Читать книгу The Black Book: What if Germany had won World War II - A Chilling Glimpse into the Nazi Plans for Great Britain - Mei Trow - Страница 12

When Winston Churchill talked of the experience of invasion that the British people had not known for a thousand years, he was talking about 1066, still regarded by many as the best-known date in British history. There have only been three identifiable foreign invasions in recorded history, not including drifts of demography by the Celts, Saxons and Vikings.

The first was the arrival of Julius Caesar – twice! – in 55 and 54BC. This was more of a fact-finding mission than an attempt at conquest and was part of Caesar’s far more ambitious campaign in Gaul. The second was the appearance of Aulus Plautius and his four legions in 43 AD. Although it is not possible to be accurate in terms of numbers, Plautius’s full strength would have given him about 20,000 men; perhaps double that if we factor in the auxiliary units that the Romans habitually used.

William of Normandy’s invasion of 1066 was a much less impressive venture. Rome was a super-power, dominating the Europe of the ancient world; Normandy, by comparison, was a small, obscure duchy with little to recommend it. Again, numbers are hazy but it is likely that the Normans had no more than twelve thousand men, some estimates going as low as eight thousand.

The Roman invasion worked, not only because of the superb qualities of the Roman fighting machine, but because Britain, at the time, was a rag-bag of independent tribes; the Romans picked them off, one by one. In 1066, the English king, Harold Godwinson, had to fend off an invasion in the north before turning south with an exhausted army to face William at Senlac (Hastings). It would all be very different in 1940.

In pondering the task before the Germans in the Spitfire summer, Joachim von Ribbentrop, former ambassador to London, believed it would be a walk in the park. ‘English territorial defence is non-existent. A single German division will suffice to bring about a complete collapse,’ he told Mussolini in Rome. But then, the ex-champagne salesman was not a military man and his gaffes, in public and private, were legendary. At a royal reception in 1937, he had greeted George VI with a Hitler salute instead of the bow and handshake he ought to have given. He reported to Hitler that the British were lethargic and paralysed and would never go to war over Poland. Most of his peers had nothing but contempt for him. The far more able Josef Goebbels, for instance, wrote, ‘Von Ribbentrop bought his name, he married money and he swindled his way into office.’20 William Keitel, by contrast, was far more realistic. Recently promoted to Field Marshal, the man was old-school Prussia – tall, erect, with a monocle flashing over his left eye. As the war went on, the independence he still showed in the summer of 1940 disappeared. He became known, behind his back, as ‘Lakaitel’ (flunkey) and ‘the nodding ass’. On trial for his life at Nuremberg after the war, he said, ‘I was never permitted to make decisions, the Führer reserved that right to himself…’21

Keitel may have been aware that two other planned invasions of Britain had come to grief, in both cases because of command of the seas or, rather, lack of it. In the summer of 1588, irritated by English privateers raiding his silver convoys and giving aid to Dutch protestant rebels, Philip II of Spain unleashed his Armada against England. One hundred and thirty ships carrying 18,000 soldiers and manned by 8,000 sailors sailed up the Channel to link up with the Duke of Parma’s force in the Spanish Netherlands – another 30,000 men. By sixteenth century standards, this would have been a formidable force and England had no standing army to stop them. In the event, naval clashes off the south coast were inconclusive and it was the weather that destroyed the Armada, the ships battered on the British coast and scattered as far west as Ireland.

The threat of 1804 was, in many ways, greater. At Boulogne, that summer, was camped L’Armée d’Angleterre – the army of England – 200,000 regulars commanded by the ‘god of war’ who crowned himself emperor in that year. This time, England did have a regular army but it was scattered far and wide in defence of its colonies and the recently raised militia and yeomanry forces were untried and badly trained. Against them would have come Napoleon’s ‘grognards’ (grumblers), who had achieved phenomenal success against all the powers of the ancien regime. Once again, it was the weather that came to the rescue. The French could not get their huge army across the Channel, either in conventional transports or on the vast rafts built for the purpose – Nelson’s navy was there to stop them. And stop them it did, off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. Even before that, Admiral St Vincent, First Lord of the Admiralty, understood the situation perfectly – ‘I do not say they [the French] cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea.’22

But if Philip II and Napoleon Bonaparte could not do it, perhaps Adolf Hitler could. The men responsible for planning the invasion of 1940 were the staff officers of OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) in collaboration with OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres). The genesis of both, overlapping, organisations, was the Prussian General Staff, which morphed into the Great General Staff (Grosser Generalstab) under the Kaiser. In Napoleon’s day, military success rested above all with the ability of army commanders. The Prussian Frederick the Great had been brilliant. So was Napoleon. Other rulers of states, less so, but they were still expected to command armies in the field and make military decisions they were rarely qualified to do. After Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussians at Jena in 1806, the Germans set up the Kriegsakademie (War Academy) under Carl von Clausewitz, one of the foremost military authorities in Europe. Under the hugely impressive Helmut von Moltke in the middle of the nineteenth century, the General Staff prepared for war with any European country, collecting data of all kinds, drawing maps and investing in technology. By the time a united Germany came into being in 1871, the General Staff was the most efficient and organised in the world. The French, by comparison, rested on their laurels as the country that had bred Napoleon (he was, actually, of course, a Corsican) and paid the price of that arrogance at Sedan when they were smashed by Otto Bismarck’s Prussians. As if to point up the disparity between the combatants, the Germans took their troops to the front along twenty-six railway lines; the French had one!

Under the terms of the treaty of Versailles, the General Staff was banned but, even under the liberal Weimar government in the 1920s, it re-emerged under the euphemism Truppenamt (Troop office), run by the military reformer Hans von Seeckt. In 1935, with the Nazis in power, the old Kriegsakademie re-emerged. Despite its defeat in 1918, the German army was a formidable organisation – Hitler’s introduction of conscription and the oath of allegiance to him personally in 1934 also meant that it was growing enormously. Its officers were still largely conservative and traditionalist and, in 1940, not many of them were committed Nazis. They disliked the ‘little corporal’ who now ran Germany and were disquieted by the street gangsters of the SA (Sturmabteiling), which, at one point in the Thirties, outnumbered the Wehrmacht. By the outbreak of the war, the army had less influence than it had enjoyed in 1914, partly because of the rise of the Luftwaffe as a strike force and because there was no crony in the army as close to the Führer as was Goering for the air force.

Since before 1914, the major strategic problem for Germany had been the war on two fronts. If Russia were to join forces with Britain and France (as happened at the outbreak of the First World War) then Germany had to split her forces. The answer in 1914 was the Schlieffen Plan, which was to knock France out quickly while the ponderous Russians, with their nine million man army, were still mobilizing. In 1939, the same realpolitik no longer existed because, until Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, there was no threat to Germany from the east. The Axis powers could concentrate all their resources on Britain.

On Agler Tag, the OKW issued its invasion plans. They were divided, in terms of information gathering, into three sections. Part 1 dealt with an introduction to a country that relatively few Germans would ever have visited, including weather and climate, the industrial infrastructure, transport and, most tellingly for this book’s purposes, population and social conditions. Part 2 broke down individual geographical areas in terms of strategic and military importance. Part 3 went further with this and included the sort of information found today in tourist guide books. Model questions included, ‘Which is the shortest way to…?’ and ‘What is the name of this town?’ One of the most bizarre was, ‘Where is the next tank?’ Bearing in mind that citizens had already been told to say nothing in response to questions from the invader, it is debatable how useful this section was!

Portfolio A, the country’s general description, contained photographs and maps. The latter were widely available from HMSO bookshops and were standard Ordnance Survey. The concentration of Britain’s industrial areas was more diverse than Germany’s Ruhr. Coal and steel were centred in Tyneside, Lancashire, Yorkshire and South Wales. The aviation industry was clearly labelled, as was shipbuilding and ‘explosive products’. Individual cities, marked with road and rail linkages and key installations, included London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Coventry and Bristol. All of these would be targeted in the Blitz which began in September, but other areas were included in the Invasion Plan. South Shields was there, as were Sunderland and Bradford. Derby featured too and, most bizarrely, Oxford. The city was the home of the Morris-Cowley car industry, now converted to war production, but it was also the home of the country’s oldest university and Hitler, thinking in terms of invasion, did not intend to damage that or Cambridge. They would become the great Anglo-German centres of Reich learning in the future.

Portfolio B focused on London. As the capital, the cities of London and Westminster held a special place in the country’s history. They were symbols of power and national resistance since the time of the Roman invasion. The government was based here, from the royal family at Buckingham Palace to the mother of parliaments at Westminster and a labyrinth of executive offices along Whitehall. In the East End, the largest docks in the country were a tempting target for Goering’s Luftwaffe. The maps here were overlaid with an artillery grid.

Portfolio C was devoted to potential landing places along the south-east coast. The planners of 1940 ignored the fact that the only two successful invasions had hit single, narrow areas and had fought their way inland. Aulus Plautius and his legions landed at Rutupiae (Richborough) and marched on London. William of Normandy’s ships ground into the shingle near Pevensey and he faced Harold Godwinson’s English a little to the north of that before, again, making for London by a circuitous route. In 1940, an attack in Kent was ruled out. The whole nature of warfare was different now and the Medway was a barrier which the defenders could hold for a prolonged period. The original idea was to land on a broad front from the Isle of Wight in the west (with a reserve at Bridport) to Ramsgate in the east. These units would have converged and could cut London off from the rest of the country. The south-east was agriculturally rich and could provide easy billeting of troops once the Wehrmacht was on dry land.

The invasion of Britain was given the codename Lion (Löwe), later changed to Sealion (Seelöwe), perhaps by Hitler himself. The initial plans had been worked on by the Kriegsmarine soon after the outbreak of war, if only because it would be their responsibility to get the Wehrmacht ashore. The initiative came, as we have seen, from Admiral Erich Raeder, who raised it with the Führer at various meetings in June and July. This does not mean that he was a gungho commander anxious to sail into glory – in fact, as time went on, he realised how suicidal the whole venture was. It was merely that he was a supreme professional and needed as much time as possible to get his battleship ducks in a row. It has to be said too that the German navy was playing third fiddle in 1940 to the air force and the army. The Wehrmacht had just won spectacular victories east and west, astonishing everybody by the speed of their advance. The Luftwaffe, too, had swept aside the opposition of the Polish and French air forces and Goering had come to believe his own advertising about the almost magical brilliance of his fighters and bombers. The navy had been useful off Norway but the Graf Spee had gone and the Bismarck had yet to be commissioned (24 August 1940), although she had been launched in February 1939. Raeder had to get it right.

The plan was for the Kriegsmarine to create a narrow ‘corridor’ across the Channel, supported by long-range artillery firing from Cap Gris-Nez, flanked by minefields to keep the Royal Navy away and to prowl the area with U-boats. Through the corridor, the army would be landed in two waves – the first of 100,000, the second of 160,000 men – under the overall command of von Runstedt. He would eventually set foot on British soil, in Bridgend, South Wales, as a prisoner of war in 1945. Halder, as Chief of Staff, demanded forty divisions to take the various bridgeheads of the south coast. Four of these had to hit Brighton and there needed to be a significant presence in the Deal-Ramsgate area. Raeder alone seems to have understood the impracticalities of this. His European harbours would be too cluttered with shipping to accommodate all the men involved and no one seemed to grasp the need for speed to avoid the bad weather of late September and the fogs of October. No one not wearing the uniform of the Kriegsmarine had any grasp of tides at all. For all the German war machine was supremely mechanised by 1940, it still relied on the arbitrariness of the weather, and the Wehrmacht planned to bring several thousand horses with it, to haul artillery and equipment.

Doubts and arguments raged in the weeks and then months after Dunkirk. The number of troops was reduced; forty divisions became thirteen. An essential prerequisite was the knocking out of the RAF’s Fighter Command, whose Group 11 in the south-east was on constant readiness in what would come to be known as the Battle of Britain. Goering promised Hitler he would do that in four days; the entire RAF in four weeks. Until that was achieved, no army crossing could be made at all.

Once air supremacy was achieved, the rest would be relatively plain sailing. The Sixteenth Army, moving out of ports from Rotterdam to Boulogne in huge, difficult-to-manoeuvre barges (mostly commandeered from Europe’s canals), would wade ashore at Hythe, Rye, Hastings and Eastbourne. The Ninth Army, out of all ports between Boulogne and Le Havre, would attack between Brighton and Worthing. The beaches taken, using amphibious craft that could run up the shingle and the sand, bridgeheads would be established, the Luftwaffe’s Stukas hurtling down on enemy troops being rushed from further north to hold the coast. The two armies would then merge and sweep in a huge arc over the South Downs and make, as all would-be conquerors had, for London. Within an estimated seven days, the Wehrmacht would have established a line from Gravesend to Portsmouth. The Sixth Army, in reserve, would land in a third wave at Weymouth, to reinforce the rest.

Because none of this worked and Sealion was effectively abandoned by the end of September, it has assumed a fairytale quality, an exercise in futility and yet another example of the wishful-thinking ramblings of a maniac. All military historians today see the huge flaws in the plans of the General Staff, the shortcomings of all three services involved and the lack of clear-sighted preparation, all of which contributed to the venture being shelved. But it was not like that in the summer of 1940. Bizarrely, an increasing number of people were putting their faith in Churchill. They believed wholeheartedly his bulldog public appearances and were impressed by his speeches. But this was a man who suffered badly from depression – his ‘black dog’ as he called it – and, only three months earlier, his own party had cold-shouldered him in the Commons over the ousting of Chamberlain. He was no more infallible than anyone else, believing that there was a secret, if undirected, army of 20,000 Fifth Columnists walking Britain’s streets. And he had, after all, been at least partly responsible for the Norwegian debacle which had swept him to power.

The British army, frantically pushing untrained men into uniform, was woefully ill-equipped and understrength. On paper, they had twenty-nine divisions but they were scattered all over the country (including Northern Ireland) and were still shell-shocked from Dunkirk. Much of their equipment had been left behind there. The Local Defence Volunteers, who officially became the Home Guard in August, were a keen bunch but they were civilian amateurs and the Second World War was no country for old men. There were nearly 40,000 service personnel in Britain from other armies – Poles, Czechs, Free Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Belgians – but how useful they would be in an alien country with an alien language was debatable.

An American opinion poll was printed in The Times on 12 September. At the outbreak of war, 82 per cent of Americans expected Britain to win. By the time of the fall of France, that had dropped to 32 per cent. Joseph Kennedy, the ambassador to the Court of St James, who had Nazi leanings and was never impressed by Britain, used phrases like ‘when the Germans occupied London’, not if. A week before the poll was published, the American politician Cordell Hull reported to the United States cabinet, ‘England is undergoing a terrific attack. As a matter of fact, it has been getting worse and worse over there…’23

The stationers might sell placards to stick up in the windows of front rooms which read, ‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist,’ but, of course, they did. And the British high command knew it. Their infantry divisions were barely at half strength (11,000 all ranks). Of the sixteen in question, nine had reached a ‘fair’ standard of training, five had done very little and two none at all. The equipment available to them was almost laughable and, although the munitions factories were working around the clock to rectify this, it would hardly dent the first wave of the Wehrmacht. There were 54 anti-tank guns, which had already proved useless in France, 42 field guns, and 163 medium and heavy guns (with limited ammunition and some seriously old). There were less than 500 tanks and nearly half the available armoured cars were in Northern Ireland, making sure that the spectre of an Irish rising along 1798 lines never happened.24

It was estimated that there were 70,000 rifles in Britain in the summer of 1940. Thousands more were handed in by civilians to police stations but some of these were obsolete smoothbores with no suitable ammunition. Axes, golf clubs, assegais and packets of pepper to be thrown in Aryan faces were all on standby, just in case. The novelist Margery Allingham wrote, ‘All this looks childish written down, but it was a direct, childish time, quite different from … any other piece of life which I, at least, have experienced.’25

Churchill consistently, at least in public, played down the reality of invasion, even when he talked of fighting on the beaches. He also believed an invasion of the south coast was impractical, which is odd in a man who saw himself as an historian. In 1688, William of Orange had landed successfully at Lyme Regis; two hundred years earlier, Henry Tudor had come ashore at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire. William of Normandy’s ships made for Pevensey and Julius Caesar’s not far away. In fact, the only invaders who had not done this were Harald Hardrada’s Vikings in 1066, destroyed by the English at Stamford Bridge.

German radio propaganda was doing its bit to rattle the island defenders. William Joyce had been on the air since the war began but the plummy, over-the-top accent of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ was more a source of hilarity than the drip-drip of fear. The New British Broadcasting Station, beginning its broadcasts with ‘Loch Lomond’ and ending with the National Anthem, was altogether cleverer. It gave the impression of the enemy within, that perhaps there was a Fifth Column after all and that Churchill and his gang were increasingly clutching at straws. Workers’ Challenge, broadcast on 8 July, tried the hypocritical approach of a people’s revolution. Trade Unions had been banned in Nazi Germany, the Fascist Labour Front of Dr Robert Ley operating instead. That did not stop the broadcasters, in pseudo-Scots accents, urging the workers to overthrow their public-school-educated government. The ‘Christian Peace Movement’ had a go too, with equal hypocrisy, since the Nazis were interested in neither Christianity nor peace. The propaganda they all spouted was largely nonsense – but such is the way with propaganda. The Jews were giving the War Cabinet bungs to keep the war going. Foot and mouth disease was decimating the countryside. The banknotes in listeners’ wallets were forgeries. The tins of meat they opened were poisoned by agents working in Argentina. When the first German parachutists arrived, they could stay in the air for up to ten hours, choosing their landing grounds with precision – oh, and they took ‘fog pills’ which made them invisible. The only answer was to horsewhip Churchill and burn the property of the warmongering elite.

Unwittingly, the Invasion Warning Sub-Committee of the Combined Intelligence Committee was helping to create the sense of panic. It first met at the Admiralty on 31 May and its early meetings were dominated by the likelihood of Irish attacks backed by the IRA. On the other hand, seeing bogeys in bushes where there were none, was perhaps preferable to ignoring those that were obvious. When the RAF reconnaissance aircraft brought back clear photographs of a shipping build up at Kiel, the Committee believed that they probably had something to do with ‘mining or other temporary restrictions’. When the RAF snapped the transport barges massing at Ostend at the end of August, they were probably there to fetch iron, steel and textiles. When it became known that all Wehrmacht leave had been cancelled for 5 September, the Committee calmly reflected, ‘Any leave is stopped from time to time without special incident.’ Had the public known about these misconceptions and blatant ostrich behaviour, they may have asked whose side the Invasion Warning Sub-Committee was actually on!

Years later, Peter Fleming wrote of these bizarre months:

‘Would tanks, one day, come nosing through the allotments? Would tracer bullets flick across the recreation ground? Would field-grey figures carrying stick grenades and flame-throwers work their way along the hedges towards the flimsy pill-boxes opposite the Nag’s Head?’26

Had he remembered it, Fleming would already have had his answer. On 4 September, Hitler spoke to ranked thousands of his adoring subjects in the Sportpalast in Berlin, the scene of so many oratorical triumphs. ‘When people are very curious in Great Britain,’ he said, ‘and ask, “Yes, but why doesn’t he come?” We reply, “Calm yourselves! Calm yourselves!”’ And, as always, his voice rose to a massive crescendo, ‘“He is coming! He is coming!”’