The Battle of Britain

by James Holland

  It was not, however. There had been frantic bunker-building in the area over the winter so that by May there were 103 in all, but many were only half finished, lacking steel gun port shutters and doors, and still surrounded by their construction pits. Most of the construction work had been carried out by infantrymen rather than engineers; instead of training for combat they were busy building bunkers. As it was, the 55th Infantry Division was a second-rate division made up mostly of reservists. When the crunch came, and determined German troops were storming their positions, far too many realized they had no idea what they should do, so large numbers either fled or surrendered.

  And there was another curious French practice that was a hangover from the last war. The individual infantry companies were constantly being rotated between construction work of various kinds, even agriculture, and infantry training. Once back in the line, they rarely returned to their former sector, but took over the positions of the company they were relieving. This meant they never got to know any stretch of the line particularly well. In the static attritional war along the Western Front, rotation had been more important than local knowledge, but that was not the case in 1940. Furthermore, by rotating companies in such a way, these units had become separated from their parent battalions. One company might be at one end of the sector, another in the middle, sandwiched between two companies from entirely different battalions. As a result cohesion – and hence strong communication – had been crucially lost between units.

  Guderian had chosen his principal crossing point at Gaulier next to the Draperie Sedannaise for a very good reason. First, his approach was hidden by a multitude of buildings, but, second, there was not one single bunker along the far bank of the Meuse at this particular part of the river. Even though this mile-long stretch lent itself very obviously to the siting of a string of machine-gun and anti-tank gun posts, there was nothing. This was incomprehensible and doubly so because it had been at precisely that point that the German army had crossed the Meuse in August 1914.

  To make matters worse, there was a complete absence of mines at Sedan, even though the narrow flood plains either side of the river were perfect mine-laying terrain, while the open countryside beyond should also have been pasted with them. Mines were comparatively cheap and easy to make – far easier to build and lay than bunkers – yet the 55th Infantry Division had been given just 422 for its part of the line. Most of these had not been laid, however, and those that had been, had been dug up and moved to a nearby depot to be re-greased to protect them from soil moisture. Needless to say, they had not been relaid by 10 May.

  Curiously, it was a politician rather than a soldier – Pierre Taittinger, a member of the Parliamentary Army Committee – who first warned Gamelin about the poor defences at Sedan. ‘In this region,’ he told Gamelin in March, ‘we are entirely too much taken with the idea that the Ardennes woods and the Meuse River will shield Sedan and we assign entirely too much significance to these natural obstacles. The defences in this sector are rudimentary, not to say embryonic.’ His warning was not heeded.

  Of course, once the bunkers were overrun, the poorly trained French infantry inside them did not know what to do. The Germans followed a ‘mission command’ principle, known as Aufstragstaktik. This meant that an officer or NCO would be given a mission or goal, such as to capture a specific bunker or to destroy an enemy gun position. How he then achieved it was entirely up to him. This was not a concept that the French – or British for that matter – understood at this time. Oberleutnant Korthals of the 1st Panzer Division was given the order to destroy a key bunker overlooking the Meuse, but not told how to do it. Using his initiative, he then went on to destroy a large number more.

  Guderian, Rommel and Kempf led from the front – almost recklessly so in the case of Rommel – but by being near the action they were able to inspire their men at crucial moments and also see for themselves how the battle was going. At Sedan, Général Lafontaine, commander of the French 55th Infantry Division, remained in a bunker built into a hidden quarry some eight miles south of the town. When the panic occurred on the night of the 13th, he hastily vacated his command post and moved even further back.

  The French were not prepared for the unexpected. The last war had been about having the most concrete and the best guns; so this was what they had concentrated on developing during the intervening years. They were to be proved half right, but when they discovered they had been certainly half wrong, they could not adapt quickly enough. Instead they became like a rabbit trapped in headlights: scared, frozen to the spot and unable to respond.

  *

  On the evening of 16 May, the BEF was ordered to fall back to the River Escaut, the ‘E’ Line, just inside Belgium. It would be part of a collective retreat but was necessary to ensure the British kept a straight front between the Belgians to the north and the French First Army to the south. The move was to take two days, and they would pause the first night along the River Senne to the west of Brussels and then the second along the River Dendre, a further twenty-five miles back. At Gort’s Command Post, his Chief of Staff, General Pownall, wondered wearily whether it would be possible. ‘I don’t see how we can get back again in two days in a hurry,’ he scribbled in his diary, ‘especially as the roads are badly blocked with thousands of refugees and we may be sure that we shall get properly bombed, which we didn’t on the way up.’ To make matters worse, the truth about the German breakthrough in the south had not become clear to all. ‘I hope to God the French have some means of stopping them and closing the gap,’ scrawled Pownall, ‘or we are bust.’

  10

  Emergency Measures

  FROM ALMOST THE moment the German offensive began, Britain had become gripped by enemy paratroop and Fifth Column fever. ‘Preparing a hot reception for any parachutists’ was the headline in a page of the British weekly magazine, The War Illustrated. Underneath was a series of pictures of the army preparing roadblocks, soldiers ushering a bus around a pile of sandbags, and a Tommy checking the papers of a motorist. ‘Britain took immediate and vigorous steps to meet the possibility of invasion from the air,’ ran the article. ‘Though this method had been foreseen, some surprise was occasioned by the large scale on which it was carried out in Holland and Belgium by the Nazis and the measure of success which attended it.’

  It was the German airborne drops on the Low Countries, above all, that shocked the British. It made them realize how very vulnerable they were. For millennia, Britain’s island status had protected her: no invader had managed to successfully cross the Channel since William of Normandy in 1066, yet now it seemed that stretch of sea was no longer the barrier it had once been. Aircraft could now bring new levels of destruction; Baldwin’s line about the bomber always getting through still haunted the thoughts of many. And aeroplanes could now deliver a new terror as well: hordes of parachutists.

  On 10 May, the Air Ministry had circulated a memo about this new type of airborne soldier. ‘German parachute troops, when descending, hold their arms above their heads as if surrendering,’ it warned. ‘The parachutist, however, holds a grenade in each hand. These are thrown at anyone attempting to obstruct the landing.’

  How a paratrooper was supposed to hold the cords of his parachute and clutch, let alone throw, grenades at the same time was not made clear, but certainly it appeared a very real threat. After all, for so long Nazi propaganda had been declaring that Britain was the primary enemy, and it stood to reason that if German paratroopers could be dropped over Holland and Belgium with such apparent ease and with so dramatic an effect, there was little to stop them crossing the Channel and delivering them over England as well. By 11 May, the Home Office had already issued a warning that the arrival of parachutists should be reported to the nearest police station. This meant the Government was taking the threat seriously, and few among the public were prepared to question that. ‘The parachute troops now seem to have taken precedence in catching the imagination of the people,’ noted Daidie Penna af
ter a day of hearing her friends and neighbours speak of little else. ‘It is said that the downs and the roads near our station are being closely watched for possible landings.’

  It was primarily as a means of combating the threat of an airborne invasion that the Government decided to recruit a home guard. The decision had been made the day after the offensive had been launched, and three days later, a very rough and rudimentary means of organization having been worked out, an appeal for volunteers was made by Anthony Eden, the new Secretary of State for War. Clearly, it would have been far better to have completed the organization of this new force first, but such was the sense of crisis, it was felt there was no time to lose; the muster needed to be called now.

  On the evening of 14 May, Eden broadcast to the nation. ‘I want to speak to you tonight,’ he said, ‘about the form of warfare which the Germans have been employing so successfully against Holland and Belgium – namely, the dropping of troops by parachute behind the main defence lines.’ These troops were to disorganize and confuse as a preparation for the landing of troops by aircraft. The Government wanted to leave nothing to chance so was asking for men who were British subjects, and aged fifteen to sixty-five, to come forward and offer their services. The name of this new force was to be the Local Defence Volunteers. ‘This name describes its duties in three words,’ added Eden. ‘You will not be paid, but you will receive a uniform and will be armed.’ Anyone choosing to join simply had to report to their local police station and hand in their names, and then wait to be called.

  The first volunteers had arrived at their local stations before the broadcast had even finished. Within six days, more than a quarter of a million had offered their services; there were more than a thousand on duty along the Kent coast by the evening of 17 May. The problem was that despite his promise to clothe and arm these volunteers, Britain had nothing like enough uniforms or rifles or any other kinds of weapon to fulfil that pledge. Instead, a call was made for people to hand in shotguns and pistols, which raised around 20,000 firearms. Those who had volunteered and who had rifles or shotguns tended to keep hold of them, but volunteers turned out with picks, axes, crowbars and anything else they could think of that might be used against a parachutist. Local – and zone and group – commanders were appointed by the military. Landowners and retired officers were obvious choices, and where they did not exist, local dignitaries and businessmen took command. In the first days, improvisation was the by-word.

  As elsewhere, the response was enthusiastic in the village of Tadworth in Surrey. Daidie Penna met an early recruit the following morning. ‘I hope they give me a gun,’ he told her. ‘I’m just dying to have a pot at one of them fellers comin’ down!’ The man’s wife was rather indignant at not being given the chance to join too.

  ‘Your job is to keep up the morale on the home front,’ her husband told her.

  ‘I’m doin’ that all right,’ she replied, ‘on my knees.’ Daidie assumed she meant scrubbing not praying. Later, her oldest son, Dick, came back from school and gave her a detailed account of the techniques and equipment of parachute troops. ‘So Hitler had better look out,’ noted Daidie. ‘Reigate Grammar School is discussing him!’

  While most LDVs had to make do without uniforms or rifles, there were some who were considerably better equipped than others, albeit hardly in the latest 1937 pattern battledress. There were a large number of cadet forces throughout the country, although they were a particular feature of the country’s public schools. At Marlborough College in Wiltshire, the school OTC (Officers’ Training Corps) almost immediately offered its services. Dressed in old-style Service Dress, peaked caps and puttees up to their knees, and armed with Short Magazine Lee Enfield No. 1 rifles, they were the envy of the local townsmen who had to make do with trilbys, cloth caps and the odd shotgun.

  Boys were expected to join the OTC at the beginning of their second year, although the Master announced that only those who were seventeen or older could join the LDV and only once they had received the written approval of their parents. Two of those who wasted no time in doing so were Douglas Mann and John Wilson, both seventeen.

  Although attending a boarding school in Wiltshire, both lived in Kent. Douglas’s father was a successful London brewer, but also owned around 1,500 acres between Tonbridge and East Grinstead, part of which he farmed and part of which was leased to tenant farmers. He was a wealthy man, with servants, a chauffeur and all the trappings of someone of his standing at that time. ‘You were living in Edwardian times really,’ says Douglas, ‘right up to the war.’

  Douglas had three older brothers who had all gone to Marlborough too; so had his father and his grandfather before that. Public school could be harsh, but Douglas loved it – he was surrounded by friends and there was always plenty of sport to play. ‘It suited me down to the ground,’ he admits.

  John Wilson was equally happy at the school too. He was the son of a distinguished officer in the Indian Police who had risen to become Inspector General of the Bombay Presidency. Like so many children of colonial officers, John had been brought up entirely in England, mostly by his grandparents, although his mother would return home for six months every year. ‘She couldn’t stand the summer heat,’ says John. However, his father had retired in 1932, and returning to England had bought a large house in Hawkhurst.

  Shortly after war had been declared, John had taken a telephone message for his father. ‘Markover,’ the voice had told him. ‘That’s all you need say, and the time of the message.’ In fact, his father was on the reserve list for the security service and the message was the signal for him to report to London immediately. By May 1940, he was working in counter-intelligence at Wormwood Scrubs in west London.

  And now his seventeen-year-old son was doing his bit too. The OTC was run by a retired Lieutenant-Colonel, Bill Harling. New recruits joined ‘D’ Company, then after the first year they entered their house platoon for further training. There were enough volunteers in the sixth form to base the Marlborough College LDV on the same house platoon system. ‘I was in B3 House Platoon,’ says John, ‘which in the LDV had a strength of fourteen. And we were never split up.’

  The boys were soon set manning roadblocks on the Bath Road and an OP (observation post) on Manton Down. The roadblock on the A4 was created by dragging an old threshing machine halfway across. As incoming traffic came towards them, they would make the vehicles halt, then check drivers’ identities, ask a few questions about where they going to and why, and look underneath their vehicle. ‘There was the threat from both Fifth Columnists,’ says John, ‘and from parachutists. They virtually turned the whole of Britain into an armed camp.’

  Exciting though it was to begin with, the novelty quickly wore off for Douglas. ‘It was awful really,’ he says. ‘You spent the night, two hours on and two hours off and so on, and then you had to go to lessons just the same and you had to fit your prep in.’

  The term ‘Fifth Column’ had originated during the Spanish Civil War when Franco’s Nationalist Forces were closing in on Madrid. The Nationalists claimed that in addition to four columns of troops in the field, they had a fifth column already inside Madrid. The expression caught on and had since been cleverly exploited by Josef Goebbels in particular, who had spread the word that Germany had large numbers of undercover spies operating in France and the Low Countries, spreading confusion and discord and preparing the ground for airborne troops. Certainly, the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht intelligence service, had spies in these countries but nothing like as many as Goebbels had made out.

  Once this seed had been planted, Goebbels’s work was done; the Allies themselves did the rest. The genius of the scam was that it made everyone suspicious. It was not the man with the upturned collar and hat lowered over his face that the public needed to be wary of, but those who looked otherwise completely normal. Suddenly, any stranger was a suspect; any unusual behaviour, or strange, throw-away comment, a matter of deep suspicion.

  The Dutch Foreign Mi
nister had claimed that many of the German paratroopers that had fallen on Holland had been disguised in Belgian, Dutch, French and British uniforms and even as priests, nuns and nurses. The rumours spread like wildfire and soon it seemed that everyone was vainly searching for German parachutists dressed as nuns. On 18 May, The Times ran a section on its letters page called ‘Parachutes and Traitors – More Suggestions’. One man had written in proposing to arm ‘anti-parachutists’ with Winchester .44 repeating rifles and with shotguns using solid ‘paradox’ shot. ‘A paradox ball,’ he wrote helpfully, ‘will stop big game at short range.’

  The creation of the LDV was just one of the measures to counteract the fear of Fifth Columnists and parachutists. On 16 May, the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff Committee were presented with a memorandum by the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee entitled ‘Security Measures against Air Invasion’, in which they urged the internment of all enemy aliens between the ages of sixteen and seventy, male and female, and the heightening of internal security particularly for all officers and civil servants. They also suggested that all ports should be treated as prohibited areas and that in the event of an invasion or imminent threat of a landing, complete military control of the United Kingdom should be put into force immediately.

  This advice led to Churchill asking Chamberlain to discuss with ministers the security implications of disaster in France. The result was two bills that were hurriedly drawn up and duly passed through Parliament on 22 May. The first was the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, which gave the Government the completely unprecedented authority to exercise control over property, business, labour and life of the nation. The second was the Treachery Act, which enabled the Government to round up and detain all enemy aliens – i.e. Germans and Austrians – between the ages of sixteen and sixty. That most of the 60,000 such people were Jews and political refugees cut no ice with the Government as it desperately tried to stem the tide of Fifth Column fever. At Chamberlain’s suggestion, these people were rounded up and taken to camps on the Isle of Man, well out of harm’s way. Other ‘aliens’ were also forced to surrender cars and bicycles and to adhere to a strict curfew between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. The act also allowed the Government to fling in prison without trial anyone it considered in any way in cahoots with the enemy. That included Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, and his wife, Diana; the following day, both were sent to Brixton Prison. Never in its history had Britain enforced such draconian measures; never had a Government wielded such far-reaching – and, frankly, undemocratic – power. As Harold Nicolson noted, ‘We have today passed a bill depriving ourselves of all our liberties.’