The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (323 page)

For the Home Guard, improvisation was the order of the day. Cans of gasoline were stored near important intersections, the idea being that members of the Home Guard, upon spotting the approaching Germans, would pour the fuel in the road, toss a grenade into the puddle, and make good their escape. British anti-tank mines, so complex and overengineered that they could not be produced in sufficient quantities, were replaced by commercial cake pans stuffed with eight pounds of TNT and fitted with a simple compression trigger. Churchill’s imagination turned to his beloved gadgets and scientific schemes. The floating of fuel oil on harbor waters to ignite the invasion barges was one such. Another: Could slender gasoline-filled pipelines be readied behind seaside dunes, to spray flaming fuel upon the invaders? Yes, but what if the invaders came ashore elsewhere, or the winds blew those flames and smoke toward the defenders, which is exactly what happened when the system was tested. That was how things stood in late June and the first days of July, a time when
ad hoc
best describes Britain’s defenses. None, including Churchill, knew during those weeks that the Germans had not even drawn up an invasion plan.

T
he Admiralty told Churchill that the likeliest time for hostile seaborne landings was a moonless night, at high tide, near daybreak. Once the onslaught began, all the church bells in England were to start ringing. Speculation about the German timing continued. On July 11 Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary: “They expect an invasion this weekend.” But he also wrote: “I am cocky about this war. Cocky. I really and truly believe Hitler is at the end of his success.” On July 20 he noted: “I think Hitler will probably invade us within the next few days. He has 6,000 airplanes for the job…. We know we are faced with a terrific invasion…. Yet there is a sort of exhilaration in the air.” Actually, the Luftwaffe force assembled across the Channel was composed of about 2,500 bombers, fighter-bombers, and fighters.
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The news was blacked out, beaches and military installations off-limits. Ship arrivals and departures were no longer reported in newspapers. Even weather reports were banned; why tell the enemy what the conditions might be in Sussex next week? Nicolson was still expecting the great attack two months later; on September 13 he wrote: “There is a great concentration of shipping and barges in France, and it is evident that the Cabinet expect
invasion at any moment.” Ironside had thought it was coming on July 9. On July 12 Sir Alan Brooke told his diary: “This was supposed to be the probable day of invasion!” Colville told his diary on July 14: “There is an ominous calm… and it looks like
der Tag
may be imminent.” On that day, Colville noted, even Churchill lacked his usual confidence. On July 22, Sir Alan Brooke, who had only the day before replaced Ironside as commander of Home Forces, went “to the War Cabinet Room where I may have to be near the PM if an invasion starts.” That night, while dining alone with Churchill at No. 10, Brooke found Churchill to be “full of the most marvelous courage, considering the burden he is bearing.” Brooke added an observation, variations of which would find their way into his diary for the next five years: “He [Churchill] is full of offensive thoughts for the future.”
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Dining with three of his generals on Friday, July 12, Churchill declared that if the Germans came, he wanted “every citizen to fight desperately and they will do so the more if they know that the alternative is massacre.” Colville that night noted that Churchill “is sufficiently ruthless to point out that in war quarter is given, not on grounds of compassion but in order to discourage the enemy from fighting to the bitter end.” Contrary to the French experience, no panicked streams of civilian refugees (Churchill preferred the term “fugitives”) would clog British roads if the Germans arrived, for there was no escape. Churchill offered that the citizens would fight, even if only with “scythes and brickbats.” One of the generals declared that the citizenry should be ordered to stay home; Churchill replied that they would not obey such an order. Then, wrote Colville, Churchill arrived at the root of the matter:

On Bastille Day, Sunday, July 14, four days after the first large-scale dogfights between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force, Churchill spoke to the nation over the BBC. Britons believed their plight was desperate, and he did not paint it otherwise, as he had promised Colville he would not. Their losses in France and Flanders had been enormous, “including a very large part of our Air Force.” Their enemy was the fiercest in history. Nation after nation had fallen beneath the Nazi juggernaut.

Then, the caveat, which conveyed his own feelings and offered Britons a speck of hope:

He knew the “monstrous force” of the Nazi war machine. But, he added, Britain now had a million and a half soldiers under arms on her own soil, and more than a million volunteers in the Home Guard, and a thousand armed ships sailing under the white ensign, binding them to the United States, “from whom, as the struggle deepens, increasing aide [
sic
] will come.” And the Nazis should know the ferocity of British determination: “Hitler has not yet been withstood by a great nation with a will power the equal of his own.”

Nevertheless, he told them, that “while we toil through the dark valley we can see the sunlight on the uplands beyond” provided they remembered who they were: “all depends on the whole life strength of the British race… doing their utmost night and day, giving all, daring all, enduring the utmost to the end.” This was “a war of the Unknown Warriors; but let
all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age.”
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The Führer had assumed that invasion would be unnecessary. After the fall of France he considered the war over. In the East his pact with Stalin assured continuing peace as long as neither side abrogated it, which Hitler intended to do once the English came to terms. When Hitler ordered the demobilizing of forty divisions, he told Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, that all war plans could be scrapped; he would reach an “understanding” (
Übereinkommen
) with the British. Actually, he expected London to take the initiative; he told Dino Alfieri, the Italian ambassador in Berlin, that he “could not conceive of anyone in England still seriously believing in victory.” To Lieutenant General Franz Halder, chief of the Army High Command (OKH), he said that “England’s situation is hopeless. A reversal of the prospects of success is an impossibility.” His generals agreed; on June 30 Jodl, OKW’s chief of operations, wrote: “The final German victory over England is now only a question of time. Enemy offensive operations on a large scale are no longer possible.”
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The Führer preferred a settlement, freeing the Wehrmacht from the need to defend a Western Front when he attacked his mortal enemy, the Soviet Union. Though he despised Churchill, he admired the British Empire; its existence, he believed, was essential to world order. (All SS officers were required to watch the film
Gunga Din;
that, he told them, was the way a superior race should treat its inferiors.) Therefore he was prepared to offer England a generous treaty. Convinced that they must realize the hopelessness of their situation, he dismissed Churchill’s defiance as bluff and expected the British to come to him. After four weeks of waiting, on July 19 he made his move in a Reichstag speech. After insulting Churchill—“I feel a deep disgust for this type of unscrupulous politician who wrecks whole nations”—he said of himself, “I am not the vanquished begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.” He promised Britons that absent a settlement, “great suffering will begin.” Speaking directly to Churchill, he said, “Believe me when I prophesy that a great Empire will be destroyed—an empire which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm.” Hinting at liberal terms, he concluded dramatically, “I can see no reason why this war must go on.”
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The answer came within the hour. Churchill did not deign to comment on the offer—“I do not propose to say anything in reply to Herr Hitler’s speech,” he said, “not being on speaking terms with him”—but a BBC broadcaster, later supported by the foreign office, addressed the Führer directly: “Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal to what
you are pleased to call our reason and common sense. Herr Führer and Reich Chancellor, we hurl it right back into your evil-smelling teeth!”
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In Rome the diarist Count Galeazzo Ciano noted that “a sense of ill-concealed disappointment spreads among the Germans.” Actually Berlin was astounded, and Hitler nonplussed. The German General Staff had always assumed that Britain could be defeated only by cutting its sea routes. Although all great powers spend peacetime preparing contingency plans for war against other countries, including their closest allies, the German army did not draft preliminary plans for an offensive against England until June 1937, and the Luftwaffe did not follow through with similar memoranda until 1938.
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And these were merely paper exercises. As A. J. P. Taylor has pointed out, Hitler had foreign policy ambitions but no war plans at all; he was, in the words of the historian and novelist Len Deighton, “one of the most successful opportunists of the twentieth century,” making it up as he went along. Indeed, it is an astonishing fact—the military historian Basil Liddell Hart calls it “one of the most extraordinary features of history”—that neither the Führer nor his General Staff in Zossen had studied or even contemplated the problems arising from Britain’s continued belligerency. They hadn’t done it when war broke out; it was still undone nine months later, when the French capitulated. They had worked out elaborate strategies for seizing every European country, including Spain, the Balkans, and their Italian ally; they had drawn up orders of battle for Scandinavia and the Soviet Union; they even knew how, if it became necessary, to overwhelm the Vatican. The German naval war staff, knowing the
Kriegsmarine
would be charged with ferrying German troops to England if the orders came down, had studied the problem in desultory fashion since the previous autumn. The army and Luftwaffe had not. On May 27 the naval war staff had drafted a vague
Studie England,
but in all the banks of steel files in Zossen, there was not so much as a single memorandum on the question of how the greatest army the world had ever known could subjugate Great Britain.
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To reach England the Wehrmacht had to cross the Channel or the North Sea. Hitler hated the idea. “On land I am a hero but on water I am a coward,” he told Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt. Since Nazi Germany had no landing craft and no plans to build any, German troops, if they went to England, would do so aboard river barges. The barges were intended for river traffic; flat-bottomed, 90 feet long, 20 feet wide, with a top speed of 7 miles per hour, they were not built for seagoing excursions. Some operated under their own power, many were towed. Not a single unit in the German army had been trained in the skills of amphibious warfare. The Continent and contiguous lands were the only world the
Generalstab
knew. That world ended at its edge, the western coast of France. Paris had
been the objective of the Nazis’ great spring offensive, to the exclusion of all else, the last step before the invasion of Russia.
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