Inferno - Max Hastings [61]
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, overage and underage 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. The 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, when a warning was transmitted to the Home Guard that German landings were imminent:
The Sedgebury Wallop platoon was on the job that night, and marched seventeen bewildered civilians to the local police station because they had forgotten their identity cards. But at 0700 the farmer in Walter Pocock woke up, and he suggested to his shepherd that he might abandon soldiering for shepherding for half an hour. “You’ll be wanting to see your sheep, but take your rifle and ammo,” he advised. “The fold’s only ten minutes walk away, and I’ll send for you the moment anything happens.” “I’low me sheep’ll be all right eet awhile,” reported Shep. “The day’s fold were pitched eesterday, an’ although young Arthur be but fifteen, I’ve a-trained ’im proper. Any road, I bain’t gwaine till the ‘All Clear’ be sounded.” At about 11 o’clock, when the word came through that the real or imaginary threat of invasion had passed, grumbling was rife. “Bain’t ’em reely comin’, sir?” asked Tom Spicer wistfully. “ ’Fraid not, Spicer,” replied Walter. “Jist wot I thought,” growled Fred Bunce the blacksmith. “There bain’t no dependence to be put in they Germans.”
Those Wiltshire rustics enjoyed a luxury denied to the peoples of continental Europe. They could mock their enemies, because they were spared from the ghastly reality of meeting them: on 17 September Hitler gave the order indefinitely to postpone Operation Sealion, the Wehrmacht’s plan to invade Britain. The British people and the pilots of Fighter Command saw only a slow, gradual shift during October from massed daylight air attacks to night raids. Between 10 July and 31 October, the Germans lost 1,294 aircraft, the British 788. Hitler had abandoned hopes