The account given by Charles Sydnor of the treatment of three Totenkopf privates taken prisoner four days later, on 25 May, bears repetition here:
The German prisoners were transferred immediately to a compound near the Channel coast … At the rear-area compound, the SS prisoners were interrogated by a German-speaking captain. They were given clean clothes, a warm meal, and cigarettes. During the last days of the fighting in northern France, these men were shuttled around behind the front. According to their own version of the captivity, they were not mistreated by the British. At one point, British soldiers even saved the prisoners from a French mob that tried to lynch them after the Luftwaffe had destroyed a small village and killed several civilians. Thereafter they were dressed in British greatcoats and helmets so as not to attract the attention of the French population. The SS men finally escaped when the British soldiers guarding them simply walked away in the confusion to join the last units being evacuated from Dunkirk.
The lack of any corresponding German allegation cannot be underestimated. Hauptman Hans Ulrich Schroeder, then adjutant with the 65th tank battalion of 7 Panzer, recalled the British attack at Arras in the following terms:
We suffered some very heavy casualties before we were able to stop the British on 21st May. Our infantry on lorries and some of our tanks were hit very hard by British tanks. But a massacre of Germans after surrender? I never heard of such a terrible thing. There was no bad behaviour of that kind in this engagement. I was, of course, talking quite a lot with General Rommel that day and afterwards, and he never made any complaint about the way the British fought the battle, except that they fought rather well.
We occupied the battlefield afterwards and made no discovery of Germans perhaps shot down after surrendering. Our wounded whom we recovered made no complaint. My impression – and that of General Rommel himself – was that the British in 1940 were honourable fighters.
In addition to the episode at Duisans cemetery, Harman relied on the testimony of a Royal Tank Regiment officer to support his contention that DLI troops dispatched German prisoners:
An officer of 7 RTR on a scouting mission captured a German non-commissioned officer, and carried him back for interrogation. ‘I continued into Dainville and handed over the prisoner to a Captain of the DLI for conveyance to Provost personnel. The troops displayed great animosity towards the prisoner, and I was compelled to draw my revolver and order them off before I could reach their officer.’ This officer’s report is quoted in the Official History of the war in France and Flanders; the passage here extracted was, understandably, omitted by the official historian.
If the Germans had to rely on the Durhams’ officers for their protection they were out of luck. By the evening of May 21st most of the DLI officers were dead, and every single one of their eight companies present was commanded by a second lieutenant.
The RTR officer in question was Lieutenant Thomas Hepple, who clarified details of his encounter with troops of 6 DLI in a letter to journalist Laurence Turner in 1981:
I produced the German from inside the tank and enquired politely: ‘Have you any means of dealing with this prisoner?’ I was greeted with some remarks indicating that they had plenty of means of dealing with a ‘******* German.’ I then clambered down with my prisoner to look for a Durhams officer. One or two soldiers laid hands on the German’s shoulders and I didn’t like that, so I pulled my revolver half out of its holster and spoke to them sharply, ordering them to calm down.
The Durhams then stepped aside and allowed me to reach one of their officers. He took charge of my prisoner quite happily, called over an NCO and instructed him to take the German back down the column to headquarters. This NCO was also quite correct in his attitude, and I was satisfied that the German was in safe hands.
Hepple’s experience at Dainville hardly amounts to a massacre, and instead describes a tense but commonplace battlefield encounter. What, then, gave rise to the massacre myth? The incident described to Harman, probably at second or third hand, was eventually disclosed by George Self, who in May 1940 was a corporal with 8 DLI and present at Duisans. Although Self omitted the incident from his affidavit sworn on September 1989, the previous year he had volunteered the following information in a taped interview made for the Imperial War Museum. Following the French tank action at the cemetery:
The three French tanks cleared them out of the cemetery, shot them up. Then some of our lads followed in behind and went round to see if there were any prisoners. They passed some Germans that were lying dead. There were about six of them, all lying there wounded or dead. The last boy was shot in the back by one of these Germans that was supposed to be dead. I suppose they just lost their heads and opened up. If there was anybody else alive besides the one that shot our lad, they weren’t alive very long … They shot everything.
Regrettable, perhaps, but scarcely a war crime. As evening fell on 21 May the Territorials of the DLI had just fought their first battle, leaving some so exhausted they had to be kicked to their feet on their way back to Vimy. Many were close to the end of their tether, but even the shooting at Duisans described by George Self does nothing to support the allegation that the officers and men of both battalions of the Durham Light Infantry were complicit in mass murder. Elsewhere in his book Harman asserts that all BEF ‘fighting units’ had orders to take no prisoners, save for interrogation, but surviving DLI veterans are adamant that no such instruction was received by them at any time during the campaign.
Harman’s flawed account of the DLI in combat at Arras contains a host of other, lesser errors. The regiment, apparently, accepted no recruits taller than 5 feet 2, never ‘seriously expected’ to have to fight in France, had few sergeants, Bren guns or radios, lost almost all its officers in the attack, and was described as ‘practically untrained’ – none of which is true. But these falsehoods pale beside the murder charge, and also beside the potential danger raised by allegations of this kind. In 1988 it was hinted that a former commander of the Leibstandarte, the infamous Wilhelm Mohnke, might yet stand trial for the massacre at Wormhoudt, news which triggered renewed public debate over the accusations levelled by Harman against the DLI. Concerned that the issue might be raised by the defence in any future trial, several former officers and men of the DLI felt obliged to swear formal affidavits which set out the entirely correct manner in which their prisoners were taken and treated at Arras on 21 May 1940. Mohnke never did stand trial, after a German prosecutor concluded there was insufficient evidence, thus removing the risk of the DLI’s reputation being smeared in court. Nevertheless, this sorry tale stands as a stark illustration of just how damaging false ‘history’ can be.
5
Myths of the Blitz
Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, the threat of aerial bombardment of towns and cities was viewed with the same degree of terror as that stirred by nuclear war two decades later. Although bombing raids against Britain by Zeppelins, Gothas and Giants during the First World War caused little substantial damage, by 1923 the military theorist J.F.C. Fuller had conjured a nightmare scenario of London under fire:
Picture if you can what the results will be: London for a few days will be one vast raving Bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for peace, the City will be in pandemonium. What of the government at Westminster? It will be swept away by an avalanche of terror. The enemy will dictate his terms which will be grasped like a straw by a drowning man.
The following year the Air Staff estimated that every ton of bombs dropped on a city would cause 50 casualties, a third of them fatal. At this time the French were reckoned to be the only potential aggressor, and were credited with the ability to inflict 5,000 casualties on the first day. Based on the same ratio of casualties per ton, the Anderson Committee later predicted 2,000 tons of bombs during the first 24 hours, and a death toll of 28,000 within a month.
In November 1931 the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin famously pre
dicted that ‘the bomber will always get through’, while three years later Churchill prophesied ‘tens of thousands of mangled people’ in London, a city he described as ‘the greatest target in the world – a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow, fed up to attract beasts of prey’. By 1938, with Germany identified as the probable enemy, the Air Staff had upwardly revised their estimates. The Germans were now credited with the ability to deliver as much high explosive in 24 hours as during the whole of the First World War. Three and a half tons of vastly more powerful bombs would be dropped on the first day, and thereafter 700 tons daily, causing 175,000 casualties a week. Many, including the Committee of Imperial Defence, anticipated that the maintenance of public order would pose the greatest problem. In January 1938 the Cabinet decreed that a large part of the Territorial Army should not be sent abroad in the event of war, but instead held in reserve to preserve law and order at home. Indeed throughout the Blitz of 1940/41 troops were retained in London with this very contingency in mind. Even the Mental Health Emergency Committee agreed, reporting in 1939 that psychiatric casualties were likely to exceed physical injuries by three to one, while three or four million hapless souls would succumb to hysteria.
Reputable scientists offered alarming statistics. In his book ARP, dating from 1938, Professor J.B.S. Haldane warned that the sound wave from a bomb was ‘like that of the last trumpet, which literally flattens out everything in front’. Those within range not immediately killed would be permanently disabled, their eardrums burst inward and ‘deafened for life’. The same gloomy result was predicted in the event of sustained anti-aircraft fire from guns positioned within London. Chemical warfare was also seen as inevitable, with London enveloped in deadly clouds of gas within hours of the outbreak of war. Lord Halsbury, for instance, forecast that a single gas bomb dropped in Piccadilly would dispatch everyone between the Serpentine and the Thames. The Gas War of 1940, a novel published in 1931 by the pseudonymous Miles, reflected (and no doubt increased) the fears of many:
In the dark streets the burned and wounded, bewildered and panic-stricken, fought and struggled like beasts, scrambling over the dead and dying alike, until they fell and were in turn trodden underfoot … In a dozen parts of London that night people died in their homes with the familiar walls crashing about them in flames; thousands rushed into the streets to be met by blasts of flame and explosion and were blown to rags.
In similar vein, the science-fiction of H.G. Wells offered countless depictions of great cities wiped out by a single raid, and large tracts of land poisoned for decades. After 1936, the expanding Wellsian mythology of bombs, blast, gas and pandemonium was given sharper focus by Alexander Korda’s film adaptation of Things to Come, which depicted the destruction of Everytown by aerial bombardment and a troglodyte existence for the unlucky survivors. The devastation of the Spanish town of Guernica in April 1937, as depicted in cinema newsreels and books such as Air Raid (1938), also did much to confirm these apocalyptic fears. An example of a related hearsay arose in the wake of the Munich crisis in September 1938:
It has long been rumoured that the reason for Chamberlain’s panic in Munich was a threat made by Göring to Neville Henderson. Göring is supposed to have told the British Ambassador at Berlin that he was quite prepared to destroy London if the negotiations fell through. He backed up his threat by having 1,400 Messerschmitts drawn up on the airport at Munich when Mr Chamberlain came along with his umbrella to talk things over.
In some areas open trenches were dug in preparation for mass burials, and large numbers of cardboard coffins stockpiled. Indeed London County Council even envisaged dumping the dead in lime pits, or from hoppers into the Channel. The reality, when eventually it came, was very different. Between 1939 and 1945 the German air force dropped an estimated 64,393 tons of bombs on Britain, killing 51,509 and injuring approximately 211,000. In the heaviest raid on Coventry, discussed in greater detail below, 500 tons of bombs and 9,000 incendiary canisters combined to kill 544 and injure another 865. Overall, air raids on Britain signally failed to live up to pre-war expectation, with each ton of bombs killing or injuring an average of four and a half people.
On the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939, just 27 minutes after the declaration of war, the dread wail of air raid sirens across London announced that a raid was imminent. The alarm proved false, and was later attributed to a lone French aircraft which had strayed into British airspace. Nevertheless the phantom raid probably did much to fuel widespread rumours of mass devastation across the country, and on the east coast in particular. War Begins at Home, a Mass Observation anthology published the following year, records that
In the absence of any official explanation of the supposed raids – the first real impact of war – people simply invented the news they were not given, in the image of the war that had for so long been looming in their nightmares and daydreams. The result was an astonishing proliferation of rumour … Nearly every town of importance was rumoured to have been bombed to ruins during the early days of the war. Planes had been seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses falling in flames. The fantasy situation was further reflected in the fact that on at least two occasions anti-aircraft units opened fire on our own planes.
Mass Observation collected literally hundreds of outlandish rumours at this time, including tales that a German aircraft shot down was found to have been disguised as a British machine, and that a Zeppelin was brought down in Essex. Each wailing siren was followed by almost gleeful rumours, reported as fact, of the destruction wrought on some distant location. Even before war was officially declared, two girl evacuees from Bradford were told by the daughter of their host that their home town had been flattened by a secret weapon, while another common evacuation rumour told of billeting families infected with venereal disease by evacuees. Rumours of mass destruction continued into the Blitz proper, as the following 11 Corps summary of ‘Rumours and Indiscreet Talk’ dated 25 September 1940 illustrates:
One Division reports that troops returning from leave have sometimes brought back exaggerated stories of the horrible effect of aerial bombardment in the neighbourhood of their homes. There is a similar tendency among civilians to make fantastic estimates of the damage done.
A ‘widespread and persistent’ (yet false) belief arose that the destruction of domestic animals had been made compulsory. This led to a veritable pet holocaust during the first week of the war, in which some two million cats and dogs were put down in Greater London alone, many by their owners. If truth is indeed the first casualty in every war, then in 1939 many of man’s best friends ran it a close second.
When eventually the bombers arrived in force a number of myths quickly spread, most allied to the various signalling scares discussed in Chapter One. During the Blitz it was widely believed that German aircraft circled above British cities for hours prior to dropping their payload, patiently waiting for agents below to indicate targets. There were even isolated prosecutions for alleged signalling, including a German-Swiss resident of Kensington arrested after dark with a large cigar. According to one witness, a porter: ‘He was puffing hard to make a big light and pointing it at the sky.’ No less ridiculous was the prosecution of a man who struck a match on the platform of Bridgend station the day after war broke out.
As we saw in Chapter Two, the campaign in Flanders fed back several false reports of downed Luftwaffe bombers flown by female aircrew. During the Blitz, one of the best, and silliest, falsehoods held that many German airmen were rouged nancy boys. According to the Daily Mirror on 16 April 1941:
Officers of the German air force in a prisoner-of-war camp in England spend part of their pay on face creams. Two shot down had waved hair, rouged cheeks, painted lips and enamelled fingernails and toenails. The medical profession has a word for men of this type. It classifies them as moral deviates, a class with curious tendencies, including outbursts of emotional violence admirably suited to the ruthless tactics of the Luftwaffe.
Sir James Purves-Stewart, celebra
ted neurologist, discovered this abnormal German desire for face cream when he was inspecting what was at that time the only prison camp for German officers in this country. ‘These young men, every one of whom was wearing at least one Iron Cross, were ill-mannered, aggressive and supercilious … This particular form of perversion happens to flourish most vigorously in Germany, and particularly in Berlin, where it receives open encouragement … Some time after visiting this camp I was on an official mission in Spain and was given corroboration of this state of affairs by a reliable medical colleague. During the Spanish war he had personally seen a German officer shot down. This airman had waved hair, rouged cheeks, painted lips and enamelled finger and toenails. A Scots acquaintance told me that a German officer with precisely similar make-up had been shot down in Scotland.’
The same story is echoed in a memoir by the official censor, Admiral George Thomson, who recalled that Rudolph Hess was found to have ‘polished toenails’ when he parachuted into Scotland in May 1941. Another story ran that arrogant enemy aircrew believed part of the British Isles to be in German hands already. According to American observer Harvey Klemmer:
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 10
