Chamberlain was woken at 0300 to be told that Halifax was dead, although other details were uncertain. The unwritten British constitution had never been intended to cope with such a situation, but Chamberlain’s view was that as leader of the majority party, he was once again Prime Minister. Attempts to contact King George VI in Scotland for confirmation were unsuccessful. Fearful for his own life, Chamberlain moved to Halifax’s command bunker, from where he telephoned members of the War Cabinet with the news that some kind of uprising had occurred and that an armistice was even more urgent before the country collapsed into anarchy. Eden in particular, now back at the War Office, challenged Chamberlain’s authority and refused to order the army to stand down. At the Admiralty and Air Ministry, neither Churchill nor Wood could be found. In desperation, Chamberlain resorted to telephoning the owners and editors of every Fleet Street newspaper, ordering them to place the British surrender in their morning editions.
So on Thursday, July 18, Britain awoke to newspaper headlines (and German propaganda radio broadcasts) proclaiming that all troops should lay down their arms. This was easier to say than to do; the Royal Navy in particular showed little inclination to surrender; the Channel and the skies above southern England were not safe for the Germans yet. But gradually the cease-fire took hold. Seizing the advantage, Manstein flew in two more regiments to Manston over the next forty-eight hours, together with three squadrons of Heinkels and two of Messerschmitts. On Friday, Hitler addressed the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House, “to appeal once more to reason and common sense” for a total British surrender.
22
With the fighting effectively over, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess flew to Croydon aerodrome next afternoon to arrange details. Hess caused brief bewilderment by demanding to speak to the Duke of Hamilton, an obscure and harmless Scottish nobleman. After discussion, it was found he meant Gen. Sir Ian Hamilton, the First World War veteran who was chairman of the British Legion, on the assumption that he would act as figurehead leader of the country. The doughty old warrior’s reply is a matter of historical record.
All this took a few days in which those unwilling to give up the struggle in Britain considered their options. German military control extended only to a corner of southeast England, and in theory every inch of the country could have been turned into a battleground. But in practice, as the Luftwaffe’s strength increased, not even Northern Ireland was safe, and the most important British military asset—the fleet—could not be protected for long. By July 22, a month to the day from the capitulation of France, it was all over. Chamberlain simply vanished; later German investigations concluded that, knowing he was dying of throat cancer, he had either shot himself or taken poison. By then the Home Fleet had put to sea from northern Scotland protecting a great convoy that included the British government in exile, and almost 200,000 troops under the now Field Marshal Montgomery.
As a British historian has rightly concluded, despite appearances, Britain was not defeated by any decisive German military victory. Rather, as the result of errors and misfortunes, Britain “had quietly vanished amid the stupendous events of the Second World War, like a ship-of-the-line going down unperceived in the smoke and confusion of battle.”
23
Persistently overestimating the Germans, and underestimating its own people’s will to fight, the British government became the victim of its fears. All now depended on Canada, the rest of the Empire, and above all the United States, if the fight against Germany was to continue.
Churchill became Prime Minister on May 10, heading a coalition government, and took many of the actions rejected by Halifax in this account. Otherwise, much of this chapter reflects the reality of 1940. The Battle of France took place as described up to May 21. But Rommel and his division both survived the Battle of Arras; it was Lieutenant Most who died, and there is no monument on “Rommel’s Hill.” Rommel’s frightened complaints contributed to the German decision to halt their Panzer forces on May 24-27. This, together with Gort’s redeployment of his two divisions northward without waiting on May 27 (and Montgomery’s remarkable maneuver, which deserves to be better known) enabled the BEF to pull back intact into the Dunkirk perimeter. All but 68,000 men of the BEF were rescued from Dunkirk.
Raeder asked for a rough plan for invading Britain in November 1939, and raised the matter with Hitler on May 20-21, but Führer Orders 16 and 17 were not issued until July 16 and August 1 respectively. The only historical plan for Sea Lion was the full-scale September option, which was not carried out, partly because of the Luftwaffe’s failure in the Battle of Britain, partly because of the plan’s own military unfeasibility. It was argued at the time, and later, that Hitler never saw this Sea Lion as anything more than a deception plan and a way of encouraging rivalry between his services.
A British political surrender or negotiated peace in June or July has been proposed both in alternative and mainstream history, but this was not a realistic option if Britain hoped to keep its Empire. I have therefore devised a fictitious and smaller version of Sea Lion, begun back in January 1940, which could realistically have been mounted in July. Even this fails militarily, but I have accompanied it with a political collapse in London. Those who wish to read of how a July version of Sea Lion might have succeeded are directed to Kenneth Macksey’s admirable book
Invasion!
Much of this account is based on well-documented speculation by both sides on what might have happened. Manstein was sent to command the XXXVIII Army Corps in January 1940, which was later slated to lead the first wave of Sea Lion. Kesselring was a supporter of the July launch of Sea Lion. Student favored the June option, but, badly wounded in Rotterdam in May, he was not available to make his voice heard. Statistics given are either real or plausible projections favoring a best case for the Germans. I am grateful to Maj. Gen. K. J. Drewienkiewicz, Royal Engineers (ret.), for the performance of TA divisions in the campaign; to Dr. Niall Barr for Hess’s confusion between the two Hamiltons, and to Maj. Gordon Corrigan, Royal Gurkha Rifles (ret.) of Eastry.
In writing this account I have set myself a small historian’s challenge: from the Downing Street meeting of May 10 to Hitler’s “Appeal to Reason” speech of July 19, all quotations are real (even Halifax’s “finest hour” speech!), although the context has sometimes been changed. There are two exceptions. I have included Anthony Price’s version of “Dynamo” as if it were fact, as a tribute to a fine novelist. In the same spirit, I have borrowed Churchill’s “Day we say no!” from the Greek “Ohi Day” of October 28, 1940.
The pessimism of the British Army high command, including the role of Mason-Macfarlane, is a matter of record; that this was a military conspiracy including Gort is one possible explanation (I have discussed the available evidence in Bond and Taylor’s book listed below). Göring was indeed an avid reader of British thrillers, although as far as I know there was no new German translation of
Riddle of the Sands
produced in 1939. “Operation Smith” was identified in 1940 by British Intelligence as a codename for a German invasion plan. Model did play bridge, but “Small Slam” was his plan for what became the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. My execution of Sea Lion owes something to the Anglo-Canadian Dieppe raid in 1942, and something to the Anglo-American airborne landings in Sicily in 1943, both of which, for all their problems, were better planned than Sea Lion in any of its forms. The battle of Manston is loosely based on Student’s capture of Maleme in Crete in May 1941.
I have put “Boy” Browning in charge of the Whitehall guard on June 17 for my own amusement. In fact the connection with the Oxford Movement did not damage his career too much, and he was a brigadier by 1939. Churchill’s behavior that day owes something to a famous photograph of him cradling a Thompson gun; Chamberlain’s fate owes something to the ambiguous reports of Hitler’s death in 1945. The idea of Churchill bringing troops into Parliament is fantasy, but I believe he would have enjoyed emulating Oliver Cromwell.
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Selling War
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———,
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1
. Cull,
Selling War
, 34.
2
. See Badsey, Stephen, “British High Command and the Reporting of the Campaign,” in Bond and Taylor,
The Battle for France and Flanders.
3
. Butler,
Grand Strategy
, vol. II, 269; Hinsley,
British Intelligence in the Second World War
, vol. I, 515-19.