The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (322 page)

If the Germans tried, Churchill expected to annihilate them. On June 18 he sketched his vision for the House:

The previous summer Hitler, unlike Mussolini on June 10, had had the good sense to bring his merchant fleet into the Baltic before striking into Poland. The small size of the German merchant fleet, about 1.2 million tons, was one of four fundamental facts—after the different conditions imposed by daylight and nighttime operations—upon which Churchill based his belief that if the Germans came to England, they would fail. For Churchill, these were the details on which all else turned.

The first:
He estimated that to put the first wave of 60,000 to 80,000 German troops ashore would require almost 60 percent of all German merchant shipping. To put a second wave of 160,000 ashore, along with ammunition, tanks, and heavy artillery, would require far more shipping than Germany had at its disposal. As will be seen, those same figures, which boosted Churchill’s optimism, dismayed the high command of the German navy.

The second:
Germany lacked the specialized landing craft that could put tanks and heavy artillery right on a beach. The Germans would have to capture a port to offload their armor and equipment. If they sailed into a port, they would find the facilities destroyed by the British, the harbor entrance mined behind them such that they could not sail out, and a ring of British artillery pouring fire down on the port.

The third:
Churchill later wrote that although the RAF—in both bombers
and fighters—was outnumbered by almost 3 to 1, “I rested upon the conclusion that in our own air, in our own country and its waters, we could beat the German air force.”

The fourth:
Sea power. The Royal Navy was overwhelmingly more powerful than the German navy. Only a “hostile air power could destroy” the almost one thousand British warships deployed around England, Churchill wrote, “and then only by degrees.” Gaining the upper hand in only one or two of these categories would gain the Germans nothing; they had to successfully address all four. “These were the foundations of my thoughts about invasion in 1940,” Churchill wrote. Still, “the possibility of a cross-Channel invasion, improbable though it was at that time, had to be most closely examined.”
¹⁶¹

On June 30, General Sir Andrew Thorne, who commanded a corps in the southeast, told Churchill he thought the Germans would land up to 80,000 men, probably between Thanet and Pevensey on the Kentish coast, and just sixty miles from London. Churchill, Colville wrote, “is less pessimistic and thinks the navy will have much to say to this.” Still, if the Germans evaded the Royal Navy and made it to shore, Churchill wanted defenders on all possible shores in East and West Sussex, Kent, and Surrey. On his instructions, pillboxes and barbed-wire barricades were built there. Touring them, he asked for a chart of tides and moonrises for the next six weeks. He saw that once the enemy had committed himself, the outcome would be determined by mobile brigades stationed inland, and by Royal Navy destroyers mining and shelling the beaches, at night. Colville noted that General Thorne, whose men were expected to take the greatest blow, thought “the German left wing could be held in Ashdown Forest, but he did not see what could keep the right wing from advancing through Canterbury to London.” Mobility and imaginative tactics might prevent that. Survival would depend on flexibility, intuition, and imagination, traits (some would say eccentricities) lacking in many of England’s generals and certainly in the previous government. But not in Churchill.
¹⁶²

Throughout June, Royal Meteorological Office records show, the Channel was calm; skies were clear, with temperatures in the sixties, and the British people—including high-ranking military officials—had no doubts that the invaders would arrive soon. It is all there in their diaries and letters. As early as June 12, Harold Nicolson wrote: “The probability is that France will surrender and that we shall be bombed and invaded.” “The weather still remains very fine, worse luck,” Ironside wrote early in July. Now that the Germans had “airfields within twenty-five miles of our shores,” Ismay noted, “the possibility of invasion of Britain” seemed
“highly probable… within a matter of weeks.” At Cliveden Thomas Jones noted: “Speculation is rife about the ‘invasion.’ Wherever one goes one sees pillboxes and road barriers and field obstacles.” “Speculation” is the operative word, that week and in the weeks that followed.
¹⁶³

Most Britons were scared. Yet, Churchill later wrote: “Certainly those that knew the most were the least scared.” Those words were written long after the fact, but they reflect his belief during 1940. His private conversations and his memos to his ministers that summer and fall bear out his confidence.

A
t night primeval darkness descended upon blacked-out Britain. Drivers crept along at twenty miles an hour. The windows of commuter trains were painted black. London lampposts were ringed with white paint to warn oncoming motorists. Still, collisions were common between bicyclists and automobiles, between pedestrians and lampposts. To baffle invading troops, signposts had been removed from the countryside, baffling the locals as well. Late in June, postmen slipped official pamphlets in the mail telling householders what to do when the invasion began. Nearly everyone had some sort of crude weapon, if only a garden tool. German paratroopers would likely arrive by night. In a speech to the Home Guard the prime minister proclaimed that if Nazi paratroopers arrived, “you will make it clear to them that they have not alighted in the poultry-run, or in the rabbit farm, or even in the sheep fold, but in the lion’s den at the Zoo!”
¹⁶⁴

Fleet Street had advice, too. “A hand-grenade dump by each village pump,” was the slogan of Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express.
The
Express
also distressed many who had grown up in a quieter time by pointing out that any boy capable of pitching a cricket ball could throw a grenade. Civilians, even clergymen in their seventies, were armed with whatever was available, often shotguns. Most lacked firearms of any sort. Awaiting rifles from America, members of the Home Guard drilled with pikes, pick handles, and broomsticks. Wives were told to make homemade Molotov cocktails with kitchen kerosene; elderly men were taught how to disable panzers by pouring sugar into their fuel tanks or thrusting crowbars in their track wheels.

People then still thought of war in personal terms. There is no way a twenty-first-century citizen can oppose fleets of modern missiles, but in 1940 one Briton with a weapon, however primitive, could make a difference in the defense of the island. If the Nazis established a beachhead, King
George was prepared to lead a resistance movement. The King ordered a shooting range built in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, and there the Royal Family and royal equerries practiced daily with small arms, including submachine guns and a carbine given to the King by Churchill. The young royal princesses took their target practice with their parents. Clementine later told her daughter that Elizabeth and Margaret “have the most amusing lives, with lots of dogs (although they are those horrid ‘corgies’) & poneys [
sic
] & a delightful mother.” The delightful mother was a crack shot. On July 10, Harold Nicolson noted that the Queen “told me she is being instructed every day in how to fire a revolver. I expressed surprise. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I shall not go down like the others.’ I cannot tell you how superb she was….
We shall win.
I know that. I have no doubts at all.”
¹⁶⁵

In the Nazi invasion the number of deaths would be unfathomable. It was a time when, at every parting, husbands and wives, mothers and children, knew they might be looking their last upon one another. Vita Sackville-West wrote, “It must be in both our minds that we may possibly never meet again.” Nicolson replied, “I am not in the least afraid of… sudden and honourable death. What I dread is being tortured and humiliated.”
¹⁶⁶

Torture would be the certain fate of those who possessed special knowledge of the island’s defenses. Anticipating possible capture, many carried on their persons the means for quick suicide. A week after the French collapse, when the government was preparing to evacuate all civilians from Kent and Sussex, Nicolson, now at the Ministry of Information, wrote Vita, “I think you ought to have a ‘bare bodkin’ [after Hamlet] so you can take your quietus when necessary. But how can we find a bodkin which will give us our quietus quickly and which is easily portable? I shall ask my doctor friends.” Ten days later she wrote him that she had her “bare bodkin.” Probably it was poison, not a dagger. Churchill had repeatedly vowed that he would never be taken alive; according to Kathleen Hill, his bodkin was cyanide, which he carried in the cap of his fountain pen.
¹⁶⁷

Britons braced themselves, but against exactly what—gas, invasion, aerial bombardment, parachutists, all of the above?—they did not know. They were quite willing to fight and die, but they lacked the means to fight. Wars are fought by soldiers with weapons. In the first four weeks after Dunkirk, Britain had few of either. Ironside, then commanding Home Forces, including the Home Guard, was attempting to organize the defense of the island. He envisioned “arming of the whole population” with the “existence of the Empire” at stake. On June 22, the day the French signed the armistice at Compiègne, Ironside wrote: “Even the stoutest heart begins to wonder whether he [Churchill] can meet all the eventualities he pictures to himself. I felt it myself as I went round the endless coastline of East Anglia yesterday.”
¹⁶⁸

No one had foreseen this. For two centuries His Majesty’s Government had sent troops to every corner of the globe while the homeland enjoyed peace. The last battle on English soil had been fought on April 16, 1746, when the army of the Duke of Cumberland, son of King George II, routed the forces of the Stuart pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie. Now in June 1940 the country seemed defenseless. Harold Macmillan recalled, “Having shipped almost everything we had, we now find ourselves not only alone, but unarmed.” He was of course referring to the army; the navy was quite well armed. Still, as Churchill had noted, the success of the Dunkirk evacuation obscured the fact that the men had left their guns, artillery, ammunition, and tanks behind. In England, there were only half as many rifles as needed to defend the island. The evacuation was still in progress when the United States agreed to sell Britain—
sell
is the key word—500,000 World War I rifles, 80,000 virtually obsolete machine guns, 900 howitzers, and 13,000,000 rounds of ammunition. Although British factories were toiling around the clock, they wouldn’t make up the losses for at least three months, possibly six. Yet, within two weeks, with great difficulty, equipment for two divisions was scraped together. Churchill ordered that the most battle-ready brigade, languishing for weeks in Northern Ireland, be brought home. As for the Home Guard, realists in the military—including A. J. P. Taylor, who served in the Home Guard—concluded that if the militia somehow managed to assemble at their appointed rendezvous points, they would be massacred.
¹⁶⁹

“I have no scruples,” Churchill told Colville, “except not to do anything dishonorable.” Exactly where he would draw the line if the Germans came was left unspecified. The question of mustard gas was raised. It was thought the Germans would use it. Churchill wanted to use it first. To Ismay he wrote in a memo: “In my view there would be no need for the enemy to adopt such methods. He will certainly adopt them if he thinks they will pay.” Stocks of mustard gas were readied, to be dropped from bombers or shot from artillery. He envisioned “drenching” the beaches with gas, leading Colville to tell his diary: “I suppose he does not consider gassing Germans dishonorable.”
¹⁷⁰

Some of his ideas were quaint. He recalled that “a fire ship had been used” by Elizabethan Englishmen against the Spanish Armada. Might something similar be contemplated now? He would scorch England’s earth if need be. Oil storage tanks, which had fueled the panzers in France, would be destroyed once the fighting began. The Strait of Dover was already mined. Against the possibility that Germans might wear British uniforms, Tommies would wear a strip of cloth dyed a new shade of yellow. White circles were painted atop British tanks, to warn the RAF off. Army intelligence (incorrectly) believed the Luftwaffe could land as many
as twenty thousand troops; therefore, to disrupt gliders, four-hundred-yard-long ditches were plowed across large fields, even those seeded for crops. All bridges over all rivers within one hundred miles of London were rigged for demolition.
¹⁷¹