The Last Ditch

David Lampe

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781473877641
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Seconda guerra mondiale

In 1940 Britain faced its biggest threat since the Spanish Armada. Hitler's invasion plans were in full swing and Britain had to quickly assemble a secret resistance force.This compelling study reveals the intentions of both side, from Hitler's strategies for Operation Sea Lion and subsequent occupation, to Britain's secret plans for resistance.German decrees show that the occupation would have been severe, with mass deportation for all able-bodied men as well as widespread arrests, as revealed in the notorious Gestapo Arrest List. In telling this story Lampe relates one of World War II's best kept secrets and offers insight into what would have been a brutal future.

1

‘THE VEIL OF THE UNKNOWN’

IN the spring of 1940, soon after General Andrew Thorne had brought 48 Division home from Dunkirk, he was directed by the War Office to take command of XII Corps—in order to defend against German invasion a front that extended from Greenwich, on the Thames in south-east London, around the Channel coast as far as Hayling Island in Hampshire. If the Germans had tried to invade, their main landings would almost certainly have been on the beaches in the XII Corps area, yet when the General went down to Kent to what was supposed to be his new headquarters at Tunbridge Wells he had trouble finding any army people who had even heard of the corps. And when at last he did come across someone who knew about it and he asked what it comprised, he was told simply, ‘You.’

Thorne did not throw up his hands in defeat, for even in those bleak days he had good reason to be sceptical about the Wehrmacht’s ability to move enough men across the Channel to establish a beachhead in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire or, for that matter, anywhere else in Britain. Early in the ‘thirties Andrew Thorne had been Military Attaché in Berlin and had had a number of conversations with Hitler (they had reminisced about the days when they were young soldiers on opposing sides in the same First World War battle), and he had noticed that despite the Führer’s interest in all things military, Hitler had never taken the trouble to learn anything about the complexities of amphibious operations, perhaps because he himself dreaded seasickness and took every precaution to avoid it. General Thorne believed—and all the Intelligence reports that were shown to him in England in the summer of 1940 strengthened his belief—that Hitler hoped to cross the English Channel as if it were merely a wide river. The Germans might manage a few large-scale hit-and-run raids, Thorne felt, but he was sure that they would never be able to establish a beachhead—provided that the coasts of Britain were reasonably defended.

The only unit of any size that Thorne could put in the field was a Territorial division armed with rifles and with not much else. So he took all the officers who could be spared from the Musketry School at Hythe, Kent, and assigned to each of them a Martello tower. These fortresses, which had been built to repel a Napoleonic invasion, now became training centres where small bands of stevedores, contracted to the Government at the Channel ports but with no work to do, were taught to be infantrymen. The stevedores drilled with the only weapons that Thorne could find for them—pickaxe handles.

General Thorne was uncomfortably aware that however cunningly he deployed XII Corps, it would be no match for even the smallest German invasion force. And then he remembered something that he had seen in East Prussia six years earlier. The principal of the Charlottenburg High School, a military training college in Berlin, had shown him around his family’s estates in East Prussia. The land had been given to an ancestor by Frederick the Great on condition that a private army be provided to protect it against invasion from the east. When Thorne visited the estates in 1934 some of the descendants of the original peasant soldiers were digging new defences on the crests of hills, and these were being stocked with arms, ammunition and food. The peasants would not be able to stop a modern invading army, Thorne’s friend explained, but when it had passed over they would be able to play hell with its supply and other supporting units. Why not, General Thorne asked himself in Kent that summer in 1940, prepare the same sort of civilian ‘stay-behind’ troops in XII Corps’ coastal areas?

He got in touch with General Ismay at the War Office and was told that an officer would be sent along to raise and to train just such a body of civilians who would be known as the XII Corps Observation Unit. Thorne was delighted when the officer sent down to him from London turned out to be Captain Peter Fleming, a young Guards officer for whose father he had fagged at Eton. Thorne believed at the time—and continued to believe for many years afterwards—that he was responsible for an idea that was very soon to spread right around the country.

The state of the defences in the south-east of England was bad that summer—but no worse than the defences anywhere else in the country. When the last of the 368,000 men who had escaped from France had returned from leave, Britain could muster a mere twenty-seven divisions to defend the entire country against invasion. Some 840 anti-tank guns had been left behind in France, so that now only 167 of these weapons were available for home defence. So few anti-tank shells remained in the arsenals that the firing of even a single round for practice purposes was sternly forbidden. Half again as many field-guns had been left behind in France as there were now in all the arsenals in Britain. The twenty-seven home defence divisions were so badly off for weapons that even the Crimean War field pieces of French manufacture that had recently been sent to the Finns, in a moment of what had not then seemed unbridled generosity, would now have been very useful. Museums all over Britain were being ransacked for serviceable weapons, and among those ordered back into service were 300-year-old howitzers.

So few military vehicles had been brought home from France that the few mobile defence units that could be raised in the summer of 1940 had to rely almost entirely on hired civilian motor coaches for their mobility. Eight hours’ notice was needed just to get these units on the road—more time than the first wave of Hitler’s invasion armada would have taken to cross the English Channel and unload its troops. These defence units would then have crept across the country very slowly, impeded by the absence of signposts which Field-Marshal Ironside, at that time the Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, had ordered to be taken down, and by the blackout. Any military convoys not well supplied with maps would almost certainly have got hopelessly lost, for the public were sternly cautioned that summer to give directions to no one. Ingenious military drivers who had to get around the country did manage to find their way, by reading the local authorities’ names on manhole covers or the addresses which were still posted up in most telephone kiosks.

In coastal areas all round Britain gangs of civilian labourers were kept busy building and camouflaging pillboxes. All these fortifications were sited by local commanders, some of whom thought that the invasion force would come from the air and not from the sea. Many of the pillboxes were placed so near to houses and to other buildings that it now seems ridiculous that, instead of wasting so many millions of bricks, so many tons of mortar and so many irretrievable man hours, the buildings themselves which probably would have been smashed by German artillery and tanks, anyway, were not simply sand-bagged and made ready to be converted into gun emplacements the moment that enemy landings were reported.

Several hundred vulnerable miles of the East Anglian coast were shielded by an ingenious—and costly—network of explosive-laced steel scaffolding set on the beaches, just below the low-water mark. On the morning of 15 December 1940, months after the first invasion scare had passed, senior officers of the three Services and civilian technicians gathered at Felixstowe to watch as a self-propelled wooden barge smashed head-on into the scaffolding, sliced right through it and then rasped aground—without detonating a single booby trap.

During the weeks immediately following Dunkirk Churchill knew perfectly well that the huffing, puffing, albeit grimly determined members of the Local Defence Volunteers, soon to be re-named by him the Home Guard,* numbered half a million and not a million, as Anthony Eden told the newspapers. Churchill knew that this as-yet-untrained force did not consist entirely of skilled marksmen, as the newspapers were boasting, and that, in any case, its principal weapons were sporting guns, First World War souvenirs, farm tools, pickhelves and oddities like boarding pikes taken from, among other places, Nelson’s flagship Victory. Yet the Prime Minister somehow managed to convince everyone around him that if the Germans were foolish enough to invade, they would at once be hurled back into the sea. He once remarked defiantly to Lord Boothby, ‘If the worst comes to the worst, you can always take one with you!’ Lord Avon and Lord Boothby say that the people who worked at Churchill’s elbow at that time were so sure themselves that the Germans would not invade that they made no private plans either for escaping or lying low.

However optimistic the politicians in Whitehall may have been—or may have managed to appear—Military Intelligence officers were gloomy. As they studied each new report of enemy activity across the Channel, as they examined each new RAF reconnaissance photo, those officers wondered how soon the codeword ‘Cromwell’ would have to be given to signal that formations of German troops were wading ashore or were dropping from the skies. That summer a committee set up by Field-Marshal Ironside to coordinate all civilian and military defence activity was asked to consider massing a convoy of buses in Hyde Park when the Germans landed, so that key civil servants could be sped to the countryside where they would be hidden. Ironside refused, explaining that if the Germans did land, he would be much too busy to evacuate the white-collar warriors and, in any case, such a convoy would be an obvious target for low-flying Luftwaffe fighters.

Just how edgy were ordinary Britons that summer? A few popular newspapers and magazines published grisly articles revealing the secrets of unarmed combat, and many employers made plans for their assembly-line workers to man the factory ramparts in the event of an invasion, but the average person did not take such preparations very seriously.

Nevertheless, when the Local Defence Volunteers refused to admit women into their ranks—despite the fact that in some places in the country women were to teach the men in the LDV how to fire rifles—fifty indignant female patriots, including Marjorie Foster, who had won the King’s Prize on the rifle range at Bisley in 1930, met at 106 Great Russell Street in London to form the Amazon Defence Corps. The Amazons, who would each pay a shilling a year for membership, intended to campaign for their admission into the LDV, for women in the Services to receive the same training in the use of small arms as men, for general weapons instruction for all civilian women, and ‘to encourage in all women the spirit to resist the invader by all means available’. Soon groups of Amazons were training all over the country, not only on backyard rifle ranges but also on improvised grenade ranges—lobbing half bricks at bucket targets at twenty yards. In the summer of 1940 fifty Lambeth Amazons were reported in the Press to have ‘armed themselves with broomsticks’.

That summer, in the Herefordshire village of Much Marcle, Lady Helena Gleichen, a cousin of Queen Mary, formed the employees on her estate, Hellens, into a private army, the ‘Much Marcle Watchers’, arming them and teaching them how to shoot. Groups of women in various places set up teams to watch for Fifth Column parachutists, and militant members of the clergy joined the Home Guard.

As soon as Hitler had recovered from his surprise that Britain did not beg for peace after Dunkirk, he had formally accepted France’s surrender and had then given the orders that set into motion the preparations for ‘Operation Sea Lion’, his plan for the invasion of Britain. At his command the Luftwaffe had begun its systematic destruction of the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command—to clear the skies over what were to be his invasion beaches in Kent and Sussex. At the same time every serviceable river barge in France, Belgium and Holland was ‘requisitioned’ and ordered to sail to one or another of the ports between Rotterdam and Le Havre. To assemble an armada adequate to transport his three invasion armies across the English Channel, Hitler found that he had to divert a third of Germany’s entire merchant fleet. He moved entire armies westward, and soon large-scale amphibious troop manœuvres commenced along those stretches of the French coast which his Intelligence officers had decided most nearly resembled the proposed landing places in Britain. Preparations on this scale could not be camouflaged, and British bombers tried to smash the barge formations. But little damage was done, and the Nazi invasion build-up continued according to plan.

During the first three days of ‘Sea Lion’ Hitler intended to land more than a quarter of a million troops in the counties of Kent and Sussex. Secure a bridgehead, he believed, and the British would be finished. His men were to take with them more than 60,000 horses, and between 30,000 and 40,000 motor vehicles—including 650 tanks. This at a time when only four British home defence divisions were fully equipped, when fifteen had little equipment worth talking about, and when, despite the fact that the manufacture of arms was being given priority in every factory capable of making any contribution to the nation’s arsenals, only 348 serviceable tanks of all types existed in Britain. Hitler, we now know, planned to concentrate the main force of his invasion armies on a relatively small front, but although the British guessed this and guessed correctly which beaches he had chosen for his landings, they had to play safe and deploy their forces widely. Suppose the Germans decided to land in East Anglia? Despite the even greater distance across the water, suppose they landed west of Southampton and moved northward in a column to slice Britain in half on roughly a north-south line? Lacking the armour and vehicles necessary for a strong, mobile counter-attacking force, the British had to spread their meagre butter very thin.

After concentrating virtually his entire war machine on preparations for ‘Sea Lion’ throughout the summer of 1940, when the British Isles were more vulnerable than they had ever been in the past or were likely to be in the future, why did Hitler decide at the last minute to call off his invasion until the spring of 1941?

This is a question that can never be finally answered. Certainly a number of factors weighed heavily against a successful invasion in 1940. Hitler’s admirals had assured him that by a planned deployment of ships and mines they would be able to seal off the English Channel long enough to keep the Royal Navy from interfering with the barges, tugboats, freighters and fishing vessels that were to comprise the invasion task force. But with the ships and mines that Germany possessed in 1940 this could never have been done, and the German admirals must have known it. Hermann Göring either had lied or had been optimistic—or perhaps both—when he had assured Hitler after Dunkirk that by the end of the summer the Luftwaffe would have destroyed Fighter Command and would also have crushed British morale. We also know from captured German records that Hitler received Intelligence reports stating that although many senior British officers were so set in their antiquated ways of warfare that they were incapable of ordering an effective defence against a Blitzkrieg, they nevertheless commanded men who were better fighters in every way than the troops of the Wehrmacht. Hitler may also have been put off by German meteorologists’ forecasts for the middle of September 1940, when ‘Sea Lion’ was supposed to be mounted, for these suggested that the Channel weather would be exceptionally rough.

Peered through from either side of that thin strip of water in 1940, what Churchill called the ‘veil of the Unknown’ was indeed dense and baffling. During the preparatory phase of ‘Sea Lion’ German monitors had been able to decipher all coded radio messages used for troop communication in Britain and had thus been able to chart with some accuracy the deployment of the main body of the British defence forces. An examination of Wehrmacht military maps prepared at the time suggests that the British military radio networks made the German monitors think that there were some defence formations in Britain which in fact did not exist. But this deception, although probably successful, was on too small a scale to have affected the ‘Sea Lion’ plans very much. Nevertheless, radio monitoring was the Germans’ principal source of information for the development of the final plans for ‘Sea Lion’, but just when they had steeled themselves to accepting the realities of an invasion, Whitehall ordered the changing of all British radio codes. Was this done as a matter of routine, or had the effect that it would have on the Germans been anticipated and planned? At any rate, for months afterwards, Hitler, with no way of knowing the precise deployment of British home defence forces, dared not risk an attack. And so on 17 September he ordered the postponement of ‘Sea Lion’ until the following spring.

If he had not made this decision, the corpses of young Germans would no doubt have littered the beaches of Kent and Sussex. Many of those young men would have been burned to death as they stepped out of the water, for preparations had been made to set the beaches alight with barrels of pitch. Others, if rumours still current among British high-ranking officers have any basis in fact, would have been gassed—although even today nobody will say just how this was going to be accomplished.

But who can guess how many tens of thousands of Germans would have survived to get past the beaches and through those miles of winding, unmarked roads, straight to the heart of Britain? Little wonder that the Island’s defenders planned against invasion—and also against occupation.

* On 14 May 1940 Anthony Eden broadcast to the nation for volunteers for this new force to go on duty against airborne invasion, asking for ‘British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five . . . [to be] entrusted with certain vital duties for which reasonable fitness and a knowledge of firearms [would] be necessary.’ Before he had even finished speaking men all over the country were already queueing outside police stations to join what newspapers called the Parashots’. The Home Guard, although it performed many useful functions, was to become a wartime joke, and not entirely without reason. As Liddell Hart pointed out in a series of memoranda written early in 1941, the Home Guard was prepared to fight only along conventional lines and not as a guerrilla force, its members spent too much time on the parade ground and on picket duty, and not enough learning to fight off an invader. He therefore proposed a sort of Home Guard organization which, as we shall see, had been formed secretly almost two years before he wrote his critique.

2

HOW TO BEHAVE IN ENGLAND

PERHAPS only as an academic exercise, in 1923 the Wehrmacht produced a detailed blueprint for the conquest of the world. Academic exercise or statement of intentions, the plan was carefully filed away. And as early as 28 February 1934 Hitler was confiding to the heads of the SA and the Reichswehr that a war between Germany and England was an inevitability. In 1938, when General Franz Haider became Germany’s Chief of the General Staff, one of the first things he did was to get out the plan for world conquest. His Director of Operations, Max von Viebahn, pointed out to him that the plan was one for aggression. Why did he want to see it? The Chief of Staff supposedly blushed and replied that really he thought that he should be familiar with all plans.

All the more strange, therefore, that until the spring of 1940 no Wehrmacht plans for the occupation of the British Isles seem to have been committed to paper. Stranger still that only when the final details of ‘Sea Lion’ were being decided did Hitler at last ask his generals to tell him how they thought that the occupation of Britain should be administered—and what they thought that its purpose shoul...