by Norman Gelb
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Dr J.H. Leakey
The Local Defence Volunteers were ... at the start ... more of a menace than an asset. I remember one night being called over about 1.00 a.m. to visit the little boys at Benenden as one of them was rather ill. I climbed into the car cursing at the thought of a three mile drive in the middle of the night. As I was turning down Golford corner, an uncouth youth, flourishing some sort of musket of ancient vintage, held me up. As he seemed extremely uncertain how to manipulate his weapon, he filled me with an agony of nervous apprehension. ‘For God’s sake, put that bloody thing down,’ I said. ‘I am sure you will do either yourself or me severe damage if you are not careful.’ He meekly obliged and laid the musket on the ground. He then asked to see my papers and bent over unarmed, reading them by the light of my side lamps. Then, having given me back my papers, he picked up his blunderbuss and allowed me to go on, obviously feeling very pleased with himself over the whole affair.
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Major E.A. Cox Field, A Company, Fourth Buckinghamshire Battalion, Home Guard
We were lucky in that among our earliest volunteers were a high proportion of ‘old sweats’, ex-NCOs of the regular army and of the army of the last war. They provided us with the nucleus of a grand staff of instructors ... We had one difficulty in our training. In our area, we never had any Field Force troops. But one way or another, we managed to find people to fight ... When we could not get regulars to fight, we fought anybody we could persuade to fight us. We fought two battles against the Thame Home Guard and each time we defeated them against heavy odds ... In one encounter we found fa] substitute for grenades. A man from Lacey Green brought a clutch of addled goose eggs. One of them in your face and you sought the decontamination centre.
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Daily Mail, 28 June
Any motorist who leaves his car unattended even for a minute, at any hour of the day or night, is now compelled to put it out of action, under an order made by the Minister of Home Security. Moreover a car is unattended unless there is someone, aged fourteen or more, either inside or near it and within sight — an important point at night. One person cannot ‘attend’ more than one car, so do not regard a car park man as ‘attending’ your car.
This is what you must do to put a motor vehicle out of action: By day — (1) Remove the ignition key and lock the car ... If you cannot do both these things you must either (a) remove an essential part of the mechanism — the distributor arm or the main ignition lead, (b) apply a locking device to the mechanism, steering wheel, or a road wheel, or (c) put the car in a locked garage or yard.
By night — You must remove the key and lock the car as before and also remove part of the mechanism. If you cannot do all three things, the car must be locked in a garage or yard.
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Air Commodore A. Warrington Morris, Commandant, Observer Corps
TRAINING INSTRUCTIONS
The only weapon available to the parachutist during the jump are a pistol, which is carried in a thigh pocket of the trousers, and several small hand grenades the shape of an egg, which are carried loose in the trouser pockets. If he anticipates resistance by the enemy on landing, he holds a hand grenade in each of his hands, which he holds above his head so that he is in a ready position to throw them. This holding of the hands above the head should not be confused with a desire to surrender.
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Assistant Section Officer Molly Wilkinson
I used to have to drive and take secret documents to Huntingdon from Ipswich — eighty miles. I was given a revolver and whenever I did this drive, I had to have it in the pocket of the car in case I met a German parachutist.
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Prime Minister to the Home Secretary
The police, and as soon as possible the ARP [Air Raid Precaution] services, are to be divided into combatant and non-combatant, armed and unarmed. The armed will co-operate actively in fighting with the Home Guard and regulars in their neighbourhood, and will withdraw with them if necessary; the unarmed will actively assist in the ‘stay put’ policy for civilians. Should they fall into an area effectively occupied by the enemy, they may surrender and submit with the rest of the inhabitants, but must not in those circumstances give any aid to the enemy in maintaining order, or in any other way. They may assist the civil population as far as possible.
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Gunner Fred Taylor
Every field in the marshes had telephone posts stuck up so no planes could land. And as you went through the villages on the way to the coast, you could see that they’d built concrete bunkers inside village shops at strategic points. Hay ricks in the field were erected around concrete bunkers there so that when the invasion came, there'd be fortified positions to fight from.
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Pilot Officer Jas Storrar
They cut the hedges down around our airfield to give better visibility against a German ground attack and we had boxes of grenades at dispersal in case German paratroopers came down on top of us. We really expected them and it was hard to see that we had enough men or machines to stop them.
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New York Times
London, 11 June — Working against time to complete preparations before an anticipated German attack, engineers operating massive American-built excavators are tearing huge, jagged scars across the beautiful parklands around London, while camouflage experts are making it difficult or impossible for airmen to recognize former landmarks. For many miles around London now there is not an open space on which a troop-carrying plane could land without crashing into a trench or earthwork. So thoroughly have place names and other marks of identification been removed from garages, stations, post offices and notice boards that a parachutist, even provided with map and compass, would stand a good chance of getting lost ... Cricketers every night push disused trucks onto their playing fields, police block arterial roads, farmers leave implements around and sharpshooters — the ‘parashots’ — take positions behind hedges and sandbagged emplacements ... Owners of many country houses near London had trees painted over them.
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Gunner Robert Angell
I started off in the army in the field artillery. I was eighteen at the time and, being under nineteen, was classed as one of the ‘Immatures’. That was the official name for us. The government said we were too young to go and fight abroad. So my battery went off to France at the beginning without me and were all captured by the Germans while I was put on Home Defence. For me, that meant the anti-aircraft. That’s what landed me up sitting on the sea-front at Dover, just at the edge of the harbour, nineteen miles from the enemy. On a clear day, you could see them over in France. You could see their cars going up and down and you could see trains puffing smoke.
We soon got used to the fact that the Germans had coastal guns which were firing at Dover. We posted a sentry — sometimes it was me — to watch the coast. He’d watch for a flash, shout a warning when he saw one, and we’d start counting. When we’d counted up to twenty, we’d all get down because we knew bloody well that a shell was about to fall somewhere in the vicinity. The harbour was the target and that’s where we were. In fact, a shell did hit the Dover Municipal Swimming Baths right behind us.
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Chiefs of Staff Committee, War Cabinet, 14 June 1940
The evacuation [of coastal regions that might be invaded] would be on a semi-compulsory basis in that all evacuees would be told that it was their national duty to move out. All arrangements for the evacuation ... were already made but it would take a little time to sort out those who should go from those who should stay ... It was agreed that on military grounds it was eminently desirable that any evacuation which was to be carried out should be done as early as possible; otherwise it might be too late ... Two or three days’ notice was ... necessary before the invasion materialized if the scheme was to be of any value. Some doubt was expressed whether there was any likelihood of our getting this warning of an invasion, but it was pointed out that the Chiefs of Staff had always con
sidered that intensive air attacks on the RAF and the aircraft industries would be a preliminary to any invasion on a large scale. Such attacks might therefore give us the necessary warning.
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War Cabinet Minutes, 3 July
The Prime Minister expects all His Majesty’s servants in high places to set an example of steadiness and resolution. They should check and rebuke expressions of loose and ill-digested opinion in their circles, or by their subordinates. They should not hesitate to report, or if necessary remove, any officers or officials who are found to be consciously exercising a disturbing or depressing influence, and whose talk is calculated to spread alarm and despondency. Thus alone will they be worthy of the fighting men who, in the air, on the sea and on the land, have already met the enemy without any sense of being outmatched in martial qualities.
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General Sir Edmund Ironside
Diary, 13 July
[The Germans] daren’t not do something. They will begin with some three or four days’ intensive bombing and then air landings with parachutists, followed by sea landings according to the weather. All carried out in different places so as to upset us and get our troops rushing about the country. If our men will attack a fond, all is well. But they are so dreadfully untrained that we cannot depend upon them to go in successfully.
There were some 8,000 Americans living in Britain at the time, mostly in London. A group of them formed a Home Guard unit of their own despite the strong disapproval of United States ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Kennedy had advised Americans in Britain to make for home as soon as possible. He was convinced that ‘England will go down fighting. Unfortunately I am one who does not believe that it is going to do the slightest bit of good.’
Despite lack of encouragement from the American ambassador, Churchill, the son of an American mother, looked across the Atlantic in his desperate search for arms and perhaps even greater support. The United States had come to the aid of England and France when they had been threatened by Germany two decades earlier. It was clear, however, that this time most Americans preferred to stay aloof from the conflict between foreigners across the sea.
Isolationist sentiments were widely felt and widely articulated, most notably by the ‘American First Committee’, which was then being formed. Some Americans merely wanted no part of foreign troubles. Others felt that American involvement in any way would just prolong a tragic struggle which they believed could best be settled through negotiations. A comparatively small but vociferous group was tinged with pro-Nazi sentiments. Students at Columbia University in New York and elsewhere demonstrated against American involvement with placards bearing the legend THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING. However, a growing number of Americans were coming to believe not only that the Nazis were evil and should be opposed in a concrete fashion on moral grounds, but also that they were a potential threat to America’s own security.
As a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, President Franklin Roosevelt recognized the danger the German fleet could pose to the United States if England was subjugated and the ships of the Royal Navy were seized by the Germans, providing them with truly formidable naval resources. Churchill, who had established a correspondence with Roosevelt many years before when he had been at the Admiralty in London, was not slow to press that point home in private communications to the White House from ‘Former Naval Person’.
Roosevelt and others in Washington also saw that a German victory over Britain, and the mood of invincibility it would kindle in Berlin, could be a prelude to a systematic expansion of German influence in South America, where there were already active Nazi movements with close links to Berlin. A Nazi party was, for example, well established in Chile; Uruguay had to beat off an attempted Nazi coup just before the start of the Battle of Britain; and the Brazilian government showed distinct signs of succumbing to fascist doctrines.
Then, as now, the interests of the United States were seen to be directly at stake in Latin America. The British did not overlook this fact when trying to pry armaments and supplies out of America. They sought to convince American leaders that Britain’s struggle was their struggle as well, and they were not without success. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was, for example, not alone when he told President Roosevelt, ‘It seems to me that we Americans are like the householder who refuses to lend or sell his fire extinguishers to help put out the fire in the house that is right next door although the house is all ablaze and the wind is blowing from that direction.’ American diplomats in Berlin also sent warnings about long term German intentions.
Roosevelt was sympathetic, but there were congressional restraints on him; and generally, the American public simply did not want to be enmeshed in a war it could avoid. The President wasn’t about to push them into one, certainly not in an election year in which he was running for an unprecedented third term. Aside from that inhibiting quadrennial factor, there was no certainty that Britain would be able to withstand the expected German onslaught, even if it received American aid. Ambassador Kennedy, one of whose sons would later also occupy the White House, had been sending
Roosevelt and the State Department gloomy prognoses even before the Dunkirk evacuation.
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The United States Ambassador in the United Kingdom to the Secretary of State
24 May
PERSONAL FOR THE SECRETARY
The situation according to the people who know is very, very grim. The mass of people just never seem to realize that England can be beaten or that the worst can happen to them ... They feel that they will protect themselves well in the daytime and, at night, the efforts of the Germans cannot be anything but indiscriminate, and they expect to return the attack on German locations, and in this way hold on for some time until help can arrive from the United States. Finally, I don’t think that, if the French and British Expeditionary Force are licked in their present struggle, things will turn out quite as well as the English hope. I do not underestimate the courage and guts of the people, but from the reports brought back by American newspapermen who were with the forces in Belgium and northern France, it is going to take more than guts to hold off the systematic air attacks of the Germans coupled with their terrific superiority in numbers.
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For the President from Former Naval Person
London, 15 June
SECRET AND PERSONAL
Although the present Government [of Britain] and I personally would never fail to send the fleet across the Atlantic if resistance was beaten down here, a point may be reached in the struggle where the present ministers no longer have control of affairs and when very easy terms could be obtained for the British islands by their becoming a vassal state of the Hitler empire. A pro-German government would certainly be called into being to make peace and might present to a shattered or a starving nation an almost irresistible case for entire submission to the Nazi will. The fate of the British fleet ... would be decisive on the future of the United States because if it were joined to the fleets of Japan, France and Italy and the great resources of German industry, overwhelming sea power would be in Hitler’s hands ... This revolution in sea power might happen very quickly and certainly long before the United States would be able to prepare against it. If we go [down] you may have a United States of Europe under the Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New [World].
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Alexander Kirk, United States Chargé d’Affaires in Germany, to the State Department
Berlin, 17 June
The United States is the only power in the world which can effectively oppose Hitler now and in the future, and he knows it. It is easy to say that it is safe, in so far as Nazi aspirations are concerned, or even that in the post-war plan of the regime, a world is envisaged in which the United States will maintain its established position in cooperation with the German hegemony in its extended spheres of influence, and the utterances of Hitler himself would tend to quiet any fears to the contrary. The developmen
t of Nazi aims in the past, however, and the contradictions in fact which have characterized his other assurances, would not justify any belief in those assumptions. It is also easy to assume that even if Hitler intends to launch an offensive against the Western Hemisphere, the United States can oppose and destroy Hitler after he has established his domination of Europe; and finally the assumption may be offered that, as there is a limit to what the power galvanized by one human being can achieve, time and the extension of that power will eventually negative its effectiveness ... The position of America, therefore, is clear. There will be no place in the world envisaged by Hitler, and he will exercise his power with a view to eliminating it as a great power as soon as possible. He will not attack the Americans by force, as he can attain his aims by other methods, once he has established his domination over the countries of Europe. He will strangle the United States economically and financially and even if he does not succeed in breaking down the solidarity of the countries of the Western Hemisphere, which may be precarious at present, he will confront the United States within a brief measure of time with the impossible tasks of adjusting its system to an economy in which it will be excluded from access to all foreign markets. The fight, therefore, which is now being waged in Europe, is a fight for the preservation of the American order, and complete defeat of the Allies in the present battles is the defeat of the United States.
