by Norman Gelb
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Lord Beaverbrook
Women of Britain, give us your aluminium. We want it and we want it now ... We will turn your pots and pans into Spitfires and Hurricanes, Blenheims and Wellingtons. I ask therefore that everyone who has pots and pans, kettles, vacuum cleaners, hatpegs, coat hangers, shoe trees, bathroom fittings and household ornaments, cigarette boxes or any other articles made wholly or in part of aluminium, should hand them in at once to the local headquarters of the Women’s Voluntary Services.
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Commander R. Fletcher, Member of Parliament
For seventeen hours a day, that man is at his job. If when I say goodnight to him he is angry, I go to bed and sleep peacefully for I know that Lord Beaverbrook’s anger means that in the morning there will be some great improvement in our war effort.
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Winston Churchill
This was no time for red tape and circumlocution, although these have their place in a well-ordered, placid system. All [Beaverbrook’s] remarkable qualities fitted the need. His personal buoyancy and vigour were a tonic. I was glad to be able sometimes to lean on him. He did not fail. This was his hour. His personal force and genius, combined with so much persuasion and contrivance, swept aside many obstacles. New or repaired aeroplanes streamed to the delighted squadrons in numbers they had never known before.
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Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding
We had the organization, we had the men and we had the spirit which could bring us victory in the air, but we had not the supply of machines necessary to withstand the drain of continuous battle. Lord Beaverbrook gave us those machines and I do not believe that I exaggerate when I say that no other man in England could have done
By the time the first phase of the Battle of Britain drew to a close, the British, buoyed up by Churchill’s Shakespearean rhetoric and exultant newspaper accounts of RAF achievements, believed they had reason not to be despondent. They realized they were still under serious threat, but the Luftwaffe had lost 227 aircraft during that period to the RAF’s ninety-six. Spitfires and Hurricanes had proved themselves reliable battle machines and British pilots had proved themselves worthy of the critical role to which they had been assigned at that historic moment. They had roared out from their bases to hurl themselves without hesitation at the swarms of enemy aircraft sent to lure them to disaster.
At the same time, however, the Germans, despite their losses, were convinced they had achieved what they had set out to achieve. In view of their superiority in numbers, they could absorb their losses more easily than the RAF. They were prepared to move on to the next, more intense phase of the Battle of Britain.
Though the air war had been hotting up, right through this first phase and almost till the closing October days of the battle, the prime focus of concern for the British had been the threat of a German invasion. This concern now intensified. The War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff examined and re-examined the possibilities and procedures for coping with an invasion attempt when it occurred, with almost everyone in the country convinced it was only a matter of time.
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General Staff Headquarters, Southern Command, 13 July
1. The following notes are published so that all personnel may understand the sequence of events that may be expected at aerodromes if the enemy invades this country. An appreciation of what is taking place to a great extent eliminates surprise and this aids the defence.
2. Large scale attacks on aerodromes will probably take the following form:
(1)Attack made at dawn.
(2)Me 110s arrive first to draw off our fighters.
(3)Soon afterwards, very low flying bombers attack. Bombs [are dropped on the] perimeter of aerodrome and aerodrome defences.
(4)More heavy fighters then attack the defences with front cannon and machine-guns. At the same time:
(5)Complete companies of parachute troops are dropped at three or four points around the aerodrome about 1,000 to 1,500 yards away.
(6)Parachute troops form up in 12 to 15 minutes and storm the aerodrome with machine-guns, hand grenades and perhaps 2-inch mortars.
(7)About 10 minutes after this attack has started, Ju 52s and large troop carriers land on aerodrome at about six a minute. These troops have machine-guns and probably 2-inch and 3-inch mortars and guns and also motorcycles.
(8)Fighters then land whilst a fighter umbrella is maintained over the aerodrome until attempted capture is complete.
3. Should any high bombing take place, do not let the whistling bomb scare you. It is no more dangerous than any other bomb.
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Fighter Command Diary
Fighter Command [has] published to its Groups the codewords which had been adopted by the navy and the army for making the first reports of Hitler’s invasion:
BLACKBIRD: Surface vessels, submarines and motorboats have been sighted but not yet identified.
GALLIPOLI: The enemy are landing from ships, boats or caterpillars.
PARASOLS: The enemy are landing by parachute.
STARLING: Enemy air transports are landing on our aerodromes.
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Chiefs of Staff Committee
Report by Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, 16 July
The principal enemy objective in an invasion of this country is likely to be the capture of London.
To achieve this, it is considered that beaches will be selected on which to land a wave of AFVs [Armoured Fighting Vehicles] carried in small flat-bottomed craft, supported by troops carried in specially equipped merchant ships which can be run ashore to facilitate disembarkation.
Large numbers of small craft of all types are likely to be used in addition, both to assist in any main landings and as feints.
It is considered that the main seaborne invasion is most likely to be made between the Wash and Newhaven, and the areas most likely for beach landings are in the region of Southwold and in East Kent. Simultaneous landings in both areas are to be expected, with the object of a pincer movement on London. Additional subsidiary landings may be expected elsewhere, but there is no reliable evidence as to where they may take place.
We may also expect the Germans, with the assistance of airborne troops, to attempt to seize from the land side, a port such as Harwich, the Humber or Dover in order to facilitate the disembarkation of additional troops and stores ...
Seaborne troops: Up to five divisions might be landed as an initial striking force, assuming that they could avoid detection and interference by our naval force for twenty-four hours, and that they could obtain control of the necessary beaches and landing facilities. The main landing force would probably be carried in transports of substantial size ... There is reason to suppose that Germany possesses special craft for landing tanks on open beaches ... Gliders maybe used. It is practicable to carry light tanks by aircraft. The Germans are known to possess 5,000 parachutists and others are believed to be in training.
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Captain Euan Wallace, Senior Regional Defence Commission,
London
24 June
It’s no use kidding ourselves that we are not within the next few weeks or days going to get a taste of German frightfulness. One object of that frightfulness ... will be to intimidate and terrify the civilian population. We can beat that ourselves if we remember what to do when an air-raid alarm comes. Remember that on courage, coolness and resolution depends the defeat of Hitler.
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Ministry of Information Poster and Circular
IF THE INVADER COMES
1) If the Germans come, by parachute, aeroplane or ship, you must remain where you are. The order is ‘Stay Put’ ...
2) Do not believe rumours and do not spread them. When you receive an order, make quite sure that it is a true order and not a faked order. Most of you know your policeman and your ARP [Air Raid Precautions] wardens by sight, you can trust them. If you keep your heads, you can also tell whether a military officer is really British or only pret
ending to be so. If in doubt ask the policeman or ARP warden. Use your common sense ...
3) Keep watch. If you see anything suspicious, note it carefully and go at once to the nearest police station or officer, or to the nearest military officer ...
4) Do not give the German anything. Do not tell him anything. Hide your food and bicycles. Hide your maps. See that the enemy gets no petrol ... Remember that transport and petrol will be the invader’s main difficulties. Make sure that no invader will be able to get your cars, petrol, maps or bicycles ...
5) Be ready to help the military in any way. But do not block roads until ordered to do so by the military or LDV authorities ...
6) In factories and shops, all managers and workmen should organize some system by which a sudden attack can be resisted.
7) Think before you act. But think always of your country before you think of yourself.
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General Raymond E. Lee, United States Military Attaché, London
Went over the land defenses in the morning. The whole coast defense machinery includes minefields, the navy, the RAF, the anti-aircraft, the army and behind all, the Local Defence Volunteers. It looks fairly good, if it can all work smoothly together. It could all, of course, be much stronger, but it is fairly strong now. The main trouble is going to be that Hitler may produce some new surprise weapon like thousands of glider transports, or he may attack at so many distant points that he’ll be able to form one bridgehead and get some of his big tanks ashore. Every day that he puts it off is immensely valuable and I should say that in another three weeks the coastline will be nearly impregnable to ordinary attack. But the whole thing is going to depend on the navy and the RAF.
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Former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
Broadcast, 30 June
If the enemy does try to invade this country, we will fight him in the air and on the sea. We will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have. He may manage here and there to make a breakthrough. If he does, we will fight him on every road, in every village, and in every house, until he or we are utterly destroyed.
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Sergeant Tom Naylor
Just before the Battle of Britain began, they discovered that among those of us who’d been recruited for Operations Room training, there was one man who’d had over a thousand hours’ flying experience. That was Dudley Mason. He was quickly winkled out and given a different job and just before the threat of invasion reached its climax during the battle, old Dudley was given a Tiger Moth [a pre-war biplane] somewhere down in Surrey, where they were busy welding milk crates under the wings to carry bombs with which to bomb the beaches when the Germans landed. He told me, ‘The darn thing won’t even fly, never mind carry bombs, with all that garbage on it.’
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Winston Churchill
War Cabinet Minutes
The land defences and the home army are maintained primarily for the purpose of making the enemy come in such large numbers as to afford a proper target to the sea and air forces ... and to make hostile preparations and movements noticeable to air and other forms of reconnaissance. However, should the enemy succeed in landing at various points, he should be made to suffer as much as possible by local resistance on the beaches, combined with the aforesaid attacks from the sea and the air. This forces him to use up his ammunition, and confines him to a limited area. The defence of any part of the coast must be measured not by the forces on the coast, but by the number of hours within which strong counter attacks by mobile troops can be brought to bear upon the landing places. Such attacks should be hurled with the utmost speed and fury upon the enemy at his weakest moment, which is not, as is sometimes suggested, when actually getting out of his boats, but when sprawled upon the shore with his communications cut and his supplies running short. It ought to be possible to concentrate 10,000 men fully equipped within six hours and 20,000 men within twelve hours, upon any point where a serious lodgment has been effected. The withholding of reserves until the full gravity of the attack is known is a nice problem for the Home Guard.
Where and how the Germans would land was a matter of constant worry and speculation. It was feared the Germans might quickly try to follow up their victories on the continent and move against Britain before they lost their momentum, before British forces could recover from the trouncing they had taken in France, and before the RAF could regain its strength and balance. British leaders had been dazzled by the lightning military coups executed by elite German airborne troops in Belgium and Holland. The use of the same tactics against England could not be ruled out.
In fact, Hitler wasn’t certain at the time that he would actually proceed with an invasion of England. He still hoped the British, their noses badly bloodied, would seek to extract themselves from the war so that he might devote the energies of his forces to expanding the borders of the Third Reich eastwards into Russia. But so long as the British insisted on continuing to fight, they could not be ignored. British bombers were raiding targets in Nazi-occupied Europe. Fighter Command was rebuilding its operational strength. It was an increasingly inescapable fact that only defeat would remove the British from the conflict and that only an invasion of England could bring that about. A start was made in gathering supplies and equipment for a Channel crossing and landing. Though a date for the invasion was not yet set, German leaders radiated confidence that it would succeed and Britain would be crushed.
Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations, OKW
(Oberkommando der Wehrmacht)
30 June
The final German victory over England is now only a question of time. Enemy offensive operations on a large scale are no longer possible.
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Flight Lieutenant Gerry Edge
I’ve always thought that had they come straight across and landed all their aircraft and paratroops in Kent before we got the Dunkirk people back or before the army was reformed, we would have been in serious trouble. Troop morale was very low and our squadrons had taken such heavy losses in France.
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OKW
2 July
The date of the commencement [of a landing in England] is still undecided. All preparations to be begun immediately ... All preparations must be undertaken on the basis that the invasion is still only a plan and has not yet been decided upon.
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Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under Secretary, Foreign Office Diary, 30 July
Can’t make out what the Germans are doing. Various good indications that they are going to attack us. But why haven’t they done so? And what are they doing with these costly and half-hearted air raids? ... Must be something very deep.
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James Reston, New York Times
London, 18 July — Prime Minister Churchill, who has always worked on the theory that anybody who sleeps more than five hours a night is a worthless slacker, announced in the House of Commons today that he has asked his leading Cabinet ministers to move out of their houses and sleep in their offices, where they can be gathered together at a moment’s notice. Members of Parliament, who are never surprised by Mr Churchill’s requests, decided tonight that this move had three advantages:
First, it will enable the Prime Minister to call his colleagues together in a hurry in the event of a German invasion.
Second, it might improve the attendance at his ‘breakfast Cabinet meetings’.
And third, it will enable the Prime Minister to get a quick audience for his latest inspiration at any hour of the day or night.
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Mrs H.E. Miles, Surrey
War Journal
Story about Hitler and Michelangelo’s great picture of ‘Moses’, which he is reputed to have looted from the Louvre. The Führer is supposed to have been found on his knees before the great Jew and he was saying: ‘Dear Moses, tell me how you got across that strip of water.’
With no firm invasion decision forthcoming from the German High Command, no urgency was felt by the Gest
apo and other security authorities in Berlin to produce plans of their own for Britain. Nevertheless, the matter did receive close consideration and, over the next few weeks, a programme for policing occupied Britain did emerge. Professor Dr Franz Six, a colonel in the SS who would later be implicated in the massacre of civilians in Russia, was to head German security services in the country. He was told his task was to combat ‘all anti-German organizations, institutions, opposition and opposition groups which can be seized in England’. A list was drawn up of Britons who were to be taken into custody as soon as possible, including parliamentarians, writers, academics and other public figures who were outspoken in their denunciation of Nazi doctrine and practice. Special attention was also to be paid to European refugees who had found sanctuary from the Nazis in Britain. The people of Britain were to be told that ‘all thoughtless actions, sabotage of any kind, and any passive or active opposition to the German armed forces will incur the most severe retaliatory measures’. A programme was to be outlined for deporting able-bodied British males between the ages of seventeen and forty-five to Europe to man the industries which fuelled Germany’s war machine. ‘Action Groups’, of the kind that were later notorious for the slaughter of civilians in Nazi-occupied Europe, were to be deployed in various parts of Britain ‘as the situation dictates and the necessity arises’.
Though the security services in Berlin were beginning to hatch their plans for occupied Britain, it was not until a full six weeks after the German forces had driven the British out of Europe and into the sea at Dunkirk that Hitler actually gave the order to prepare ‘landing operations against England’. Even then, he declined to make this order final, stipulating that the operation was to be carried out only ‘if necessary’.
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The Führer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces
Führer Headquarters, 16 July
DIRECTIVE NO. 16
ON PREPARATIONS FOR A LANDING OPERATION AGAINST ENGLAND
Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no signs of being ready to come to an understanding, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England and, if necessary, to carry it out. The aim of this operation will be to eliminate the English homeland as a base for the prosecution of the war against Germany and, if necessary, to occupy it completely.
