6. The New Order: The British Empire
The Fuehrer's plan for Britain was multifold, consisting of the following points:
1. Conquest of the British Home Islands.
The psychological shock of a German landing on British soil was, the Chancellor estimated, sufficient to bring the British government to ask for terms; if it failed, the Reichsheer was to occupy the whole of Britain itself and bring the British to negotiation by force.
2. Seizure of British Imperial resource regions.
To ensure that the British Empire was incapable of responding as Germany herself had to a Versailles-like peace, Germany must emasculate the British Empire. The immediate goal was therefore the destruction of the governments of Burma, Irak, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia; though the last was not directly affiliated with the British Empire, the seizure of the Arabian Peninsula would effectively place the world's oil supply under Reich control, beyond British reach.
3. Political isolation of Britain.
The Reich's long-term security relied on the establishment of a European order in which no country could challenge Germany. This included within the British Isles. If Britain could not be brought immediately to negotiate and hence preserve her integrity, suitable candidates for Reich-friendly governments in Wales and Scotland must be found and set up, and their independence made part of any peace negotiations. Abroad, a similar course should be followed in Africa and India - the elimination of British dominions and establishment of Reich allies where possible should be a natural consequence of any occupation. In India, this was especially critical simply to reduce the size of the area's polities; the Hindu-Moslem religious divide would be fully exploited in this region in order to maximize the effect of this policy. In Africa, as a base requirement, the destruction of South Africa as an entity was required.
4. Establishment of a Reich ally on the British throne.
This measure was actually the easiest to enact; the former King Edward VIII was residing in Portugal, a Reich ally, at the time that the invasion plan was approved. The most uncertain portion of the plan was the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, who was unreachable without disclosing the planned invasion. Before the war, like the American Lindbergh, he had been a supporter of the Reich's modernization. Now, however, his position was less clear, especially in the face of an invasion.
The sum of these goals was Case Wilhelm, the most ambitious operation the Reich had attempted since the Sowjet war, involving fighting on no fewer than seven fronts - Egypt, Irak-Jordan-Arabia, west India, east India-Burma, central Africa, south Africa, and Britain. It was perhaps the most complex military action since the Mongol campaigns, and executed on a far more centralized basis.
Figure 84: Hitler and the Generals during the planning of Case Wilhelm
Despite the fact that he was not personally involved in the planning for the invasion, Grand Admiral Raeder telegraphed all fleet units available and ordered their assembly, along with all of the Reich's militarized shipping, in the Low Countries. He arrived himself in the late hours of October 15, 1947, and after a brief conference with Lieutenant-General Ramcke, a uniquely qualified officer whose training and experience thus far had covered both parachute and amphibious operations in Scandinavia, proceeded by Fieseler Storch to Berlin. In Berlin, he presented Ramcke's invasion plan, a revised version of the 1941 Manstein Plan prepared while the Reich had been actively focusing on developing an amphibious capability. Ramcke's plan was for a concentrated landing on the Dover coast, followed by a rapid breakout through Norfolk and Sussex to encircle London; it differed from Manstein's in that it neglected diversionary landings in Sussex and Norfolk in favor of a narrow beachhead easily secured by naval forces.
Matters were further complicated by an emergency meeting between Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop and the Japanese ambassador, General Oshima. Oshima behaved with typical Oriental reserve, given the gravity of his message: he was charged by the Showa Emperor to report that the United States had resumed hostilities with Japan, and under the circumstances the Emperor saw no choice for Japan but to ally herself with Germany. This involved Germany in the seven-year-old war boiling in the Philippines, but the Fuehrer, remembering Japan's political support during the lean years of the 1930s, agreed. On October 25, 1947, the German Reich found itself at war with the United States. The only hope for a rapid end to the war was a show of force in Britain, so Wilhelm went ahead. The Fuehrer's parting words to Raeder were unusually pensive:
Well, Admiral, it all rests on your shoulders now - keep the Channel open for a week and I'll be happy, then it'll be the soldiers' work.
On October 27, the Reichsmarine sortied to secure the Channel; the transports were not far behind. The initial landings were conducted by pressed civilian craft, since war was not formally declared. Most of the soldiers involved in the operation expected the invasion of Britain to be a rapid affair; indeed, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the overall commander of land forces, had planned a visit to British mystery writer Agatha Christie. Navigational errors put Field Marshal Hausser's 1.
Panzerarmee north of the Thames. When notified, Hausser gave his famous reply.
Very well, we shall fight the war from here.
Hausser's troops came ashore near Clacton-on-the-Sea in force against minimal resistance - no one on either side had expected a landing in Norfolk. On the Dover approach, the invasion forces were held up for more than a day by heroic defense on the part of the garrison, until Hausser, using the same boats which had led the initial wave, forded the Thames Estuary and came into Kent from the north. Such British troops as could retreated; many were forced to die where they stood by the rapidity of the German advance. In London, Prime Minister Attlee's resignation was accompanied by the distant echo of Hausser's guns, and the ascent of Winston Churchill, Germany's longtime foe in the British Parliament, marred by the fact that for the first time since William of Orange, foreign troops were on British soil. Churchill gave one of his famous orations, though even here the sound of distant gunfire intruded into the BBC's sound studio:
The whole question of home defence against invasion is, of course, powerfully affected by the fact that we have for the time being in this Island incomparably more powerful military forces than we have ever had at any moment in this war or the last. But this will not continue. We shall not be content with a defensive war. We have our duty to our Ally. We have to build up the Home Army, under its gallant Commander-in-Chief, Lord Gort. All this is in train; but in the interval we must put our defences in this Island into such a high state of organisation that the fewest possible numbers will be required to give effective security and that the largest possible potential of offensive effort may be realised. On this we are now engaged. It will be very convenient, if it be the desire of the House, to enter upon this subject in a secret Session. Not that the government would necessarily be able to reveal in very great detail military secrets, but we like to have our discussions free, without the restraint imposed by the fact that they will be read the next day by the enemy; and the Government would benefit by views freely expressed in all parts of the House by Members with their knowledge of so many different parts of the country. I understand that some request is to be made upon this subject, which will be readily acceded to by His Majesty's Government.
We have found it necessary to take measures of increasing stringency, not only against enemy aliens and suspicious characters of other nationalities, but also against British subjects who may become a danger or a nuisance should the war be transported to the United Kingdom. I know there are a great many people affected by the orders which we have made who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them, but we cannot, at the present time and under the present stress, draw all the distinctions which we should like to do. If parachute landings were attempted and fierce fighting attendant upon them followed, these unfortunate people would be far better out of the way, for their own sakes as well as for ours. There is, however, another class, for which I feel not the slightest sympathy. Parliament has given us the powers to put down Fifth Column activities with a strong hand, and we shall use those powers subject to the supervision and correction of the House, without the slightest hesitation until we are satisfied, and more than satisfied, that this malignancy in our midst has been effectively stamped out.
Turning once again, and this time more generally, to the question of invasion, I would observe that there has never been a period in all these long centuries of which we boast when an absolute guarantee against invasion, still less against serious raids, could have been given to our people. In the days of Napoleon the same wind which would have carried his transports across the Channel might have driven away the blockading fleet. There was always the chance, and it is that chance which has excited and befooled the imaginations of many Continental tyrants. Many are the tales that are told. We are assured that novel methods have been adopted, and when we see the originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays, we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous maneuver. I think that no idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered and viewed with a searching, but at the same time, I hope, with a steady eye. We must never forget the solid assurances of sea power and those which belong to air power if it can be locally exercised.
I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.
At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government - every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.
The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight wherever we shall find the foe, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Churchill's speech, while it did what it was meant to do and excited the British public to defend against the landings, was too little, too late. Von Rundstedt had already reached Christie's Devon estate, only to find her absent in Manchester, on November 2, 1947. She was prevented from returning either to it or to London by Field Marshal Geyr von Schweppenburg, whose thrust northeast out of the beachheads was aimed at the separation of Wales from the United Kingdom. Von Schweppenburg's attack was matched by a drive by SS General Wilhelm Bittrich and the Wiking division into Scotland; other than these two detached forces, the entirety of the German force in England concentrated in a ring around London. Churchill's bravado was to be tested sorely; by December 1, the city was completely sealed off from the outside world.
On a bitterly cold day in Edinburgh, December 10, 1947, a hastily-assembled pipe and drum corps stood in freezing rain to welcome the first monarch of independent Scotland in two hundred and forty years, Charles III, of the Galloway Stuarts. In his coronation speech, the new Scots monarch, in his mid-30s, informed the assembled, dispirited crowd that this was not an end of their relations with England, which could never be completely severed, but the beginning of a new golden age for Scotland. It was perhaps one of the most ironic beginnings for any nation, especially considering that the first order of business was the presentation of the Order of the Thistle to a series of high-ranking Germans beginning with General Bittrich. This was the second and more significant of the Fuehrer's blows at the fundamental structure of Britain; the Scots dissolution of the Act of Union technically ended "Great Britain" as an entity, though the British crown retains the name to this day.
Figure 85: The disintegration of the British Empire, November-December 1947
Elsewhere in the world, the war continued apace. Irak had collapsed within days of the invasion order going out; it had been followed in short order by Saudi Arabia and Yemen, giving Germany total dominance of the Arabian Peninsula. In Egypt, Walter Model drove east from the German starting position in Tobruk, assisted in a hammer-anvil approach by Lieutenant-General Ringel and his paratroopers. They took Alexandria on November 12, freeing the forces which had advanced across the Suez for an assault on Cairo which succeeded on the 18th. Model and Field Marshal Kesselring, commander of the Suez assault force, both turned their attention to India. In India, General Guderian fought a series of dazzling battles against forces which frequently outnumbered him ten-to-one, but retreated with minimal force applied. However, he was a victim of his own success and quickly found himself overextended, chasing willy-nilly across the Indian countryside in an attempt to keep his front intact. To the east, an SS-led force marching out of former Indochina maintained the pressure required to keep Guderian mobile, reducing Burma to surrender by December 20.
By this time, SS-Marshal Dietrich had reached Pretoria and forced the surrender of the Smuts government. It was a fairly amicable surrender; the old Boer was forced to admit his admiration for Dietrich, who had marched without connection to his own supply lines for the past three weeks, his rear covered only by Portuguese infantry. Dietrich, for his part, welcomed the South Africans into the Reich as true, albeit geographically mislaid, Germans, and tarried only long enough to be informed that, unbelievably, the British Indian Army was marching to South Africa's relief - a full eighty divisions had mysteriously appeared in Windhoek without resistance. It was a problem swiftly dealt with; Dietrich was able to provide the Fuehrer with the most lavish Christmas present of captured standards imaginable.
Figure 86: London's St. Paul's Cathedral, obscured by smoke from the Battle of London
In Britain, the long, drawn-out agony of London was only beginning. For three weeks, the Reich had tightened its grip on the city. Within, Field Marshal Gort had a mere two armored and one motorized division, plus the various Territorial units which had been swept in during the encirclement, for a total of an estimated 100,000 soldiers. Against this was arrayed the initial invasion force - well over a million Germans under arms - plus approximately the same number of troops shifted from the Continent. It is a tribute to Gort's heroic defense of the city of London that the assault was called for a re-equipping pause no fewer than three times, during which Churchill continued to exhort the city's defenders to their utmost.
Figure 87: Prime Minister Churchill among the ruins of St. James's, Picadilly, Christmas Day, 1947
The Battle of London was the longest single battle fought by the Reich during the War Years, eclipsed only by the Battle of Verdun in 1916 in terms of casualties and destruction. From December 1, 1947 to the fall of London on February 2, 1948, over two hundred divisions of the Reichsheer and Waffen-SS converged on the city. The level of destruction was unparalleled in any urban center in the modern era.
Significantly, during this entire period, the Royal Navy proved incapable of dislodging Admiral Raeder from his position astride the resupply route, and Raeder steadfastly refused to be lured off of this approach. To his credit, Raeder's force, consisting essentially of the entire Reichsmarine outside the Mediterranean and a single Asiatic squadron, sank half of the existing Royal Navy in that strait, including the entire British carrier fleet. It was a battle which changed the perception of carrier power in the Reichsmarine. Even the outdated
Graf Zeppelin was able to claim more than twenty ships to its credit, and Raeder transferred his flag about her from the battleship
Tirpitz in honor of the achievement despite his well-known reservations about air as the decisive arm at sea. In exchange, he lost ten light warships, which were even then being replaced at Kiel.
As Raeder stayed in place, the Americans desperately attempted to relieve pressure on London with a broad-front landing in France aimed at pulling troops from Britain; however, this was simply not to be. Troops who had been sitting at embarkation points merely rolled westward from Calais, and northward from Bordeaux, where Field Marshal Rommel had waited patiently for the apparently inevitable order to invade Spain, and wiped out no fewer than fifty-five American divisions on the beaches. Perhaps most noteworthy was the defense of Brest, conducted by Lieutenant-General Ramcke, who had been cheated of participation in his own plan by an administrative error. Ramcke's three marine divisions were faced by eight American armored divisions led by their armored innovator, Patton, who had won some distinction during the abortive Second Mexican War. It proved to be a nearly equal struggle, with neither side acquiring any significant advantage in the bocage and shingle beaches, poorly suited for armor but excellently suited for a man like Ramcke, who had the distinction of being the only officer in the Reichswehr to complete the training for, and command, airborne, marine, and mountain forces during the war.
In the end, it was demoralization and an incapability for Gort to shuffle his outdated Churchill tanks everywhere that they were needed that cost the British the Battle of London. When he arrived to present awards and inspect the survivors, the Fuehrer was visibly shocked by the destruction, murmuring, "Perhaps we would have been more merciful to use the Device."
Figure 88: London's Whitechapel district, the wreckage of Christ Church, Spitalfields, still standing
The Fuehrer was defeated in his ambition to meet his British opposite, who had opposed him from Parliament since a decade prior, before the Treaty of Munich. Prime Minister Churchill elected not to live to see the Empire fall, dying on February 1st as the last units under Gort's command surrendered on the Isle of Dogs, the city's last defensible position. Chancellor Hitler surveyed the wreckage of London, personally meeting with the men who had survived three harrowing months on both sides of the battle and visiting the extensive German Cemetary on the north bank of the Thames. He then quietly conferred with his architect, Albert Speer, and determined that perhaps Bamburgh Castle, to the north, would be a more suitable place for the inevitable peace conference.
Figure 89: The end for the British Empire
Despite its location in Bamburgh, the conference was still referred to universally as the "London Conference." Its outcome was mostly predictable - a final settlement of the questions of African and Pacific colonies, a redress of Elsass-Lothringen, and the outright annexation to the Reich of Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the Balkans, Italy, and Asia Minor. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the French Marshal Petain appeared and announced that France would be reconstituted as a German ally. This was contrary to the Fuerher's stated war aims, "the reunion of eastern and western strains of Karl der Grosse's empire." Historians have puzzled over this; recently declassified documents reveal the Fuehrer's motives were simple: occupied France was a civilized country, and measures that kept the peace in the East were simply unacceptable against civilized people. The rising tide of banditry and political violence in France had led the Fuehrer to reconsider his occupation policy, and meetings with Petain had actually begun almost as soon as the Fuehrer had made his famous "The future belongs to the Reich" speech.
For two weeks, the United States and Germany continued technically to be at war. During those two weeks, intense negotiations between the two parties led to the reestablishment of Edward VIII as King of England - though he claimed the titles of the other British kingdoms and of Emperor of India despite India's dismemberment into Muslim and Hindu states by German occupation forces. The actual administration of the rump of Britain was to be carried out by the new "Lord Protector," a lifetime title granted to Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, in coordination with advisors from the Reich. The dominions of the British Empire, unsurprisingly, chose to shift their allegiance to the United States as an alliance of equals. The United States, shocked at the violence unleashed in Europe, chose to make peace with its enemies and withdraw to its sphere of influence. It was therefore a very pleased Chancellor and Fuehrer Adolf Hitler who returned from Bamburgh Castle to the Reich Chancellory on February 14, 1948, two months and six days short of his fifty-ninth birthday, the greatest conqueror in human history.