building’s white, stuccoed front with splodges of green and brown, both to make it a less conspicuous target, and to disguise a landmark that might be useful to the enemy pilots on their way to or from Coventry or Cardiff. Neighbours – mostly First World War veterans – considered the exercise mildly eccentric, and the Colonel’s family found it rather embarrassing; but he – head of the local ARP squad – was serious about it, and organized regular fire drills, during which his grandchildren stood to with stirrup pumps and pails of water.