The MI14 team, whose initial five officers would grow to more than fifty, lived what Sanderson called a ‘troglodyte existence’ in the bowels of the War Office. This created something of a bunker mentality, especially as their job was to immerse themselves in their enemy’s thinking. They sometimes feared that their combination of dedication and humour might lead to confusion and even suspicion among those not part of the team. ‘We had in this large basement a great picture on the wall of Hitler with the inscription “Heil dem Führer”,’ Sanderson later recalled. ‘We often spoke German among ourselves for fun or practice and I wondered what a British passer-by in Whitehall would have thought, had he witnessed the scene.’
Amidst the humour and camaraderie, MI14’s work could not have been more serious. In six weeks of May and June 1940, France, Belgium and the Netherlands had all collapsed. There was now one crucial question to which everyone from Churchill down to the man on the street wanted the answer. Was Britain next? Were the Germans about to invade? This became the overriding mission for MI14 in its early days. Few tasks could have been more important. The fear was that the Germans would simply follow through and head over the Channel. At the end of May 1940, an urgent telegram went to coastal stations saying all defences had to be manned through the night since an invasion was considered imminent.
From June 1940, Sanderson was made responsible for all Army intelligence relating to the invasion of the UK. He was the only officer on the ‘Invasion Warning Committee’ who worked full time looking for ‘indicators’ – warning signs that meant the worst was about to begin. The committee met every day at noon at the Admiralty and at one o’clock would issue a single sheet of paper that summarized all the intelligence which had come in over the last twenty-four hours. It aimed to answer three simple questions: where, when and how would an invasion take place? That piece of paper would go up to the Chiefs of Staff and to the Prime Minister himself. The team would hold their breath for any outbursts from Churchill. Normally, by 3 p.m. they knew they could breathe out if nothing had been heard.
In June 1940, Churchill had prepared the public for the possibility that German troops might arrive over the Channel. ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,’ he had promised a nervous but resolute nation. The message is now remembered as one of defiance, but it was also designed to prepare the public for what many then thought inevitable. Posters were put up for public consumption entitled ‘If the Invader comes – what to do and how to do it’. The advice was simply to stay put.
The last invasion of the country had been in 1066, and Sanderson felt the public had no idea what total war would be like as ravaging armies moved across the British countryside. ‘Confusion and bewilderment might have led to disaster,’ he believed. ‘We felt that if we held out for a week we should do well.’ For all Churchill’s talk, the secret British assessment was that if the Germans did manage to gain a foothold in Britain, there would be no chance of driving them back into the sea. The country would be lost. The Army was short of equipment and the Home Guard was not far off their depiction in Dad’s Army, relying on pitchforks and golf clubs as weapons. Sanderson compiled a top secret handbook to help defending British forces know what to expect (although it did not remain so very secret, since someone managed to leave a copy in a public lavatory in Dublin and an Irishman handed it to the German embassy). The Army prepared an emergency pigeon service which would provide communications for defensive lines if all other links between HQ and forward units were cut.
There were also farcical attempts to undermine German morale. English phrase books were dropped by air upon German troops in France containing what seem comical phrases such as ‘We are sea-sick – where is the basin?’, ‘See how briskly our Captain burns!’ and ‘Why is the Führer not coming with us?’ But there was little hiding the fact that the situation was desperate. If the Germans seized the moment, it might all be over.
On 16 July 1940, Hitler issued Directive No. 16, ordering his armed forces to prepare plans for Operation Sealion – the invasion. The German navy had been considering the challenge for close to a year. They reckoned if they could get an initial ten divisions, or about 110,000, men over a bridgehead they could drive west of London to cut the capital off, forcing its surrender. German spies reported back to the High Command details of coastal defences between Dover and Brighton. The Germans also planned their own deception operation – as the British would later manage – in which they would feed false radio traffic and intelligence to make it look as if a landing was about to take place in the north-east of England to send defending forces the wrong way. The German D-Day was initially planned for September 1940.
The job of Sanderson and the MI14 team was to provide warning. They had said an attack on the Low Countries was probable. But they had never spotted any signs that it was actually beginning. Britain had been completely blind to the attack on Norway as well. The fear that there would be no warning when it was Britain’s turn haunted the team at the War Office. They were convinced Germany had completed all the necessary arrangements.
The British had no spy inside Berlin who could tell them when the order was given, so Sanderson’s job was to scour whatever scraps of intelligence he could get his hands on to find any so-called indicators. For instance, the Germans would need barges and other vessels to carry troops across the Channel, and so any sign of increased activity at ports in Belgium and France might be a giveaway (there were plans to bomb the ports if sufficient warning was received). Every moment mattered and might make the difference between the country’s survival and its capitulation.
The sources Sanderson and MI14 could turn to for insights into German plans were scant. The intelligence picture was parlous. The pickings were so slim that at one point MI14 were instructed to see if an astrologer and water diviner, ‘Smokey Joe’ from Yorkshire, might be able to help. The Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park would eventually transform understanding of Germany’s actions, but at the start of the war that effort was only just beginning and was yet to bear much fruit. In the dark early days there were only two real sources.
The first was age-old – human intelligence, courtesy of MI6. But their networks were an absolute mess at the start of the war. In November 1939, two MI6 officers had fallen into a Nazi trap and been captured at Venlo on the Dutch border. They were interrogated, with the result that much of the secret service’s work in Western Europe was compromised. The Nazi thrust through Belgium, the Netherlands and then France had compounded the disaster for MI6. No one had expected that those countries would collapse so quickly and so no one had prepared for the gathering of intelligence through underground networks under occupation. Almost all of MI6’s existing networks had been rolled up and it had to start virtually from scratch. Dansey and MI6 were all too aware of the pressure they were under to deliver – especially since they now had competition from the newly formed Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was making a lot of noise carrying out orders to ‘set Europe ablaze’.
The reputation of MI6 – fuelled by thriller writers even then – might have been fearsome, but the reality did not always match up. Brain power was often lacking, as the emphasis was on a kind of schoolboy cunning. Hundreds of reports from MI6 regularly passed through Sanderson’s tray in a single week, but many were likely to be rubbish. Some of the reporting Sanderson saw from MI6 was ‘quite ludicrous’, he thought. One report in 1940 suggested German troops in Norway were training to swim ashore wearing green watertight suits and had been heard practising on Scottish bagpipes. There was absolutely no reliable source in France reporting anything to MI6 until late November 1940.
Belgium, with its busy ports, was always likely to be a key staging post for an invasion of Britain. But MI14 was unconvinced by the reports that came in during the early months of the war. ‘Unfortunately, neither the agent in Belgium nor the agent in France inspire full confidence,’ the team noted of MI6’s offerings. ‘The agent in Belgium may be described as enthusiastic, as well as painstaking; his frequent reports are alarmist in tone (some of his prophecies have already been disproved), and he has provided very few identifications.’ Along with the French agent, the two ‘can only be classed as among the least reliable of our whole body