If Britain Had Fallen by Norman Longmate Read Free Book Online

of the British Isles.
    German radio commentator, 18 July 1940
    Great Britain really began to prepare to resist an invasion on 10 May 1940. At dawn that morning Germany began her great offensive in the West -but early that evening, on the far side of the Channel, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Henceforward, even if the means to fight were still lacking, the spirit was not. When, at the end of May and during the first days of June, the British Expeditionary Force, driven back from the Belgian frontier to the sea, had to abandon all its equipment and take to the boats to escape capture, it seemed to the German generals and the German people a great victory. To the British the sight of their retreating soldiers, lacking weapons, uniforms awry, weary, travel-stained and apparently decisively beaten, far from spreading gloom merely seemed to generate resolution. The reaction observed by one woman in Kent was typical:
     
    We lived near the railway line from Dover to London. One day we noticed, from our field, a trainload of very tired, dishevelled-looking soldiers. Then another and another, day after day, night after night. Lots of people came from the village to stare. It was very hot, and we took out bottles of water and handed them up…. They wanted to know whether we had been bombed. ‘Not yet.’ At the next station, Headcorn, three miles away, arrangements had been made for feeding them. Local residents worked day and night, cutting sandwiches in an old barn, strings of sausages, hundreds of cans of tea. We did two or three nights and still the trains piled up along the line. The station was littered with tins and paper. It was intensely dramatic—the eager work in the dim lantern light in the old barn, us with our backs to the wall, and the fleeing army crowding back….
     
    More alarming as a reminder of what might be in store for the country, for the British troops were now at least back in their own country and no longer reliant on untrustworthy allies, was the arrival of boatload after boatload of civilian refugees, driven from their homes, and finally from their country, by the irresistibly advancing Germans. One thirteen-year-old Dorset schoolgirl now saw for herself what invasion could mean:
     
    Weymouth was one of the main ports for the refugees and my mother was in charge of cooking for them, in a park called the Alexandra Gardens. She had six wash boilers for coffee, six for tomato soup, and a working party of about a dozen matelots to help her. They stirred the soup with cricket bats and were tireless and gentle with the babies…. My job was to wander around finding anyone who needed clothes for themselves or their babies, and taking them backstage in the theatre to fit them out…. One lady held a tiny baby, and the severed hand of a toddler. She had bent over the baby when the bombs fell, and the blast had killed and taken away the toddler. We could not take that gruesome hand away from her and she had to be sedated and taken to hospital…. The refugees were all trying to dry their photos from home, and one little Parisian was trying to sort out his photos near the heat of one of the boilers. He was an incredibly handsome man and looked so funny in his bloomers, but he wouldn’t let go of one of these photos, it was all he had left of Paris.
     
    In London, too, the arrival of the refugees made a deep impression. One woman, working all day at Victoria on 27 May as an interpreter for the Belgians flooding in from the Continent, found the policeman beside her growing more and more silent. At last he voiced what was in his mind, a fear almost unthinkable to someone living in a country not invaded for nearly a thousand years: ‘Why, Miss, this is really serious…. This may happen to us.’
    Already, too, some residents of Great Britain were being uprooted from their homes, as the government reluctantly bowed to public pressure and began to round up male Italian citizens, to join in captivity the