GREAT BRITAIN: Invasion: Preview and Prevention

Invasion: Preview and Prevention The last time that an enemy (William the Conqueror) successfully invaded Great Britain, he assembled 700 transports (open barges) at St. Valéry-sur-Somme, waited for a fair wind, embarked an Army of 5,000 men, including 2,000 mobile armored units (mounted knights and their squires), sailed overnight across the English Channel (70 miles) and landed at Pevensey next morning. Immediately he marched to the nearest big city (Hastings), which he started fortifying (building a castle). The British (under King Harold of Wessex), though forewarned, had been drawn away by another invader on the east coast (Harold of Norway) whom they repelled (Battle of Stamford Bridge). Returning hurriedly to the Channel, their lightly armed forces (Saxon soldiers with shields and two-handed axes, peasants with javelins and stone-tipped clubs), were easy carving for the mounted, armored Normans. In October, Conqueror William won the Battle of Hastings, where King Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye. William proceeded leisurely to London, where he was crowned on Christmas Day, 1066.

Three enemies since William have threatened Britain seriously with invasion. The first, Philip II of Spain, built a great armada for the try, but it got wrecked by battle and storm near the British coasts. The second, Napoleon, threatened from Boulogne in 1805, but his inept Navy and his elaborate feint to draw the British Navy off to the West Indies failed miserably. The third, Hitler, last week put out preliminary feelers over southeast England. Some chickens, a pony, a cow and two heifers were the first victims.

Last week Abbeville (eleven miles up the Somme estuary from William’s embarkation point) and Boulogne were both in the grasp of Adolf Hitler. So apparently was Calais, nearest port to the British coast (25 miles from Dover). But the attempt by Hitler to invade Britain his power dream’s dearest chapter—was not expected by experts to come from these beachheads.

If it came they expected it from Dutch and Belgian ports taken fortnight ago, from Norwegian beachheads taken in April, and perhaps from Eire, where beachheads might be established with the quisling connivance of the Irish Republican Army. Experts expected landing parties to concentrate on the southeast lowlands of England—Kent, the Thames valley, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk—with diversions in the Scottish lowlands and in Wales, for the invasion’s main target would be the munitions-making Midlands. This plan has been openly recommended by Ewald Banse, professor of military science at Brunswick Technological Institute, whose writings have great weight in Nazi war councils.

Banse Plan. In an invasion the German Air Force would have the task of razing the naval bases at Harwich, Sheerness, Chatham, Ramsgate, Dover, Portsmouth, Southampton, Cowes, Plymouth (see map, p. 18), Britain’s Fleet air arm. Coastal Command of the Royal Air Force, and anti-aircraft batteries would have to protect Britain’s naval bases as best they could. Last week’s preliminary Nazi bombings in Essex and Yorkshire were possibly to test and spot these defenses. German coastal cannon planted at Calais, Cap Gris Nez. Boulogne might aid in trying to reduce the British bases. Britain’s coastal batteries have long range but are old. Heavy units of the Royal Navy, scarcely daring to contest invading forces in the narrow straits area, would probably withdraw to stations up the west British coast or down the French coast at Le Havre Cherbourg, Brest. To light units, though vulnerable to air bombs, would fall a large part of the defensive work.

Allied sources estimated—possibly over-estimated—last week that Hitler has 20,000 parachutists in reserve for such an invasion, and 2,000 transport planes capable of ferrying almost one division per hour of regular infantry across the 130-mile median distance from the European to the British lowlands. But the full power of the invading troops—armored equipment and artillery—would have to go in surface transports. British mines threaten these, so before the parachutists take off Phase 2 of the German plan would be minesweeping. Several narrow channels through the minefields might be swept in one dark night. The Nazi minesweepers would be guarded by swift, shallow-draft motor torpedo boats. Light units of the British Fleet would face a test of vigilance and daring that night and the next dawn, when the transports and their German naval and air escorts set out on William the Conqueror’s path.

As the waves of the ocean would be the waves of German bombers—heavy, light and dive—which would precede the sea ferries and air-troop transports. Professor Banse long ago recommended Norfolk-Suffolk as a base for the G. E. F. because “the Great Ouse, which flows into the Wash, and a number of streams flowing into the Blackwater estuary . . . make the peninsula into a regular island, which provides an invading army with safe and roomy quarters from which it can threaten London, which is quite close and without natural defenses on that side—and also the industrial Midlands.”

Professor Banse concluded: “We confess that it gives us pleasure to meditate on the destruction that must sooner or later overtake this proud and seemingly invincible nation. . . . The above sentences would appear monstrous, nay rank blasphemy, to every Englishman and Englishwoman in the world—if they ever saw them.”

Britain Prepares. Last week Britons grimly prepared their last-ditch defenses for such an onslaught. Parliamentarians carrying gas masks passed through barbed-wire entanglements and past sandbagged guard posts in order to reach Government buildings. Motorists were cautioned to remove spark plugs from their cars when parking so that Nazi invaders could not use them. An 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew was imposed on all foreigners, Americans and Frenchman included. Motor launches between 30 and 100 feet in length were requisitioned by the Admiralty for coastal patrol. Police swooped down on firearms dealers, gunsmiths and pawnbrokers throughout Britain and confiscated their guns and pistols. A new “treachery bill,” designed to put teeth in the present treason law dating from the 14th Century, was rushed through Parliament, which voted dictatorial powers to the Government (see p. 29).

War Secretary Anthony Eden’s call for minutemen to join the L. D. V. (Local Defense Volunteers) was responded to by 500,000 embattled Britons between 17 and 65, who signed up as parashooters. Elderly gentlemen shouldering elaborate sporting rifles marched to recruiting stations before dawn to be first in line, and a gouty colonel from Epsom declared, “Dammit, sir, I would be pleased to patrol the Derby Race Course.” The Duke of Atholl’s private Army of 250 kilted gamekeepers and farmers at Blair Castle enrolled in a body. The rifle squad assigned the task of shooting wild animals that might escape from the London Zoo during an air raid was told to add ‘chutists to its list. Issued old Army uniforms or khaki denim overalls 28 and overseas caps to give them military status, Britain’s minutemen, nicknamed “Last-Ditch Volunteers,” patrolled moors and downs, while flying columns in radio-equipped cars prowled the highways. Like their compatriots who colonized America, farmers ploughing in overalls kept their rifles close at hand.

Criticizing the L. D. V., onetime War Secretarv Leslie Hore-Belisha declared: “The new scheme is amateurish.” Amateurish or not, the last-ditch volunteers were as determined a group of defenders as ever faced a frontier, and a pilot of an R. A. F. plane who made a forced night landing in a field near North Baddesley. Hampshire found himself immediately surrounded by grim-faced farmers armed with shotguns, scythes and pitchforks. In Ulster three R. A. F. aviators were fired upon and wounded when parashooters mistook them for Nazi air visitors.

Squaring off to meet invasion, the British Army High Command made its chief defense strategist, hulking, vigorous General Sir Edmund Ironside, Commander in Chief of the Home Forces. General Sir Edmund, who sucks mint bullets (English for jawbreaker) while working up battle plans and as a secret agent once entered the German Army and won a medal for valor, surrendered his post as Chief of the Imperial Staff to an offense specialist in tank and artillery warfare, Lieut. General Sir John Greer Dill.

Big Fish Caught. Seven thousand men and 3,500 women were interned as enemy aliens. The net thrown out for fifth columnists and quislings brought in some bigger fish, including Leader Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists; Captain Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay, Conservative M. P. and ardent Hitlerite; onetime M. P. John Beckett, militant pacifist and nuisance (he once tried to steal the Speaker’s mace in the House of Commons); Germany’s master spy and saboteur in World War I, Captain Franz von Rintelen.

When police arrived at the “Black House” of Sir Oswald’s British Union, they did not find the Führer himself, but eight black-shirted comrades who lined up and shouted “Hell Mosley!” before they were hustled off to Brixton Gaol. Married with Nazi pomp to Diana Guinness, sister of the Führer’s bullet-punctured friend Unity Freeman-Mitford, with Hitler reported to have been best man. Sir Oswald recently celebrated “my forthcoming arrest” in a swank London restaurant. He was picked up at home and police were sent after his wife, who had headed for Eire.

Captain von Rintelen, who came to England in 1926 when he fell out with Arch-Intrigant Franz von Papen, was arrested even though he is over 60, the age limit for interning enemy aliens. Styling himself a “fugitive from Naziism.” Rintelen is known in England as an elderly Beau Brummel and author of a best-seller on espionage. Americans remember him as a slick spy who caused $50,000,000 worth of damage to American industry and commerce in World War I. He expressed surprise at his arrest, but decided to “take it philosophically.”

Impressed with contra-fifth-column measures, Chicago Daily News’s William H. Stoneman, no scaremonger, cabled his paper: “A good many people who have been living in comparative security are going to be shot—and speedily. The most sensational story of the war will be broken within the near future.”

Rumor-Mongers Silenced. While Scotland Yard worked to remove a tangible menace from the British Isles. Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper inveighed against the more insidious danger of “lethargy, defeatism and rumor.” Declaring that the impending dangers are being faced “in confidence, indeed in pride,” he opened a campaign against rumormongering. It had been verified that “They say . . .” stories had caused the evacuation of several French villages and had thrown thousands of peasants into panic, and even as Duff Cooper spoke, a creepy story circulated in London about a nun in a railway carriage who stooped to pick up a newspaper and revealed to horrified passengers a man’s hairy forearm. With “wide powers” to stop rumormongering, police went to work. A news vendor in Portsmouth was sentenced to three months for shouting “Germans bomb London!”

Bread & Brandy. In Eire, members of the I. R. A. received instructions to go to Communion before May 24, whereupon the authorities of North Ireland got busy on a thorough Ulster roundup of suspects. They know that no Catholic Irishman will risk his life without first taking Communion bread.

Word got out that a German ‘chutist had actually landed in Eire. Police arrested two suspects, found parachute, cap and equipment, but no ‘chutist. Raiding the house of a Dubliner named Stephen Carroll Held, they next found not only an opened German parachute, German Air Force cap and German uniform insignia, but also maps of Dublin bridges, harbors and airdrome, a box containing $20,000 in U. S. money. The parachute, Held explained, had been left by a German named Heinrich Brandy, who had stayed at his house after arriving from the sky. The second suspect, Mrs. Iseult Stuart, daughter of Maud Gonne (see p. 76), wife of an aviator now living in Berlin, was charged with providing civilian clothes to a ‘chutist and concealing him.

Thoroughly angry at what he considered injudicious incitement of a belligerent neighbor, Prime Minister de Valera declared, “It took 600 years to get the British out of this country. We don’t want them or any others to come in here again. . . . Unfortunately there is a small group that appears to be meditating treason. I tell them . . . that such a state of affairs will not be tolerated. . . .”

Day of Prayer. United by a common menace, Britons of all faiths joined in an Empire Sunday of Prayer (see p. 48). Accompanied by Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands, King George and Queen Elizabeth attended services at Westminster Abbey to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury assure them that “it cannot be the will of God that a rule of brute force . . . should prevail on the earth.” Catholic Cardinal Hinsley’s more vitriolic sermon at Westminster Cathedral, proclaiming that “there cannot be peace until by God’s aid this hideous system [Hitlerism] vanishes from the world,” was interrupted by a middle-aged woman quoting Scripture: “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it. . . .” She was hustled out.

Said George Bernard Shaw: “Now that we’re thoroughly frightened, we’ll be all right. Until the British are frightened, they never do anything but play cricket, football, hopscotch and tennis.”