Station Officer Thomas Goodman, a London fireman on relief at Dover, heard of an attempted landing at Sandwich Bay, 14 miles north: the inshore waters, it was said, were black with German dead. Taking a staff car, Goodman set off – to find only baking sands and blue sea, not a soul in sight.
In The Big Lie, John Baker White also records rumours of ‘a great pillar of smoke rising from Sandwich Bay and the secret burial in the sand dunes of hideously charred bodies’. A more detailed account of a legendary German landing at Sandwich was given by David Collyer in Deal and District At War. According to John Wilson, then a Home Guard messenger boy, on the night of 15 August 1942:
It was about midnight when there was a terrific knocking at our door, and when we opened it there was an army dispatch rider. He informed my father that the invasion alert had gone off and that there was a general call-out on. Dad rushed over to the Home Guard HQ, while I got dressed and set out on my bicycle to knock up the rest of the platoon. Looking across the north-east, towards the Stour Estuary, all hell had been let loose. I could see machine-gun fire, flares, and star shells all going up, and even the anti-aircraft guns at Manston aerodrome seemed to be firing almost horizontally across Pegwell Bay.
One clue as to what was going on that night emerged later. At the Reed Barn school in Ash village was a detachment of the Dorset Regiment. They were on duty in the pillboxes down at Sandwich Bay for three days a week, and then came back for a three-day rest, then went back on duty again. One of the local girls had become friendly with one of the young Dorset lads, but as her parents did not approve, she used to bring him up to our home.
She had arranged to meet him the evening after all that rumpus down at Sandwich Bay, but he did not turn up, and neither did he appear on the following evening, so she started to get worried. We asked some of the Dorset lads what had happened to him, but we couldn’t get anything out of them. Father had dealings with the Dorset detachment about rifle and ammunition supply for the Home Guard, so he tackled their sergeant about it after a few days, but all he could get out of him was: ‘Well, it was their own fault – they were all asleep!’
Nothing more happened until six or seven months later, when the young lady concerned arrived at our house in tears, having just received a Red Cross postcard from her young man – from Germany!
A similar ‘lost patrol’ myth has been attached to Hollesley Bay, Suffolk. According to local historian Derek Johnson, in December 1939 a patrol from the Essex Regiment vanished while patrolling the beach between Shingle Street and Bawdsey:
George Wright told of a strange ‘do’ on a bleak winter night soon after his arrival. George was a corporal wireless operator. One of his jobs was to take hourly wireless reports from the various patrols scattered along the coast. One night late in December 1939, he lost contact with the Shingle Street squad. By 8 am the following morning, all the other patrols were back – but still no sign of the men from Shingle Street. By now there was great concern for the safety of the missing men and a search party was dispatched … All that was found was a rifle and a steel helmet near the water’s edge.
No trace was ever found of the men, and the affair was hushed up. The general feeling was that the men had been taken by a patrolling submarine or E-boat, in the hope that they could give valuable information on some of the secret radar installations and defences along the coastline.
Sadly the tale is full of holes. No relevant unit histories or war diaries confirm such a loss, while the idea that Home Defence patrols were routinely equipped with portable wireless sets in 1939 or 1940 is a nonsense. Reports of snatched sentries were common in Britain throughout the war, and elderly Home Guards were even reported in German prison camps. Typical is the following story given to the author by George Hearse, concerning his father, also named George:
Being a 1914–18 war veteran my father took part in Home Guard duties in London. Sometime late in 1943 there was an appeal for Home Guard personnel to volunteer for weekend guard duty at a sensitive location on the coast. One man said goodbye to his wife on the station platform in London, expecting to be home in a few days’ time. His wife heard nothing more about him until several weeks later, when she was informed he was a prisoner of war in Germany. My father told me this story some time before his death in 1945, and I have no reason to doubt its authenticity.
The snatched sentry legend is in many respects similar to the flurry of press reports which appeared between August and December 1914, when it was reported that a number of sentries (usually Territorials) had been shot dead by unknown assassins. Few if any were actually killed in this way, and the reports were more likely to have been a ruse to keep the population on their toes. The same is undoubtedly true of the deadly motorcyclist, another First World War bogeyman, sometimes reported to be touring the country disguised as a scoutmaster, and offering poisoned sweets to sentries. Remarkably, he too rose like Lazarus two decades later, as former police officer George Ffoulkes recalled:
Between 1940 and 1944 I was a Superintendent of Police in the Balasore district of India, where there was an ordnance proving station. In about 1940–41 two Royal Artillery officers came out from England and, in conversation one night, told me how when they had been posted to a coastal battery in East Anglia, a party of Germans had come ashore, ridden round the countryside on motor bikes, and thrown grenades into some of the coastal batteries.
The incident is more likely to have been an unannounced training exercise by a Home Guard Auxiliary Unit, but like the legend of the snatched sentries, the truth of the matter is impossible to gauge with any certainty.
Another invasion myth which first surfaced in 1954 concerned psychic defence and witchcraft. During the summer of 1940 a gathering of witches was said to have been held in the New Forest with the object of erecting the so-called Great Circle. According to Gerald Gardner, the self-proclaimed King of the Witches, the ancient magical ritual of the Great Circle was invoked only in times of acute national crisis, and in the past had been staged to repulse the Spanish Armada and Napoleon. The ritual itself involved raising ‘a great cone of power’, which was then directed across the Channel towards ‘Hitler’s brain’. However the rite proved a serious drain on the life force of the assembled covens, and was repeated only four times before fatalities among the older witches forced the plan to be abandoned. In Witchcraft Today (1954) Gardner wrote:
I am not saying that they stopped Hitler. All I say is that I saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea into his mind, and this was repeated several times afterwards; and though all the invasion barges were ready, the fact was that Hitler never even tried to come.
Another version holds that the rite was staged by a determined Hampshire coven, and involved the deliberate sacrifice of the oldest and frailest member, who volunteered to perform the open-air ritual ‘skyclad’ (i.e. naked) without the usual protective covering of bear-fat. Unfortunately the gathering took place on the coldest May night in years, and over the next fortnight two other members of the coven also contracted pneumonia and died. Quite how bear-fat might have been obtained in ration-hit Britain is not explained, however. No less far-fetched was the following elaboration proposed by Richard Deacon (as Donald McCormick) in his book Murder by Witchcraft:
Fire and wind were the traditional weapons of witches against ships at sea, and it is interesting to recall that in the late summer of 1940 much propaganda was made of the story that German invasion barges were destroyed in mid-Channel by burning oil on the waters …
Atrocity propaganda was far less common in the Second World War than in the First World War. Nevertheless, a myth widespread at the time, yet forgotten today, concerned a particularly barbaric punishment inflicted on Allied prisoners by their Axis captors. Two versions from 1942 are recorded by Marie Bonaparte in Myths of War:
A ‘Cape-coloured’ taken prisoner at Tobruk wrote to his wife, in South Africa, that the Italians were treating him well, but added that sinc
e she was collecting stamps she should peel the stamp off the envelope, as it was rare. She does so and finds written below: ‘It’s dreadful, they’ve cut out my tongue.’
A major captured at Singapore, writes to his wife that the Japanese are treating him well and advises her to remove the stamp from the envelope. Below is written: ‘They have cut out my tongue.’
An American version is recorded by Paul Fussell in Wartime, which told of a mother who received a letter from her soldier son held in a Japanese PoW cage. He tells her that he is well and that she is not to worry, and adds that she might like to soak off the stamp on the envelope to give to a collector friend. When she does so, she discovers the usual message that his tongue has been removed. In truth the tongue story is nothing more than an echo of the lurid stories of castration and eye-gouging common to ancient wars. Somewhat less easy to fathom were rumours that Polish officers and men were liable to bite off the nipples of women rash enough to consort with them. This bizarre story was current in 1939 in the vicinity of Coetquidan in Brittany, where the Polish Legion was stationed, and emerged again in Africa in 1942.
The fact that Italian soldiers were rumoured to confiscate tongues from their prisoners seems surprising today, for there remains a strong perception that Mussolini’s troops were a cowardly rabble, reluctant to fight, yet all too keen to surrender en masse, often while carrying neatly packed suitcases. The other stereotype was of ‘a lot of opera singers’ (according to Roosevelt), and vainglorious dandies ‘pomaded and scented, accompanied by framed pictures, birdcages and similar domestic amenities, their elegant spare uniforms neatly folded in extra suitcases and trunks’. In North Africa the Italian army retreated so often that their trucks were said to be fitted with five reverse gears, while in London a popular dance-step called The Tuscana was ‘supposedly based on the Italian’s way of fighting ie one step forward, two steps back’. Later, on the steppes of Russia, it was rumoured that the Duce’s frozen soldiers were issued with cardboard boots. Although there is a great deal of truth in these many anecdotes about Italian military ineffectiveness, the charge of inherent cowardice is a myth, for the Italian soldier was more often the victim of inadequate training, poor equipment and incompetent leadership.
The myth and reality of the Italian soldier in combat between June 1940 and September 1943 is the subject of a searching essay by Brian Sullivan published in 1997. Although Mussolini was clearly a supreme military incompetent, he had made it clear to Hitler before the outbreak of war that the Italian army would not be prepared for a war with the West until at least 1943. Following an opportunist attack on France in June 1940, but finding the war unwon, his army was obliged to fight on for over three years with arms and equipment that was almost always inferior to those of their opponents. Training was poor, consisting largely of close order drill and marching, while most soldiers went into combat in 1940–41 having never seen a tank, let alone trained with one. During the same period Italian troops were issued with a motley assortment of rifles of no fewer than four different calibres, ranging from 6.5 mm to 10.35 mm, and creating obvious problems of ammunition supply, while no fewer than seven different calibres of machine-gun were adopted. In June 1940 the great majority of Italy’s 10,000 artillery pieces were of pre-First World War design, many of them captured from Austro-Hungarian forces in 1918, and again of a bewildering variety of types and calibres. Of 1,600 so-called tanks, all but 300 were small, turretless L3/35 machine-gun carriers, while trucks and transport were in constantly short supply. The Italian invasion of Egypt from Libya in September 1940 was never likely to succeed, as Brian Sullivan explains:
The problem was that Libya was a country with very scanty water resources. There’s no river in the entire country. What water there is is in artesian wells, but to make matters worse there had been a drought previously, so there was even less water than usual. The Italian army had very few motor vehicles. The majority of its forces were infantry in the full sense of the word: they were foot soldiers. Marshal Graziani had some tanks and artillery, but basically if his army was going to reach the Nile Delta it would have to march on foot. And, of course, June, July, August and September is a period of blazing heat. In order for him to cross the Western Desert he had to supply his men with water, and he had a lot of men: well over 10,000.
The result was inevitable, and between December 1940 and February 1941 British and Commonwealth forces captured 150,000 prisoners and 400 tanks. Cowardice played little part. Instead, large masses of immobile Italian infantry were time and again cut off by Allied armour, and had no choice but to surrender, or die of hunger and thirst. The Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940 fared little better, coming just three weeks after Mussolini had demobilised fully one-third of his army for economic and political reasons. As a result the gaps in the ranks were hastily filled with raw recruits, who received little or no training before being thrust into the front line. It is therefore little wonder that the Italians failed to break through, and that Greece eventually had to be subdued by German forces.
After these crushing defeats in North Africa and the Balkans, the Italian army managed a partial recovery. During the spring and summer of 1941 its battle performance improved immeasurably in North Africa, culminating in the defeat of the British 22nd Armoured Brigade at Bir el Gobi in late November. The following year Italian paratroop units fought with skill and courage at Alam el Halfa, and at El Alamein to virtual extinction. Although the three divisions Mussolini unwisely sent to assist Germany in Russia were handicapped by a lack of transport, they fought well enough along the Donetz-Donbas canal from December 1941 and March 1942, although in the final tally lost as many men to frostbite as to bullets. Today the hapless Italian army is remembered only for its poor early showing in the Western Desert, but 75,000 died in Russia and the Ukraine. Field casualties in North Africa totalled just 38,000 dead, although another 17,000 were lost at sea as a result of attacks on transports by the Royal Navy and RAF. In the final analysis, according to Sullivan:
Throughout the war, whether under Mussolini or Badoglio, the Italian soldier had done his best, fighting for what he was told were his country’s interests and honour. 350,000 died in battle, succumbed to wounds or perished in prison camps. The incompetent leaders at the summit of the fascist regime and its military-monarchist successor failed to match such selflessness and dedication. The Italian soldier deserved better, even considering the purpose of his war. That he fought for an evil cause in 1940–43 is incontestable. That he fought heroically is undeniable.
In Britain, at least, notable military disasters were often followed by allegations of betrayal and treachery from within. The loss of the Royal Oak in 1939, and the disastrous performance of the British army in Norway, Belgium and France in 1940, were all blamed at the time on the mythical fifth column. In much the same way, later costly or ill-fated operations at St Nazaire, Dieppe and Arnhem all led to conjecture that they were compromised by enemy spies.
The facts of the disastrous Dieppe raid are well known. On 19 August 1942 an Allied force of 6,000 men carried out a daylight ‘reconnaissance in force’ against the French coast at Dieppe, codenamed Operation Jubilee. Intended as an operational trial for an eventual Second Front, and to relieve pressure on the Russians by forcing the German High Command to retain divisions in France in a defensive role, the plan involved a bold frontal assault on the port by two infantry brigades and 27 new Churchill tanks. Once the coastal artillery on the adjoining headlands had been silenced, and the town cleared, a five-mile perimeter was to be established, within which various intelligence gathering missions would to be completed prior to an orderly withdrawal. To ensure complete surprise, the landing was made without the benefit of a preliminary naval bombardment or air attack, and the result was an unmitigated disaster. The Canadian contingent, which comprised three-fifths of the main assault force, was decimated on the beaches. Of the 4,963 Canadian troops who took part in the raid, only 2,210 returned to England, of whom 586 were w
ounded; 907 were killed, and 1,874 taken prisoner. Indeed the Canadian army lost more prisoners at Dieppe than in the whole eleven months of the later campaign in north-west Europe, or in their twenty months in Italy. A destroyer and 33 other vessels were lost, as well as every last one of the tanks. In the skies above the port, the RAF flew 2,617 sorties and lost 106 aircraft, including 88 Spitfires, with 113 pilots killed or missing. The whole débâcle lasted just nine hours.
Astonishingly, Lord Louis Mountbatten, then the head of Combined Operations, felt able to report to the War Cabinet that the raid had gone off ‘very satisfactorily’, and that of the men who had returned ‘all I have seen are in great form’. In fact rumours of traps and betrayals began to circulate among the survivors almost immediately. A survey by the postal censor in the weeks following Operation Jubilee revealed that 5 per cent of Canadian survivors writing home blamed their horrifying casualty rate (68 per cent) on a betrayal, while returning prisoners later claimed their German captors had boasted of being forewarned. Lord Beaverbrook is said to have been convinced of the truth of the rumour, while one version even held that the tip-off had been deliberate, in order to prove to Stalin that a Second Front was an impossibility. According to historian Eric Maguire, writing in 1963:
One fact emerged, however: every survivor of the holocaust on those beaches was convinced that the enemy was forewarned. That they should have thought so is not altogether surprising. They point out that after weeks spent at practice embarkations and landings, always under cover of darkness or smoke, they were embarked in broad daylight on the 18th, with no smoke cover and with rumours circulating of German aircraft in some areas. The very fact of Dieppe being the target again was disquieting, and as their briefing had given them no idea at all of the fire-power they were to encounter on the beaches, it is little wonder that they formed the conclusion that their arrival was expected.
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 23
