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Britain’s people endured the nation’s ordeal with some fortitude. Those who lived outside conurbations were spared from Luftwaffe attack, but fear of invasion was almost universal. If Churchill was committed to fight to the last, he was also brutally realistic about the implications of possible failure and defeat. Brigadier Charles Hudson attended a senior officers’ conference in York in July which was addressed by Anthony Eden as secretary for war. Eden told his audience that he had been instructed by the prime minister to take soundings about the army’s morale. He proposed to ask each general in turn whether, as Hudson recorded, ‘the troops under our command could be counted on to continue the fight in all circumstances … There was almost an audible gasp all round the table.’ Eden intensified the astonishment when he said that ‘a moment might come when the Government would have to make, at short notice, a terrible decision. That point when … it would be definitely unwise to throw in, in a futile attempt to save a hopeless situation, badly armed men against an enemy firmly lodged in England.’ He asked how troops might respond to an order to embark at a northern port for Canada, abandoning their families.

Hudson wrote: ‘In dead silence one after another was asked the question.’ The almost unanimous response was that most regular officers, NCOs and unmarried men would accept such an order. However, among conscripts and married men, ‘the very great majority … would insist either on fighting it out in England … or on [staying behind to take] their chance with their families whatever the consequences might be’. In other words, senior officers of the British Army believed that, in the face of imminent defeat, many of their men would make the same choice as had French soldiers – to give in, rather than accept the uncertainties and miseries of continuing the struggle in exile. Hudson concluded: ‘We left the conference room in a very chastened mood.’ Neither he nor most of his colleagues had contemplated the prospect that fighting on to the end might mean doing so from a foreign country, with Britain vanquished. Churchill accepted such a contingency; but in this, as in much else, Britain’s prime minister was willing to contemplate extremities of sacrifice from which many of his fellow countrymen flinched.

Hitler might have attempted an invasion of Britain if the Luftwaffe had secured control of the airspace over the Channel and southern England. As it was, however, instinctively wary of the sea and of an unnecessary strategic gamble, he took few practical steps to advance German preparations, beyond massing barges in the Channel ports. Churchill exploited the threat more effectively than did the prospective invaders, mobilising every citizen to the common purpose of resisting the enemy if they landed. Signposts and place names were removed from crossroads and stations, beaches wired, over-age and under-age men recruited to local ‘Home Guard’ units and provided with simple weapons. Churchill deliberately and even cynically sustained the spectre of invasion until 1942, fearing that if the British people were allowed to suppose the national crisis had passed, their natural lassitude would reassert itself.

Uncertainty about German intentions persisted through that summer and into autumn. Among the population at large, fear was mingled with a muddled and excited anticipation, all the keener because the prospect of fighting Germans in the fields and villages of England seemed so unreal. One aristocratic housewife injected some of her hoarded stockpile of Canadian maple syrup with rat poison, destined for German occupiers. To the dismay of her family, however, after some weeks she forgot which tins had been treated, and was obliged to deny the delicacy to her disappointed children. Wiltshire farmer Arthur Street caught something of the pantomime element in people’s behaviour, in an account of his own workers’ and neighbours’ conduct on 7 September,