223: Invasion Preparations

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This episode delves into the high-stakes preparations of Britain’s military and government as they braced for a potential German invasion during the summer of 1940, a pivotal moment in the Battle of Britain. From chaotic early responses fueled by panic to the gradual organization of defenses like the Home Guard, the narrative captures the tension and transformation of Britain’s resilience during this critical period. As the episode unfolds, it reveals how the nation’s efforts evolved into a structured defense system, setting the stage for the broader struggle against Nazi aggression.

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Summary

This episode delves into the high-stakes preparations of Britain’s military and government as they braced for a potential German invasion during the summer of 1940, a pivotal moment in the Battle of Britain . From chaotic early responses fueled by panic to the gradual organization of defenses like the Home Guard, the narrative captures the tension and transformation of Britain’s resilience during this critical period. As the episode unfolds, it reveals how the nation’s efforts evolved into a structured defense system, setting the stage for the broader struggle against Nazi aggression.

Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 223 - The Battle About Britain Pt. 7 - Invasion Preparations. This week a big thank you goes out to Andrew and Anton for supporting the podcast by becoming members. Members get access to ad-free versions of all of the podcast’s episode plus special member only episodes roughly once a month. Head on over to historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members to find out more. The preparations made by the British government and the British military in the face of a possible German invasion in the summer of 1940 would greatly evolve over the months that they would take place. In the immediate aftermath of the French defeat and the near disasters at Dunkirk and other evacuations the best way to describe the preparations were that they were fueled by panic. This would be the period where some of the more theatrical preparations were made, although they did not know that they were theatrical at the time, with the early stages of the Home Guard being included on that list. But as the summer progressed what was initially rather small and disorganized turned instead to much more powerful and structured. This episode begins a two part series on these defensive preparations made between May and October 1940, with this episode focusing primarily on the early stages of those preparations up until the late summer of 1940. Even during this period the situation would drastically change as the British Army recovered from the continental disasters and the British factories began to really ramp up their production of war material.

During the stressful summer months of 1940 one of our best sources of information about the mindset and morale in Britain comes from the Home Intelligence Division. If you have ever read anything about how the people of Britain felt during the war, it is likely that somewhere in the source chain for that document was a Home Intelligence Division report. The Division had been created when the war started, and it was the idea of a young woman named Mary Adams, who would go on to lead Home Intelligence with the goal of keeping a constant finger on the pulse of the nation. Adams believed that it was crucial to understand the morale of the people if the government wanted to properly impact that morale with propaganda and actions, and so the Home Intelligence Division was born. After a few months of organization it started publishing reports in early 1940. These Home Intelligence Reports were sourced from Regional Information Officers who were themselves members of local communities, and their goal was to get information from wherever it could be attained and the list of sources was numerous. They spoke to local business leaders, church members and ministers, school officials, almost anybody who wanted to talk could be a source of information. The Regional Information Officers then submitted their reports which were them summarized and collated into the weekly Home Intelligence Reports, with daily reports being available after mid-May 1940. As interesting as these reports can be, there should be some real skepticism about their accuracy, and there even was skepticism at the time with Churchill himself saying that he was concerned that they were just being dreamed up by a London bureaucrat in April 1942. But there were real efforts being made by people down the chain to determine the overall feelings around Britain, and even if the reports were not perfectly accurate, they are still an interesting primary source as a way to learn more about how the people compiling the reports felt the people around them were feeling at the time, even if they did not have specific sources for how people felt. One of the challenges with the high level weekly and daily reports is that they are forced to make somewhat vague statements which, if you were to post them online today, would cause people to hound you for your sources. For example, on May 30th with the Dunkirk evacuation underway the report would say “Many people think the Army will succeed in fighting its way out with heavy losses. Few appear to believe the situation is hopeless. The net feeling is one of suspense.”. How many were many? How few were few? Impossible to say.. Then on June 17th “The public are ready and determined to follow the Prime Minister if he gives the word, but if that word is not given there are signs that morale may change rapidly for the worst.”. Which reads quite positive, but almost certainly hid many of the true feelings of people around Britain. The sources of the reports did not help this problem, with the people talking to the Regional Information Officer often knowing they were talking to the Regional Information Officer, so how truthful were they?. It was a difficult time for anybody to speak out too strongly against the war, and in May 1940 there would even be arrests made when anti-war protests were made. To try and prevent any future protests the leaders of the Peace Pledge Union, who had been at the forefront of the Pacifist movement in Britain during the 1930s, were told that they would be prosecuted if any anti-war campaigns began with their backing. Concerns about the growth of pockets of defeatism were a major concern during the summer months, but according to the Home Intelligence Reports the government could count on the support of most of the people to continue the war.

While the morale of the people was important for resisting an invasion, it was far from the most important, and as soon as invasion fears began to rise in late May what would have been seen as drastic measures before the war began to be put in place to ensure that preparations were being made as quickly and effectively as possible. This included wide ranging controls over the economy and society. Under Chamberlain’s control would be placed government committees that would have the power to control the labor of anybody over the age of 16, if required by war preparations. Similar governmental powers were put in place to allow any changes to any personal or public property should it be required for production or defense. These were among the many changes that were made as part of the various homefront committees, with many of them chaired by Attlee and Greenwood, the two members of the British Labour party that had been brought into the coalition government when Churchill was made Prime Minister. It is interesting to note that this provided the socialist leaders of the previous opposition party with more power than they could have dreamed of the remake the British economy . But they were almost required to have that authority due to lack of other options, it was not like Churchill was going to get involved in economic organization and management. He was more than happy to hand off all of those topics to Chamberlin, Attlee and Greenwood so that he could get on with fighting the war. And so the three ministers went to work on putting in place what they thought the situation required. These powers were the result of what would be called the Emergency Powers Defence Act of 1940, which would be put in place on May 23. It gave the British government the ability and power to put in place any regulation that was deemed necessary for defense, without any need for further approval by Parliament. One of the changes in June was a reduction in the ability of consumer goods to be produced, with the amount of supplies provided to civilian production reduced by about a third so that it could be redirected to war production. This was not the cause, but it did contribution, to major gains being made in July in terms of total armaments production. Production rose dramatically during the summer months, especially when compared to the numbers from earlier in the year. Part of this was due to the changes made to the economic limitations that had previously held down production, like the availability of workers and raw material, but no small part of the turn around should be credited not to the government leaders but instead the workers in the factories. The factories would be working around the clock in some cases, and this meant that during the summery months the British factories would come equal or even exceed what the Germans were producing in some critical equipment areas like aircraft and tanks.

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The quantities of equipment being produced, when combined with the growing organization of national resistance would cause a major increase in confidence at all levels of British society. At the highest levels, this confidence was boosted by much of the intelligence coming out of Germany, with some decrypted messages causing the British intelligence groups to reduce their estimates on the number of German aircraft being produced. Among the people it was clear that preparations were being made, and even decisions that were seen as possibly very unpopular, like the attacks on French forces at Mers-el-Kébir and elsewhere would not greatly damage confidence in the path ahead. Or as one Home Intelligence report would state: ‘generally welcomed and even the fact that many French sailors lost their lives has been allowed to pass with little comment’. All was not perfect in the government though, and there were growing disagreements from various areas around governmental policies. From the more traditional conservatives, those that had supported Chamberlain to the end and had only given Churchill their support due to Chamberlain doing so as well, there were concerns that the new coalition government was giving far too much power to the Labour party, and they were using their positions for political reasons. Among the Labour party there were concerns about British war aims and what post-war Britain might look like. Attlee was getting a lot of pressure from the leftists in his party that they wanted firm statements from the government on reforms that would be put in place due to their support for the war. this would eventually cause the creation of a War Aims committee in late August with the remit to ‘consider means of perpetuating the national unity achieved . . . during the war through a social and economic structure designed to secure equality of opportunity and service among all classes of the community’. Meanwhile, Churchill was also proposing his own radical changes to British society to provide for British defense when in June he offered up Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland in exchange for the usage of Irish naval bases by the Royal Navy. This offer seems wild given the events of the last 85 years but it did happen, and in fact the Irish leader de Valera would reject the idea out of concern that it would bring Ireland into the war and a general distrust of British promises which was a reasonable viewpoint given recent Irish history at that time. Churchill would also make the same offer in late 1941, again to be rejected. But no matter what wild ideas Churchill had, or political grumbling that was happening in London, one fact remained the Germans were preparing for an invasion, a fact that was confirmed when some of Hitler’s directives during the summer of 1940 were intercepted and decrypted. They made it clear that the German military was planning their attack, and this served as a tremendously potent unifying factor in British society and so disagreements were pushed aside due to immediate need.

Not everyone in Britain just fell in line behind the government’s policies, and there would many people arrested either for individual acts or by collective guilt. At the individual level there would be arrests based on speeches and public statements that were made. For example a 50 year old artist, Bernard Wardle, would be arrested after he advised two Canadian soldiers not to the fight for the British government because they were rotten to the core. The 25 year old William Garbett was also arrested, and held for an entire year, after he was quoted as saying in a cafe that he would personally be quite happy when the British Empire was destroyed, as it just existed to enrich the ruling class. While these and other cases often had specific justifications, even if those justifications were questionable, there were also widespread arrests throughout the country in the wake of both the start of the war, and then the German attacks into France, and then the defeat of France. The target for many of these were people that had recently immigrated from Germany and Italy, and particularly any men who had recently come into the country. During the opening months at the war of the roughly 26,000 men who fell into this category, just over 500 had already been arrested after being judged to be high security risks. Then in May 1940, with the German attacks moving West, another and much larger set of arrests were made with 2,000 men in coastal areas arrested and kept in captivity. Just a few days after these 2,000, another 6,000 were also ordered to be arrested, all of those that had previously fallen into the second highest level of concern, or Class B. On June 10th when Italy officially entered the war 4,000 Italian men were immediately arrested. After June 22nd, the remaining 17,000 German men also began to be arrested and detained, with many simply being grabbed off of the streets. This meant that by the end of June over 26,000 individuals were being held without trial, and without any concern for what their political leanings actually were. This is particularly concerning when you realize that many of the immigrants were refugees that had left Germany and Italy specifically because they did not support the leaders that Britain was now at war with. Churchill would later say that these mass arrests and internments were a ‘grave affront’ to the rights of those individuals, but he would justify his actions by claiming that the plight of Britain was so great that no actions were off limits. Which to me just sounds like a pretty bad justification, especially considering that the vast majority of that 26,000 had already been judged to be either low risk or no risk at all. Just like similar incidents in other warring nations, these detainments were driven less by military necessity and more by racism and xenophobia, and Churchill and the British leaders were certainly not immune to those impulses.

On the military side of preparations, that generally came under the purview of the Chief of Home Forces which, up until May 1940 was General Sir Walter Kirke. During the first months of the war Kirke and the Home Forces took a different path than what they had done during the First World War, during which specific home guard units had been created early in the war, and instead the idea was that the Field Force would be prepared and sent to the continent, where it would theoretically assist the French in either defeating or holding off the attack of the Germans. A report near the end of 1939 would say “We wish to avoid the mistake made in the last war of raising and maintaining units and formations designed only for home defence and with no overseas role. It is a reasonable assumption that if and when all Field Army divisions have left this country, the risk of invasion if it exists at all, will have been seriously diminished.”. Obviously this view would prove to be a bit optimistic about what the performance of the Field Force would be in France. When Churchill took over the government he would create a new Home Defense Executive which served as the coordinating military body for defensive preparations, with Kirke at its head and members of all three armed services. It would be from this executive that much of the organization of the following months would originate. The first order of business was to create a new force of civilian volunteers, to quickly fill out the ranks of the forces in the British islands that were ready to meet a foreign invader. This would be called the Local Defence Volunteers, or the LDV, which would eventually morph into the Home Guard. To fill out the LDV appeals were made to all men between the ages of 17 and 65 to join . Kirke would then retire in May and he would be replaced by General Edmund Ironside. Ironside had a long a very public series of posting in the British Army, including being the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. It was because of his public profile that he was chosen for the command, with the hope being that a familiar face would provide greater confidence. On the evening of May 25th he would write that “told that I had to take over the command in England and organise that. I am to be made Field Marshal, later. Not at once, because the public may think that I am being given a sop and turned out. An honour for me and a new and most important job, one much more to my liking than CIGS in every way.”. Ironside would soon be faced with the problem of having far more men than equipment, because while many men were taken off the beaches of Dunkirk and elsewhere, they brought with them little of their equipment. In fact, at the beginning of June the total number of modern tanks was only a bit over 200, not counting over 600 light tanks of minimal value and 132 older models of questionable utility.

I mention the available armor numbers because one of the major challenges that Ironside would face when developing a plan to meet an invasion was the overall lack of mobility of his forces. When this lack of fighting vehicles was combined with the issues posed by the Luftwaffe, who would be very active over all of the most likely landing beaches, Ironside had some real challenges. The solution arrived at were to form a defense based on three key elements. The first element was a series of division placed along the coast to act as a kind of outpost like, with the goal of spotting the invasion, and then delaying any breakout attempts while more forces were brought in. The second element was the creation of a large defensive line which was primarily focused on anti-tank obstacles . Then the third element was the mobile reserves that were positioned to be able to move to meet the invasion. The forces on the beaches would obviously be the first at threat, and so they had been provided with the majority of the available British field artillery, in an effort to increase their ability to delay a German attack. 8 of the British Army’s 15 available divisions were placed along the coast . On the beaches themselves each infantry battalion was responsible for around 2 miles or 3 kilometers of beach, with an internal rotation of forces within the battalion to keep some troops at the forward defensive positions while others were in reserve. At the very edge of the water, on some of the beaches, there would be obstacles put in place that were often called Admiralty Scaffolding which were really just large steel scaffolding designed to trap and damage landing craft. This took a tremendous amount of steel, around 200 tons for just 1 mile of beach, and they ofter were not very useful because of poor practices for anchoring and securing the scaffolding in place which meant it was not in position at the right times. Along with this scaffolding there were efforts made to secure the greatest friend of the defender: mines. Unfortunately for the British Army, and a key oversight in pre-war planning, they did not have any anti-personnel mines in 1940, and in fact they had to turn to the Admiralty to try and secure any type of mine that would target infantry forces on the beaches. This came in the form of 50 pound Mushroom mines, which contained 20 pounds of Amatol explosive. This was not a perfect solution though, because the mushroom mines would prove to be very sensitive, resulting in many premature explosions and casualties. In fact, in late September a German bomb that landed on a beach set off over 500 of the mines, causing major issues for defensive preparations in the area. One of the challenges faced by the British planners was that they did not know exactly where the Germans would land, and during the first 9 months of the war all of the plans and efforts made for anti-invasion defenses had been positioned on the east coast, along the North Sea. This was done for the simple reason that it would be impossible for the Germans to invade from the south, across the English Channel, with French defending from the south and the British from the north. When the French disasters began to occur, initially British defensive planning did not change, if only due to inertia, but the focus of defensive preparations would eventually shift south . Behind the beach each unit was ordered to set up a series of defensive stop lines and strong points, under the assumption that stopping the invasion on the beaches was improbable. Regardless of exactly how their defenses were constructed, the primary goal of the force units was not to defeat the invasion but just to delay it, to hold it in place until the mobile columns could arrive.

But the quality of the defensive measures, particularly behind the beaches would certainly help delay any German invasion. These defensive preparations, called by Ironside the GHQ line, were not on the coasts but instead were positioned inland at areas where the British Army had a better chance of slowing the German invasion. Along with newly built bunkers and pillboxes, of which there were many, there were also efforts started to turn many of the villages in likely areas of invasion into strong defensive positions that could control roads and movement. Anti-tank ditches were also a popular construction item. All of this construction would really start getting underway in late June, and the British construction workers were certainly prolific. There were 900 pillboxes being built in Kent alone by the end of June, and by the end of the year 28,000 of them would be in place. This was a feat far beyond the abilities of the Royal Engineers, and so they were joined by many civilian construction companies. Many of the pillboxes were then protected by nearby infantry trenches, designed to provide support for the machine guns which were often the heaviest weapon available. Anti-tank ditches were also being dug at this time, and what mines were available were being postioned in minefields. The major problem with all of this, was that many of the defenses were not positioned well, and many bore the clear tokens of expediency. This makes sense, because they were mostly making it up as they went along, but it is likely that if they had been forced to use the fortifications many of them would have turned into poorly sited death traps. And it should be remembered that all of these efforts soaked up a tremendous amount of industrial and civilian resources, whether that was concrete production, steel for reinforcement, or just the man hours put into the construction. In fact, most of them never would be completed, both as a consequence of the time it took to build them, with many not completed by the end of 1940 when construction wound down, or because after Ironside was replace by Brooke in July the entire structure of the defensive plans changed. Gone were the plans for an almost entirely static defense, and in its place was a more dynamic plan using the growing strength of the British mobile columns to meet the invader where ever they landed. And for those mobile columns, Brooke required as many of the machine guns and artillery pieces as could be assembled, and many of them that had been placed in the static fortifications earlier in the summer were removed for their new purpose