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 9

It was Friday, 1 September 1939 and little Sam Pivnik was out with his friends, playing football. It was a day he would always remember well because it was his birthday. He was thirteen. He could not quite remember, years later, who was with him – Jurek was there, the Gutsek boys; probably Yitshak Wesleman, lads he had known all his life.

What he does remember clearly about this particular birthday, though, was the burst of activity. The normally quiet town of Bedzin, Poland, was full of people, grim-faced and muttering on street corners. Bedzin was a garrison town and, shortly before lunch, the local regiment, the 23rd Light Artillery, rattled out of their barracks, with creaking wheels, snorting horses and the clash of hoofs on the cobbles. All very exciting to a boy just turning thirteen but nothing holds a kid’s attention for long and Sam and his friends were soon kicking the ball around again.

That was when they heard it. The drone of aircraft coming from the west. It took a while for them to stop their game and focus in the bright glare of the sun. They were fighter bombers, pale blue on their under-wings with tell-tale black crosses. Sam had no idea that these planes had already hit Wielun, 100 kilometres away, leaving a blazing ruin and 1,200 bodies in the rubble. The first bomb on Bedzin smashed through the roof of the railway station. ‘It’s funny,’ Sam remembered long years later, ‘you don’t just hear a bomb going off, you feel it. The shock was like being hit in the pit of the stomach.’5

This was Fall Weiss, the German code name for the invasion of Poland, engineered by a cynical lie. It was necessary if Hitler was to add East Prussia to his Third Reich, to give his people the lebensraum (living space) he claimed they needed. The victors of Versailles – Britain, France and the United States – had created the artificial Polish ‘corridor’ that gave the Poles their only access to the sea, with Danzig (today’s Gdansk) as a free port for use by all. That corridor lay between Hitler and his next objective and it had to be closed.

Accordingly, on the last day of August, Operation Himmler was launched. At 8pm, six SS men in Polish army uniforms crashed into the German radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border. There was a roar of gunfire, bullets biting into the plaster walls and the bewildered staff were pistol-whipped. One of the raiders grabbed a microphone and announced in immaculate Polish:

‘People of Poland! The time has come for war between Poland and Germany. Unite and smash down any German, all Germans who oppose your way. Trample all resistance! The time has come!’

They killed no one at the station but the body of a concentration camp inmate, also dressed as a Pole and referred to in the codes of the time as ‘canned goods’, was left on the floor.

The next day, Hitler announced to the German people that ‘the attack by regular Polish troops on the Gleiwitz transmitter’ was the direct cause of the war that was about to begin. Even before his broadcast, Army Group South, commanded by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, had crossed the Polish border with fifty-three divisions, six of them armoured. One eye witness who was not supposed to be there was 27-year-old Clare Hollingworth, who died in January 2017 aged 105. She was a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph who grabbed a diplomat’s car and drove to the frontier. She hung out of an upstairs window with a telephone receiver held out so that her editor, on the other end of the line, could hear the snarl and roar of the tanks. Sixteen hundred aircraft accompanied the advance, the terrifying Stuka dive-bombers snaking over the countryside as the bringers of blitzkrieg, lightning war. Against them, the Poles had twenty-three divisions of infantry, one armoured division, insufficient artillery and an impressive, but obsolete, cavalry force. This was 1939 and blitzkrieg was a new, mechanised and faster-moving kind of war than anything the world had seen. Rumour rode with General Heinz Guderian’s panzers and, for years afterwards, people believed the myth that Polish lancers had charged the German tanks with the inevitable slaughter that would result. It never happened.

Throughout September, the Wehrmacht pushed the Poles back, confident that, because of the treaty that Hitler had signed with Stalin weeks earlier (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), there would be no opposition from the USSR’s Red Army. Poland was to be dismembered, split down the centre by the vastly more powerful states on its flanks. Germany would have the lion’s share of the country and Russia would control the rest as well as Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Estonia. Despite the uneasiness with which the ideologies of Fascism and Communism worked together, the geographical elements were a marriage made in heaven. In fact, a British cartoon appeared soon after this time showing a smiling groom, Joe Stalin, arm in arm with Adolf Hitler as his blushing bride.

By the day after the invasion, Runstedt had crossed the Warta river. In the south, the Lodz army collapsed and this led to a bizarre scene in Sam Pivnik’s home town. Bedzin, on Monday, 4 September, was full of excitement. The rumours rode again – this time, it was the British and French who were riding to the rescue. People lined the streets to welcome them, the girls and women holding flowers to give to their saviours. But it was not the British and French. It was the dark motorcycles and side-cars of the Wehrmacht’s motorised units: ‘Hard men,’ Pivnik remembered, ‘and hard faces. Behind them came grey-painted trucks, all crashing gears and rattling tailgates…between [them] came armoured cars, with cannon and machine-guns – the face of total war.’6 The cheering stopped. The smiles vanished. The flowers were thrown to the cobbles.

And four days later, hell came to Bedzin. The Einsatzgruppen arrived, Hitler’s execution squads. Shots echoed in the streets and the smell of the burning synagogue filled the air. When the Pivniks came out of their self-imposed home prison after three days, Sam saw his first corpse. In fact, dozens of them; old Jews with Orthodox ringlets, beards and black clothes lay in the gutters, smashed by rifle butts, slashed with bayonets. Others hung from lamp-posts in the town square, swaying with the wind. The names of some of these men were on the Polish Special Search List. This was the reality of which the people of Britain, as yet, knew nothing. And many refused to believe it when they did.

The September War, as the Poles called it, was in many ways a foregone conclusion. Warsaw, the capital, was pounded by the full might of Goering’s Luftwaffe in a foretaste of what all major cities would experience in the coming months. A Polish government in exile was set up in London with Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz as the new president and the unpopular Wladyslaw Sikorski as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, some of whom had got away in the four destroyers the Polish navy had been able to extricate from the Kriegsmarine. On 3 October, the remnants of the Polish army that stayed surrendered near the town of Luck. The Germans took 700,000 prisoners, the Russians 200,000. Fall Weiss had been a total success and Poland had ceased to exist.

***

Neville Chamberlain’s plummy, out-of-touch tones crackled over the radio waves on Sunday, 3 September 1939, reaching a numbed British population who would spend the next six years glued to their wireless sets. Some of the men who heard Chamberlain remembered all too well the last time they had clashed with Germany, only twenty-five years before. It had been the Kaiser’s Germany then, a new nation flexing its military muscles on the world stage. It was Hitler’s Germany now and the men and women who listened to Chamberlain that Sunday had watched in growing disbelief as Germany had risen from the ashes of defeat in just six years. Most Englishmen found the Führer funny; he had awful hair and a silly moustache. His high-stepping minions in the black-shirted SS were something of a joke. But some of those listeners were impressed by the economic miracle that Hitler had brought about in a nation all but destroyed by defeat and the Wall Street crash. Some of them believed that the Allies had been too harsh in punishing Germany at Versailles in 1919 and that Hitler’s rise was wholly explicable. Still others rather admired the stand he took against the Bolshevism that had made a monster out of Russia. And a few, although they would spend the rest of their lives denying it, thought that he had a point in his detestation of the Jews.

From that Sunday, Britain was at war with Nazi Germany. So, with immediate effect, were Australia and New Zealand, whose men had bled in the trenches of Gallipoli in the First World War. Chamberlain – the arch-appeaser who had stood by and watched as Hitler annexed the Saarland, sent troops to the demilitarised Rhine, forged an alliance with Austria and snatched first the Sudetenland, then all of Czechoslovakia – called a meeting of his cabinet. Alongside the time-servers and paper-shufflers who did not believe this moment would ever come were two who knew that it would: Anthony Eden, Secretary for the Dominions, the old empire which, fifty years earlier, had been the largest in the world; and Winston Churchill, the maverick anti-Nazi of the Thirties, now First Lord of the Admiralty.

Minutes after the Prime Minister’s announcement and before the cabinet assembled, the tell-tale whine of an air-raid siren wailed over London. It was a noise that would strike terror to millions over the next six years. Churchill and his wife Clementine went up to the roof of their town house. They saw, in the hazy midday sun, thirty or forty barrage balloons, floating like huge beached whales in the sky. Then, with the sang froid that he would show for the next six years, Churchill made for the nearest air-raid shelter ‘armed with a bottle of brandy and other appropriate medical comforts.’7

The raid was a false alarm. Churchill’s shelter was the basement of a house with no sandbags and the all-clear sounded after fifteen minutes, followed by someone walking along the street calling out the same. No doubt the famous British sense of humour kicked in – ‘Is that all they’ve got?’ ‘Typical – late for their own war.’ Many people would learn to laugh at death in the coming months.

At 5pm on that Sunday, France, whose own ultimatum to Hitler over Poland had not yet expired, followed Chamberlain’s lead and declared war on the old enemy. And then …nothing.

The strange lull before the storm that the West experienced has been called ‘the bore war’ because it was so dull. The French knew it as drôle de guerre (the funny war). The Germans, who were, in fact, busy in the East, called it sitzkrieg (the armchair war). The British coined the expression of an American journalist based in London and the ‘phoney war’ was born. Even that first weekend, there was a peculiar sense of time standing still. Most football matches on the previous day had been cancelled because of a shortage of players. By the time of Chamberlain’s broadcast, many of the West Ham team were already wearing their itchy new battledress khaki, scanning the empty skies with the Essex regiment’s searchlight section.

Behind the scenes and unbeknownst to the British public, the government had set up Code Yellow and Code Black, mass movement unprecedented in history. People were on the move to safety. The BBC closed down its infant television station at Alexandra Palace, right in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon (unlike Nazi Germany, which continued to broadcast throughout the war). Realising the vital need to keep radio going and to provide news, the rest of ‘Auntie’s’ operatives moved to Bristol and Evesham. The Bank of England abandoned Threadneedle Street and became the Little Old Lady of Overton, Hampshire. The National Gallery began the huge task of moving its art exhibits, of the sort that Hermann Goering was fond of collecting, to caves in a slate quarry in Wales.

But the biggest movement of all was of children. The horrific experiences of the town of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War two years earlier had brought a new word and a new concept to warfare – blitzkrieg.8 A reporter who was there told a disbelieving world:

‘I saw a priest in one group … His face was blackened, his clothes in tatters. He couldn’t talk. He just pointed to the flames, still about four miles away, then whispered, ‘Aviones … bombas … mucho, mucho.’ In the city, soldiers were collecting charred bodies. They were sobbing like children. There were flames and smoke and grit and the smell of burning human flesh was nauseating.’9

The ‘aviones’ were the Heinkel IIIs, the Dornier 17s and the Junkers 52s of Germany’s Condor Legion, the pride of Goering’s Luftwaffe, and Guernica was their dummy run for the war that was to come.

To avoid this unimaginable horror, on the last day of August, vast numbers of London schoolchildren had been marshalled by adults as bewildered as they were. They carried toothbrushes, sandwiches and one favourite toy, taken to their schools by tearful mothers and then by bus or Underground to the nearest mainline station. Their faces all stare out of grainy black and white snapshots today, clutching all that was left of their world. Journeys by train took hours and there were often no corridors. Toilets overflowed. Children were sick, with excitement and fear. They missed their families already and they had no idea where they were going. The whole thing was chaos. Large hotels in the country waiting to receive their cohort got no one. Tiny village cottages were swamped with siblings who refused to be separated. Many of them were crawling with lice and fleas. They had rarely seen soap and did not own a comb. To many of these townies, seasons and cows were just words that their teachers sometimes used.

***

The land war may have been ‘phoney’ but the story at sea was different. The Kriegsmarine had fifty-eight submarines (U-boats), thirty-nine of which were at sea by early September. Although not a new weapon, the U-boat was regarded with apprehension by everyone. Until sonar (underwater radar) was perfected, a submarine was a silent killer, able to strike anywhere and disappear in minutes. Surface shipping, including that of the Merchant Navy and civilians, was at serious risk. Fifty-three such ships had been sunk by 3 September and it was not until four days later that the first British Atlantic convoys set out with destroyer escorts. On paper, the Royal Navy had the edge over the Kriegsmarine, although the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935 had allowed Hitler to build warships openly and four years of hectic arms manufacture had produced impressive results. The aircraft carrier Courageous was sunk on 17 September in a routine submarine patrol and, after that, the carriers were withdrawn. They were too important and too expensive to be squandered.

Most notorious of the Kriegsmarine’s fleet was the pocket battleship Graf Spee, which sank nine ships between September and December. By the end of October, 196,000 tons of Allied shipping had been lost, at the expense of five U-boats. The biggest blow, however, fell on 14 October, when U-boat commander Gunther Prien took his U-47 into the naval base of Scapa Flow and sank the Royal George. Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment had a field day. The next month, on 23 November, the merchant cruiser Rawalpindi was blown out of the water by the Scharnhorst. What no one realised at the time was that the Kriegsmarine were able to intercept British codes and plan their strategy accordingly.

What was the mood in Britain? The people only knew what they were told by the media, and both the BBC and the mainstream newspapers were soon tightly controlled by the government’s Ministry of Information. The paranoia of the period believed that there was a Fifth Column operating across the country, in constant touch with Nazi Germany and prepared to undermine morale in a thousand ingenious ways. Given this situation, the Ministry behaved not unlike Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, exhorting people to ‘Be like Dad – keep Mum’, ‘Tittle-Tattle Lost the Battle’ and ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. The public could only see things through official channels and those channels, naturally, tried to put a brave face on things. Spreading alarm and despondency was the last thing anyone wanted to do. Today, a number of historians believe that, in general, the media told the public the truth. I dispute that. On 10 May 1941, in the heaviest – and last – of the Luftwaffe’s Blitz on London, the Air Ministry claimed to have shot down twenty-eight German aircraft. In fact, the figure was seven and that was scant recompense for the terrible punishment that London had taken. The BBC reported it nonetheless.

Harold Nicolson provides a fascinating candid snapshot of reaction to the news. He was a National Labour MP for West Leicester when war broke out and would serve as a Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information from May 1940 to July 1941. Despite his ‘establishment’ status, his diary was written strictly for private purposes, not publication and the highs and lows of international developments give him a rather schizophrenic aura – suicidal in the morning, gung-ho in the afternoon (or vice versa), depending on the situation.

He had grasped the situation clearly by 6 September: ‘If we insist upon the continuance of battle, we may condemn many young men to death. If we urge acceptance, we are ending the British Empire.’10

In those early days of the war, Anthony Eden was seen as the hawk of the Commons, broadcasting to the nation. Nicolson’s schizophrenia is shown by his diary entry for 11 September: ‘If Anthony had said “We will consider peace” I should have been wretchedly relieved. As he said “We shall fight to the end” I am stimulated and happy.’

On 20 September, Chamberlain, Nicolson observed, was tired and depressed. At least ten MPs nodded off during his speech to the House. It says a great deal about the difference between illusion and reality in the opening weeks of the war that one of the people Nicolson dined with that night was the double agent Guy Burgess, the BBC journalist who worked for Section Nine of SIS, the Secret Service and who would spectacularly defect to the Soviet Union in 1951. Nicolson noted the appearance of Winston Churchill ‘like the Chinese god of plenty suffering from acute indigestion. He just sits there, lowering, hunched and circular’ but when he got up all the benches cheered him wildly.

It would not have surprised men like Nicolson to know that Hitler was already planning to strike west and he told his chiefs of staff precisely that on the 27th. He may have expected wholehearted support – after all, the Polish campaign was all but over; in fact, the reception was not only lukewarm, it was downright hostile. Harold Nicolson believed the Germans were naturally a diffident people and Hitler’s high command seemed to bear this out. Blitzkrieg had not yet made its true impact. The tank had been underused in Poland, with conventional infantry tactics being preferred by the more staid of the Wehrmacht generals, almost all of whom were veterans of the First World War.

The French army, its mobilisation surprisingly slow, had marched into the Reich at Saarbrucken and patrolled until 17 September, when news of the imminent collapse of Poland made Eduoard Daladier’s War Cabinet call them back.

By the middle of October, four British divisions had crossed to France. It spent time improving the defences of the Maginot Line while the Germans improved theirs – the Westwall, which the British called the Siegfried Line. Despite this flurry of activity, involving miles of barbed wire and hundreds of Royal Engineers, not a shot was fired.

One of the many myths to emerge from this period is that Britain had so slavishly followed the government’s line of appeasement to Hitler that she was totally unprepared for war. This is patently untrue. Thanks to the pioneering genius of men like R. J. Mitchell, Britain had the Spitfire, the best fighter plane of the war. We had a small but professional and well-equipped army that would be augmented by conscription even before war was declared. And, of course, the navy, despite its losses, had a reputation second to none. We also had an experienced and large workforce and had made enough adaptations to changing technology to stand against any country in the world in terms of arms production. These were the positives but would they be enough?

On 6 October, Hitler kept the world guessing and held out an olive branch to the West. In a speech to the Reichstag, he said that all Germany had done to date was to correct the vicious unfairness of Versailles. He believed that a Munich-style conference of European leaders could produce results – as long as warmongers like Churchill were not present. Harold Nicolson told R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, that Chamberlain should consider this, with various guarantees. In the event, the Prime Minister rejected the idea out of hand, as did Daladier in France. It is unlikely that Chamberlain shared the same happy-go-lucky sang froid of songwriters Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr, who were ‘gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’, but the man had been permanently scarred by the Munich Conference in 1938; he wasn’t about to make the same mistake again.

Three days later, in Directive No. 6, the Führer made his aims clear: ‘Should it become evident in the near future that England, and, under her influence, France also, are not disposed to bring the war to an end, I have decided, without further loss of time, to go over to the offensive.’

On 5 November, the Wehrmacht’s commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, was summoned to the Reichs Chancellery to talk strategy. He told Hitler that the army was not ready for the planned strike west scheduled for a week’s time. Hitler went into one of his carefully planned but increasingly frequent rages and shouted the man down. But the weather, at least, was on Brauchitsch’s side. Between 7 November and 16 January 1940, the strike west was postponed an astonishing fourteen times!

As the year closed, the Winter War, fought in the snow of the frozen north between Finland and the USSR, continued, the vastly superior Red Army getting a bloody nose for its pains against a tiny but committed and professional force. The Graf Spee, driven for shelter into the River Plate in Argentina, scuttled herself rather than face the Royal Navy in open waters.

The new year brought economic sanctions on all sides in the war. In Germany, Hermann Goering was put in charge of war industry. The former air ace and larger-than-life Nazi was the most preposterous of the goldfasanen, the golden pheasants, who strutted around in glitzy uniforms. Four years earlier, in his famous ‘butter or guns’ speech, he had spelled out the determination he expected from the German people. Germany, he told his listeners, ‘must have a place in the sun… What’s the good of being in the concert of nations, if we are only allowed to play a comb?’11

In Britain, bacon, butter and sugar were added to the growing list of rationed goods, increasing the power of the Ministry of Food and extending the remit of the black market. France, too, was suffering. On 11 January, the government announced that Friday would be a meatless day (many French Catholics thought it already was) and that no mutton, beef or veal would be sold on Mondays and Tuesdays either. Grim though the economic figures were, it was still possible to afford pre-war luxuries if you knew the right place or person. Keith Simpson, the Home Office pathologist, continued to enjoy slap-up meals at L’Etoile in Soho’s Charlotte Street for the rest of the war and, on the day of the French pronouncement, Marie Vassiltchikov in Berlin drank champagne at Ciro’s nightclub in the city.

Militarily, it became a race for Norway. The country produced heavy water and could supply safe, deep-water harbours for U-boats in its fjords, thus avoiding the Allied naval blockade that had crippled the Axis powers in the First World War. In the event, the Germans struck first and it was not until early April that the British navy moved on Norway. The Germans were already there, forcing Copenhagen to capitulate after a single day. In the brief fighting that took place, of the 16,000-strong Danish army, there were only 13 deaths. Churchill was off form in the House, shuffling his papers, mistaking Sweden for Denmark and generally giving the air of a man who had been outthought and outfought by the speed and efficiency of the Reich. MPs muttered among themselves that, if Norway fell, Scotland might be next. There were successes at sea, with seven German destroyers sunk, but the army fared less well and there was talk of evacuation. Churchill was a victim of his own (dubious) reputation. He had made serious mistakes at the Admiralty over the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War, to the extent that he had been forced to resign. Many were surprised to see him back in post twenty-four years later. ‘Today,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, ‘he cannot dare to do the things he could have dared in 1915.’

In Berlin, Marie Vassiltchikov, a Russian émigré, with her perfect English, listened illegally to the BBC – ‘People here are rather staggered by this precipitous pull-out [from Norway]. Many Germans still have a lurking admiration for the British.’12

At the end of the month, King Hakkon and his government left collapsing Norway with the country’s gold reserves on board the cruiser Glasgow to become yet another government-in-exile in London. British and French forces evacuated soon after, leaving valuable equipment behind. All in all, it did not bode well for the future.

Harold Nicolson wrote one of his longest diary entries for 8 May. There was a debate in the House over the Norwegian situation and it turned into a vote of no confidence in Chamberlain. The first stab was inflicted by Herbert Morrison, MP for Hackney South, and the Prime Minister took the attack personally. Ashen-faced, he rounded on Morrison – ‘I have friends in this House.’ It all sounded rather spiteful and like school-playground antics. In the frantic behind-the-scenes lobbies in the mother of parliaments, grown men bitched and plotted. Chamberlain was prepared to jettison Samuel Hoare and John Simon, his cabinet cronies. Duff Cooper of the Ministry of Information and David Lloyd George, the Welsh wizard who had led Britain in the First World War, savaged Churchill in the chamber. Forty-four, including Nicolson, voted against the government. Thirty abstained. MP John Wedgwood (the List’s W38), carried away with the emotion of it all, sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and, all around the chamber, shouts of ‘Go, go, go, go!’ filled the Prime Minister’s ears as he left.

The next few days were turmoil in the corridors of power. ‘Germany,’ wrote Marie Vassiltchikov, ‘has marched into Belgium and Holland.’ Harold Nicolson saw the same newsstands as he caught the London train from Brighton. The rumour machine followed him, with stories of the bombing of Lyons and an imminent invasion of Switzerland. On his arrival in the capital, he was immediately in the thick of politics. In the light of the news, some people contended that Chamberlain must stay. Samuel Hoare refused point blank to leave the Air Ministry. What about, some wondered, a triumvirate of Chamberlain, Churchill and Lord Halifax, the tall, stately Foreign Secretary? News from the Continent, arriving by the hour, was grim and there was panic in Whitehall. What made it all worse, Nicolson remembered, was the gorgeous spring day, with bluebells and primroses everywhere. He was back home in Sissinghurst by nine o’clock that night, in time to hear Chamberlain’s tones, still plummy, still out of touch, but now desperately tired, offering his resignation. There was to be no triumvirate. There was to be no Halifax at Number Ten.

Marie Vassiltchikov wrote, ‘It comes as a shock as this means the end of the “Phoney War”…Paris is being evacuated, Chamberlain has resigned and Churchill is now Prime Minister. This, probably, kills any hope for peace with the Allies now.’

When Churchill appeared in the House for the first time after he had kissed rings at the Palace, he got a rousing cheer from almost everyone except his own party. He would have to use his prodigious energy to win friends, and quickly – the same negative advice was being drip fed into his ears, as it had been into Chamberlain’s. Basil Liddell-Hart, arguably the most influential independent military adviser in the country, had said in March that the only solution was to ‘come to the best possible terms as soon as possible …we have no chance of avoiding defeat.’13 Lord Beaverbrook used his Express Newspapers fortune to create a realistic team of peace candidates in the House. Halifax, who had actually turned down the premiership because, sitting in the Lords, he felt out of touch, also thought that coming to terms with Hitler was the only way forward.

The Dominions were not happy either. At the start of the war, Canada had waited a week before declaring war on Germany. In South Africa, it had taken a change of government in Johannesburg for that to happen. Now, Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, told his High Commissioner in London that Churchill was a publicity-seeker and that the real enemy was not Nazi Germany but Bolshevik Russia.

And it was to get worse. On 10 May, Fall Gelb was launched, a simultaneous attack on the Netherlands, Belgium and France. In the north, Field Marshal Bock’s twenty-nine divisions of Army Group B moved against a pitifully weak Dutch defence. The flat nature of the Netherlands offered very little in the way of natural barriers to slow the Wehrmacht down. In the centre, Army Group A, under von Rundstedt, marched confidently into Belgium from the West Wall. This was the major thrust of the campaign, forty-five divisions, crashing through the forest of the Ardennes with a speed that bewildered everyone except Heinz Guderian, whose panzers now came into their own. Against them, the Belgian army was feeble. The Dutch and Belgian reserves were based in the west, nearest to the coast. The Germans had forty-two divisions in their reserve, stationed in the north but ready to reinforce the line wherever needed.

In the south, Wilhelm Leeb’s Army Group C stretching from the Swiss border near Basel to Luxembourg, faced the French Maginot Line. Much has been written about these fortifications and the ‘defence mentality’ that they bred. The French Army Groups 2 and 3 manned it, under Generals André-Gaston Prételat and Antoine-Marie-Benoit Besson. Further north, along the French border, the 1st Army Group under General Gaston Billotte had twenty-two divisions. Further north still, along the Somme of bitter First World War memory, Field Marshal John Gort’s British Expeditionary Force had nine divisions and at the coast near Dunkirk, General Henri Giraud’s seven divisions included two motorised and one light mechanised.

On paper, the sides seemed evenly matched but the reality was very different. While Leeb feinted in the south, Runstedt simply bypassed the Maginot Line and pressed forward between Luxembourg and Aachen. The advantage that the Germans had was that the three army groups were co-ordinated by von Brauchitsch at OKH, the Army High Command. Against that, there was less co-operation than there should have been, certainly in the planning stage, between the Dutch, the Belgians, the French and the tiny British force involved. They had all had eight months since the outbreak of war to prepare for this moment but the possibility of establishing peace with Hitler, arrogance and inertia had combined with fatal results.

The French command was especially weak. General Maurice Gamelin, the commander-in-chief, did not have the confidence of the government or many of the officers under him. He was too old to appreciate the situation facing him. Even by the end of the first day’s fighting, everything had gone to the Wehrmacht’s plan and the Dutch and Belgians were struggling to hold out. In the air, the Luftwaffe’s superiority was clear – 3,000 combat aircraft to 2,000 of the Allies. It prompted the question from many disgruntled British squaddies in the days ahead, ‘Where the bloody hell was the RAF?’

Two days later, the Wehrmacht marched into Sedan unopposed. The French army retreated, determined to hold the Meuse with their heavy artillery. As Queen Wilhelmina and her advisers left for England to become another government in exile, Giraud’s Seventh Army was in full retreat, pushed back by Guderian and, another rising star in the Wehrmacht galaxy, Erwin Rommel.

That was the day that Churchill made one of his most famous speeches in the House. ‘I have nothing to offer you,’ he said, ‘but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’

Rotterdam was flattened by aerial bombing on 14 May and the Dutch were staring surrender in the face. In Britain, the Local Defence Volunteers were formed. Subsequently mocked as ‘Dad’s Army’ it was a last-ditch defence organisation composed of old men, teenagers and those with various disabilities. Without uniforms, guns or, at first, a structured command, they seemed as desperate as the times. The Dutch surrendered on the next day and the French First Army pulled back. The German commanders were at the front with their men, spearheading attacks as the Germans had for centuries.

In Britain, Air Marshal Hugh Dowding persuaded Churchill’s War Cabinet not to send any more fighters to France. They would simply be swallowed up in the German advance and Britain had neither the planes nor the pilots to spare. Instead, Bomber Command was given the green light to target the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, to damage war production. This may seem an obvious decision but it was directly at odds with the opening weeks of the war. Then, only leaflets were dropped because, after all, the factories in the Ruhr were private property!

Churchill flew to Paris on the 16th. He learned that the French Reserve had virtually ceased to exist. Minions in government offices were already burning top-secret papers and a radical shake-up in that government effectively removed Gamelin two days later. Marshal Phillipe Pétain, the hero of the First World War at Verdun, became deputy prime minister under Paul Reynaud, and General Maxime Weygand took over the supreme command. With hindsight, the aged Pétain was a poor choice; he had little faith in his own army and was overawed by the speed of the blitzkrieg that they faced.

In the case of the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), Gort was increasingly uneasy about the situation. He had the right to refuse French orders if he felt his own units were compromised but exactly when to pull out was difficult. At home, Harold Nicolson had been asked by Churchill to step up to the plate. In the Prime Minister’s own words, ‘Harold, I think it would be very nice if you joined the government and helped Duff [Cooper] at the Ministry of Information.’ Nicolson was like a schoolboy in his ‘sunny little room’ in a building belonging to London University, with pins and coloured wool showing troop positions across the Channel. By that day, Guderian’s panzers had carved a twenty-mile corridor from the Ardennes to the French coast. As he played with his pins, it may have dawned on Nicolson that the Third Reich was just over one hundred miles from him and getting closer every day.

On 21 May, a unit of British Matilda tanks hit back at Arras, where their fathers had fought in the First World War, but they were too few to do much damage and the French general Billotte was killed in a car crash. Walter Monckton, Director-General of the Press Bureau of the Ministry of Information, heard a loud laugh at the Foreign office that morning – ‘a sound which I have not heard for a week’. It was probably hysteria. Hitler held a high-level conference in Berlin that same day. This was the moment when Admiral Erich Raeder suggested to his Führer that it may be necessary to invade Britain.

In the House, the Emergency Powers Act was passed, giving sweeping new authority to the magistracy, the police and the emergency services, which would have been unthinkable in peace time, and a new army of ‘little Hitlers’ threw their weight about in a society ever more afraid for its own safety.

Harold Nicolson was expecting the worst. He advised his wife, the novelist Vita Sackville-West, to fill the tank of her Buick with petrol, grab her jewels and a twenty-four-hour food supply. ‘I should imagine that the best thing you can do is to make for Devonshire.’ He was not talking about invasion yet, but the need for the government to get out of London. If the Luftwaffe’s bombers were to be based on the French coast, then the British capital was well within their range.

The Royal Navy was now in action in the Channel, firing in support of Allied troops pinned in at Calais and Boulogne. Under Defence Regulation 18B, Oswald Mosely, the British Fascist Leader and Captain Archibald Ramsay, chairman of the Right Club, were interned along with many others. In the rising tide of panic, anyone with obvious German or Austrian connections was rounded up and placed under lock and key, including, ironically, several who would appear on Walter Schellenberg’s List in a few weeks’ time.

On 24 May, in a move that surprised everyone at the time and has been debated ever since, Hitler ordered a halt to the attack. Goering was demanding a more central role for his Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht’s tank crews certainly needed rest. Whether he deliberately soft-pedalled in his advance against the British in an effort to bring about peace talks is still argued today; but if he did, he reckoned without Winston Churchill.

Beaverbrook’s Daily Express could scream in its banner headlines on 11 May, NOW WE’RE AT THEIR THROATS! but the reality was that we were David throwing pointless rocks at Goliath and the story was not turning out as it did in the Old Testament. On 4 June, Churchill made what is probably his best-known speech in the Commons:

‘We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.’14

By the time he made this speech, Churchill knew that fighting in France was no longer an option. There had been upbeat moments of good news – ‘Our army has fought the most magnificent battle in Flanders,’ Nicolson wrote on 31 May; two days earlier, he had talked of erecting a Corunna Line15 around Dunkirk and ‘hope to evacuate a few of our troops.’16

Operation Dynamo was the name given to the evacuation from Dunkirk that began on 26 May. Thanks to Churchill’s genius as a rhetorician, the phrase ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ entered the English language and a victory was born. In fact, as most people realised at the time, Dunkirk was a defeat and an embarrassing one at that. First Norway, now France; the much-vaunted British army had been well and truly beaten twice. Photographs of the Tommies returning home to Dover give a false impression. Their grins are those of relief, not pride. Some of these men were jeered in the streets. A few were spat at.

‘Our great-grandchildren,’ said the writer J. B. Priestley in a broadcast on 5 June, ‘when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat…. may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.’17

The ‘little ships of England’, privately owned motor boats, made the dangerous Channel crossing more than once. They could carry few men, however, and virtually no equipment. These were transferred to Royal Navy transports and warships at a suitable distance from the coast. The rows of dispirited men, in battle bowlers and greatcoats, sleeping exposed on the Dunkirk beaches, were sitting ducks for the fighters and dive bombers of the Luftwaffe. On 31 May, they had thirty-eight planes shot down by the RAF, who themselves lost twenty-eight. It was all too little, too late. By the next day, 64,429 men had crossed the Channel but four British destroyers were sunk and five others seriously damaged. On 2 June, the last British units left, a little before midnight.

The evacuees included 112,000 Frenchmen, who would form the Free French army in exile under General Charles de Gaulle in London, itching for a chance to renew the conflict on their own soil. Eighty ships had been lost and the navy’s resources were now seriously depleted. Of the 180 destroyers in the navy list at the start of the war, only 74 were still fully operational. Eighty of Dowding’s RAF pilots had been killed – altogether a more expensive commodity than Gort’s BEF ground troops and more difficult to replace. As if to add insult to injury, five days later, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisnau, marauding along the coast of Norway now that the British and the Norwegian royal family had abandoned it, came across the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious with two destroyers as escort. All three British ships were sunk.

‘And now comes Italy,’ moaned Harold Nicolson. ‘What a mean, skulking thing to do…They are like the people who rob corpses on the battlefield …. The Greeks had a word for it.’

In fact, it would be another six days before Benito Mussolini officially declared war on Britain and France, and both he and his country’s military effort were to become, in the months ahead, an acute embarrassment to Hitler. At the time, of course, this was not the point. Mussolini, who became the Fascist dictator – Il Duce – of Italy in 1922, was very much the senior partner in the totalitarian stakes. Germany and Austria were Fascist, so was Italy. So, too, was Spain, although, exhausted by her civil war, she took no active part in the Second World War. It made sense for Italy to throw in her lot with Germany, and the Pact of Steel now created sent a shudder through the corridors of Whitehall. The Italian army was not first rate and the economy would find it difficult to sustain a prolonged war. The navy, however, was formidable, with state-of-the-art battleships nearing completion and the largest U-boat force in the world, 116 strong. The British possessions of Gibraltar in the west of the Mediterranean, Malta in the centre and Cyprus in the east, could all come under serious threat of invasion.

Immediately, in Britain, people with Italian surnames or connections were rounded up under Regulation 18B. Ice-cream parlours vanished overnight. And, with the signposts taken down from roads and barbed-wire entanglements embedded into the beaches, it was not going to be a wonderful summer! ‘What makes me gnash my teeth,’ Nicolson wrote to his wife on 12 June, ‘is that Hitler said he would be in Paris by 15th June and I think he will meet that date, thereby increasing his mystic legend.’

Nicolson was anaesthetised by the situation. Convinced that Britain would be bombed and invaded in three weeks, he and Vita had taken steps to commit suicide with cyanide capsules – the ‘bare bodkin’, as he calls them – ‘I am quite lucidly aware that in three weeks from now Sissinghurst may be a waste[land] and Vita and I both dead.’

The very last of British and Canadian troops were evacuated from France by 18 June. Churchill hit exactly the right note again in the Commons, broadcast to the nation later:

‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin …The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us up in this island or lose the war… Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say “This was their finest hour”.’18

Weygand had also said (although Churchill did not make this public for well over a year) that he expected, within three weeks, for Britain to have her neck wrung like a chicken. William Shirer, reporting for the Columbia Broadcasting System, was in the forest of Compiegne on Saturday, 22 June to witness France’s total humiliation. Hitler had insisted that the very railway carriage in which the Kaiser’s army had surrendered to Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch in November 1918 be used again; this time with the Führer in Foch’s seat, literally as well as figuratively. The sun shone through the elms and cedars that afternoon as Shirer watched history reverse itself. The whole thing, with formal salutes and grim faces, lasted for fifteen minutes. Then the German band struck up ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’ and the ‘Horst Wessel’ song, which was virtually a Nazi theme tune. Shirer noted the inscription, as did Hitler and his cronies, that the French had erected there in 1918 –‘Here on the eleventh of November 1918, succumbed the criminal pride of the German Empire, vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave.’ Twenty-two years later, the free peoples were vanquished after all.

***

Britain now stood alone, separated from Hitler’s Reich by twenty-one miles of water. As if to signal the next move, on 30 June, the Wehrmacht occupied the Channel Islands, technically setting foot on British soil for the first time. The following month came to be known to the Kriegsmarine as die gluckhche zeit (the happy time) because of the high hit rate on Allied shipping in the Atlantic.

And on the second day of the new month, the OKW, the German High Command, issued a new order called The War Against England – ‘The Führer and Supreme Commander has decided that a landing in England is possible.’ Luftwaffe attacks on Allied ships intensified. The next day, Churchill made one of the most difficult and fateful decisions of the war. Concerned that the French navy would fall into German hands, he ordered the Royal Navy to open fire on the French and destroy as many ships as they could. Those in British harbours were seized quietly and with minimum bloodshed. At Mers-el-Kebir, however, demobilisation talks broke down and Admiral James Somerville opened his broadsides on Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul’s ships, sinking the Bretagne and damaging two other battleships.

Probing Britain’s south coast and anxious to show what his airmen could do, Goering unleashed a Stuka squadron on a convoy off Portland Bill. Five of the nine ships were sunk. As an obvious prelude to a seaborne invasion, it was vital that the Germans should knock out the RAF first. Poland’s excellent air force had been caught off guard by the suddenness of the invasion but Goering could hardly count on the element of surprise now. Throughout June and July, there was frantic work in the RAF and its support industries to build planes and train pilots. Churchill later wrote:

‘This was a time when all Britain worked … to the utmost limit and was united as never before. Men and women toiled at the lathes and machines till they fell exhausted… and had to be ordered home… Nothing moves an Englishman so much as the threat of invasion, the reality unknown for a thousand years. Vast numbers of people were resolved to conquer or die.’19

The British reckoned 10 July to be the opening of the Battle of Britain. There were dog-fights over the Channel, Messerschmitts and Hurricanes snarling through the summer skies to try to down each other. The gloomy thinking throughout the Thirties was that ‘the bomber will always get through’ and a squadron did that day, hitting the docks in Cardiff and Port Talbot in South Wales. Most of the Luftwaffe’s attacks were on shipping in the Channel and they sustained the heavier losses. In terms of fighters, however, the tally was about equal and the Luftwaffe easily outnumbered the RAF in that respect.

The French had lost heart. Their army beaten, their air force shattered, their fleet non-existent, they rolled over to German occupation, giving the British a foretaste of what might come for them. President Lebrun resigned and was replaced by Petain, the war hero-turned-collaborator. All over the country, his grim countrymen formed Resistance movements, just to show how far they were removed from him.

Two days later, Hitler issued Directive 15. The full blast of the Luftwaffe’s strength was to be unleashed on 5 August. The summer of 1940, now invested with a nostalgic glow as the ‘Spitfire summer’, was unusually hot and dry – excellent flying weather. Goering fell at the first. Having promised Hitler that the RAF stood no chance, he now had to report that his cohorts would not be up to strength by the 5th and precious days were lost.

The next day, Directive 16 was issued in Berlin. ‘I have decided,’ said the Führer with all the confidence that a dictator of a police state can afford, ‘to begin to prepare for, and if necessary, carry out, an invasion of England.’

It had taken Hitler weeks to come to this decision and the rather curious wording implies, perhaps, a lack of conviction. Why prepare for invasion and not carry it out? With hindsight, we know that many of the German High Command were sceptical; that they fully appreciated the difficulties of invasion. But, if they dithered, all Hitler had to do was to point to Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Blitzkrieg was unstoppable. Some of today’s historians have taken this apparent indecision to extremes; that Hitler never had any serious intention of invasion and that he would much have preferred to make peace.

On 19 July, the Führer made ‘a final appeal to common sense’ in the Reichstag, the last olive branch of peace that he would offer to Britain. The reaction in Whitehall was fascinating. Harold Nicolson was convinced that the Germans would invade in ‘the next few days’, even though Hitler had now fixed the airborne attack, Agler Tag (Eagle Day), for 13 August. Lord Lothian, the Right-wing peer who had been shunted to the role of British ambassador in Washington, essentially to keep him out of the way, rang Halifax on the 22nd begging him not to respond to Hitler’s offer in a way that might close the door on peace. In the event, Halifax did just that. To paraphrase – and invert – Churchill’s epithet, it was to be ‘war, war, not jaw, jaw.’

Harold Nicolson – and, indeed, many of Churchill’s War Cabinet – seem to have had only the vaguest notion of what actual invasion would bring, even though Nicolson’s Ministry of Information had already issued pamphlets on the subject! ‘It may be that Hitler will bomb us first with gas. At the same time, Italy and Japan will hit us as hard as they can.’ In fact, Hitler had already turned down Il Duce’s offer of military help and Japan was almost six thousand miles away. There was one thing, however, that Nicolson got right – ‘It will be a dreadful month.’

The gas rumour emerged in Germany too. Marie Vassiltchikov wrote on 25 July that ‘some gas bombs were found in the wreckage of a recently shot down British plane.’ There were even more bizarre stories. ‘Today, at the office, I received, by mistake, a sheet with a yellow strip across – it was an alleged rumour about a riot in London, with the King hanged at the gates of Buckingham Palace.’

***

Eagle Day was imminent. Tanks, mechanised transport, men and machines were massing at Boulogne and other bases along the newly-captured French coast. Another campaign. Another dazzling victory for the glorious Aryan armies of the invincible Third Reich.

And, as part of that preparation, Walter Schellenberg, deputy leader of Amt IV of the Reich Central Security Office and personal aide to Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, was ordered to compile a list. It was the Sonderfahndunglist G.B, Special Search List Great Britain and it contained the names of 2,694 individuals who, once the eagle landed, would find themselves dead.