In that febrile atmosphere spy mania flourished. All strangers were suspect. A man walking along a lane with a pack on his back was obviously a spy – until he turned out to be a farm worker on his way to a distant field. Scratches which appeared on telegraph poles were waymarks incised by agents to guide the German infantry when they invaded. Arrow-shaped flower beds in cemeteries had been deliberately planted with white flowers so that they pointed towards ammunition dumps. A farmer who covered a field with heaps of white lime was suspected of deploying them in a pattern that would indicate the direction of a railway junction to a pilot overhead.
The population was warned against impostors. ‘Most of you know your policemen and your ARP wardens by sight,’ ran an official pamphlet. ‘If you keep your heads, you can also tell whether a military officer is really British or is only pretending to be so.’
Particular suspicion attached to nuns – or to people dressed like them – who were almost certainly enemy spies in disguise, with weapons hidden under their habits. Amateur sleuths followed black-clad figures eagerly, only to be disappointed when the fugitives turned round and revealed themselves as elderly women. One day on a train the writer Virginia Woolf insisted to her husband Leonard in a stage whisper that a woman who had got into their carriage was a German spy. In fact she was an embarrassed and innocent nun.
In fact a few spies were arriving, some by parachute, some by ship or submarine. In the autumn of 1940 twenty-odd German agents came to Britain, but all were so incompetent or amateurish that they were quickly rounded up, mainly because the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park had cracked the wireless code used by the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service) and were reading messages between Berlin and its outstations. Forewarned and forearmed, the British arrested the new arrivals one after another – all except one man who escaped and shot himself. After interrogation, five of the prisoners were executed, fifteen were gaoled and four were taken on to become double agents.
A leaflet issued by the Ministry of Information gave civilians detailed instructions on how to behave if the Germans arrived. Just as in 1803, when fear of invasion by Napoleon’s armies was widespread, the inhabitants of Hastings had been advised to stay at home ‘for the preservation of their lives and property which would be much endangered by any attempt to remove from the Town’, so now people were told: ‘You must remain where you are. The order is to “stay put” to avoid clogging up the roads and being exposed to aerial attack … Think always of your country before you think of yourself.’
Individual motorists were ordered to immobilize their cars by taking the rotor arm out of the distributor whenever they left them; the police were empowered to remove some essential part of the mechanism from any vehicle they found inadequately crippled, and to leave a label on the car saying that the part could be recovered from a police station. Another Government order prohibited the use of ‘wireless receiving apparatus’ in all road vehicles.
A leaflet reminded farmers that their first duty was to ‘go on producing all the food possible … Unless military action makes it impossible, go on ploughing, cultivating, sowing, hoeing and harvesting as though no invasion were occurring.’ ‘Plough now! By day and night’ exhorted one of the Ministry’s posters. Farmers also received instructions for putting their tractors out of action if there was a danger that the enemy might capture them.
Parish Invasion Committees were formed ‘to draw up precise inventories of things available likely to be of use – horses, carts, trailers, wheelbarrows … crowbars, spades, shovels … paraffin lamps etc’. The Ministry of Information issued a short film, Britain on Guard, only eight minutes long, with script and narration by J. B. Priestley, which included an excerpt from Churchill’s ‘we shall fight on the beaches’ speech, and the stirring declaration that Britain was responsible ‘for the future of the civilised world’. Along the south coast farmers made plans to move their cattle and sheep inland, their overriding aim being to ensure that neighbours did not manage to annex any of their animals during a sudden, unseasonable transhumance.
With nerves on edge, people began to agitate for permission to take up arms to defend themselves. From their redoubts in the Home Counties superannuated colonels dropped hints in letters to the press: ‘Retired men over the age limit are of course a confounded nuisance in wartime, but’ … ‘Parachutists? The great army of retired-and-unwanted at present … can all use the scatter-gun on moving objects with some skill.’ The newspaper tycoon Lord Kemsley suggested to the War Office that rifle clubs should be formed as the basis of a home defence force, and the Sunday Pictorial asked if the Government had considered training golfers in rifle shooting, to pick off German parachutists as they descended. The Home Office, worried that private defence forces might start to operate outside military control, issued a press release laying down that it was the army’s task to engage enemy parachutists: civilians were not to fire at them. In the House of Commons an MP asked the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, whether, ‘in order to meet the imminent danger of enemy parachute landings’, he would sanction the immediate formation of a corps of older, armed men ‘trained for instant action in their own localities’.
Together with senior military officers, the Government had been putting together a plan, and on the evening of 14 May, after the nine o’clock news, Eden came on the radio with a stirring announcement:
We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain as are British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to come forward now and offer their services in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the Local Defence Volunteers. The name describes its duties in three words. You will not be paid, but you will receive uniforms and will be armed.
Anyone might join, said Eden, simply by handing in his name at the local police station. The result was phenomenal. Men were heading for their nearest station before he had finished speaking, and within seven days 250,000 too old or too decrepit to fight in the armed services, or already in reserved occupations, signed up for the LDV. On the day after Eden’s broadcast the War Office announced that volunteers would be issued with denim uniforms and field service caps – and these had to suffice until serge khaki battledress and armbands became available.
Such was the enthusiasm that in July the number of volunteers rose to 1.5 million, but at first the organization of the new force was chaotic, as different factions had different ideas about its role. Almost at once it became known by its alleged motto: Lie Down and Vanish. Was its purpose merely to act as an armed constabulary, observing the movements of any German troops who landed, or was it to be more aggressive, and attack invaders whenever possible?
Within days the embryonic organization had a new title. Churchill, disliking ‘Local Defence Volunteers’, which he found uninspiring, changed its name to the Home Guard. Enthusiasm was particularly strong on the south coast, where any invasion force was most likely to land. When a company was formed in Worthing, with platoons in the town and outlying villages, two local benefactors each offered £1000 for the purchase of arms and equipment, and a theatre was taken over as a headquarters.
One of its first units was established at Storrington, a village north of Worthing, where recruits set up their headquarters in an evacuated monastery and began to patrol the South Downs on the lookout for paratroopers, besides guarding a railway tunnel against sabotage. Little did they know how quickly they might have become engaged with German forces – for in the final version of Hitler’s invasion plan, after a landing between Brighton and Eastbourne some units would have swung westwards along the line of the Downs, and Storrington would have lain directly in their path.
If anyone sought to ridicule the new organization, there were plenty of spokesmen to defend it. ‘It is no mere outlet of patriotic emotion that we are endeavouring to recruit,’ said Lord Croft, the Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for War, in the House of Lords, ‘but a fighting force which may be at death grips with the enemy next week, or even tomorrow.’
Another leading advocate of the need for a people’s army trained in guerrilla warfare