If Britain Had Fallen

The Real Nazi Occupation Plans

Norman Longmate

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781783030828
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

What if Germany had invaded the British Isles? "A distinguished contribution to the canon of alternate histories" ( Military History ). If Britain Had Fallen is a fascinating contemplation of what it would have been like for Britain to live day to day under Nazi occupation. It discusses every phase of the scenario, from the German pre-invasion maneuvering and preparations, to the landing of troops, to the German seizure of power. What would have happened to the king and the government? Would America, Canada, or Australia have come to the rescue? Would the British people have grown to accept the occupation? Would the deportation of friends and the flying of the swastika from Buckingham Palace incite passive compliance, or brave resistance? All these questions and more are explored in this thought-provoking and chilling pastiche of the twentieth century's most enduring and darkest episodes. Based on a classic television film of the same name, this book includes illustrations and an updated foreword by military historian Norman Longmate.

Contents

New Introduction

Foreword

1 Plans

2 Preparations

3 Anticipation

4 Bombardment

5 Assault

6 Break-out

7 Defeat

8 Wanted: a Quisling

9 The Merseyside spies

10 Whatever happened to Nelson?

11 To laugh at the Führer is forbidden

12 How long is a Crayfish?

13 Requisitioned

14 Deported

15 See Germany and die

16 Resistance

17 Collaboration

18 Which way to the Black Market?

19 The New Order

20 The end of the nightmare

A note on sources

Index

Illustrations

Between pages 64 and 65

1 Building a strongpoint, Trafalgar Square, May 1940

2 Weapon training for Members of Parliament, July 1940

3 Assault training for Southern Railwaymen, June 1940

4 Central London street scene, May 1940

5 Enemy aliens en route to internment, May 1940

6 A roadblock in Southern England

7 Home Guards erecting a wire trap across a road

8 and 9 Anti-air-landing obstructions, July 1940

10 A roadblock near the coast

11 The removal of place-names. A notice in the Bristol area, June 1940

12 A church notice board, Summer 1940

13 Anti-tank roadblock, July 1940

14 An anti-aircraft gun’s crew taking post, 1940

15 Sea-bathing on the south coast, 1940 style

Between pages 144 and 145

16 Invasion barges, as seen by the RAF

17 Oil defences being tried out on the south coast

18 German storm troops under training

19 The defenders. Winston Churchill and General Sir Alan Brooke on the south coast

20 The attackers. Hitler with General von Brauchitsch and Admiral Raeder, on their way to an invasion conference, June 1940

21 An invasion barge, during an exercise at Calais

22 Embarkation exercise at Dieppe, September 1940

23 A cliff-scaling exercise on the French coast

24 and 25 A German parachutist and a Panzer break-through (a British artist’s impression)

26 and 27 German motorised troops on manoeuvres and a river-crossing exercise, with rubber boats

28 A pontoon bridge in use in Luxemburg, May 1940

29 German troops occupying Luxemburg

Between pages 192 and 193

30 German troops on Guernsey

31 Guernsey Occupation Orders, July 1940

32 German troops in St Peter Port, Guernsey

33 German tanks on occupied Guernsey

34 A German military bank in the Royal Parade, St Helier

35 Guernsey cinema taken over by the Germans

36 Anti-invasion defences under construction at Anne Port, Jersey

37 A captured French gun being towed into position on Guernsey

38 and 39 A gas-driven van and a horse-drawn van on Jersey

40 Resident of Jersey collecting Red Cross food parcels

41 The Germans burying British servicemen with full military honours

42 The New Jetty, Guernsey, awaiting possible demolition

43 Parliament Square, July 1940

Maps

British Isles, showing possible German invasion routes page 10

The south-east in 1940 page 14

Acknowledgement is due for permission to reproduce the following plates:

Associated Press 26, 28; Central Press 3,13, 43; Frank Falla 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 42; Fox photos 15; Imperial War Museum 16; Jersey Evening Post 34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41; Keystone 4, 23, 24; Radio Times Hulton Picture Library 1, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 19, 25, 27; Wide World 2; Reece Winstone 11.

The maps were drawn by Nigel Holmes. The illustration on page 123 is reproduced by courtesy of Rupert Hart Davis Ltd.

To
J.C.L

Who grew up in freedom, because we won

New Introduction

Since the first edition of this book was published in 1972 much has changed. At that time most of the population had lived through the war and the mere suggestion that Britain might have been defeated was widely regarded as an outrage. Today no one much under the age of seventy can have any recollection of the summer of 1940. Since the 1972 books and broadcast, programmes of the ‘What if…’ variety have become commonplace and alternative history is now respectable.

The military appreciation of how the country was supposedly defeated was not my work, though I fleshed out the experts’ narrative with my own fictional detail. The account of events still seems to be entirely plausible and all we learned later in the war suggests that the loss of air superiority would have been decisive.

On the subsequent pattern of occupation I think that I may have under-estimated the depredations that the country will have suffered, especially in the cultural sphere. I referred to the plundering of the great national collections, but experience in Europe, which still results in occasional court cases, makes clear that the major country houses would not have been spared and privately owned works of art might have been forcibly acquired, possibly for Nazi leaders, with art dealers being used to give the transaction a show of legality. One interesting point is that one official is quoted as favouring the return of ‘stolen works of art to their original owners’, instancing the Elgin Marbles, which a number of no doubt patriotic Britain have recently advocated.

The most sensitive chapters of the book dealt with the likelihood of collaboration and the emergence of a Quisling puppet government. Here, what happened in the Channel Islands is reassuring. A thorough investigation at the end of the war, though its findings were not made public until 1992, cleared the authorities in Jersey and Guernsey and the other islands of assisting the Germans more than was required to protect the civil population from worse treatment. The only charges brought against ordinary citizens were low-grade offences like working in menial posts for the enemy and even here the defendants could, and did, argue that they were acting under duress.

As for a British Quisling, a number of cases have come to light of prominent aristocratic or, occasionally, literary figures advocating friendship with Germany even after the war was visibly approaching or had begun, though their motives—honourable enough, if misguided—were to prevent at almost any price a repeat of the bloodbath of 1914–1918. A German invasion would probably have concentrated the minds of all but the most besotted, but there is one exception about whom, since his death in May 1972, much more has been revealed and all to his discredit. Wherever one looks, in Great Britain or the United States, the Duke of Windsor’s name emerges as the likeliest head of a pro-Nazi government. Only recently have we learned that Churchill was exasperated by the Duke’s reluctance to leave Europe when the war seemed lost. Not till November 1992 did an American journalist who interviewed the Duke in the Bahamas in 1940 reveal, as he claimed, the Duke’s strongly pro-German sympathies. There can be no question that the Germans regarded the Duke as sympathetic to the ‘new Germany’ and he unquestionably had Nazi sympathisers as friends and was, at the very least, indiscreet in revealing his opinion to visitors.

I believe that the Duke might have convinced himself that it was his duty to interpose himself between what had so recently been his People and the Germans and thereby reduce the worse effects of occupation, especially if the Germans had offered such inducements as the return of British prisoners of war and the survival of the British Empire.

The role of the Duchess, a grotesquely vain and self-centred woman with whom the Duke remained infatuated, would have been crucial. The Duke’s great quarrel with the British government and the royal family had been their joint refusal to grant his wife what he regarded as her proper status and refer to her as ‘Her Royal Highness’. If the Germans were, as they clearly would have been, willing to adopt this style it could have tipped the scales for the Duke and from ‘Your Royal Highness’ it would have been a small step, for both partners, to ‘Your Majesty’.

As for his chief minister, Sir Oswald Mosley remains the obvious candidate although there is no proof of his intended disloyalty. He too might well have persuaded himself that it was his duty to take office and to convince the nation that further resistance was futile and could only lead to bloody reprisals. Peace and prosperity as part of a single European economic unit lay, he might have argued, in co operation with Germany. And what alternative, with no prospect of liberation, was there?

In the long term, I suspect Hitler would have attacked the United States, with Wernher von Braun having by now have developed inter-continental missiles. If Germany still lacked the atom bomb the Americans might have won, and with aid of the dominions the New World would have set out to restore the freedom of the Old. This is the conclusion that I reached back in 1972 and it still seems valid.

N.R.L.

2004

Foreword

A possible German invasion and occupation of the British Isles is a subject that has attracted many previous writers. Some, like Erskine Childers in The Riddle of the Sands, first published in 1903, have been concerned solely with the preparations for an attack; some, like ‘Saki’ (H. H. Munro) in When William Came (1913), have dealt solely with life under German rule; some, like C. S. Forester in If Hitler had invaded England (published posthumously in 1971), have concentrated on the actual landing and the subsequent military campaign. This book is different from these distinguished predecessors, and from various others less distinguished, in that it covers the whole subject, from the initial planning, through the assault and later operations, up to the German seizure of power and daily life under enemy occupation. It is, I believe, the first book to do so, and it also differs from earlier works, which have included at least one play and two films, in that it is based on fact. The first four chapters, describing German preparations and the British reaction to them, are wholly factual, while the last thirteen describe, in an entirely non-fictional way, what German occupation would have been like, by reference to captured documents and by the record of how the Germans actually behaved in other countries, especially the one small corner of Britain they did occupy, the Channel Islands.

Thus of twenty chapters only three deal with imaginary events, and even these are very far from being mere fiction. The military formations taking part on both sides are those which actually existed at the time, and the places where the invaders landed are those they selected for the purpose. The course of the battles which would have followed is inevitably a matter of speculation, but I have been guided by the conclusions reached by a panel of high-ranking military advisers to the associated television programme, who studied the problem at length, and by the narrative of the likely course of events prepared by the military historian, Mr Basil Collier, who is the author of the relevant volume of the official government History of the Second World War and an acknowledged authority on the subject. I have added a good deal of description and a few incidents to the factual skeleton, but have included nothing that could not have happened. The massacre of civilians by German troops, for example, did actually occur, though in 1944 in France and not in 1940 in the Sussex village where I have set it, and to which I have given the only imaginary place-name in the book.

Any historian must feel some diffidence about mixing fact and fiction, but I finally decided that, provided the three fictional chapters were clearly signposted as such, the technique was in this case legitimate, partly because, as mentioned earlier, such accounts have a long and respectable ancestry, but, more important, because the preceding events would directly have affected the nature of the occupation following them. Denmark, which capitulated without a struggle, had a far easier time than Norway, which put up a gallant fight, and life in occupied Britain, after weeks of bloodshed and with no government in being, would clearly have begun in a very different atmosphere from that of the Channel Islands where not a shot was fired and the civil authority was still in being.

The book has its origin in the television programme of the same name, but it is something more than the ‘book of the programme’, not least because a volume of this size can include more material than even a three-hour television programme. Although I have had the benefit of discussions with the producer about his intentions, and have had access to the documents assembled for the production and the transcripts of the interviews recorded for it, I had when I wrote the book seen neither a complete script nor any part of the final programme, which was then still being edited. Much of the material I have used is based on my own research and does not appear in the programme. Although on the military side I have closely followed the conclusions of the experts, my own military service, as a private in the Home Guard and an NCO in the Army, having been at less elevated levels, I have felt free to dissent in minor matters, and the account of the form occupation would have taken is wholly my own.

While writing the book I have constantly had cause to feel grateful that the whole of my military service, after preliminary training, was spent in studying, though in a very junior capacity, the problems of an occupied country, first from outside and then on the spot. From August 1944 to May 1945 I worked in London in the Supreme Headquarters Mission to Denmark, moving with the Mission to Copenhagen at the end of the war, and remaining there until I was demobilised in September 1947. It was, I now appreciate, a valuabl...

Table of contents

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