Don't Panic E-Book

Mark Rowe

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Between May and October 1940, following Hitler's invasion of western Europe and the evacuation of the Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, it was feared that the Germans would invade Britain. Over a million men volunteered for the Home Guard, beaches were covered with barbed wire, and pillboxes were scattered across the countryside. But even amid this frenzy of preparation, many Britons were indifferent to the perceived threat. In Don't Panic, Mark Rowe presents the definitive account of Britain's 'finest hour'. Using diaries, official documents and many previously unpublished photographs, he recounts the history of the invasion that never was, including how Churchill interfered with the defence of Whitehall, the many false alarms such as the 'Battle of Bewdley', and the general who boasted his orders were 'grandiloquent b*ll*cks'. Moreover, it shows how the people of Britain sought to defend their island against a truly formidable enemy, and how their preparations arguably prevented the invasion from ever taking place.

Leseprobe

DON’T PANIC

DON’T PANIC

Britain Prepares for Invasion, 1940

MARK ROWE

SPELLMOUNT

First published 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© Mark Rowe, 2010, 2011

The right of Mark Rowe, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7612 4

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7611 7

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 The First Shock: Paratroopers

Chapter 2 The Next Shock: Britain Alone

Chapter 3 The Battle of Bewdley, 30 June 1940

Chapter 4 Tactics

Chapter 5 Town, Coast and Country

Chapter 6 Imagined Invasion

Chapter 7 Basil Liddell Hart and George Orwell

Chapter 8 Northern Ireland

Chapter 9 Women Left Out

Chapter 10 Spies, Saboteurs and the Fifth Column

Chapter 11 September 1940: The General Talks Bollocks

Chapter 12 Conclusion

Bibliography and Sources

CHAPTER 1

THE FIRST SHOCK: PARATROOPERS

‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.’

(A soldier’s lament sung to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’)

Sir George Schuster was the sort of man who knew if you were going wrong; and he would tell you so. In a letter – a long letter – printed in The Times on Friday 10 May 1940, he called for national unity; and what he called a ‘national government’. As the National Liberal MP for Walsall, he was calling, in political code, for an end to Conservative Neville Chamberlain’s government. By the time the letter was in print, Winston Churchill was Prime Minister. That morning, Germany attacked France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Sir George had new telephone calls to make, letters to write and tempests to call up.

Walsall Mayor J. Cliff Tibbits sent a letter to Sir George’s central London home on Monday 13 May. Tibbits recalled a weekend letter and telephone call from Sir George. The Mayor had spoken with the local Chief Constable, who saw Sir George’s letter. All agreed: something should be done. Tibbits wrote:

He [the Chief Constable] is confident that a strong force can be recruited if called immediately. Arms would of course have to be provided. The Chief Constable agrees with me that Walsall’s aerodrome is a weak spot in the district and we should like a military guard on the site of the aerodrome. The aerodrome is only a small one but any troops landed there can be in New Street, Birmingham in 15 minutes. I have also been concerned about the protection of the Generating Stations of the West Midland Electricity Authority … As far as I know the police are not armed and they have been doing all they can for six months so it hardly seems possible that they can now increase their efforts.

Sir George wrote back to Tibbits on Thursday 16 May. He had been trying to find out more about local defence schemes – the typed word ‘schemes’ was crossed out and ‘volunteers’ written above. ‘All that the War Office could tell him was that ‘full particulars will be published in the next day or two.’ Sir George felt strongly that the Mayor should satisfy himself about ‘who is concerting measures’:

Everyone now seems to be devoting attention to the matter of raising a new corps but it seems to me that that must be a secondary consideration and what I should want to know is not how new men are to be raised but how such forces as are already available are going to be used to protect the essential points. I asked the War Office who the area commander was in your case and all they could say was that you would be able to find this out in the telephone book. From what you told me before, the regional commissioner’s office in your case seems to take the line that it is not their business, but I understand that they definitely are concerned and again if I were in your place I would get on to them … I am not at all satisfied as to the way in which these things are being done and indeed all these schemes ought to have been worked out long ago … It seems to me however that the only thing to do now in order to ensure that proper arrangements are being made is for people on the spot in each area to worry the authorities and find out what the arrangements are.

Such was the beginning of Britain’s finest hour, as defined by Churchill and echoed by all ever since. It started on 10 May with the German invasion of Western Europe, quickly and shockingly successful, ending in winter when the threat of a German invasion of Britain went away until the spring. All the ingredients of the summer were in Sir George’s flurry of letters: exaggerated yet vivid fears for the worst – Germans landing at Walsall’s grass airfield and driving stolen cars nine miles to Birmingham city centre in a quarter of an hour; critics ‘worrying’ the authorities with their bright ideas; and those in authority confused by that frightening and thankfully rare phenomenon in life, something important and unavoidable. Britain faced the greatest risk of invasion since Napoleon.

SHOOT FIRST – BUT WITH WHAT?

The sudden, novel and real threat of paratroopers making Britain their next stop after Belgium and Holland brought out the genuinely patriotic, the know-alls, and madmen who liked to write to newspapers and see their names in print.

E.R. Lansdale, of Petersfinger, near Salisbury, was a former soldier. He was ‘Giggleswick School OTC 1920–4’, according to the letter he wrote to Southern Command headquarters in Salisbury on 13 May. He was careful to put on paper all his military experience – that he had helped run a school’s officer training corps – because he was asking for his name to go on the waiting list ‘if it were decided to issue rifles to householders on the outskirts of towns and having a good field of fire and who are accustomed to the use of service rifles’. Lansdale included – and the Army filed it, so that today it sits in the National Archives – a clipping from the previous day’s Sunday Express. According to the newspaper,

… it would be a wise precaution to issue free arms licences and permits to buy ammunition to men possessing revolvers, rifles or guns who are judged trustworthy by police. There are enough such persons all over the country to deal with isolated raiders. It would be well to inform the public that the parachutist is trained in every sort of trick. Anyone taken in by a friendly gesture or a sign of surrender will certainly be shot. Shoot first is the only safe motto; in any case parachute troops are a form of warfare that should be discouraged.

The same day, a Major W.A.D. Edwardes sent a reply to Lansdale, ending: ‘Meanwhile should you spot any parachutists doubtless you will take such steps as you would take to be necessary in the national interest.’ As yet the Army had no authority to form ‘contra-parachutists groups’.

It is significant that Mr Lansdale enclosed the newspaper cutting, drawing support for his fears, and for presuming to write to the Army, from what he read. Around the country, newspapers fed quite suddenly fears of a new kind of warfare, fears that for a few days the government could not calm.

The Tuesday evening after the Friday shock of the German attack, the new Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, went on the radio to announce what soon became the LDV – Local Defence Volunteers. What happened in between? Plenty of talking. At 3pm on Saturday 11 May a meeting at the Home Office discussed arming the police. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game strongly opposed any arming of his police. As for police on guard at factories, telephone exchanges, and so on, chief constables could arm their men if necessary, the meeting heard. The job of police on patrol was to watch, and even if they were armed they could only deal with two or three saboteurs or parachutists. The meeting agreed chief constables could still use their discretion. In any case, the police had fairly few weapons in stock: 1,000 rifles, mainly around the coasts, 5,000 revolvers and 3,000 automatics. Even if the police took up arms, it was doubtful whether as many men were trained in their use as the number of firearms to hand.

A secret 12 May memo went from the Home Office to chief constables. It called for a state of ‘maximum efficiency’ for dealing with the possibility of enemy landing by parachute. Speed was of utmost importance; if police saw an invader they should report at once to the nearest Army or Royal Air Force station. As for the public sighting ‘any persons landing by parachute’, the memo admitted: ‘It is inevitable that a large proportion of these reports should be unfounded and the police will no doubt do everything possible to verify their accuracy; this should not however delay the communication of the information to the military authorities.’ And as for arming of the police, it was ‘reasonable that police guarding important vulnerable points particularly in the southern and south-eastern part of the country should be armed with revolvers on a more general scale than has hitherto been the case.’ But there was no general issue of arms. So the government stressed that if anyone saw paratroopers, they should tell the authorities. Sensible, even obvious advice: but then what?

WISE BEFORE THE EVENT

Meanwhile, ordinary people were having the same ideas. G.H. Cookes, secretary of the Nuneaton branch of the British Legion, told his local weekly newspaper:

Before Mr Eden had made his appeal for volunteers two of our members came to see me to see whether we could do something as a branch to take a lead. I got in touch with one or two people and went to see Supt Cresswell [the local police chief] who was very pleased to see us.

Even quicker off the mark was someone who signed themselves ‘Prepared’, who had a letter printed in Sir George Schuster’s constituency newspaper, the Walsall Observer & South Staffordshire Chronicle, on 11 May 1940. ‘Prepared’ proposed a volunteer defence corps, under former officers and non-commissioned officers.

This corps should be trained for use in the event of enemy action in this country, to be ready to meet any surprise landing of troops by enemy planes … available day and night to deal with any such opposition until such time as detachments of regular troops could reach the place.

This is close to a description of what became the Home Guard.

When the war was over, understandably some people claimed that they had the idea first. Major John Maxse, in an undated memo after the war for the War Office, went over the claims. Maxse’s yardstick: did a claimant put it in words as used by Eden in his crucial 14 May 1940 broadcast? What Eden had said was based on words by the Commander in Chief Home Forces, General Sir Walter Kirke, and chief of staff Brigadier W. Carden Roe, and the adjutant general, General Sir Robert Gordon-Finlayson.

Despite the raising of battalions for home defence, in the months between the start of war in September 1939 and May 1940, Britain became if anything shorter of soldiers. Before and after the Germans invaded Denmark in April, the British authorities agreed that the best insurance against an invasion of Britain was to send front-line soldiers, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), to France, and ‘less advanced formations’, too, who could better finish their training nearer the front line.

In Britain, even before 10 May, everyone in authority at strategic locations – ports, gasworks, factories, airfields – wanted guards. In Maxse’s words ‘penny packets’, little groups of soldiers on guard dotted over the country, threatened to deprive Kirke of any concentrated mobile reserve to deal with parachutists, the only danger in those days. Kirke felt the need for a home defence force like the First World War Volunteer Force. The Army Council in a letter of 7 May 1940 to Home Commands in Britain’s regions said it was considering a Volunteer Home Army. In other words, when talking among themselves the generals and the government saw the need for home guards, but only when the Germans got too close for comfort did they act on it.

Events moved fast – so fast that it’s easy to miss the stages of the rising threat. In the first days after 10 May a few voices recalled that the country had gone through it all before, during the First World War. The Derbyshire Times in its editorial of 17 May 1940, the Friday after Eden’s appeal for LDVs on the Tuesday evening, noted:

In the last war the Home Guards were a valuable adjunct to home defence and there is no reason why the new defence body should not be more useful with enlarged activities especially if they are quickly trained to shoot. This is where the British Legion of ex-servicemen and men who can handle firearms can form a valuable nucleus.

THE EXAMPLE OF 1914–18 AND EARLIER

Continent-facing counties had done most to prepare in case of invasion in the First World War. In Norfolk, for example, the authorities had grappled with questions that cropped up again in 1940: should cattle be shot rather than fall into enemy hands? Should cattle or fleeing people be allowed to get in the way of troops on the roads? Would Norwich, on the likely route of an invader, be defended? (The view in 1915 was that it would not.)

Some people remembered how it had been the last time around. The Bromsgrove Weekly Messenger, for instance, opined on 18 May:

The formation of this LDV is a step similar to that taken in the last war, when those whose duty lay at home evinced a spontaneous desire to help the country in a more active way than merely carrying on civilian pursuits. The Volunteers were armed and equipped and grouped in battalions and were assigned special tasks including a mobile cycle corps that patrolled the East Coast to watch for possible invaders.

Some had more vivid recollections; ‘Mr Leicester’ in a regular column in the Leicester Mercury on 24 May harked back to a citizens defence corps training camp at nearby Syston, under canvas, and how he slept in a blanket on the ground.

Those 1914 volunteer home defence forces sprang up regardless of officialdom. Similarly, some took things upon themselves second time around. Before 1939, a TA (Territorial Army) battalion parade in Cambridge had in its rear 250 members of the Cambridgeshire Regiment Old Comrades Association. By 1939 some of these ‘old and bold’ formed what they called the Wisbech Training Corps. They had leaders and instructors ready-made when Eden broadcast.

A nineteenth-century force, the rifle volunteers, formed in case of a French invasion, were within living memory – just. Surely the oldest defence volunteer of 1940, and an extraordinary link with the mid-Victorian rifle volunteers, was John Davis, who must have called on the Cheltenham daily newspaper’s offices even before Eden launched the LDV. The paper’s gossip columnist duly reported that the 91-year-old, ‘fit and as hearty as can be’, was anxious to serve. He had joined the Post Office Rifles in 1868 and claimed to have delivered letters to Charles Dickens.

The authorities already had a defence body without having to set up another: the National Defence Companies. Maxse in his memo recalled a ‘rather shadowy force’, the Royal Defence Corps, probably ‘sadly wasted away’ during ‘the lean years’ between the wars when the government spent so little on the armed forces. In July 1936, as Nazi Germany became to menace, the government announced National Defence Companies of the TA by county or city. Membership by November 1937 was a spectacularly undaunting 6,766. In March 1939, members were asked to do six drills a year – again, hardly anything. Eden and his War Office advisers decided to start from scratch with a new organisation, rather than use the National Defence Companies that no-one had heard of, or the longforgotten and patchy First World War volunteers.

A DOG’S DINNER; AND HORSEMEN

General Sir Henry Pownall, the chief of staff of the BEF, was put in charge of inspecting the Local Defence Volunteers in June, after the BEF was thrown out of France and evacuated from Dunkirk. In the first entry of his new diary he wrote with characteristic hauteur that Eden had announced the LDV

… without I gather enough time for previous thought or organisation by the War Office or GHQ Home Forces … The organisation in fact started from below rather than above. The result of course is that it is a rare ‘dog’s dinner’ now.

It was always going to be a dog’s dinner, because of the haste, and because so many people were coming together who had never had dealings with each other. According to the notes from a Home Forces conference on 17 May, among other things it urged commanders to ‘liaise with everybody, British Legion, National Union of Cyclists have offered their services; make use of every organised body. Must avoid getting duds in.’

Who would call whom a dud? Even cyclists had rival organisations, each ringing their own bells. Herbert Stanier, secretary of the Cyclists Touring Club (CTC); and Adrian Chamberlain, secretary of the National Cyclists Union (NCU) went out of their way in those weeks to write to newspapers around the country, each boasting about what their organisation was doing for defence (and ignoring their rival). In the weekly Coalville Times of 7 June, Chamberlain told how three weeks before, NCU members began patrolling highways for parachutists. Cyclists’ mobility was, Chamberlain reckoned, ‘of inestimable use to the new local defence volunteer force’. A fortnight later, in the same newspaper, Stanier described CTC members as air raid precaution (ARP) messengers and useful to the ‘parashots’ – an early name for the anti-parachutist defence volunteers.

Horsemen too claimed a role. On 16 May, Major F.S. James, Sheffield Chief Constable, told the Yorkshire Post that as most of the patrolling in the Sheffield area would be on the moors outside the town, a ‘mounted detachment’ would be invaluable. Sure enough, the Sheffield Telegraph printed a photograph of an excavalry man leading a string of riders past his home at Callow. The horsemen had volunteered to cover the moors between Hathersage and Buxton, to watch for paratroopers. To point out only two other mounted patrols, one went around the sparsely populated fringes of Oxford – between villages like Woodeaton, Horton cum Studley, Waterstock and Stadhampton; and another crossed the wildest part of mid-Wales, between Tregaron and River Towy. Horses were the only way to cover such a remote area that was, as a history of Home Guards in Cardiganshire described it, a ‘no man’s land’.

As with so much about home defence in 1940, many people were having the same idea at once. In June, a Captain Anthony Hope, looking for work, wrote a complaint to the authorities that he was ‘not very kindly treated’, though he had been twelve years in the Army, three in charge of irregular levies with ‘political and intelligence work’. He had an idea for mounted patrols, having had experience on the Persian border with 500 levies. He suggested that horse patrols would conserve machines and watch large areas of the country with economy. ‘Local defence people had told me that there is considerable discrepancy between the arrangements of even adjacent villages and that uniformity of procedure and action is not much in evidence.’ This prompted Churchill’s chief of staff General Ismay to write to General Anderson at the War Office about mounted patrols from riding schools, ‘as any suggestion these days is worth considering’.

Separately, a meeting at the War Office on 23 May, mainly of colonels from regional commands, agreed to use the motoring organisations RAC and AA, and pony clubs, as dispatch riders where possible.

POLICE AND PUBS

Arguably the most obvious force to take charge against invasion was the police. They were a uniformed force, already there, official and national, already with assigned tasks in the case of an invasion. In any emergency, the state expected the police to do the dirty jobs.

Len Francis was a Cheltenham Grammar School boy whose father was the police sergeant in the Cotswold village of Winchcombe. Their family home was the living quarters of the police station. By the summer of 1940 the police had issued Len Francis’ father with a .45 revolver and he and the other policemen fired it at a target in the orchard behind the police station. Len Francis recalled:

Being conversant with guns – I had an air-gun and had been out shooting rabbits with a 12 bore shot gun – I was allowed a few shots and was impressed with the recoil the gun gave. I never knew whether my father’s revolver was meant to repel German invaders or to quell civic unrest.

That said, police – as their officers made clear – were not part of the armed forces of the Crown. If police were armed, to keep order, that still did not make them part of the armed forces, or able to fight an invader.

One commentator, the broadcaster A.G. Street, paid tribute to the police later in the war, claiming ‘in every rural district they were the Home Guard’s father, mother and daughter.’ Yet, as so often, some would tell another story. Lieutenant-Colonel H.K. Boyle, who raised a company at Moortown in Leeds, recalled he had a mere eighteen rifles at first for perhaps 400 men, covering a two-mile front. Given such a ‘desperate and deadly shortage’ of guns, his men added ‘shotguns, sporting rifles, revolvers and any other weapons that volunteers either possessed or could borrow’. However: ‘The police put up a strenuous opposition from the first against these revolvers and the anomalous position was reached of men going out night after night to defend their country against possible enemy paratroops and having to conceal their arms for so doing from our own police.’ To Boyle, this was one of the ‘stupidities of 1940’. Boyle plainly wanted police to relax the rules on holding guns during the national emergency. Several cases came to court around the country of men carrying a gun or an airgun in public, without a licence. Sometimes the magistrates let the men off, sometimes not.

The police could argue that they were not there to choose which laws to enforce, and nobody told them anything different – or even told them anything – although Eden in his broadcast had asked volunteers to report to their local police station. Just after Eden’s broadcast, the Chief Constable of Newark, G.F. Goodman, admitted at Newark town hall to a crowded meeting of exservicemen that he did not know much, only that he had been asked to arrange somewhere for volunteers to register. Police were the gate-keepers and simply taking the names and addresses of volunteers would take some doing. Organisers would then look out for likely helpers – and be vigilant in keeping out communists and fascists.

As soon as they came together, volunteers talked. A journalist, John Langdon-Davies, was one of several self-appointed instant authorities on how to counter an invasion. He began one of his 1940 books, Parachutes over Britain: ‘In the pub tonight most of us are meeting to discuss the formation of a local defence corps of parashots.’ As he admitted, this was a chance for men to indulge their imaginations: ‘… those of us who when younger were Boy Scouts or imagined ourselves to be Red Indians have now got the opportunity to play our boyhood games on a grander scale.’

Pubs were of course the convenient meeting places. Hugh Meynell recalled the Shropshire small town where his father volunteered:

I would be about ten years old. Albrighton, they used to parade in the car park of the Crown Hotel, every Thursday [evening]. And that was because the men were farm hands or firemen or old fogeys who were too old for the war, so evenings the farm hands were tired out after a day’s work or fed up with the thought of going to the Home Guard. I suppose on looking back, all the officers were my father’s generation, who had all been serving officers in the First World War. And the company sergeant major was Regimental Sergeant Major Moore, an ex-RSM from the Indian Army. He was a dapper little man, he kept the Crown Hotel in the day time and used to appear wearing a bow tie and a tuxedo and open the doors at 11am and take a huge breath of fresh air and say, that was his fresh air for the day.

The volunteers were good for the pub trade, and made quick and cheap recruits for the state. Were volunteers, though, the right people to counter an invasion? The military theorist Basil Liddell Hart doubted it, with a frankness that he did not – or dared not – show in public. In private notes in June 1940 he wrote of the ‘fundamentals of war’.

Men’s resistance is strongest when their instincts to defend their country and protect their families coincide and weakest when any conflict is created between these two instincts. When it comes to the point, men who belong to a village may be wary of putting up a resistance within it when that is likely to involve the destruction of their homes and families. Such a difficulty does not arise of course with troops who are merely stationed in the area or brought there in an emergency.

Volunteers would hardly take kindly to going across country to defend strangers, leaving their families behind, merely so they would fight more fiercely; and it was more practical to leave the volunteers where they were, to defend their homes. How much could you reasonably ask of unpaid volunteers, in any case?

1939: THE THREAT DISMISSED

Could the authorities have seen all this coming? Some people reckoned so. Captain D. Bourne, Midland area secretary for the British Legion, was saying in the first days of the LDV, ‘when the war started we wanted to do something of this sort.’ He was one of those who believed that the British Legion, as veterans of 1914–18, ‘should have run the whole show’. Similarly, Stephen Morton, secretary of Sheffield and district federation of the Ramblers Association, claimed he had suggested a ‘scheme of service’, in other words a watch over the countryside, before the war, but whoever he told in authority had told him to join the forces. Of course such people might have been being wise after the event.

In truth, the military did weigh the risks before the war. According to the official historian of the defence of the UK, successive governments put off attending to coastal defence ‘like a man who dreads a visit to the dentist’.

In February 1939, after the War Office asked for a defence review – the question having been discussed in September 1938 – Major-General Green, a Devonport-based commander, replied to a Southern Command letter asking whether garrisons should be mobile. Green wrote: ‘I understand that enemy landings have now been practically ruled out of consideration as being unfeasible.’ A garrison’s main duty, he added, would be to assist civil authorities in the event of air raids. Lieutenant-General A.P. Wavell, then in charge at Southern Command in Salisbury, agreed: ‘Personally I feel that the probability of such [hostile] landings is very remote.’ A sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence (no less) had ruled that the likelihood of organised attack on a large scale on the shores of Britain was very small, so a Lieutenant-Colonel A.W. Lee of Southern Command’s general staff wrote to area commands in March 1939. ‘There is however the possibility of small raids carried out by limited numbers of troops transported in fast warships, submarines or possibly dropped by parachutes but it is considered that this is only likely to take place on the east coast.’ The east coast, until May 1940, was England’s only coast facing the enemy.

Desk wallahs were batting the unlikely risk around on paper, rather than doing very much about it. Air Commodore John Slessor at the Air Ministry raised the possibility of paratroopers in a letter to Brigadier John Kennedy at the War Office on 25 September 1939.

You will remember I have raised this question of parachute attack on various occasions and if I remember rightly your general view has been that it could be dealt with, if it were successful in dropping a large number of troops, under local district or area defence schemes by the movement to the threatened point of a reserve which is available for the purpose.

Slessor questioned whether any reserve at ‘fire brigade readiness’ would have transport and communications sufficient to meet possibly 2,000–3,000 invaders. Slessor was arguing it was unwise to ignore the possibility, but it was the Army, not his Air Force, that would have to spare men to watch for parachutes. Instead, even after Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, the military was looking to take soldiers away from home defence, to send fighting men to the Continent. A meeting on 24 April at Horse Guards between General Sir Walter Kirke and his regional commanders heard that the total of 30,500 guards on VPs (vital or vulnerable points), was 6,500 lower than in March 1940. And the Army proposed to release another 3,000 men from guard duties by May. Proposed instead were more dock police and physical defences, to save on men.

1939: THE THREAT WITHIN

At the Home Office on 31 October 1939 civil servants and the military discussed co-operation of the civil authorities in the event of an invasion. The view of the meeting was that ‘such enemy action represents a very outside chance’. They agreed on the need to keep roads clear, allay panic and stop evacuation – ‘Broadcasts might help here’ – and went on: ‘What we feel is that the best way in which the civil population can help us to mop up the invaders, which we hope will be only a matter of a few days, is to take refuge in their homes or other shelters and sit quiet until the danger is past.’

Such a condescending official opinion – of civilians at best not getting in the way of those doing the fighting – lingered through 1940, though it did not sit easily with Eden’s broadcast appeal.

The authorities, showing even less trust in their own citizens, feared trouble. The military ran a two-day defence exercise in London in April 1939. Officers visited the places they then acted out ‘narratives’ about. First, the battalion at Chelsea Barracks had orders to move by river transport to West India Docks, because crowds were trying to get into them. The Army orders were to prevent refugees moving into the Isle of Dogs.