Innumerable variants were in also circulation in France, and were recorded by Marie Bonaparte in her excellent book Myths of War. Moreover it is clear that several passengers arriving in New York from Lisbon on liners such as the Exeter were primed by British intelligence. On 21 September the New York Times reported:
Robert Solborg, returning with his wife and daughter after 20 years of residence in France, said the Germans were holding invasion practice off the French coast also … and that British bombers had taken a heavy toll. Mr Solberg added that he had definite information that the Germans have attempted no actual invasion of England. He said the British, tipped off by the Dutch and French, waited for the barges with planes and submarines and that ‘thousands of Germans have been lost in this fashion.’ Mr Solborg said he recently visited a French Channel port where bodies of German troops were being washed ashore daily.
On the same date, a Daily Mail correspondent in New York teased further details from Mr Solborg, described as the vice-president of a steel company:
The British sent submarines and planes and sank the barges. It is estimated that at least 10,000 Germans lost their lives. Many of the German troops are refusing to continue the practice and hundreds are being transported back to Germany with their hands tied behind their backs.
In fact, Solborg was no ordinary refugee. A former Tsarist cavalry officer who fled the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Solberg (the correct spelling) had already acquired American citizenship prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, and in December 1940 was recruited by American military intelligence. In October 1941 he was posted to London to liaise with SOE, reporting directly to Colonel William Donovan, the OSS chief whose own role in promoting the invasion that never was is examined below. However, Solberg was clearly already well acquainted with British intelligence. Hints about information passed back by Dutch and French patriots was simply a cover for Enigma decrypts, although Solberg would hardly have been privy to the Ultra secret.
To be completely effective, a rumour requires some foundation in fact, and so it was with the legend of the bodies on the beaches. Late in September 1940 Gunner William Robinson, stationed at Herne Bay with 333 Coastal Artillery Battery, was dispatched to Folkestone to take part in a macabre detail. Together with half a dozen others, he was instructed to search the beach between Hythe and St Mary’s Bay for dead Germans. On the first day two corpses were located, together with seven or eight more over the following two days. All were taken by truck to a field west of New Romney, where they were unloaded behind a canvas screen. An NCO checked the bodies for identity discs and paybooks, which were then handed over to the supervising officer. Robinson recognised the dead men as German soldiers, rather than airmen or naval personnel, by their field grey uniforms. All appeared to have been in the water for some time. By way of a reward for this unpleasant fatigue, Robinson and his colleagues drew a daily ration of twenty Woodbines, and additional daily pay of two shillings.
The bodies kept on coming. On 20 October the corpse of a German anti-tank gunner, Heinrich Poncke, was recovered from the beach at Littlestone-on-Sea, near Dungeness. According to the brief report in The Times:
He was wearing the uniform of a German infantry regiment and appeared to be about 28. The body had been in the sea for several weeks and death is believed to have been due to drowning.
Like the bodies recovered by Gunner Robinson, this single body was removed to New Romney for burial. Unlike the others, Poncke’s arrival was reported openly in local and national papers, and even announced by the BBC. It is unlikely that he perished while attempting to invade Britain. More probably, he was a casualty of a ‘cutting out’ operation against German flak trawlers in the Channel on 11 October, when three Felixstowe-based motor torpedo boats sank two such trawlers north of Calais and captured 34 crewmen, several others being drowned. These prisoners were seen passing through a London railway station, thus fuelling speculation. Over the next few weeks Poncke’s body, like others, was carried by the tide, with the result that small numbers were washed ashore on both sides of the Channel. This tends to confirm the truth of an official statement made to the House of Commons by Clement Attlee in November 1946, which estimated that ‘about 36’ German soldiers had been washed ashore at scattered points between Cornwall and Great Yarmouth over a period of several weeks.
At the same time that rumours of bodies, rewards, mutinies and overflowing hospitals were circulating abroad, a quite separate deception was being fed to the enemy. The idea of augmenting conventional coastal defences by burning fuel on the surface of the sea had been investigated as early as 1937 by a team of Royal Engineers at Christchurch, while an Admiralty proposal to attack enemy harbours with fire ships was tested in May 1939, eventually leading to the abortive Operation Lucid in the autumn of 1940. By May of that year, surplus fuel stocks in Britain had reached such a level that it was decided by Lord Hankey and Geoffrey Lloyd, the Secretary for Petroleum, to test ways and means of exploiting it for defensive purposes. A number of uncoordinated and largely unsuccessful experiments were unified at the beginning of July under the auspices of the Petroleum Warfare Department, at first little more than a miscellany of displaced sappers, oilmen and Post Office electrical engineers.
As well as flooding inshore waters with fuel from bulk storage on land, the PWD also devised roadside flame traps and the so-called Flame Fougasse, a 40-gallon drum filled with gun cotton, petrol and gas oil. These proved so effective that by June 1941 some 7,000 flame traps and 12,000 fougasses had been installed, chiefly in southern England, where they were manned by the Home Guard. Experiments at setting the sea on fire took longer to perfect, with the first trial at Dumpton near Margate on 3 July an ignominious failure. According to the unofficial history of the PWD, Flame Over Britain, published by its wartime director Sir Donald Banks in 1946, the first success was at Titchfield on the Solent on 24 August, when pipes from ten Scammel tankers were rigged to deliver twelve tons of fuel an hour onto relatively calm water. According to Banks, both trials were interrupted by air raids, and observed by inquisitive enemy aircraft. However it is more probable that the Germans first learned of British flame warfare defences by virtue of one of the ‘methods that must remain forever secret’ alluded to by John Baker White.
The remarkable truth is that German intelligence were aware of the PWD’s sea-fire research as early as 10 August. The revelation that Sealion’s first wave might encounter burning oil off the landing beaches greatly concerned the German High Command, and spurred prompt investigation of counter-measures. At Wilhelmshaven on 18 August the German navy carried out tests using 100 tons of a petrol–oil mixture, and found that in calm conditions it burned for almost 20 minutes, generating a great deal of smoke and heat. It was decided to counter this threat with pump and fire-fighting vessels, depth charges and booms fashioned from log chains. However, the fact that a German trial was apparently staged six days before the first successful British test of a sea flame barrage leads to the inevitable conclusion that details of this untested (and ultimately ineffective) weapon had been planted on German intelligence by the beginning of August, and that subsequent British trials in 1940 were little more than window dressing, deliberately staged in full view of the enemy.
From November 1940 onwards, rumours of a failed invasion attempt leaving thousands of German bodies floating in the Channel were deliberately co-mingled with the falsehood that Britain could set fire to the sea. The first variant, launched in September, held that British submarines had spread oil on the water. A ‘Short Invasion Phrasebook’ dropped in large quantities by the RAF over the enemy coast in late September made explicit reference to seas of petrol and burning comrades, while the BBC’s German service offered similarly mordant language lessons on the radio. Then, in November, the War Illustrated ran an article which suggested that the Sealion armada had set sail on 16 September, largely on the strength of several imaginative American stories, such as that run by the New York Sun:
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p; The carnage was reported to have been terrific; neutral observers stated that the number of killed, drowned and wounded were to be counted in tens of thousands. All available hospital accommodation in and around the Channel ports had to be commandeered for the German wounded, and one report quoted a French doctor who said he had seen several thousand severely burned German soldiers in hospitals in occupied France; they had been, said the doctor, on board transports and barges preparing for the invasion of England when they were caught by British oil bombs, and the flaming oil on the surface of the water burned the troops as they leapt into the sea.
A French variant, noted by Marie Bonaparte in early October, stretched credulity to breaking point:
350,000 men were burnt alive by fuel oil spread on the sea. The British collected the corpses, identified them by their identity discs, loaded them in planes and dropped each corpse in its own village to strike terror into their families and undermine German morale … From Calais to Honfleur, the German soldiers could be seen swimming ashore upright. It was an army of the drowned. Their heavy equipment had slipped to their feet and so they were kept upright … The Germans are in such terror of embarking for England that they have to be driven aboard with machine-guns at their backs and their hands tied, to prevent them committing suicide.
By December, the burning sea story had expanded to include two thwarted invasion attempts. According to a report in the New York Times by one Boris Nikolayevsky, no doubt issued from the BSC office on Rockefeller Plaza:
‘We were caught like fish in a frying pan,’ was the way a German soldier who escaped from the débâcle described it to a French nurse. Only a few thousand Germans succeeded in reaching the French coast. The others perished in the sea or were burned to death. The Germans tried again in September, over another route, and suffered a similar fate. People in the occupied French ports estimate that perhaps as many as 80,000 German troops perished in the two attempts. The fact is that hospitals in occupied France are filled with Nazi soldiers, all of them suffering from severe burns. Thousands of dead Germans have been washed ashore.
A string of official denials from Berlin from 25 September onwards had little impact, and in due course the great invasion rumour took on a life of its own. Several books published in Britain in 1941 helped to perpetuate the myth, including The Battle of Britain by James Spaight, who wrote of a ‘mid-September mystery’ in which ‘a large number of German troops were burned severely’ by oil bombs, and bodies washed ashore’. An American writer, Lars Moen, had been trapped by the German attack in May, and was unable to leave Europe until late October. Moen devoted no little space to the invasion rumour in his book Under the Iron Heel, which he acknowledged was largely cobbled together from reports told by others on board the Exeter en route from Lisbon. 16 September was again identified as Der Tag, on which ‘a considerable force of towed triple-barges’ on exercise were cut off by British destroyers, and their human cargo roasted after RAF bombers dropped vast quantities of oil drums and incendiary bombs. Moen added:
I first learned of the burned patients from a Belgian nurse working in an Antwerp hospital; Americans living near Ostend confirmed reports of the bodies being washed ashore … It was extremely significant that reports from the most widely scattered sources were unanimous on one point: that a considerable number of German soldiers had been badly burned.
These various suggestions that oil-filled bombs and torpedoes could wreak such havoc are plainly nonsensical, for no bomber or submarine then in service was capable of carrying a payload of oil sufficient to kill 80 men, let alone 80,000. Instead, a more subtle account aroused greater interest, this time by the celebrated commentator William Shirer, then a journalist with Columbia Broadcasting. In his Berlin Diary for 18 September, Shirer recorded an incident at the Potsdamer Bahnhof:
I noticed several lightly wounded soldiers, mostly airmen, getting off a special car which had been attached to our train. From their bandages their wounds looked like burns. I noticed also the longest Red Cross train I’ve ever seen. It stretched from the station for half a mile … I wondered where so many wounded could have come from, as the armies in the west stopped fighting three months ago. As there were only a few porters I had to wait some time on the platform and picked up a conversation with a railway workman. He said most of the men taken from the hospital train were suffering from burns.
The following day, Shirer claimed to have observed another long Red Cross train unloading wounded and received word of two more at Charlottenburg. This contemporary account, by a highly reputable journalist, is not easily dismissed, although precisely what Shirer witnessed first-hand beyond ‘several airmen’ remains ambiguous. Shirer later concluded the men in Berlin were casualties of an exercise surprised by the RAF, but it should be borne in mind that he was actively pro-British, and was thanked by name in the official history of BSC in New York, written in 1945. The suspicion therefore remains that in 1941 Shirer deliberately exaggerated the hospital train story as a morale booster, at a time when the war was going particularly badly for Britain. Curiously, there exist apparently reliable reports of similar trains seen at the Gare du Nord in Brussels at about the same time. Yet even the most hardened conspiracy theorist must baulk at the notion that, in the years since 1945, all mention of a large-scale amphibious disaster to rival the Dieppe raid in 1942 can have been expunged from every memoir, unit history and official file.
Where some spread the invasion myth as part of the war effort, or were merely gullible, others simply lied in pursuit of personal gain. In April 1942 an American journalist named Charles Barbe gave a talk at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, in which he claimed that 33,000 men from three fictive Waffen-SS divisions had perished in a sea of flame in September 1940, and that on the coast near Dieppe he had seen with his own eyes ‘bodies on the shore like driftwood [and] blackened tree stumps’. The lecture was duly reported in the British press, but Barbe’s mooted book, None So Blind, failed to find a publisher. Three years later another man finagled his name into print with a claim that he had watched the invasion attempt one weekend in September from a spot on the Sussex coast near Bognor, and saw hundreds of bodies washed ashore.
Following Barbe’s lecture at Chatham House the invasion myth was largely absent from the press until October 1944, although in the interim fact and fiction began to blur. Graham Greene had published his short story ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’ in 1940, but this story of a thwarted German fifth column and parachute attack proved more popular as a film, Went the Day Well?, released in November 1942, and which went on to inspire The Eagle Has Landed, the postwar thriller by Jack Higgins. Greene’s original story also informed When the Bells Rang, an anonymous book from May 1943 in which the Kentish town of Russocks is occupied by jackbooted Nazi thugs. None of these books mentioned burning oil and charred bodies, but a popular Will Hay comedy feature from 1942, The Goose Steps Out, includes a pointed reference to visiting Germans receiving the ‘warmest welcome’ of their lives. Indeed Went the Day Well? referred to an invasion attempt which ‘went up in smoke’. Evelyn Waugh also noted the rumour in his 1952 novel Men At Arms, which spoke of troops being consoled in September 1940 ‘by a rumour, quite baseless, which was travelling the whole world in an untraceable manner, that the invasion had sailed and been defeated, and that the whole Channel was full of charred German corpses’.
In August 1944 the existence of the PWD was revealed to the public for the first time, after Geoffrey Lloyd held a press conference and released details of assorted petroleum weapons. The rapid Allied advance across north-west Europe following D-Day brought correspondents into contact with liberated civilians, some of whom resurrected the mid-September mystery. After speaking with a nurse in Brussels, John Parris of British United Press claimed to have uncovered ‘final details’ of Hitler’s ‘calamitous attempt to invade Britain on September 16th 1940.’ By this account, printed in the News of the World:
Thousands of German soldi
ers – 50,000 so it is said – were burned to death or maimed for life on that September day. ‘A nightmare in hell’ was how German soldiers described it after the RAF, catching the Nazi fleet in mid-Channel, dumped oil on the water and set fire to it with incendiary bullets …
The nurse claimed to have treated German casualties at a Brussels railway station on 17 September, and that Red Cross trains had passed through for three days after. Of one wounded soldier, said to have been burned about the head and shoulders:
He said they had been told they were going to invade Britain, that nothing was going to stop them, that it was just a matter of getting into boats and crossing the Channel. He told me: ‘It was horrible. The sea was ablaze. The British bombed and machine-gunned us. Hell couldn’t be worse.’ Then he died, there on the stretcher. We looked after more than 500 soldiers as best we could. Many of them died in Brussels railway station, others in our hospitals.
Many still believed that the mid-September mystery was the ‘biggest secret’ of the war, and several questions raised in the House of Commons had drawn only evasive answers. One of the most persistent inquirers was the Conservative MP, Major Vivyan Adams, whose wife Mary was the director of Home Intelligence at the Ministry of Information. Thus in June 1945 Geoffrey Lloyd, by then the Minister for Information, held a second press call on the subject, which became front page news on both sides of the Atlantic. In it Lloyd revealed for the first time that British intelligence agencies had fostered the burning sea rumour overseas, albeit in an unlikely manner:
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 14