rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

702 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHfall off, as Hitler had so confidently expected. Just the opposite. Aircraftfactories in England, one of the prime targets of the Luftwaffe bombers, actuallyoutproduced the Germans in 1940 by 9,924 to 8,070 planes. Hitler’s bomberlosses over England had been so severe that they could never be made up, andin fact the Luftwaffe, as the German confidential records make clear, never fullyrecovered from the blow it received in the skies over Britain that late summerand fall.The German Navy, crippled by the losses off Norway in the early spring, wasunable, as its chiefs admitted all along, to provide the sea power for an invasionof Britain. Without this, and without air supremacy, the German Army washelpless to move across the narrow Channel waters. For the first time in the warHitler had been stopped, his plans of further conquest frustrated, and just atthe moment, as we have seen, when he was certain that final victory had beenachieved.He had never conceived – nor had anyone else up to that time – that adecisive battle could be decided hi the air. Nor perhaps did he yet realize asthe dark winter settled over Europe that a handful of British fighterpilots, by thwarting his invasion, had preserved England as a great base forthe possible reconquest of the Continent from the west at a later date. Histhoughts were perforce turning elsewhere; in fact, as we shall see, had alreadyturned.Britain was saved. For nearly a thousand years it had successfully defendeditself by sea power. Just in time, its leaders, a very few of them, despite all thebungling (of which these pages have been so replete) in the interwar years, hadrecognized that air power had become decisive in the mid-twentieth century andthe little fighter plane and its pilot the chief shield for defense. As Churchilltold the Commons in another memorable peroration on August 20, when thebattle in the skies still raged and its outcome was in doubt, ”never in the fieldof human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”IF THE INVASION HAD SUCCEEDEDThe Nazi German occupation of Britain would not have been a gentle affair.The captured German papers leave no doubt of that. On September 9Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army, signed a directive providingthat ”the able-bodied male population between the ages of seventeen and fortyfive[in Britain] will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling,be interned and dispatched to the Continent.” Orders to this effect were sentout a few days later by the Quartermaster General, in OKH, to the Ninth andSixteenth armies, which were assembled for the invasion. In no other conqueredcountry, not even in Poland, had the Germans begun with such a drastic step.Brauchitsch’s instructions were headed ”Orders Concerning the Organizationand Function of Military Government in England” and went into considerabledetail. They seem designed to ensure the systematic plunder of the island andthe terrorization of its inhabitants. A special ”Military Economic Staff England”was set up on July 27 to achieve the first aim. Everything but normalhousehold stocks was to be confiscated at once. Hostages would be taken. Anybodyposting a placard the Germans didn’t like would be liable to immediate