For Anthony Rhodes
(1916–2004)
soldier, author and friend
Contents
Title
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction: True Lies
1. Dressed as Nuns
2. The Royal Oak
3. The Miracle of Dunkirk
4. The Massacre That Never Was
5. Myths of the Blitz
6. The Invasion That Never Was
7. Hitler Myths
8. Hess and the Royals
9. The Man Who Never Was
10. Canaris and the Abwehr
11. Myths in the Field
12. Crash Myths and Foo Fighters
Appendix 1: The Fifth Column in France
Appendix 2: The Rumor Racket
Notes
Bibliography
Plates
Copyright
Acknowledgements
The author owes a particular debt of gratitude to Nigel Bewley, Terence Burchell, Nicholas and Dawn Champion, Terry Charman, David Collyer, Peter Dachert, Clive Dunn, Lowell Dyson, Ian English, Julian Foynes, James Herbert, Robert Jackson, Richard Knight, Chris Lewis, Bob Moore, Roger Morgan, Ian Munroe, Mick Muttitt, Roy Nesbit, Robin Prior, Winston Ramsey, Neil Storey, Richard Townsley, T.H. Waterhouse and Nigel West. Many more people have assisted in the research and preparation of this book, although any errors in the text are mine and not theirs.
I also extend my sincere thanks to the following libraries and institutions: The Imperial War Museum, Cambridge University Library, The British (Newspaper) Library, PA News Library, Norfolk County Libraries. And to all at Sutton Publishing, in particular Jonathan Falconer, Elizabeth Stone and Nick Reynolds.
Although every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, this has not been possible in every case. If I have omitted to give due credit to any individual or organisation I offer my sincere apologies.
Introduction: True Lies
When I began researching this book, which is a sequel of sorts to my earlier study Myths & Legends of the First World War, I naively assumed that there would be less raw material to analyse. After all, by 1939 the world had moved on twenty years, the populace were wiser, and had the benefit both of bitter experience and the wireless. This is true to a point, for in these pages the connoisseur will find few tales quite as tall as those of the Angel of Mons, or the Kaiser’s corpse factory, or fiendish Hun plots to undermine the moral stamina of British troops through the use of homosexual agents.
And yet, as we see in Chapter One, a whole raft of First World War rumours were resurrected during the first eighteen months of the war. Myths fade like flowers, only to bloom elsewhere as soon as the climate and season are suitable. The same fictive poisoned sweets passed out by German soldiers in Belgium in 1914 were dropped by the Luftwaffe over Poland in 1939, and by the USAAF on Germany in 1944. Most of these resurrection myths were by-products of the spy mania common to both conflicts, with the ‘Alien Peril’ and ‘Hidden Hand’ now replaced by the equally chimerical fifth column. In Britain in both conflicts these panics were specifically engineered to keep the population on its toes, and to justify widespread internment, and differed only by degree. Whereas in 1914 dachshund dogs had been kicked and stoned on the streets, in 1939 they were merely denigrated in cartoons and portrayed with swastikas drawn on their backs. Although xenophobia was still widespread, the hatred was leavened by humour, in which Adolf Hitler was found wanting a testicle, and German parachutists were inclined to descend from the skies dressed as pantomime priests and nuns.
As with my earlier book, I was surprised to find that no previous writer had compiled a truly comprehensive study. Of course, there are several well-known books which deal with particular areas, such as The Myth of the Blitz by Angus Calder (1991), Unreliable Witness (1986) and Counterfeit Spies (1998) by Nigel West, and Double Standards (2001), which covers most aspects of the Rudolf Hess affair. There is also an abundance of large format books dealing with sundry ‘secrets’ and ‘mysteries’ on a superficial level, while John Keegan’s scholarly dissection of The Battle for History (1995) is concerned more with controversy than with myth. One reason, perhaps, for this absence is that the substance of many myths and legends is fundamentally banal, and provides no firm foundation on which to build any wide-ranging academic thesis. Another is that some areas will never be considered legitimate topics of research for the military historian, in particular the occult, and the fantastical reports of extraterrestrial Foo Fighters from 1944 to 1945. But a myth is a myth, a legend a legend, and all justify exploration between the covers of this book.
Although most of the fictions explored in the following chapters share little in common, and cannot easily be arranged to form a seamless narrative thread, they do raise an obvious question: how are myths and legends created? The detailed answer differs from case to case, as Lord Arthur Ponsonby discovered when compiling his landmark compendium Falsehood in Wartime, first published in 1928, and revived in 1940. That said, several general patterns may be discerned. One certain cause is the lack of available hard facts in wartime, often due to poor communications from the Front, or deliberate censorship. What Mass Observation founder Tom Harrisson termed ‘home made news’ is then manufactured to fill the vacuum, as were the fictions christened ‘outside information’ by diarist Naomi Royde Smith, often by people only too keen to appear in the know to their immediate social circle. In this way we can isolate a basic desire for certainty, where in fact none exists, and simple one-upmanship.
Another cause is the insatiable appetite of the man in the street, and in the front line, for lurid tales based on death, destruction and epic misfortune visited upon others, whether friend or foe. On the Allied side at least, the term ‘Schadenfreude’ would have been condemned as unpatriotic. The syndrome is explored in some depth in the US Army lecture on The Rumor Racket reproduced as Appendix Two, and in the following passage by Tom Driberg from his collection Colonnade, concerning the aftermath of a raid on London in October 1940:
I looked at the ruin of a house in which, I knew, one man had been killed. A bystander said to me, ‘They say there’s dozens buried down there still. They ought to call for volunteers from the street. Why don’t they call for volunteers?’
‘Who says there’s dozens buried down there still?’ I interrupted sharply.
He gave me a dirty look, mumbled ‘Chap who was here just now said so,’ edged away; a moment later I heard him say to a woman, ‘They say there’s dozens buried down there still. They ought to call for volunteers …’
Other myths arise by virtue of dishonest invention by unscrupulous writers, either through financial necessity or greed. Another stimulus is the need for secrecy, in particular the silence surrounding Enigma and Ultra, which persisted until 1974 and gave rise to persistent myths, including that of the deliberate sacrifice of Coventry. To the causal list we may also add deliberate deception operations and outright propaganda, such as the doomed Polish lancers of 1939, the flaming English Channel of 1940, the rouged German airmen of 1941, and the carrot-gobbling night fighter pilots of the RAF.
The question of whether there truly existed in Britain an indomitable ‘Dunkirk spirit’ or ‘Myth of the Blitz’ has been argued by several capable historians in recent years, including Angus Calder and Clive Ponting. Indeed Tom Harrisson himself lambasted many Home Front myths about national unity and heroism, homing in on the snobbish nature of the establishment, the inadequacy of provision made for air raids, and the dismay and even derision aroused among those who suffered the brunt of the bombing. However, this study makes no pretence of being a so
cial history, and is instead nothing more ambitious than an objective record of myth, legend, falsehood and controversy. Indeed it must stand as one of the few non-fiction books which makes a virtue of the fact that nothing in it is true.
The opening months of any war are invariably the most fertile for myth, and so it is that Chapters One, Two, Three, Five and Six of this book form a cohesive whole, since they deal in turn with spy mania, followed by Dunkirk, the invasion scare and the Blitz. Much of this period is viewed from a British standpoint, but by no means all of it. Stand-alone chapters on supposed war crimes by British troops at Arras in May 1940 (Chapter Four), and the tangled history of The Man Who Never Was (Chapter Nine), involve greater detail, and reveal in turn how flawed research and unflinching self-interest respectively can contribute to myth. Given that Adolf Hitler would probably top most polls of evildoers in the twentieth century, it is scarcely surprising that Führer myths deserve a chapter of their own, although it is interesting to note that his closest rival, Stalin, remains essentially myth free, at least in the West. Chapters Eleven and Twelve are essentially a miscellany of legends based on land and air operations, from which two salient points emerge. Whenever a major military operation goes disastrously wrong, a myth inevitably rises in its wake. And whenever a major figure or celebrity is killed – be they Glenn Miller, Gunter Prien or Adolf Hitler – stories inevitably circulate that they are not dead at all. Then again, fifty years later the same is true of Elvis Presley.
Although I cannot pretend this book will alter anyone’s perception of the Second World War, a few facts emerge which have too often been ignored. The widespread killing of suspected fifth columnists in France, Belgium and Holland, invariably on the basis of little or no evidence, reflects credit on no one, including the British Expeditionary Force. That fact that the total number of killings and summary executions probably ran into the low thousands during a campaign which lasted little more than a month is particularly disturbing. Most war histories have failed to recognise the fact that the burning sea myth of 1940 was the first significant British propaganda victory of the Second World War, and did much to convince Americans that Britain was not yet beaten. There is strong evidence that British military intelligence has often practised deceptions with the aid of corpses, and enjoyed closer links with its Abwehr counterparts than previously thought. And although often derided as little more than a joke, mistakenly pitting cavalry against tanks in the misguided belief that German armour was constructed from wood and canvas, in the light of the information contained in Chapter Three it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Polish army was the only force which put up serious or determined opposition to the Wehrmacht before 1941.
This study is also defined by those areas I have chosen to omit. For reasons of space and cohesion I have been obliged to leave certain areas unexamined. Although this book contains chapters devoted to land and air myths, the detailed examination of the Royal Oak disaster in Chapter Two left little further naval material. The fiction of secret U-boat bases on the Donegal coast remains just that, and was laid bare by Nigel West in his book Counterfeit Spies, while the wartime tale that German submarines put to sea with a grisly stock of cold-stored severed limbs to simulate their own sinking is an obvious product of propaganda. Many myths continue to attach to the resistance movement in Europe, and almost certainly deserve a book of their own, while the subject of Holocaust denial remains both delicate and litigious. The main reason I chose not to explore the latter subject is that specious claims that the Holocaust never occurred, or took place on a far smaller scale than is generally accepted, are a postwar creation, whereas I have tried to focus only on myths and legends which first arose between 1939 and 1945. For the same reason I have side-stepped several subjects which might more properly be labelled conspiracy theories, such as the charge that Roosevelt, forewarned by Churchill of the attack on Pearl Harbor, allowed it to proceed in order to bring the United States into the European war.
It is clear that the overripe ‘corpse factory’ fiction of 1917 had a detrimental effect on the way in which the Ministry of Information steered British reporting of Nazi atrocities against the Jews. But that is not a myth, and probably had no practical effect. The misconception that the incalculable human suffering inflicted at Auschwitz could have been alleviated by Allied bombing is convincingly exploded by William Rubinstein in his book The Myth of Rescue (1997). The subject of area bombing over Germany is another controversy which falls outside the scope of this book, and readers are instead directed towards The Bomber War (2001) by Robin Neillands, whose earlier study of British generalship on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 did so much to explode those hoary old myths about donkeys and lions. Yet another body of research which deserves to be read more widely, yet does not fall within the remit of this book, can be found in Other Casualties, written by James Bacque in 1989. This detailed investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners of war after April 1945 reveals a truly numbing statistic, albeit one which has been challenged, that no fewer than 750,000 died of malnutrition and disease while held in deliberately inadequate French and American camps. That the Allies had right on their side during the Second World War is one of the few absolutes of the conflict. However, the mass killing of unarmed enemy prisoners between April 1945 and 1948 is an unwelcome lesson which still remains to be learned by many, let alone forgotten.
But that is neither myth nor legend. For the fictions, read on.
James Hayward
November 2004
1
Dressed as Nuns
In the opening chapter of my book Myths & Legends of the First World War, I described how Britain was gripped by a feverish spy mania during the first few months of the conflict, in which anyone – or anything – German or faintly alien was viewed with hostility and scorn. Dachshunds were stoned in the streets, delicatessens and pork butchers attacked and looted, and enamelled advertising signs examined for coded instructions to spies. Tennis courts were identified as gun platforms, and matches struck in London streets reported as signals to German U-boats and Gothas. Spies and saboteurs were identified on every street corner, usually masquerading as waiters and barbers, with others in service as maids or governesses, their steamer trunks packed full of bombs. Some enemy agents, it was said, had been arrested in female attire, or dressed as nurses. Everywhere, it seemed, there was signalling to airships, some of them invisible, to which the latter replied by dropping poisoned sweets over cities to kill children. No rumour was too ridiculous, no exaggeration too great.
Little of this alarmism had any foundation in fact, and following the Armistice a marked degree of disenchantment flowed from the exposed falsehoods of the Crucified Canadian, the corpse rendering factory, and the often pornographic stories of bestial outrage committed by the Kaiser’s army on its march through Belgium in 1914. It is all the more fascinating, therefore, that so many of these First World War myths and legends were dusted off, re-labelled, and sold as new in 1939 and 1940, as Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and finally France were overrun. Poisoned sweets, murderous spies, treacherous maidservants, secret signals, even the enamel sign story – all, like Lazarus, rose up from the dead as soon as hostilities commenced. Just as the Kaiser was said to have been insane, so too was Adolf Hitler. One rumour current in Britain during the first few days of the war was that which held that the Führer had ‘gone off with a gun and shot himself’. A lie, it is said, never lives to be old, and so it was that this particular falsehood soon perished, to be replaced with a more pleasing (and less easily disproved) legend that the German leader was equipped with a solitary testicle. This subject is discussed at length in Chapter Seven.
Although 1939 and 1940 spy mania never escalated into the panic of 1914, the First World War rumour of the familiar figure or ‘friendly enemy’ was revised and updated. The original version involved a young woman suddenly and unexpectedly confronted in Piccadilly by her fiancé, an officer in the Prussian Guard
s, who cut her dead before making his escape by means of a passing omnibus or taxi. In the updated version, in one town or another (Dover and Crewe were among the locations cited) a tradesman was said to have called at a newly let house to solicit orders. When the door was opened, the horrified vendor found himself facing the same brutal Prussian who had commanded the prisoner-of-war camp in which he had rotted two decades earlier. In his memoir Friend or Foe, self-styled ‘spycatcher’ Oreste Pinto records a supposed chance meeting with a senior Dutch Nazi on a London street, although Pinto is a highly unreliable witness and the incident probably an invention.
Another feature common to the first few days of both conflicts were the widespread and almost gleeful rumours of mass destruction. Just as the British Expeditionary Force of 1914 was said to have suffered extinction-level casualties immediately upon arriving in France, and the British fleet mauled in the North Sea, early in September 1939 word spread of various towns being heavily bombarded from sea and air. At the same time, each air raid warning was followed by wild speculation as to the awful fate which had befallen some faraway part of the country. While it is doubtful that anyone actually wished to see the devastation of Hartlepool, Scarborough and Lowestoft repeated, the morbid appetite of some seems to have extended far beyond weary resignation.
From early September 1939 onwards false spy reports were returned from the fighting in Poland, many of them sponsored by official sources. German paratroops were reported fighting in Polish uniforms, assisted by ethnic Volksdeutsche dressed in distinctive or eccentric clothing, while the general brutality of German troops was said to include the use of civilians as human shields, and a reluctance to take prisoners. It was claimed German aircraft had dropped poisoned chocolates and cigarettes, while other reports told of tobacco leaves strewn across meadows so that cattle, alarmed by the odour of nicotine, would starve. When the Luftwaffe ran short of bombs, chunks of rail and other scrap metal were thrown from aircraft. Although there was no repeat of the sustained atrocity propaganda manufactured by the Allies in 1914–15, it is clear that the Polish authorities took a conscious decision to manufacture certain fictions, the most flagrant of which involved the use of poison gas. At a press call in London on 3 September, the Polish Ambassador announced that the German air force had begun dropping gas bombs, while on the 5th it was reported from Warsaw that
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 1
