The Battle of Britain Read online

  That same day, 28 May, Churchill was asked to approve pre-invasion preparations to ship Britain’s national treasures and gold to safe keeping abroad, including the Coronation Chair. He scribbled on the letter: ‘I believe we shall make them rue the day they try to invade our island. No such discussion can be permitted.’10 The public mood was in the main with Churchill. A Home Intelligence report on 28 May revealed a popular conviction that ‘we shall pull through in the end’; three days later the people were reportedly more bullish, displaying a ‘general calmness’ and a ‘new feeling of determination’.11 But the decision taken in late May to fight on did not still all appetite for peace. A scattered population of defeatists, ‘realists’ and fellow-travellers endorsed the idea of exploring the prospects for peace with Hitler. They included Basil Liddell Hart, the military strategist; ‘RAB’ Butler at the Foreign Office; the pacifist socialist Charles Roden Buxton; and an unlikely coupling of British fascists and communists, temporarily bound together by the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939. The peace party’s most powerful spokesman was David Lloyd George, Britain’s outstanding war leader in 1916–18. His interest in peace stemmed from an inexplicably myopic respect for Hitler (he once described him as ‘the George Washington of Germany’, and in autumn 1940 numbered Hitler ‘among the greatest leaders of men in history’). Around thirty MPs joined in urging Lloyd George to campaign for peace in June 1940. Churchill thought about inviting him to join the Cabinet, but was encouraged by colleagues to think again. Lloyd George did not want to join anyway. He preferred to wait ‘until Winston is bust’, and waited in vain.12

  A great deal has been made of the so-called ‘peace party’, but its historical significance has been vastly inflated. Even Churchill was forced by circumstances to admit the possibility of defeat, though not surrender. Halifax was never in favour of peace at any price, certainly not at a price that would compromise British sovereignty in any substantial way, and he soon came round to accept that continued belligerency was the only honourable course. The other appeasers were marginalized or ignored. There was still much evidence of the British stiff upper-lip. When the Chiefs of Staff Committee discussed the instructions to be issued to the civil population to prepare for invasion, it was decided that they should be asked to behave ‘cheerfully and bravely’. Women, the chiefs of staff declared, were of ‘best service’ keeping ‘their own home running for their own menfolk’.13 On 30 May Churchill was shown a minute circulated to officials at the Foreign Office by the Permanent Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, asking them not to reveal a glimmer of the appalling news from France: ‘We may in our own minds face very unpleasant truths and possibilities, but we have no right to let our friends or acquaintances assume from a chance word or an attitude of depression the anxiety we may feel.’ At the foot Churchill added the single word ‘Good’.14

  None the less, the decision to fight on brought weeks of fearfulness and uncertainty. Popular opinion fluctuated with the final crisis in France, but on 17 June, when news came of French surrender, Home Intelligence found only a mood of ‘gloomy apprehension’, more prominent among ‘the middle classes and the women’.15 There were mutterings picked up by Home Intelligence agents, stationed surreptitiously in bars and cafés, that a Hitler victory might not be such a bad thing. ‘Many workers say about Hitler,’ ran a report in mid-June, ‘ “He won’t hurt us: it’s the bosses he’s after: we’ll probably be better off when he comes.”’ Later reports suggested that the lower middle classes were also vulnerable: ‘The whiter the collar, the less the assurance.’ But in general, morale reports showed a strengthening resolve across the weeks before the air battles began. While only 50 per cent of respondents in one opinion poll regarded fighting alone with confidence, 75 per cent of those asked wanted war to continue (84 per cent of men, but only 65 per cent of women).16

  In the prevailing atmosphere there were daily scares about invasion or sabotage or espionage. These fears began right at the top. At the end of May the War Office, responding to intelligence information, began to prepare for a possible German invasion of Ireland. Thanks to the existence of the IRA, described by the Joint Intelligence Committee as ‘a very formidable body of revolutionists’, whose members were ‘violently anti-British and many of them pro-German’, Ireland was regarded as prime fifth column territory. The three services were warned to expect ‘a German descent upon Eire, in conjunction with subservient members of the IRA’. Though the War Cabinet took the sensible view that southern England remained the key danger-spot, the possibility of diversionary action in Ireland, Scotland or Wales, where it was felt that the Germans could exploit local ethnic grievances along ‘Sudeten’ lines, remained very much alive.17

  There were also fears of subversion closer to home. The Air Ministry observed in its ‘Plans for Invasion’ in June that the 77,000 aliens living in Britain constituted a standing threat and should all be ‘deported to the other side of the Atlantic’. The Ministry wanted further evacuation from the cities stopped in order to prevent foreign spies from infiltrating the displaced populations.18 So anxious did the Ministry of Information become that in July 1940 a ‘Silent Column’ campaign was launched under the direction of the art historian Kenneth Clark, which aimed at stamping out gossip and rumour. Like most campaigns mounted by the Ministry that year, it proved to be a disaster. Within days there was widespread public hostility to efforts to stifle discussion, and outrage at the few prosecutions. The popular view was that people ought to be able to police themselves. Two weeks after its launch, the ‘Silent Column’ was abandoned. Official unease persisted, however. As late as January 1941 the Policy Committee of the Information Ministry still bemoaned ‘the dangers of the attitude liable to be accepted by the very poor or the very rich that a German victory would not make very much difference’.19

  Such fears may seem quite unrealistic more than half a century later. Yet they reflect the evident reality that Britain was a country divided by geography and social class, riven by popular prejudices and a complex structure of snobbery. The British public did not speak with one voice; British society adjusted in a variety of ways to the prospect of fighting alone (this is perhaps the most enduring myth, sustained in simple disregard of the vital and substantial support of Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and the colonial empire). If Hitler had won in 1940, it is unrealistic to suppose that Germany would not have confronted in Britain the same unstable mix of active collaborators, silent bystanders and hostile partisans that characterized the populations of all the other states she occupied. Nevertheless, the predominant instinct in the summer of 1940 was to accept, hesitantly perhaps, fearfully certainly, that invasion might happen and that the British people should obstruct it. This was the spirit observed by the American reporter Virginia Cowles, who watched with mounting incredulity the moral revival of the population after the shock of Dunkirk and French defeat: ‘For the first time I understood what the maxim meant: “England never knows when she is beaten”… I was more than impressed. I was flabbergasted. I not only understood the maxim; I understood why Britain never had been beaten.’20

  This was an attitude little appreciated in Berlin. The victory over France transformed the possibilities confronting Hitler, but because victory was so much swifter and more complete than the German side expected, little thought had been given to what might happen next. German leaders believed that Britain had been an unwilling belligerent in September 1939. With France defeated, there no longer appeared any reason for Britain to remain at war. A political settlement seemed likely. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, told his staff on 23 June that the Churchill government was doomed: ‘A compromise government will be formed. We are very close to the end of the war.’21 The German army chief of staff, General Franz Halder, recorded in his war diary in July that Hitler favoured ‘political and diplomatic procedures’ to bring Britain to a settlement. The alternative of crossing the Channel Hitler regarded (rightly) as ‘Very hazardous’. �
�Invasion is to be undertaken,’ Halder wrote, ‘only if no other way is left to bring terms to Britain.’ In his opinion Britain was in a hopeless position: ‘The war is won by us. A reversal in the prospects of success is impossible.’22

  In the heady days following the defeat of France such confidence was understandable. Yet all the indications showed that the war was far from over as far as the British government were concerned. It has often been assumed that Hitler himself took the initiative in finally proposing invasion as a solution, but it was the German Navy commander-in-chief, Admiral Erich Raeder, who first raised the issue in conferences with Hitler on 21 May and again on 20 June. The navy had been preparing contingency plans since November 1939, and though naval leaders doubted the feasibility of invasion, they were keen to give the navy a role in the aftermath of victory over France, in which they had played a lesser part. However, Raeder’s main preference was for a joint air-naval blockade of Britain, which seemed to him to offer prospects for a quick end to the war without an invasion at all. Not wanting to be outbid by the navy, the German army began its own study of the possibility of invasion in late June, in case Hitler should call for plans at short notice.23

  Exactly when, or why, Hitler decided to take up the navy’s suggestion may never be known with certainty, but on 2 July he decided to order the armed forces to undertake exploratory planning, and on 7 July issued a directive to that end for ‘the War against England’ (German leaders almost never talked of Great Britain, or the wider Empire). This was not yet an operational order, not even a plan. The directive authorized the services to complete the necessary investigations and preparations that would make a plan possible, and they proceeded to do so with mixed enthusiasm. Hitler’s decision to explore a military solution probably owed something to the infectious Anglophobia of his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, a man whose insufferable pomposity repelled even his own colleagues and had made him a laughing stock when he came to London as ambassador in 1936. Ribbentrop was keener than anyone in Hitler’s circle to concentrate every effort on defeating Britain. On 1 July German Foreign Office officials were briefed that Germany had no thoughts of peace, but only ‘preparation for the destruction of England’.24

  This could scarcely have been further from the truth. Hitler hoped for a political settlement first and foremost. At a staff meeting shortly before the French capitulation, Hitler announced that as soon as France was finished it was planned ‘to send an offer to England, whether England is prepared to end hostilities’.25 Diplomatic traffic during June and early July suggested that there was room for a political settlement. The German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich von der Schulenburg, reported on 5 July a conversation between the Swedish ambassador and Sir Stafford Cripps, recently appointed to the British embassy. Cripps, with a disarming lack of that discretion so much in demand at home, claimed that the democracies ‘were hopelessly behind the authoritarian states, that the attack on the island [Britain] will probably succeed’. A British diplomat in Bern openly discussed the need for peace talks, and dismissed Churchill as a dilettante and a drunk. The heavily staffed German embassy in Dublin engaged in feverish attempts to find out what was happening in London, but could only forward to Berlin the very dubious intelligence that the lower and middle classes wanted peace, while the upper classes wanted war.26

  Hitler was in no rush to settle with Britain. In the absence of any clear signals from London, he decided to seize the initiative by announcing publicly that the door to a peaceful settlement was not closed if the British were prepared to ask for one. Ribbentrop was told on 6 July to draft a speech for Hitler to deliver to the Reichstag on 19 July. The draft was not what he wanted, and Hitler rewrote the speech himself. In the interim his attitude to Britain began to harden. On 7 July, the day he directed the armed forces to explore the possibility of invasion, he told the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, that he was now more inclined ‘to unleash a storm of wrath and steel upon the British’.27 A week later he instructed the armed forces to prepare an invasion to take place at any time after 15 August. On 16 July he finally published War Directive 16 for ‘Operation Sealion’, a surprise landing somewhere on the British coastline between Ramsgate and the Isle of Wight, to take place if other kinds of political and military pressure failed. Invasion was a last resort; it was only possible, the directive warned, if air superiority could be established over southern England and a safe area of sea secured for the crossing.28

  Three days later Hitler delivered his peace offer. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry made elaborate technical preparations to have the speech broadcast worldwide. The deputies assembled in the Kroll Opera House, home to the German parliament since the fire-raising of the Reichstag building in February 1933. Overhead, German fighter aircraft flew on patrol to prevent a sudden bomb attack. Hitler spoke without the usual wild oratory, and received none of the usual bays of approval and stamping of feet. Above him sat row upon row of bemedalled soldiers. In the chair sat Hermann Goering, commander-in-chief of the German Air Force and Reichstag president, writing out his vote of thanks as Hitler talked. Count Ciano sat with an Italian text of the speech, and jumped up to salute in all the wrong places. The peace offer constituted no more than a fraction of what was in effect a celebration of German victory. Its wording was haughty and condescending. Hitler blamed the war on the Jews, Freemasons and armament kings who kept the Allied peoples in thrall; he had no desire to destroy the British Empire, but would bring it down in ruins if war went on; he appealed to British common sense to end the war, but he appealed ‘as a conqueror’.29

  It was a clever speech. The continuation of the war was placed entirely at the British door; Hitler basked in the unaccustomed role of the magnanimous victor. It was sincerely meant, if only in the sense that German leaders did want Britain to sue for peace on their terms. Hitler made no secret of his disappointment when the British rejected his offer. German officials and soldiers sat listening to the British reaction on the BBC German service later on the evening of 19 July. William Shirer, a young American newsman, sat with them and listened to their howls of disbelief: ‘ “Can you understand those British fools? To turn down peace now? They’re crazy.” ’30 In London Hitler’s speech caused scarcely a ripple. Lord Halifax gave a formal rejection over the radio on the evening of 22 July, which was widely criticized in Britain not only for the lame delivery, but for the seventeen references to God. When the War Cabinet next assembled, the peace offer was not even discussed. The same day, 23 July, at the daily press conference in Berlin, reporters were told by an angry official: ‘Gentlemen, there will be war.’31

  The British rejection needs little explanation. The decision to continue the fight against Germany had already been made some weeks before. Though it is sometimes argued that Britain would have lost less by reaching a compromise in 1940, rejection was, under the circumstances, an entirely rational decision. Nothing in Hitler’s record could give any serious grounds for the British to expect Hitler to honour any pledges entered into. The treatment of the other conquered peoples was evident to the whole world; even unconquered, Britain was expected by the German side to make very substantial concessions and to pay extensive reparation. Only days after the rejection of Hitler’s offer, harsh terms were finally revealed for the territorial dismemberment of defeated France. At the same time a ‘New Order’ for the European economy was announced, with a privileged Germany at its core. British interests were, under such circumstances, fundamentally incompatible with German hegemony across Europe.

  It is more difficult to gauge German intentions. Was Hitler serious about the war against Britain? The British public was never in any doubt in 1940 that Hitler wanted to invade if he could. The German records show less certainty. Three conferences on 21, 25 and 31 July reveal strong doubts not about the desirability, but over the operational feasibility of invasion. The third of these meetings, called on 31 July between Hitler and his military chiefs, also supplies the first evidence tha
t Hitler was now thinking of a large-scale campaign against the Soviet Union in 1941. This plan, like Operation Sealion, did not originate with Hitler. The German army undertook contingency planning at the beginning of July for a brief operation against the Red Army with the limited objective of securing German predominance throughout eastern Europe, and keeping the Soviet Union at arm’s length. During June 1940 the Soviet Union had taken advantage of Germany’s war in the west to absorb the Baltic States and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. This growing threat took Hitler beyond the idea of a mere limited strike; on 31 July he instead suggested a massive campaign to annihilate the Soviet system in one blow. This campaign would secure German hegemony in the east and access to the vast food and material resources of western Asia. Preparatory work was authorized, though a final directive for what became known as ‘Operation Barbarossa’ was not issued until 18 December.32

  Such evidence has been used to suggest that the war in the west was continued only to lull Soviet suspicions, and that invasion was never seriously contemplated. This is to distort the reality. The campaigns against Britain and the Soviet Union were not alternatives. Hitler was genuinely uncertain about how to bring about either a political or military settlement with Britain, and kept several strings to his bow. He was willing to seize opportunities as they arose. He hoped that blockade and air attack might so reduce British resolve and undermine the capacity to fight that invasion would be little more than a mopping-up operation. The preparations made for the campaign were far too extensive for a mere feint. If the campaign did not work, and there was no certainty that it would, an assault on the Soviet Union, he told his commanders, would remove Britain’s last hope of continuing the war, even with American assistance. Either way, the object was sooner or later to destroy British power. If the RAF could be defeated, it might be sooner.