The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

33
The Besieged
CECIL BEATON HAD LEFT New York on the Cunard liner Britannic, on 2 July.
As the ship sailed out, a German pleasure steamer, on a tour of the New
York sights, crossed their bows. ‘And as it passed close by,’ noted Cecil, ‘its
crew grinned with macabre grimaces as it jabbed its thumbs down at us.’
Despite this taunt, and regardless of however terrible the prospect might be,
Cecil was impatient to get back home.
A few days later, after an eventless return trip in which no U-boats had
been spotted, he was back at his home in south Wiltshire. Immediately, he
found his spirits soaring once more. ‘Any day now an invasion by the
Germans could be expected,’ he noted, ‘the future might well be gruesome,
but, somehow, to be in the midst of this maelstrom was far less painful than
to hear of it from afar.’
Fear of invasion had never gone away. A report by the Chiefs of Staff
on 4 July had accepted that an invasion might take place any moment. A
few days later came another appreciation, this time on the ‘Estimated Scale
of Air Attack upon the United Kingdom’, produced by Tommy Elmhirst
and his team. ‘I think that Hitler will probably invade us within the next few
days,’ jotted Harold Nicolson the day after hearing the Führer’s speech. ‘He
has 6,000 aeroplanes ready for the job.’ In Tadworth in Surrey, Daidie
Penna could hardly keep up with the invasion rumours. It sometimes
seemed that every day Hitler was about to attack them over the Channel.
‘Today is one,’ she noted early in July, ‘but I haven’t seen him yet.’ A few
weeks later, it appeared to be quieter on the war front, despite the
aeroplanes that were flying over. ‘Though it is reported,’ she added, ‘that
Hitler is putting the last touches to his invasion plans.’
There might have been a continued expectation of invasion, but after the
dramatic events of the Dunkirk evacuation and the French capitulation, the
war seemed quieter again. Daidie was not alone in finding it hard to
continually work herself up to a fever pitch of expectation only for nothing
to then happen. It had led to a gradual acceptance of the threat of German
bombers and invasion, and the hardships and inconveniences brought by