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 15

London thought that Hitler was coming at 5.30 pip emma on Saturday, 7 September. 300 bombers, with a 600-strong fighter escort, roared over the Kent and Essex coast, making for the capital. This was part of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s 2nd Aeroflotte from Denmark and Norway and was designed to force Fighter Command to commit its carefully protected Reserve so that it could be destroyed. No one in the RAF was ready for this change of tactic and the results told their own story. The Luftwaffe, still with a huge numbers advantage lost forty-one aircraft; the RAF twenty-eight, with considerable damage to more. As darkness fell, Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, commanding another Air Fleet, unleashed 250 bombers to hit London by night. In this situation, the RAF could play no part;27 dog fights in darkness were pointless suicide missions. Only the searchlight batteries and the ack-ack guns on the ground could hope to stem the tide.

The assumption was made that the invasion would be preceded by a massive aerial bombardment, rather as formal battles in the past had been opened up by cannon fire before the infantry advanced to grapple with each other. The Deputy Chief of Staff at GHQ Home Forces sent out the codeword Cromwell soon after eight o’clock, as Sperrle’s leading bombers were circling to go home. It was sent initially to Eastern and Southern Command, IV and VII Corps (the Reserve) and HQ London District.

The very word Cromwell caused all kinds of confusion. The original code, Caesar (which made some sense historically in terms of invasion), had been changed on 5 June to that of the Lord Protector, who had only ever invaded Ireland by sea. Many of the night-duty officers, juniors with limited experience, had no idea what Cromwell meant. Some units jumped to it with the speed expected. The Home Guard in particular (‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’) rang church bells furiously. Since the outbreak of war, these had been silent, much to the annoyance of campanologists and the sound of them now, in villages and towns all over the south-east, caused a frisson of confusion and panic. Telephone operators refused to handlenon-military calls. Road blocks of carts, furniture and lumps of concrete were dragged across roads from which signposts had long since disappeared. With his typical British sang froid, Harold Nicolson wrote calmly:

‘At Sissinghurst, we have tea and watch the Germans coming over in wave after wave. There is some fighting above our heads and we hear one or two aeroplanes zoom downwards. They flash like silver gnats above us in the air.’

Denis Richards, the RAF’s official historian, writing years later, summed up the situation perfectly, ‘the brute fact that the world’s largest air force was now within an hour’s flight of the world’s largest target.’28 To those caught on the ground, it mattered little that the Luftwaffe had only about twenty-eight minutes’ time over London before they had to turn tail to refuel. The damage was done in seconds. Angus Calder, in The People’s War, makes the point:

‘… the bombs poured chiefly on Stepney… where nearly two hundred thousand people lived… on the tailors of Whitechapel; the factories, warehouses and gasworks of Poplar; the woodworking firms of Shoreditch; the docks of West Ham and Bermondsey…’’29

And that, of course, was just the start.

In the night attack, only one bomber had been shot down and a shell-shocked London emerged, blinking into the sunshine of Sunday, 8 September. T. H. O’Brien, writing in 1955 when there was no longer any need to minimise the grimness of the situation, wrote that the docks had been very badly hit. Woolwich Arsenal, so crucial to the war effort, was a smoking ruin. So were Beckton Gas Works, West Ham Power Station and street after street of the City and the West End. In one photograph taken that morning, a double-decker bus is lying on its end, the driver’s cab pointing to the sky. The front bumpers are resting on the shell of an imposing Victorian house. On the ground, bewildered men in tin hats and shirtsleeves are doing what they can to clear the debris. The entire population of Silvertown had to be evacuated by river. There were nine ‘conflagrations’ (the vortex created by fires merging into one that would destroy Dresden three years later), fifty-nine large fires and over one thousand smaller ones. It was vital to put these out quickly, not just to reduce further damage but to deny the next night’s raid an illuminated pathway to follow. On the second night, 412 people were killed and 747 badly hurt. Every railway line to and from the south was out of action.

As it turned out, this was the start of the Blitz, an attempt, futile as it turned out, to so terrify and demoralize civilians that all systems would collapse and the government would be forced to sue for peace. The change of tactic gave Fighter Command – Churchill’s ‘Few’ – a chance to regroup and rest their shattered nerves. It also gave time to build more aircraft and train more men.

On Monday morning, as if to illustrate the fact that ‘London could take it’ and it was ‘business as usual’, The Times reported that a great crested grebe had been found in an air-raid shelter in Euston! Despite the veneer of calm, however, the prospect of invasion was still starkly, terrifyingly real and the government acted accordingly, the Ministry of Information going into overdrive to exude calm mixed with defiance. Harold Nicolson was largely responsible for the most famous sheet, issued in June. It was called If the Invader Comes and by 8 September that could easily have read When. The first sentence was bold and confident: ‘The Germans threaten to invade …. If they do so they will be driven out by our Navy, our Army and our Air Force.’30

This ignores the fact that the air force could be presumed to have been destroyed by the time the Wehrmacht came ashore, that the army only had twenty-nine weak Divisions and that the navy’s use, once invasion was a reality, would be very limited. The pamphlet made the fair point that the civilians of the western-European countries overrun by the Germans had been caught napping; that could not happen to the British and everyone must be ready.

There must be no panic – no clogging of roads and public transport in a frantic effort to get away: ‘You must remain where you are. The order is “Stay Put”. If not, you are bound to be machine-gunned from the air.’

The naiveté of this is extraordinary. Machine-gunned on the blocked roads or buried under the debris of your house did not, to most people, make much difference. Point 2 talked about the Fifth Column – the sneakiness of the Germans in spreading confusion and panic. Most people knew their local bobby and ARP warden: ‘You can also tell whether a military officer is really British or only pretending to be so. [?] Use your common sense.’

When the house you live in or the school your children go to is being flattened by bombs, when Guderian’s tanks are crashing through your back garden, taking with them the walls and the washing, how much ‘common sense’, people must have wondered, was it possible to muster?

If anyone saw anything suspicious, they were to report it at once to someone in authority. Astonishingly, even the Home Guard had this instruction. They were not to tackle a potential spy themselves (there were a few isolated and unfortunate shootings in this respect as tensions rose that summer) but to find a policeman. The fact that the police, especially in the Metropolitan area, were stretched to breaking point seems to have passed the Ministry of Information by.

Next in the MOI’s leaflet came the terror of the skies, the parachutist. With more hope than experience, the government told its readers that such men would not be ‘feeling at all brave’. They would not know where they were or where their companions were and they would have no food. The experience of airborne troops who preceded D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe in June 1944, was exactly the opposite. Units were indeed scattered by the wind and navigational errors in the drop zones, but the parachutists came down in clusters and easily linked up with each other. They had rations for three days. How brave they felt depended very much on the individual but the esprit de corps of the Wehrmacht and committed Nazis easily matched Europe’s liberators of four years later.

‘Do not give the German anything,’ the MOI insisted. People were expected to hide their food, their maps and their bikes. If they had a car, the rotor arm must be removed to make it useless. The fact that the Wehrmacht could simply help themselves to most of those commodities, with or without the owners’ permission, was another little irrelevance in Whitehall’s corridors of power.

Today, owners of companies are buried in a welter of regulations about employment, health and safety, insurance and so on. In 1940, they were expected by the government to defend their premises. Everyone in such companies must know who is in charge and how orders are to be transmitted. Ex-officers and NCOs were naturally the best people to turn to in this situation.

The leaflet ended, ‘Remember always that the best defence of Great Britain is the courage of her men and women. Here is your seventh rule – Think before you act. But think always of your country before you think of yourself.’

Peter Fleming paints an amusing picture of the model citizen that summer. He always carried his regulation gas mask (which, of course, was never needed and had an asbestos lining to the filter). He carried his National Registration Identity Card (which, if he lost it, could lead to a fine or imprisonment). He carried a ration-book with coupons that allowed him so much food and comestibles per week (not fully abandoned until eight years after the war ended!). If he worked for a company, large or small, he had to have a security pass to get him in. If he owned a car (unlikely in 1940 – car numbers have been estimated at well below ten per cent of the adult population), it could not have a wireless set and its headlights had to be dimmed by a grille. The house he left to go to work every morning (and, astonishingly, bearing in mind the need to work for the war effort, there were still nearly a million unemployed that summer) had sticky tape over the windows to minimise the risk of flying glass. There were sand and water buckets in all major rooms to put out the fires of air raids. He could not hoard food (a punishable offence) but he had to make sure that his household was provided for. He would already have handed in his shotgun and his binoculars. His wife had long ago dispensed with half her pots and pans because that nice Lord Beaverbrook needed them to make Spitfires and Wellingtons, Blenheims and Hurricanes. His children, after 6 July, could not fly kites or balloons, presumably in case they had any connection with signalling to the enemy. He must never shoot carrier pigeons – how could he, since the local constabulary had his gun? He must replace his begonias with carrots and turnips, ignore malicious rumours and never doubt for a moment that Mr Churchill had everything in hand.

‘The reader,’ wrote Fleming, his tongue well and truly in his cheek, ‘will scarcely need to be told that this paragon did not, in his totality, exist.’31

Some people got out, their nerves shredded by it all. The official line from the United States government was that its citizens should leave. Hundreds did. One group that did not formed the American Squadron of the Home Guard in London, with a red eagle flash on their shoulders once they actually had uniforms to sew them onto. There was another move to evacuate children from the cities but it was much more half-hearted than at the outbreak of war. The vast majority of those children had drifted back and little boys in particular watched the dog-fights of the Battle of Britain, hoping to find bits of crashed aircraft or even, in their wildest dreams, being able to capture a German airman! Those who left were reduced to a trickle after 17 September, when the City of Benares, carrying ninety such children, was sunk by a U-boat. Only eleven survived.

There were demands for peacetime pastimes to stop. Horse-racing, dog-racing and cricket matches were among those frowned on and even the serious business of Bridge was being disrupted by air raids as the Bridge Correspondent of The Times told a disbelieving world on 3 September. There was a mild panic in London when the Zoo was hit. Poisonous snakes and scorpions had been destroyed when the war began but other animals flourished, watched over by a tiny cadre of snipers in case a dangerous one got out. A few of the birds did but the only quadruped escapee was a zebra, recaptured in the Zoo’s grounds later.

The show, despite tension, had to go on. The Windmill Theatre, with its chorus girls and risqué reputation, never closed, despite an official order that it must, and other theatres followed suit by the end of September. Concerts were held at noon in the National Gallery. Ballet dancers strutted their stuff in the Arts Theatre Club and Donald Wolfit, then arguably the nation’s leading ‘luvvie’, wowed his office-worker audience with soliloquies from Hamlet and Macbeth.

Rumours, despite the MOI’s order that they should not be spread, flew. In August, the Channel was said to be ‘white with bodies’ of a failed German invasion. Even Churchill believed this one because it had good propaganda value; if the British public believed that an invasion had been beaten back, that could only work wonders for morale. The government, in turn, formed the ‘Silent Column’ in June, pledging to shutting down rumour by prosecution. Since Duff Cooper of the MOI was its figurehead, they came to be known as Cooper’s Snoopers. Defeatism was a crime; so was being foreign. In that same month, a Dane and a Swede were arrested in Liverpool for ‘their foreign appearance’ and fined £15 each. And, according to the Daily Mail of 9 June, Dr J. J. Paterson, Medical Officer of Health for Maidenhead, had his house turned over by the police because, before the war, he had travelled widely in Germany. Everywhere, Mr Knowall, Miss Leaky Mouth, Mr Pride in Prophecy, Miss Teacup Whisperer and Mr Glumpot were all being listened to, plotted against, fined and imprisoned. It was a miserable time. And it was exactly the kind of discord that Adolf Hitler, still planning his invasion, was hoping for.

***

On 20 June, the day before Hitler crowed over the French surrender at Compiegne, the thriller writer Dennis Wheatley had lunch at London’s Dorchester Hotel with Sir Louis Greig, an RAF Wing Commander, Lawrence Darvall (same rank) and J. S. L. Renny, a Czech arms manufacturer. They met to discuss a paper that Wheatley had written which was of interest to the chiefs of staff – and would have been of more interest, almost certainly, to the OKW.

Wheatley was the son of a Mayfair wine merchant and had been expelled from the exclusive Dulwich College for allegedly forming a secret society. Since, after the war, Wheatley became Britain’s best-known occult novelist, this is not perhaps surprising. In 1940, he had a few highly successful thrillers under his belt and had offered his services as a writer to the MOI. He was mortified not even to get a reply but, since his wife worked as a driver for MI5, his potential reached the secret service. Out of this almost chance contact emerged Wheatley’s first paper on the prospects of beating an invasion. The fact that he had no military experience was precisely the point. A sharp mind not hidebound by the services nor wedged into a cupboard somewhere along Whitehall was needed. It was a maverick time – Churchill’s idea of the creation of the Special Operations Executive on 22 July to ‘set all Europe ablaze’ was yet another manifestation of it.

Wheatley worked like a demon, smoking over 200 cigarettes and downing three magnums of champagne over a 48-hour period. His resistance to invasion is fascinating, involving fishing nets, fire-ships, broken glass, flaming oil, ‘tiger pits’, tank traps, camouflage, armoured trains and gliders. It was Boys Own stuff but it was exactly the sort of thing that Churchill’s commandoes of the SOE would use in the months ahead, taking the war into the Reich. It was also the sort of tactic planned by the Auxiliary Units who were currently under training as ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’. Most fascinatingly, Wheatley had the idea of undermining enemy morale by dropping leaflets over Germany. They would read:

‘Come to England this summer for your holiday and sample the fun we have prepared for you. Try bathing in our barbed-wire bathing enclosures. Try rowing in our boats which will blow up as you touch the tiller. Try running up our beaches covered in broken glass. Try picnicking in our lovely woods along the coast and get a two-inch nail through your foot. Try jumping into our ditches and get burnt alive. Come by air and meet our new death ray (this sort of lie is good tactics at a time like this). Every Nazi visitor guaranteed death or an ugly wound. England or Hell – it’s going to be just the same for you in either.’32

The meeting at the Dorchester went further. Wing Commander Darvall asked Wheatley to prepare a plan for the invasion of England as though he were a member of the Nazi High Command. It ran to 15,000 words and was delivered to ‘Mr Rance’s room at the Office of Works’ (actually the Joint Planning Staff’s HQ at the War Department).

With a novelist’s verve, Wheatley put himself in the position of every villain he had created or was to create. ‘It is British hypocrisy, duplicity and greed,’ he wrote as devil’s advocate, ‘which has consistently barred the path of German advancement… There is no room in the world for a great and prosperous Germany and a still powerful Britain.’ He was wrong there. Repeatedly during these months and even as late as the flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland in May 1941, the modus vivendi which Hitler described was that Britain should be left alone to run her overseas empire, giving Germany a free hand in Europe. The British government never seriously considered that and neither, for his 1940 black propaganda purposes, did Wheatley. The novelist, posing as an OKW adviser, advocated the use of bacterial warfare and poison gas. He pushed the idea of landing in Ireland with its huge anti-British sentiment. He demanded the first wave of troops ashore be 600,000 strong with a further million in the second wave. Nothing was too costly to achieve the German objective, so the loss of thousands of men, most of the air force and a considerable number of ships was a small price worth paying.

Infiltration should already have happened. Apart from those interned under Defence Regulation 18B (who would of course be released once the Wehrmacht rescued them), there were thousands of refugees in Britain who may already be secret Nazis or could be easily ‘turned’ in that direction. New signposts would be erected quickly by these Fifth Columnists, who would poison water supplies, dig tunnels, provide lights for landing strips, break out prisoners and those in asylums, cut through telegraph wires and spread as much doom, gloom and panic as possible. Fake orders would be issued by men in fake uniforms. Trains would be sabotaged. Gas mains would be blown up by men in overalls. Drugged cigarettes would be given out and women would be placed in front of advancing troops as human shields. Assassination, though difficult, must be attempted. Government ministers, senior soldiers and airmen, must be targeted in their homes. Open grounds like golf courses, cricket pitches and race tracks must be commandeered to allow parachutists to land. Booby bombs with delayed detonators would be essential.33

Wheatley’s 15,000 words detail the progress that must be made by the Wehrmacht on successive days, together with the objectives of the Northern, Midland and Southern Forces.

Taking off his OKW braided hat with its eagle insignia at the end of this section in his paper, Wheatley turns on the stuffed shirts whose job it is to prevent the invasion he has just described:

‘These men have proved themselves lacking in vision, tortoise-like in adjusting… to new conditions, incompetent and gutless. [They are] unworthy to serve under our lion-hearted Prime Minister… The public is asking that a full inquiry should be instituted into the men responsible for this cowardly policy which has cost the nation so dear at such a vital time and that those who have shown themselves incapable of leadership should forthwith be relieved of their responsibilities.’

Rather cutely, he added later in an editorial note, ‘Dear, dear; I had got myself into a tizzie, hadn’t I?’

***

In one chilling respect, Dennis Wheatley had got inside the heads, not only of the OKW, but the SS too. In the section marked ‘Assassination’, he says that the ‘directing brains of British defence’ should be put out of action quickly ‘and this policy will be pursued after the conquest to prevent any leaders of public thought forming an unauthorised government or even leading local riots.’34 He advocates the shooting of every officer above captain in the army, lieutenant in the navy and flight-lieutenant in the air force. That would include all politicians, past and present of the Commons and Lords, all industrialists, editors and journalists, leading barristers, prominent churchmen, magistrates and well-known sportsmen.

Nearly seven hundred miles away, in Berlin, Reichssicherheirshaupstant Walter Schellenberg had creepily similar ideas. And he was preparing such a list of personalities. Unlike the amateur Dennis Wheatley, Schellenberg was a professional. And he intended to put his theories into practice.