Why Hitler Did Not Invade England

Inside Stories of the War

After France Fell

S\NE of the mysteries of the war was the strange behaviour of Hitler in June and July, 1940. France, Belgium and Holland had collapsed; western Europe was completely under the domin ation of the Hun; only the British remained unconquered, but the army which they had saved from Dunkirk was without equipment or organisation, the Home Guard was unequipped and almost unarmed, and the total of planes, in operation and in reserve, was pitifully small.

If Hitler had attacked Britain swiftly, after the fall of France in June, 1940, he almost certainly would have succeeded.

But he stayed too long to gloat over his prostrate enemy, and to lead goose stepping celebrations of victory, and the British used the unexpected respite to get ready for the Huns; and when the belated attempt at invasion did come, they smashed it.

The following is condensed from “Berlin Diary”, a book by a famous American correspondent, William L.

Shirer. Written originally behind the scenes in Germany, it explains much that hitherto puzzled us.

IN summer, 1940, when the demoralised French asked for an armistice on June 18, many of us who followed the German army into France expected Hitler to turn and strike at Britain immediately. The British, now alone, were reeling from titanic blows.

They had abandoned irreplaceable arms and equipment on the beach of Dunkirk, and no longer had an organised army. Their shore defences were pitiful.

Their navy could not fight in great force in the narrow waters of the Eng lish Channel, over which Goering’s planes now had control.

But Hitler hesitated and his hesitation may well prove to have been a blunder as colossal as the indecision of the Ger man High Command before Paris in 1914.

Why was the invasion of England not attempted immediately? What went wrong?

The answer, I think, is that Hitler believed an invasion would never be necessary. He felt so certain of con cluding a final triumphant peace before the summer’s end that he ordered re viewing stands erected in Berlin—they were completed early in August—for the great Victory Parade through the Bran denburger Tor.

I recall now—though the fact made no impression on me at the time—that at Compiegne, where Hitler dictated a harsh armistice to France, the Germans seemed to be in no hurry to finish with Britain.

Piecing together stray bits of conversa tion picked up in Compiegne and Paris, I think word had come from Hitler that he believed Churchill would now accept a face-saving negotiated peace. And though he ordered an invasion prepared, his certainty that it would never be necessary delayed and slackened the work of its preparation—the construction and concentration of barges, shipping, and a thousand kinds of equipment.

IT may well be that Hitler expected Churchill to make the first move for peace. He waited a month for the realisation of defeat to sink in. The Luftwaffe had been established on the North Sea and the Channel, but he held it back. Then, on July 19, speaking in the Reichstag, he publicly offered Britain

peace. At the same session he made his leading generals field marshals, as though the victorious war were in truth over England’s prompt and unequivocal rejection of his “offer of peace’’ came as a shock to him. He hesitated until the end of July—l 2 days—before accepting it as final. By then a month and a half of precious time had been largely lost.

Britain had meanwhile, to some recovered from the earlier blows, and there is reason to believe that most of the German High Command now had grave doubts as to the success of an invasion. The naval problem involved baffled them. And though Goering assured them he could knock out the RAF in a fortnight, as he had destroyed the Polish air force in three days, they seem to have had some doubts—later fully justified—on this score, too.

THROUGHOUT July the Germans had been gathering barges and pontoons along the French, Belgian and Dutch coasts and assembling shipping at Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel, and various ports in Denmark and Norway. A com mon sight in western Germany was that of diesel-motored barges from as far away as the Danube being hauled on rollers toward the coast. Workshops and garages all over the Reich were put to work on armored, self-propelling pon toons which, in a calm sea, could carry a tank or a heavy gun or a company of troops over the Channel.

On the night of August 5, Hitler had a long conference in the Chancellery with his chief military advisers; Goering, Admiral Raeder, Generals von Brau chitsch and Keitel, and the extremely influential General Jodi from Hitler’s own military staff. It is likely that Hit ler at this meeting made his decision to attempt the invasion as soon as possible, and went over the final plans.

From what has leaked out we can deduce the strategy decided upon. A great air offensive against the British air force would be launched about Aug ust 13. The RAF would be wiped out by September 1. And then, with complete mastery of the air over the Channel so as to prevent the British navy from con centrating, and over England to smash the defending British artillery, the inva sion would be launched.

The main force would cross the Chan nel in barges, pontoons and small boats.

Other ships, protected by planes, would set out from Bremen, Hamburg and the Norwegian ports for Scotland. A small expedition from Brest would take Ire land. And, of course, there would be large-scale parachute action to demora lise the British and Irish in the rear.

EVERYTHING depended upon annihi lating the Royal Air Force. Goer ing promised swift success. But like many a German before him, he gravely miscalculated British character and therefore British strategy.

Goering based his confidence on very simple mathematics. He had four times as many planes as the British. No mat ter how good English planes and pilots were—and he had a healthy respect for both—he had only to attack in superior numbers, and even if he lost as many planes as the enemy, in the end he would still have a substantial air fleet and the British would have none.

What Goering was incapable of grasp ing was that the British were prepared

to see their cities bombed and destroyed before they would risk all their planes to defend them. To the British this was mere common sense and the only tactic that could save them.

To destroy the British air force Goer ing had to get it off the ground. But try as he did—and when I was on the Channel in mid-August he was sending over as many as 1,000 planes a day to lure the British into the air—he never succeeded. The British kept most of their planes in reserve. Their cities, for a while, suffered as a result. But the RAF remained intact.

WHY could not the Luftwaffe destroy the RAF on the ground as it had largely destroyed the air forces of other nations? The Luftwaffe’s own answer is undoubtedly true. German air men tell me that the British simply scattered their planes on a thousand far-flung fields. No air force in the world, with any opposition at all, could hunt them out in sufficient numbers to destroy any sizable portion of them.

Goering tried for a month to destroy Britain’s air arm, using great daylight attacks, for you cannot destroy a nation’s air force at night.

But by the third week of September the grandiose daylight raids had ceased.

The RAF had taken such a toll of Ger man planes that Goering had to aban don them. For while the British never risked more than a small portion of their available fighters on any one day, they did send up enough to destroy more German bombers per day than Goering could afford to lose. For he was using them in mass formations, more as a snare to get the British fighters off the ground so that his Messerschmitts could get at them than for mere bombing.

And here British air tactics played an important role. The Germans tell me that the British fighter squadrons had strict orders to avoid combat with Ger man fighters whenever possible. Instead they were instructed to dart in on the bombers, knock off as many as they could, and then steal away before the German fighters could engage them.

These tactics led many a Messer schmitt pilot to complain that the Brit ish Spitfire and Hurricane pilots were cowards, that they fled whenever they saw a German fighter. But knowing that Britain was lost if her outnumbered fighters were destroyed, the British adopted the only strategy which would save them.

The result was that on at least three separate days British fighters shot down some 175 to 200 German planes, mostly bombers, and crippled probably half as many more.

Moreover, as most of the air battles took place over England, the British were saving at least half of their pilots whose machines were shot down. But the crews of every German plane shot down were lost to the Luftwaffe for the duration of the war—a loss of four highly trained men per plane in the case of bombers. The Luftwaffe could not indefinitely sustain such losses of planes and crews, despite its numerical super iority.

AND so the first fortnight in Septem ber came and went, and still the Germans could not destroy the British air force. And the great Nazi army waited, cooling its heels behind the cliffs at Boulogne and Calais and along the canals behind the sea.

It was not left entirely unmolested.

At night British bombers blasted away at the ports and canals and beaches where the barges were being assembled.

The German High Command has main

tained absolute silence about the losses in men and materials sustained by these insistent British air attacks. But from what I saw of these bombings and from what I’ve been told by German airmen, I think it is highly improbable that the German army was ever able to assemble enoueh barges or ships to launch an invasion in adequate force.

The stories emanating from France that an actual full-fledged invasion was attempted in mid-September seem with out foundation. What probably hap pened is that the Germans attempted a fairly extensive invasion rehearsal. They put barges and ships to sea, the weather turned against them, and naval forces and planes caught them, set a number of barges on fire, and caused heavy casualties.

The unusual number of hospital trains filled with men suffering from burns would bear out this version. I know of four such trains which arrived in Ber lin alone within two days, September 18-19. One of them, stretching out from the Potsdamer Bahnhof for half a mile, was the longest Red Cross train I’ve ever seen.

By October the Germans were in a great state of mind because the British would not admit they were licked. They could not repress their rage against Churchill for still holding out hopes of victory to his people, instead of surren dering as had all of Hitler’s other opponents. The Germans cannot under stand a people with character and guts, and their mis judgment of the British and the consequent failure of their pro ject to invade Britain in the summer of 1940 may have marked the turning point of the war.