Read Online If Britain Had Fallen by Norman Longmate - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Norman Longmate
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well with the inmates and take food and medical supplies to any in need.’ Their prize item of equipment was an enormous tin opener labelled, a little ironically, ‘Made in Germany’.
Despite all its requests to ‘stay put’, the government realised that there would still be an exodus from some of the invaded districts, by people whose homes had been destroyed, by those in whom the instinct to flight was irresistible, and, most commonly of all, by residents ordered by the British military authorities to leave an area about to become a battleground. The then Chief Constable of Essex remembers that, to prevent these retreating evacuees becoming entangled with the (one hoped) advancing British forces, a map was drawn up for ‘yellow roads’ to be used by refugees, and ‘red roads’ to be used by the Army. It became something of a joke within the police force, who had to see that the two streams of traffic were kept apart, that the authorities’ preparations had not extended to ordering sufficient coloured ink. A note on the map they received explained that ‘yellow roads’ were in fact shown in purple, as no yellow had been available.
Another experienced police officer, then serving in Kent, in the very front line of the expected invasion, was personally involved in drawing up plans to deal with the expected flood of refugees. Some places were in fact to be evacuated, such as ‘nodal points, which were going to be subjected to all-round defence and in those cases all “useless mouths”—women and children and the aged—would be compulsorily removed. The ‘Stay Put’ order applied everywhere else. ‘The idea was, of course, that they should remain where they were, but,’ he admits, ‘I don’t think we were so naive as to expect that they would. Certainly some of them would have bolted and the whole idea was that they should be kept away from main routes which the defence forces might be expected to use and they should be headed off into woods and more remote villages, and there looked after as best we could by putting them in village halls, churches and that sort of thing. It was our purpose to turn them away from those areas where they could do any harm until the battle had rolled over them and then to try to get them back whence they came.’
It would, he believes, have been a difficult and, of course, unfamiliar job for the police, but not impossible. ‘Crowd control’, he points out, ‘is usually a question of having enough policemen…. It would have been a question of having officers at suitable strategic road junctions and ensuring that they followed the routes that we wanted them to.’ Occasionally, he admits, peaceful persuasion might not have been sufficient. ‘If you get a difficult person who simply won’t go the way you want him to well then you have to shove him the way you want him to go. And I suppose if theworst comes to the worst, you have to knock him down and hand him over to someone else to cart off.’
Prewar governments had sometimes dreamed, in the days when the reality of air attack and the capacity of the ordinary citizen to resist it were both unknown, of bombed cities having to be ringed by an armed cordon to stop the inhabitants fleeing in terror. By September 1940 such fears had subsided, although a good deal of thought had been given to arming the police, not to keep order among the civilian population (though conceivably in an emergency it could have come to that) but, since they were already well organised, uniformed and disciplined, to serve as a kind of second-line Home Guard. Churchill was an enthusiastic advocate of this policy, which he proposed at his first Cabinet meeting on 11 May, and ten days later the Cabinet agreed to it ‘as far as the arms available permitted’ an important qualification, since at that time the Army and LDV had first claim on any firearms that could be found.
During the next few weeks ministers returned to the question on several
Despite all its requests to ‘stay put’, the government realised that there would still be an exodus from some of the invaded districts, by people whose homes had been destroyed, by those in whom the instinct to flight was irresistible, and, most commonly of all, by residents ordered by the British military authorities to leave an area about to become a battleground. The then Chief Constable of Essex remembers that, to prevent these retreating evacuees becoming entangled with the (one hoped) advancing British forces, a map was drawn up for ‘yellow roads’ to be used by refugees, and ‘red roads’ to be used by the Army. It became something of a joke within the police force, who had to see that the two streams of traffic were kept apart, that the authorities’ preparations had not extended to ordering sufficient coloured ink. A note on the map they received explained that ‘yellow roads’ were in fact shown in purple, as no yellow had been available.
Another experienced police officer, then serving in Kent, in the very front line of the expected invasion, was personally involved in drawing up plans to deal with the expected flood of refugees. Some places were in fact to be evacuated, such as ‘nodal points, which were going to be subjected to all-round defence and in those cases all “useless mouths”—women and children and the aged—would be compulsorily removed. The ‘Stay Put’ order applied everywhere else. ‘The idea was, of course, that they should remain where they were, but,’ he admits, ‘I don’t think we were so naive as to expect that they would. Certainly some of them would have bolted and the whole idea was that they should be kept away from main routes which the defence forces might be expected to use and they should be headed off into woods and more remote villages, and there looked after as best we could by putting them in village halls, churches and that sort of thing. It was our purpose to turn them away from those areas where they could do any harm until the battle had rolled over them and then to try to get them back whence they came.’
It would, he believes, have been a difficult and, of course, unfamiliar job for the police, but not impossible. ‘Crowd control’, he points out, ‘is usually a question of having enough policemen…. It would have been a question of having officers at suitable strategic road junctions and ensuring that they followed the routes that we wanted them to.’ Occasionally, he admits, peaceful persuasion might not have been sufficient. ‘If you get a difficult person who simply won’t go the way you want him to well then you have to shove him the way you want him to go. And I suppose if theworst comes to the worst, you have to knock him down and hand him over to someone else to cart off.’
Prewar governments had sometimes dreamed, in the days when the reality of air attack and the capacity of the ordinary citizen to resist it were both unknown, of bombed cities having to be ringed by an armed cordon to stop the inhabitants fleeing in terror. By September 1940 such fears had subsided, although a good deal of thought had been given to arming the police, not to keep order among the civilian population (though conceivably in an emergency it could have come to that) but, since they were already well organised, uniformed and disciplined, to serve as a kind of second-line Home Guard. Churchill was an enthusiastic advocate of this policy, which he proposed at his first Cabinet meeting on 11 May, and ten days later the Cabinet agreed to it ‘as far as the arms available permitted’ an important qualification, since at that time the Army and LDV had first claim on any firearms that could be found.
During the next few weeks ministers returned to the question on several
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