The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  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.

  At 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 un
armed.” 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

  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.

  The 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.172

  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.”173

  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:

  He emphasized that the great invasion scare (which we only ceased to deride six weeks ago) is serving a most useful purpose: it is well on the way to providing us with the finest offensive army we have ever possessed and it is keeping every man and woman tuned to a high pitch of readiness. He does not wish the scare to abate therefore, and although personally he doubts whether invasion is a serious menace he intends to give that impression, and to talk about long and dangerous vigils, etc., when he broadcasts on Sunday.174

  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.

  And now it has come to us to stand in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week.

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

  Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock, or what is perhaps a harder test, a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy. We shall ask for none.175

  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.”

  Should the invader come to Britain, there will be no placid lying down of the people in submission before him, as we have seen, alas, in other countries. We shall defend every village, every town, and every city. The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army; and we would rather see London in ruins and ashes than that it would be tamely and abjectly enslaved.

  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.”176

  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.”177