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James Hayward |
BURN THE SEAFlame Warfare, Black Propaganda & the Nazi Plan to Invade England The History Press / 2016 / £17.99 (hardback edition) ISBN: 978-0-7509-6598-9 Introduction: The Smoke and the Fire At the beginning of September 1940 civilians in the small village of Crostwick, a few miles north of Norwich, were astonished by the sudden appearance of a seemingly endless convoy of army trucks and ambulances. The vehicles moved very slowly, their drivers sporting grim expressions. One let slip to Mrs Barnes, the wife of a local poultry farmer, that they were carrying the bodies of German soldiers washed up on the Norfolk coast, the grisly aftermath of a failed invasion attempt. Later that same month Gunner William Robinson, stationed at Herne Bay with 333 Coastal Artillery Battery, was sent south to Folkstone to take part in a macabre fatigue. Together with half a dozen other men, Robinson was instructed to search the beach between Hythe and St Mary's Bay for dead Germans. On the first day two such bodies were located, along with seven or eight more over the next two days. All were taken by truck to an isolated field west of New Romney, where they were discretely unloaded behind a canvas screen. An NCO checked the corpses for identity discs and paybooks, which were then handed over to an officer. Robinson recognised the dead men as German soldiers, rather than Luftwaffe airmen or naval personnel, on account of their field-grey uniforms. Some appeared to be slightly burned from the waist down; all looked to have been in the water for some time. By way of reward for discharging this unpleasant duty Robinson and his colleagues drew a daily ration of 20 Woodbine cigarettes, and additional pay of two shillings. The bodies kept on coming. On October 21st the decaying corpse of a German infantry soldier, identified as Heinrich Poncke, was recovered from the broad shingle beach at Littlestone-on-Sea. His remains, like the bodies recovered by Gunner Robinson's party, were removed to New Romney for burial. Unlike the others, Poncke's posthumous arrival was widely reported by British newspapers and the BBC. Were these casualties connected to the several long hospital trains observed in Berlin by American broadcaster William L. Shirer? On two consecutive days, September 18th and 19th, the bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich spied large numbers of wounded German servicemen being unloaded at the Potsdamer and Charlottenburg yards. "I picked up a conversation with a railway workman," Shirer recorded in his earlier Berlin Diary. "He said most of the men taken from the train were suffering from burns. I wondered where so many wounded could have come from, as the armies in the west had stopped fighting three months ago." But burned how? According to the New York Times, while attempting nothing less than a full-scale invasion of England. On December 15th 1940 the paper reported that there had already been two such attempts, and that in both instances "the Nazis were literally consumed by fire." French civilians in the occupied Channel ports estimated that as any as 80,000 German troops had perished. "Hospitals in Occupied France are filled with Nazi soldiers, all of them suffering from severe burns. Thousands of dead Germans have been washed ashore." A wave of mutinies apparently followed in September, when many troops refused to face the "burning sea" again on learning that a third attempt at invasion was planned. Little wonder, then, that the chief press censor in Britain, Rear-Admiral George Thomson, was eventually forced to concede: "In the whole course of the war there was no story which gave me so much trouble as that of the attempted German invasion, flaming oil on the water and 30,000 burned Germans." It is established historical fact that Operation Sealion, the planned German invasion of the British Isles in September 1940, never set sail, and by the close of October had been postponed until the following spring. What, then, was the truth behind the rumours of large numbers of bodies washed ashore along the southern and eastern coasts of England that autumn? Had a German landing force met with disaster in the Channel? Could it really be true that the sea itself had been set on fire? Was Hitler's villainous scheme really derailed by a secret weapon still confined to the drawing board? The myths and legends of the Second World War are legion, and often surprisingly durable. Indeed conjecture that a German raiding force was thwarted by flame would again spark a small media firestorm in 1992, this time focused on the tiny Suffolk fishing hamlet of Shingle Street, a few miles north of Felixstowe. Soon what began as a minor local story exploded across national print and television media, with questions raised in the House of Commons, the early release of classified wartime files, and robust denials of a conspiracy and cover-up by the Ministry of Defence. In truth, the Shingle Street legend was nothing more than an echo of unavowable black propaganda from 1940, concocted and spread by MI6 and the Foreign Office at a time when Britain's finest hour was fast becoming her darkest. "The burning sea story was our first large-scale attempt at a Big Lie and it proved amazingly successful," observed its creator, Major John Baker White of the Directorate of Military Intelligence. "It was produced by people who were still amateurs at the game, and projected through a machine still far from complete. But it worked." Burn the Sea provides the first comprehensive account of the origin, circulation and astonishing longevity of the myth of the "invasion that failed" in 1940, as well as its remarkable revival in 1992. It is also the story of the oddball Petroleum Warfare Department, the rusted death trap fire-ships of Operation Lucid, mysterious foreign bodies, adroit double-cross by MI5 and MI6, and the still-secret clandestine channels by which British intelligence agencies waged expert psychological warfare across Occupied Europe and the United States in 1940. Finally, it is a study of a textbook exercise in the deceptive art of the Big Lie, and of boundless credulity undimmed by the passage of 50 years. James Hayward |
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