If the Nazis had invaded Britain ...
The movie Dunkirk, opening Friday, is a big budget Christopher Nolan epic about Operation Dynamo, the miraculous 1940 evacuation of 300,000 troops to England as the German Blitzkrieg overran France. The evacuation also marked the beginning of the most perilous period in modern British history. Just as soon as they secured France’s surrender, German troops quickly began laying plans for an invasion and subjugation of the British Isles. The invasion, known as Operation Sealion, never happened. But deep in European archives still lie the chilling plans for how it would have played out, writes Tristin Hopper.
MOST OF BRITAIN’S GOLD WAS ALREADY STASHED IN CANADA
If the Nazis had gotten their hands on England, one of their first steps would have been to commence wholesale looting of the country’s gold reserves. And they would have found the vaults empty because the United Kingdom had managed to smuggle the modern equivalent of more than $60 billion in gold to Canada — the largest single transfer of wealth in history. Unbeknownst to wartime Montreal, a good chunk of the accumulated wealth of the British Empire was under the Sun Life Building for the entire war. The Crown Jewels, however, remained in England, where they were reportedly stashed under a trap door in Windsor Castle.
DEFENCE PLAN: LIGHT EVERYTHING ON FIRE
After losing much of its equipment in the Dunkirk evacuation, the British army was left to defend the homeland with startlingly little ammunition or heavy weapons. But the United Kingdom did have plenty of oil and soon rigged up whole sections of coast with impromptu flamethrowers. As German landing craft approached, underwater pipes would pump petroleum into the water and set it ablaze, enshrouding the coast in a curtain of fire. If troops made it onshore, more hidden pipes would ignite the beaches. Finally, any remaining Germans would have to endure hundreds of exploding oil barrels hidden in the trees. German spotter planes detected some of these fire experiments and word soon got around that the Brits were building some kind of fiery doomsday device. “We did hear of a rumour going around in the German troops that if they did get ashore … they would be burned alive. And that was a discouragement to them,” one participant in the experiments told a BBC documentary.
TO GET TANKS TO ENGLAND, GERMANS PLANNED TO DRIVE THEM UNDERWATER
Unlike the meticulously planned D-Day invasion four years later, the Nazi plan to storm the U.K. was much more ad-hoc. The Germans plundered their European conquests for river barges and then had shipyards cut off their bows to turn them into landing craft. Another invention was the Tauchpanzer (diving tank). The German Wehrmacht took regular tanks, waterproofed them as best they could and then fitted them with a long snorkel. On invasion day, the plan was to lower the tanks to the bottom of the English Channel and have them drive along the ocean floor and into battle.
WINSTON CHURCHILL WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY HAVE DIED IN GUNFIRE
As bombs rained on London throughout the Second World War, Churchill showed a callous disregard for his own safety. He had also personally killed people during Britain’s African colonial wars. As prime minister, he carried a gun at all times, practised shooting often and was clear that he was doing this in preparation for a last stand against the Nazis. “You see, Thompson, they’ll never take me alive,” he once boasted to his bodyguard, Walter Thompson, while waving around a pistol. Churchill was even more graphic about his fate at a critical May 1940 cabinet meeting. “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground,” he said.
TEAM WAS TRAINED TO WHISK ROYALS TO CANADA, IF NECESSARY
Known as the Coats Mission, it was an elite group of soldiers tasked with evacuating the British royal family to the country at the drop of a hat. If the Germans gained a beachhead (or a paratrooper raid threatened to kidnap the royals), the king, queen and two princesses were to be bundled into an emergency convoy and sped to one of four fortified safe houses. In a worst-case scenario, the princesses were to then be evacuated out of the country. In a really worst case scenario, it was the Coats Mission’s job to dig in at one of the houses and mount a last stand against the Germans.
MEANWHILE, CANADA ALREADY HAD AN EXILE PALACE LINED UP
Not long after German bombs started falling on England, the Canadian government purchased Hatley Castle, a massive estate just outside Victoria, B.C., probably best known for playing the X-Mansion in the X-Men movies. The Dutch royal family was already in exile in Ottawa and the plan was to keep the castle ready in case Britain needed a safe place for its head of state. King George VI was famously unwilling to leave London even at the height of the Blitz. But if there were suddenly German boots marching on the capital, it wouldn’t necessarily be the king’s call on what he got to do. “The monarch acts on the advice of his prime minister and these constitutional considerations would have influenced George VI’s decisions in the event of an invasion,” Carolyn Harris, author of the new book Raising Royalty, told the National Post. Interestingly, it’s possible a puppet British government would have installed George’s brother, the former King Edward VIII, as a collaborationist monarch.
THE NAZIS ACTUALLY DID INVADE SOME BRITISH TERRITORY
The Channel Islands aren’t technically part of the United Kingdom, but they are British territory. The small archipelago speaks English, eats mushy peas and their streets are patrolled by bobbies. But as Britain geared up for invasion, they deemed the islands of no military importance and left them undefended. For the 60,000 or so Channel Islanders who decided to stick it out, the war would be a nightmare of concentration camps, Jewish deportations and near-starvation.
BOTH GERMANS AND BRITS WERE PRETTY SURE AN INVASION WOULD FAIL
While the British had only the scraps of an army to defend themselves, they still had history’s most powerful navy. The German invasion fleet “would be intercepted long before it reached the coast and all the men drowned in the sea or, at the worst, blown to pieces with their equipment while trying to land,” wrote Churchill in his memoirs. This prediction was shared by top German commanders and later confirmed by a detailed 1974 war game: Whatever happened, an invasion would have almost certainly ended in disaster for Germany. Given that Hitler’s armies would eventually be used to massacre millions in Eastern Europe, it might have been better for almost everybody if a large part of them had been sent to the bottom of the English Channel.