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As a curtain raiser heavy attacks were made on the twelfth on enemy radar stations, five of which were actually hit and damaged and one knocked out, but the Germans at this stage did not realize how vital to Britain’s defenses radar was and did not pursue the attack.
At this rate, despite their numerical superiority, the Germans could scarcely hope to drive the R.A.F. from the skies.
The skill of British Fighter Command in committing its planes to battle against vastly superior attacking forces was based on its shrewd use of radar. From the moment they took off from their bases in Western Europe the German aircraft were spotted on British radar screens, and their course so accurately plotted that Fighter Command knew exactly where and when they could best be attacked.
Yet the attack on British radar stations which on August 12 had been so damaging had not been continued and on August 15, the day of his first major setback, Goering called them off entirely, declaring: “It is doubtful whether there is any point in continuing the attacks on radar stations, since not one of those attacked has so far been put out of action.”
This was the underground nerve center from which the Hurricanes and Spitfires were guided by radiotelephone into battle on the basis of the latest intelligence from radar, from ground observation posts and from pilots in the air.
The slow Stuka dive bomber, which had helped to pave the way for the Army’s victories in Poland and in the West, was proving to be a sitting duck for British fighters and on that day, August 17, was withdrawn by Goering from the battle, reducing the German bombing force by a third.
Five forward fighter fields in the south of England were extensively damaged and, what was worse, six of the seven key sector stations were so severely bombed that the whole communications system seemed to be on the verge of being knocked out.
With the British fighter defense suffering losses in the air and on the ground which it could not for long sustain, the Luftwaffe switched its attack on September 7 to massive night bombings of London.
Directed to drop their loads on aircraft factories and oil tanks on the outskirts of London, they missed their mark and dropped bombs on the center of the capital, blowing up some homes and killing some civilians. The British thought it was deliberate and as retaliation bombed Berlin the next evening.
But the effect on German morale was tremendous. For this was the first time that bombs had ever fallen on Berlin. The Berliners are stunned [I wrote in my diary the next day, August 26]. They did not think it could ever happen. When this war began, Goering assured them it couldn’t… They believed him. Their disillusionment today therefore is all the greater. You have to see their faces to measure it.
This was good propaganda, but the thud of exploding bombs was better.
Goebbels, who had ordered the press to publish only a few lines on the first attack, now gave instructions to cry out at the “brutality” of the British flyers in attacking the defenseless women and children of Berlin.
The main effect of a week of constant British night bombings [I wrote in my diary on September 1] has been to spread great disillusionment among the people and sow doubt in their minds…
September 1 was the first anniversary of the beginning of the war.
And Hitler proceeded to make his audience, which consisted mostly of women nurses and social workers, laugh—and then applaud hysterically.
His nerves were a factor in the fatal decision to switch the Luftwaffe’s winning daylight attacks on the R.A.F. to massive night bombings of London. This was a political as well as a military decision, made in part to revenge the bombings of Berlin and other German cities (which were but pinpricks compared to what the Luftwaffe was doing to Britain’s cities) and to destroy the will of the British to resist by razing their capital. If it succeeded, and Hitler and Goebbels had no doubt it would, an invasion might not be necessary.
The day had shown that the Luftwaffe could not for the moment, anyway, now that it had given Fighter Command a week to recover, carry out a successful major daylight attack on Britain. That being so, the prospect of an effective landing was dim. September 15 therefore was a turning point, “the crux,” as Churchill later judged, of the Battle of Britain.
Although London was to take a terrible pounding for fifty-seven consecutive nights from September 7 to November 3 from a daily average of two hundred bombers, so that it seemed certain to Churchill, as he later revealed, that the city would soon be reduced to a rubble heap, and though most of Britain’s other cities, Coventry above all, were to suffer great damage throughout that grim fall and winter, British morale did not collapse nor armament production fall off, as Hitler had so confidently expected.
For the first time in the war Hitler had been stopped, his plans of further conquest frustrated, and just at the moment, as we have seen, when he was certain that final victory had been achieved.
Nor perhaps did he yet realize as the dark winter settled over Europe that a handful of British fighter pilots, by thwarting his invasion, had preserved England as a great base for the possible reconquest of the Continent from the west at a later date.
Just in time, its leaders, a very few of them, despite all the bungling (of which these pages have been so replete) in the interwar years, had recognized that air power had become decisive in the mid-twentieth century and the little fighter plane and its pilot the chief shield for defense. As Churchill told the Commons in another memorable peroration on August 20, when the battle in the skies still raged and its outcome was in doubt, “never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Anybody posting a placard the Germans didn’t like would be liable to immediate execution, and a similar penalty was provided for those who failed to turn in firearms or radio sets within twenty-four hours.
The man who was designated to direct its activities on the spot from London was a certain S.S. colonel, Professor Dr. Franz Six, another of the peculiar intellectual gangsters who in the Nazi time were somehow attracted to the service of Himmler’s secret police. Professor Six had left his post as dean of the economic faculty of Berlin University to join Heydrich’s S.D., where he specialized in “scientific matters,” the weirder side of which cast such a spell over the bespectacled Heinrich Himmler and his fellow thugs.
so Schellenberg later claimed, though at this time he was mainly occupied in Lisbon, Portugal, on a bizarre mission to kidnap the Duke of Windsor.
Shaw’s name is conspicuously absent, but H. G. Wells is there along with such writers as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, J. B. Priestley, Stephen Spender, C. P. Snow, Noel Coward, Rebecca West, Sir Philip Gibbs and Norman Angeli.
Among the dangerous institutions, besides the Masonic lodges and Jewish organizations, which deserved “special attention” by R.S.H.A., were the “public schools” (in England, the private schools), the Church of England, which was described as “a powerful tool of British imperial politics,” and the Boy Scouts, which was put down as “an excellent source of information for the British Intelligence Service.” Its revered leader and founder, Lord Baden-Powell, was to be immediately arrested.
The British had decided, he says, as a last resort and if all other conventional methods of defense failed, to attack the German beachheads with mustard gas, sprayed from low-flying airplanes.
The Nazi Foreign Minister embraced it with all the enthusiasm to which his abysmal ignorance often drove him, and the German Foreign Office and its diplomatic representatives in Spain and Portugal were forced to waste a great deal of time on it during the climactic summer of 1940. After the fall of France in June 1940, the Duke, who had been a member of the British military mission with the French Army High Command, made his way with the Duchess to Spain to escape capture by the Germans.
The Foreign Minister, Colonel Juan Beigbeder y Atienza, saw the Duke and reported on his talk to the German ambassador, who informed Berlin by “top secret” telegram of July 2 that Windsor would not return to England unless his wife were recognized as a member of the royal family and he himself given a position of importance. Otherwise he would settle in Spain in a castle promised him by the Franco government.
The Windsors proceeded to Lisbon early in July and on July 11 the German minister there informed Ribbentrop that the Duke had been named Governor of the Bahamas but “intends to postpone his departure there as long as possible… in hope of a turn of events favorable to him.”
The next day, July 12, the German ambassador in Madrid saw Ramón Serrano Suñer, Spanish Minister of the Interior and brother-in-law of Franco, who promised to get the Generalissimo in on the plot and carry out the following plan. The Spanish government would send to Lisbon an old friend of the Duke, Miguel Primo de Rivera, Madrid leader of the Falange and son of a former Spanish dictator.
Churchill, the message said, had designated the Duke as Governor of the Bahamas “in a very cool and categorical letter” and ordered him to proceed to his post at once. Should he fail to do so, “Churchill has threatened Windsor with a court-martial.”
The Duke and Duchess have less fear of the King, who was quite foolish, than of the shrewd Queen, who was intriguing skillfully against the Duke and particularly against the Duchess.
To facilitate this, the ambassador had arranged with Suñer, the telegram added, to send another Spanish emissary to Portugal “to persuade the Duke to leave Lisbon, as if for a long excursion in an automobile, and then to cross the border at a place which has been arranged, where the Spanish secret police will see that there is a safe crossing of the frontier.”
When the confidential emissary then expressed his expectation that the course of the war might bring about changes even in the English constitution, the Duchess especially became very pensive.
Since the Duke is without passports, the Portuguese frontier official in charge there will be won over.
For this purpose, the journey to the place of the summer vacation, as well as the vacation itself, will be shadowed with the help of a trustworthy Portuguese police chief…
In this case, as in the execution of the first plan, the chief requisite is to obtain willingness to leave by psychologically adroit influence upon the pronounced English mentality of the Duke, without giving the impression of flight, through exploiting anxiety about the British Intelligence Service and the prospect of free political activity from Spanish soil.
It had a typical German clumsiness, and it was handicapped by the customary German inability to understand “the English mentality of the Duke.”
He had a bouquet delivered to the Duchess with a card: “Beware of the machinations of the British Secret Service. From a Portuguese friend who has your interests at heart.”
According to German intelligence, the ambassador continued, the Duke had expressed to his host, the Portuguese banker Ricardo do Espirito Santo Silva, “a desire to come in contact with the Fuehrer.”
The Duke paid tribute to the Fuehrer’s desire for peace, which was in complete agreement with his own point of view. He was firmly convinced that if he had been King it would never have come to war.
Disobedience would disclose his intentions prematurely, bring about a scandal, and deprive him of his prestige in England.
A brother of Franco, who was the Spanish ambassador in Lisbon, was prevailed upon to make a last-minute appeal to the Windsors not to go.
Portuguese officials delayed the sailing time until they had searched the liner from top to bottom.
There was no need to find a new King for England. The island, like all the other conquered territory, would be ruled from Berlin.
So much for this curious tale, as told by the secret German documents and added to by Schellenberg, who was the least reliable of men—though it is difficult to believe that he invented his own role, which he admits was a ridiculous one, out of whole cloth. In a statement made through his London solicitors on August 1, 1957, after the German documents were released for publication, the Duke branded the communications between Ribbentrop and the German ambassadors in Spain and Portugal as “complete fabrications and, in part, gross distortions of the truth.”
Even so astute a military critic as Liddell Hart neglected always to do so, and this neglect mars his book The German Generals Talk. Talk they did, but not always with very good memories or even very truthfully.
It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne.” † The Germans were greatly impressed by reports from the embassy in Washington, which relayed information received there from London and embroidered on it.
From that date on both sides grossly overestimated the damage they did the other.
