THE SETTING
We have reason to believe that Germany will be ruthless and indiscriminate in her endeavour to paralyse and destroy our national effort and morale and unless immediate steps are taken to reduce the intensity of attack it is conceivable that the enemy may achieve her object.
AIR MINISTRY MEMORANDUM, APRIL 19381
For most of the 1930s Britain’s politicians and military leaders were haunted by nightmare visions of a massive ‘knock-out blow’ from the air against which there could be little defence save the threat of retaliation. When Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s prime minister from 1937 to 1940, flew back to London from Germany at the height of the Czech crisis in 1938, he looked down at the sprawling suburbs of the capital and imagined bombs crashing down upon the innocent victims below him. This horrible picture inspired him to redouble his efforts for peace. A year later, on 3 September, those efforts were finally undone. Britain declared war on Germany for her refusal to withdraw invasion forces from Poland, whose sovereignty Chamberlain had guaranteed five months before.
Almost immediately after Chamberlain broadcast the news from 10 Downing Street that Britain was at war, the sirens sounded. No one had told Chamberlain about the possibility of an air raid and he was ‘visibly shaken’ by it. It was a false alarm. A second one sounded at 3 a.m. that night, getting all London out of bed. For days people waited for the blow from the air which they had been told to expect. Government observers reported that 70 per cent of Londoners carried their gas masks with them.2 The blow never came. The German Air Force had no plans to bomb London in 1939. Like the Royal Air Force (RAF), it was under strict instructions not to start the bombing war or to run the risk of killing civilians from the air. By the end of March only 1 per cent of Londoners could be seen carrying gas masks.
The war the British waged in 1939 was very different from the one they had expected to fight. Chamberlain’s government poured millions of pounds into air power between 1937 and 1939 in order to provide a defensive shield against the knock-out blow, a defence made possible thanks to the fast monoplane fighter and the invention of radar. Millions more went into the expansion of Bomber Command as a deterrent against air attack. Plans were drawn up to bomb the enemy if he would not be deterred. The civilian population was drilled in air-raid precautions so as to reduce the colossal casualties predicted from all-out air war. Much of the top-level thinking on future war presupposed that something like the Battle of Britain might well occur in its very early stages, perhaps without a declaration of war at all.
In Germany the air force took a less extravagant view of air power. There the emphasis lay on combined operations with the army in order to impose a decisive defeat on enemy armed forces. This was and always had been a central principle of German war-making. German air leaders certainly possessed by 1939 the technical means to create an operationally independent air force for long-range attacks on industrial sectors or civilian morale. It was not moral scruple that held them back. They simply did not believe that these were strategically desirable targets. Neither promised immediate results given the nature of current air technology; neither would necessarily bring the enemy armed forces any closer to defeat. The manual for ‘The Conduct of Air Warfare’ first drawn up in 1936, and revised in March 1940, directed German air fleets to seek out the enemy air and ground forces and inflict upon them debilitating blows. Joint manoeuvres carried out with the army from 1935 onwards showed what could be achieved when armies and air forces fought together. The proof was supplied in the swift demolition of Polish resistance in September 1939. When planning began for the next campaign against Britain and France, it was based on the same formula of fast, hard-hitting air and armoured forces, designed to win a swift battle of annihilation. What were defined as ‘terror attacks’ against civilian targets far from the scene of battle were to be permitted only in retaliation for terror attacks by the enemy.3
The British were largely unprepared for this kind of warfare. Until February 1939, when Chamberlain publicly pledged British military support for France, Britain did not even have a Continental ally to consider. British strategy in the 1930s was insular. The government’s first priority was the protection of the British imperial heartland, even if this meant starving the global empire of adequate resources for its defence. Hence the decision, taken when British rearmament began in earnest in 1936, to allocate the lion’s share of resources to the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. Britain’s offensive capability remained dangerously underdeveloped. Even by 1939 only two fully equipped divisions were available immediately to fight in Europe; Bomber Command, the much-vaunted striking arm of the RAF, had fewer than 500 aircraft when war broke out, incapable of reaching very far into German territory. British preparations had been based on the narrow objective of avoiding defeat and conquest. This was scarcely the state of mind necessary to conduct a major land campaign in Europe.
The fundamental ambiguity at the heart of British military preparations explains the flawed response to the demands of coalition warfare. There was little the British could do to help Poland. Assistance to France was compromised by the small scale of the army Britain sent, and by an unwillingness to commit to the land campaign aircraft that had been assigned to Britain’s own defence. The aircraft that were sent out to make up the British Advanced Air Striking Force (an organization only a little larger than the Polish Air Force, which German aviators had snuffed out in a few days) were rendered ineffective by the poor state of Allied communications and the French insistence that aircraft fight a short-range, army co-operation role to which the RAF had given almost no serious thought.
When the attack on France came on 10 May 1940, these deficiencies were soon exposed. There was often a lapse of four or five hours between sighting a fleeting battlefield target and the despatch of instructions for aircraft to attack it. British bombers in France (most of them light Battle and Blenheim aircraft, which were utterly outclassed in daylight combat) had to wait for orders to be routed from France, through Bomber Command headquarters near London, and back again to France.4 Co-operation with the army was rudimentary. While 380 dive-bombers gave close air support to advancing German troops, often reacting within minutes of a radioed request, the RAF managed between September 1939 and March 1940 to train a mere seven pilots in dive-bombing techniques, who between them dropped just 56 bombs in practice. When the French asked the RAF what Bomber Command could do to interrupt the remorseless progress of German forces, they were told that the most they could expect was the temporary disruption of three railway lines.5
The only serious contribution made by the RAF came with the deployment of squadrons of Hurricane fighters, which had been intended for Britain’s own defence. As the battle in France deepened during May 1940, more and more Hurricanes had to be sent in piecemeal to stem the haemorrhage of Allied air power. Without the home advantages of prepared bases and radar warning, fighter losses were high. In May and June, 477 fighters were destroyed and 284 pilots killed, rates of loss not far short of those later in the summer. So severe was the drain on home defence that the commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, took the unprecedented step of talking directly to the War Cabinet on 15 May to plead for restraint. ‘I saw my resources slipping away,’ he later wrote, ‘like sand in an hourglass.’6 The politicians only half responded to his argument. Churchill insisted on sending further Hurricanes, but the French got none of the coveted high-performance Spitfires. Only when British forces were pinned back on Dunkirk and faced with annihilation in the last week of May did the RAF get drawn into the battle in strength. Flying from bases in southern Britain, at the limit of their range, they established brief periods of air superiority over the beaches, and inflicted 132 aircraft losses on the German Air Force in three days of fighting. Spitfires were used in this later phase of the battle in France, but 155 of them were lost, 65 of them in accidents as aircrew tried to master the new equipment. The Dunkirk evacuation was the starting point of almost a year of continuous air combat for the defence of Britain.7
The contest that Britain faced after Dunkirk was the war Britain had expected. It was in effect to be a ‘Chamberlain war’, for this was the kind of defensive conflict he had anticipated and prepared for in the 1930s. But it was not a campaign that Chamberlain was destined to lead. His government had fallen on 10 May, following widespread criticism of its spiritless and ineffectual leadership. On the day that German forces invaded France and the Low Countries, he was succeeded by Winston Churchill. Here was a man whose instincts were flamboyantly bellicose. He relished the conflict in France (Churchill ‘likes war’ Lloyd George once remarked, not altogether charitably). He was shocked at the defeat of France, and promised French leaders that he would ‘fight on for ever and ever and ever’. It was Churchill who on 18 June 1940 memorably defined the coming contest when he told the House of Commons that ‘the Battle of France is over. I expect the battle of Britain is about to begin.’8
If this speech inspired many, it alienated others. Churchill was not the conductor of a well-drilled orchestra playing in defiant unison. Defeat in Europe in May left British strategy in tatters. Under such dangerous circumstances it is perhaps unsurprising that arguments should surface for a compromise peace with Hitler. The critical turning-point came at the end of May. Prompted by feelers from the Italian ambassador in London, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, asked the Cabinet to consider the possibility that Britain might have to seek a peace. Halifax was repelled by Churchill’s rhetorical style and his Boy’s Own zest for fighting to the death. After Cabinet on 27 May he complained that the prime minister ‘talked the most dreadful rot’, and persisted in his effort to base British policy on what he termed ‘common sense and not bravado’.9 A tense meeting on 28 May left Halifax isolated. Churchill had no intention of ending his brief wartime premiership sullied by surrender. The government remained committed to the fight. Though appeasement might have seemed irresistible at such a moment, Chamberlain supported Churchill, a factor overlooked by the many later critics. This was of profound importance, for it brought to his side the bulk of the Conservative Party – many of whom distrusted Churchill as a renegade and a charlatan – together with the Liberal and Labour ranks in Parliament upon whose support Churchill’s choice as prime minister had rested. Churchill could now fight Chamberlain’s war.
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 that 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.