The fifteenth of September was also the date agreed earlier in August for the start of Operation Sealion. Enthusiasm for invasion was waning fast at Hitler’s headquarters. On 30 August the date for possible invasion had been switched to 20 September to meet the navy’s revised schedule. On 6 September Hitler discussed the invasion plan with Admiral Raeder. The navy took the view that Sealion was possible only if the weather and air supremacy allowed it, but Raeder began to press again for an indirect strategy. Army and navy leaders recommended a Mediterranean campaign, in collaboration with Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain. Hitler now faced a number of options. Sealion was not yet ruled out, though it looked an unattractive prospect in deteriorating weather; there was the possibility of destroying Britain’s position throughout the Mediterranean basin and the eastern Atlantic, which would cut the Empire in two and leave Britain geographically isolated; there was a chance that the air assault on London might be ‘decisive’ by itself.45
On the afternoon of 14 September a conference assembled at Hitler’s headquarters. The service chiefs were there; the issue under discussion was ‘the England problem’. Hitler reminded his audience that the quickest way to end the war was to invade and occupy southern Britain. He announced that naval preparations were now complete (‘Praise to the Navy,’ the army chief of staff wryly noted in his war diary); he suggested that the air force campaign was poised for decisive success (‘Praise above all’ this time).46 None the less, Hitler concluded that air superiority had not yet been achieved. He did not cancel Sealion, but promised to review the situation on 17 September for possible landings on 27 September or 8 October. Three days later, when the evidence was clear that the German Air Force had greatly exaggerated the extent of their successes against the RAF, Hitler postponed Sealion indefinitely. A directive on 19 September ordered preparations to be scaled down. On 12 October Hitler ordered his forces to maintain the appearance of an invasion threat in order to keep up ‘political and military pressure on England’. Invasion was to be reconsidered in the spring or early summer of 1941 only if Britain had not been brought to her knees by air attack.47
The end of Operation Sealion in September 1940 did not end the Battle of Britain. At the meeting on 14 September Hitler gave the air force the chance to show what it could do on its own to defeat Britain: ‘The decisive thing is the ceaseless continuation of air attacks.’ Shortly before the meeting, Raeder had presented Hitler with a memorandum urging that air attacks ‘should be intensified, without regard to Sealion’. The air force chief of staff, General Hans Jeschonnek, grasped the opportunity with both hands. He asked Hitler to allow him to attack residential areas to create ‘mass panic’. Hitler refused, perhaps unaware of just how much damage had already been done to civilian targets. The air force was ordered to attack military and economic targets. ‘Mass panic’ was to be used only as a last resort. Hitler reserved for himself the right to unleash the terror weapon. The political will to resist was to be broken by the collapse of the material infrastructure, the weapons industry, and stocks of fuel and food. On 16 September Goering ordered the air fleets to begin the new phase of the battle. Like the campaign in Kosovo in the spring of 1999, air power was expected to deliver the political solution by undermining military capability and the conditions of daily existence.48
The popular fantasies of victory through air power, sustained in the 1930s by a stream of alarmist fiction (including L. E. O. Charlton’s War over England, published in 1936, in which Britain was forced to surrender in two days after a devastating German attack on the Hendon Air Show), became a horrible truth in the last months of 1940.49 The fear of invasion was replaced in September with a realization that Britain’s population was confronted with a test of endurance for which there was no precedent. The survival of the will to fight through the period of intense bombing is now taken for granted, but it was a will that ordinary people had to find in circumstances for which no fiction can have prepared them. When the bombing began in June, Home Intelligence observers reported a general calmness, even indifference: ‘ “A bore rather than a terror.” ’ 50 On a London housing estate in Stockwell, tenants busied themselves setting up home-from-home in their air-raid shelters: carpets, beds, furniture, decoration (‘portraits of the King and Queen, artificial flowers, Union Jacks…’), and cleanly scrubbed floors. They planned an open night, ‘to show off their shelter to their neighbours’. (Not everyone was so fortunate. Home Intelligence noted early in September a great many complaints about what were delicately described as ‘ “insanitary messes” ‘ and ‘improper behaviour’, which caused distress ‘among the more respectable elements of the community’.)51
The raids in August produced a change in mood. With the intensification of bomb attack, Home Intelligence found that morale stiffened; the spirit of those in raided areas was regarded as ‘excellent’, the shock of war on the home front even produced a temporary exhilaration. London came through its first weekend of raids ‘with confidence and calmness’ (though the inhabitants of Croydon were reportedly ‘resentful’ when the all-clear sounded just ten minutes before German bombers appeared overhead to disgorge their loads).52 In August the author John Langdon-Davies rushed out a booklet which he titled Nerves versus Nazis. It was marketed as a manual for ‘successful mental counter-attack’ against air raids, and Langdon-Davies wrote it after watching ‘400 typical Londoners’ descend to their shelters with ‘no fear, no panic’. He offered advice on coping with fear, which included his own practice of ‘counting slowly from the moment that I hear the first bomb. If I count up to 60 and am still counting, then I know that I have survived…’ He encouraged his readers to buy a large-scale local map, mark their own house with a blue dot, stand on a chair with 50 grains of salt and drop them on the plan. The reader would then be reassured by the discovery that ‘most of the salt grains have not hit any building at all… it will be a strange mischance if any grain of salt has actually hit the blue pencil point, which marks your own home’.53
When the bombing began on a large scale in early September, the strain of constant attack began to tell. Home Intelligence found that in the aftermath of the raids on London’s docks there was more evidence of panic and mass evacuation, of ‘nerve cracking from constant ordeals’.54 It is no reflection on the courage or powers of endurance of the bombed populations that they sought a way out of the turmoil. In a great many cities refugees from bombing spread out into the surrounding countryside. At the end of September it was reported that it was ‘practically impossible to get a room anywhere within seventy miles of London’. The heavy raids on Plymouth and Southampton left thousands of people living in tents and rough camps on the outskirts. Thousands of Londoners left for destinations they believed safer. In the East End there were widespread anti-semitic rumours about Jews who fled first and fastest, or sat in air-raid shelters all day.55 Even the West End was not immune from such prejudices. When the author George Orwell heard the rumours, he went to investigate a sample of underground stations converted to bomb shelters by night: ‘Not all Jews,’ he noted in his diary, ‘but, I think, a higher proportion of Jews than one would normally see in a crowd of this size. What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so.’56