Longmate - If Britain had fallen : the real nazi occupation plans

IF BRITAIN
HAD FALLEN

OTHER BOOKS BY NORMAN LONGMATE INCLUDE:

How We Lived Then,
A History of Everyday Life during the Second World War

The Real Dads Army, The Story of the Home Guard

The GIs, The Americans in Britain, 19421945

Air Raid, The Bombing of Coventry, 1940

When We Won the War, The Story of Victory in Europe, 1945

The Doodlebugs, The Story of the Flying-Bombs

Hitlers Rockets, The Story of the V-2s

The Bombers, The RAF Offensive against Germany

The Home Front, An Anthology of Personal Experience, 19381945
(editor)

Defending the Island, From Caesar to the Armada

Island Fortress, The Defence of Great Britain, 16031945

King Cholera, The Biography of Disease

The Waterdrinkers, A History of Temperance

Alive and Well, Medicine and Public Health, 1830 to the Present Day
[i.e. 1970]

The Workhouse

Milestones in Working Class History

The Hungry Mills, The Story of the Lancashire Cotton Famine,
18611865

The Breadstealers, The Fight against the Corn Laws, 18381846

NORMAN LONGMATE

IF BRITAIN
HAD FALLEN

THE REAL NAZI OCCUPATION PLANS

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NORMAN LONGMATE

FRONTLINE
BOOKS

A Greenhill Book

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited
www.greenhillbooks.com

Reprinted in this format in 2012 by
Frontline Books

an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright Norman Longmate, 1972
New Introduction Norman Longmate, 2004

ISBN 978 1 84832 647 7

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Printed and Bound
by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England
E-mail: enquiries@pen-and-sword.co.uk
Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

Contents

Between pages 64 and 65

Between pages 144 and 145

Between pages 192 and 193

Maps

Acknowledgement is due for permission to reproduce the following plates:

Associated Press 26, 28; Central Press 3,13, 43; Frank Falla 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 42; Fox photos 15; Imperial War Museum 16; Jersey Evening Post 34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41; Keystone 4, 23, 24; Radio Times Hulton Picture Library 1, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 19, 25, 27; Wide World 2; Reece Winstone 11.

The maps were drawn by Nigel Holmes. The illustration on page 123 is reproduced by courtesy of Rupert Hart Davis Ltd.

To
J.C.L

Who grew up in freedom, because we won

Since the first edition of this book was published in 1972 much has changed. At that time most of the population had lived through the war and the mere suggestion that Britain might have been defeated was widely regarded as an outrage. Today no one much under the age of seventy can have any recollection of the summer of 1940. Since the 1972 books and broadcast, programmes of the What if variety have become commonplace and alternative history is now respectable.

The military appreciation of how the country was supposedly defeated was not my work, though I fleshed out the experts narrative with my own fictional detail. The account of events still seems to be entirely plausible and all we learned later in the war suggests that the loss of air superiority would have been decisive.

On the subsequent pattern of occupation I think that I may have under-estimated the depredations that the country will have suffered, especially in the cultural sphere. I referred to the plundering of the great national collections, but experience in Europe, which still results in occasional court cases, makes clear that the major country houses would not have been spared and privately owned works of art might have been forcibly acquired, possibly for Nazi leaders, with art dealers being used to give the transaction a show of legality. One interesting point is that one official is quoted as favouring the return of stolen works of art to their original owners, instancing the Elgin Marbles, which a number of no doubt patriotic Britain have recently advocated.

The most sensitive chapters of the book dealt with the likelihood of collaboration and the emergence of a Quisling puppet government. Here, what happened in the Channel Islands is reassuring. A thorough investigation at the end of the war, though its findings were not made public until 1992, cleared the authorities in Jersey and Guernsey and the other islands of assisting the Germans more than was required to protect the civil population from worse treatment. The only charges brought against ordinary citizens were low-grade offences like working in menial posts for the enemy and even here the defendants could, and did, argue that they were acting under duress.

As for a British Quisling, a number of cases have come to light of prominent aristocratic or, occasionally, literary figures advocating friendship with Germany even after the war was visibly approaching or had begun, though their motiveshonourable enough, if misguidedwere to prevent at almost any price a repeat of the bloodbath of 19141918. A German invasion would probably have concentrated the minds of all but the most besotted, but there is one exception about whom, since his death in May 1972, much more has been revealed and all to his discredit. Wherever one looks, in Great Britain or the United States, the Duke of Windsors name emerges as the likeliest head of a pro-Nazi government. Only recently have we learned that Churchill was exasperated by the Dukes reluctance to leave Europe when the war seemed lost. Not till November 1992 did an American journalist who interviewed the Duke in the Bahamas in 1940 reveal, as he claimed, the Dukes strongly pro-German sympathies. There can be no question that the Germans regarded the Duke as sympathetic to the new Germany and he unquestionably had Nazi sympathisers as friends and was, at the very least, indiscreet in revealing his opinion to visitors.

I believe that the Duke might have convinced himself that it was his duty to interpose himself between what had so recently been his People and the Germans and thereby reduce the worse effects of occupation, especially if the Germans had offered such inducements as the return of British prisoners of war and the survival of the British Empire.

The role of the Duchess, a grotesquely vain and self-centred woman with whom the Duke remained infatuated, would have been crucial. The Dukes great quarrel with the British government and the royal family had been their joint refusal to grant his wife what he regarded as her proper status and refer to her as Her Royal Highness. If the Germans were, as they clearly would have been, willing to adopt this style it could have tipped the scales for the Duke and from Your Royal Highness it would have been a small step, for both partners, to Your Majesty.

As for his chief minister, Sir Oswald Mosley remains the obvious candidate although there is no proof of his intended disloyalty. He too might well have persuaded himself that it was his duty to take office and to convince the nation that further resistance was futile and could only lead to bloody reprisals. Peace and prosperity as part of a single European economic unit lay, he might have argued, in co operation with Germany. And what alternative, with no prospect of liberation, was there?