A Very British cover-up

From Archivist General
To M
22nd November 1991

Dear Ma'am,
The following files have come to our attention under the 50 year rule. They detail a little known incident around Lympne in December 1941 and what is likely to be the only recorded deliberate armed landing in Great Britain by German Troops in the last war.

I feel the following papers are historically important, show us in a positive light withough neccesserily doing the same to either our colleagues across the river or to the Admiralty. The only issue I can see is that it has the potential to damage the psyche of the nation by removing the blanket that we are, or were impervious to invasion. I believe this to be marginal.

It is worth noting that while the American debacle at Slapton Sands became public knowledge, this, through a combination of luck and careful management, did not.
I await your guidance on this matter.

Your faithful servant,
R
This was the note attached to one of the most unusual files to be released under the freedom of information act in the last few years, the only known armed raid by Nazi forces on mainland Britain.

Quote:
NAZI INVASION LASTED ONE DAY
BEACH TOWELS STAYED LONGER
Headline from The Sun Newspaper August 3rd 1993
 
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...And?


You know they occupied the Channel Islands right up until the fall of Berlin? British soil under Nazi jackboot...hardly covered up.
 
...And?


You know they occupied the Channel Islands right up until the fall of Berlin? British soil under Nazi jackboot...hardly covered up.

Also, if the Nazis invaded and were repulsed, especially in as little as a day, then that is so going to be fed into the propaganda machine.
 
...And?


You know they occupied the Channel Islands right up until the fall of Berlin? British soil under Nazi jackboot...hardly covered up.

He said "Great Britain" and "Mainland Britain." Neither of which technically the Channel Islands are geographically part of.
 

That was the piece that finally prompted this.


I'll have to try and hunt that film out. Also, this does owe something to "The Eagle has landed" as well.
Apologies for the bold print in the OP, it was supposed to have a sub heading. Now the format has gone as well. :eek:
 

Sior

Banned
That was the piece that finally prompted this.



I'll have to try and hunt that film out. Also, this does owe something to "The Eagle has landed" as well.
Apologies for the bold print in the OP, it was supposed to have a sub heading. Now the format has gone as well. :eek:

The Eagle has Landed was a rip off of Went the Day Well
 
The Eagle has Landed was a rip off of Went the Day Well

You know Jack Higgans denies that quite strongly. Oh look a pig just flew past my window.

As for any landing being driven off being covered up, no chance. Even if it was just a single company of men Churchill would have represented it as a great British victory in order to convince the Americans that Britain was still worth supporting and not about to collapse like Ambassadore Kennedy was telling them.
 
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Pt1
Between the end of Operation Dynamo and the beginning of the Battle of Britain, a minor raid by the 11th Independent company on a small village in Northern France took place. A pre cursor to later raids, Operation Collar was a limited success. Two German soldiers were captured, (No officers), 2 Germans were killed and one British Officer injured.

The raid itself disappeared into obscurity in Britain, overshadowed by the Battle of Britain. In Germany however, the details of the raid percolated through the ranks of the Abwehr. Alongside the operational planning for Fall Seelowe, Admiral Canaris looked to his Brandenburger Kommando to fulfil a similar role to that carried out during the invasions of Poland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands - advance troops, leading the way at strategic points.
The idea initially, was that while the seaborne invasion would be the main thrust, the Brandenburgers would have two main tasks: Secure a landing field for the planned air bridge on the south coast, and to hamper the efforts of the English to be able to respond to the invasion by sabotage and misdirection as they had done in Poland and the low countries.

The plan, as with many other things associated with Operation Sea lion, was shelved in the autumn of 1940, but unlike Sea lion, this plan did not disappear into the depths of misfortune and circumstance.

- From "The Invasion that wasn't" Max Hastings, London, 1999

------------------
To: GrossAdmiral Canaris
From: Kapitan Schrader

01.13.41

Subject: Fall Mercury

Herr GrossAdmiral,
Regarding Fall Mercury, As much as our own service should be the branch to land the special troops, I have found another possibility. The Luftwaffe unit JG 200 currently flies and evaluates captured enemy aircraft. Following our victory in France they have a number of machines to evaluate, including shot down and recovered bombers such as their "Wellington" bomber. Informally I have spoken to their commander and he has advised that they have three Wellington Bombers that are flight capable. It does restrict the number of troops we could send; however the surprise effect would make it worthwhile.

I have included the draft plan for your attention.
In Annex 2 I have amended the list of suitable target airfields on the basis that Fall Seelowe has been postponed. This does limit the options as the Kommandos in question would have to be able to make their way to the coast where by they could be collected by S Boat or U boat dependant on the location chosen.
The three most probable are:
Manston
Hawkinge
Lympne

Of the three, Manston would be both the hardest to achieve but the highest return. I would rate this as a suicide mission. (Would the SS be better suited for this?)*

Hawkinge, again would be near suicidal however, the return would not be as great.

Lympne would be my second choice. This has, (according to the Luftwaffe aerial photographs), very limited use by the RAF, while the route back to the coast takes the kommandoes past a radar station. I suggest that this could be made a secondary target of the mission. I believe that carrying out this mission will greatly benefit the war effort against the English, not to mention being one in the eye for the Army, and to a lesser extent, the Luftwaffe.

Yours,
Werner Schrader
-----------------

*Handwritten note written over the top of the line
 
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Flubber

Banned
An interesting idea marred by lousy formatting and inexcusable spelling errors.

Space your paragraphs so your readers aren't presented with blocks of text. Put the text though a grammar and spell checker. There's no excuse for writing "debarcle" and "ariel" instead of "debacle" and "aerial".
 
An interesting idea marred by lousy formatting and inexcusable spelling errors.

Space your paragraphs so your readers aren't presented with blocks of text. Put the text though a grammar and spell checker. There's no excuse for writing "debarcle" and "ariel" instead of "debacle" and "aerial".


Those are technical errors and easily remedied. His big problem remains: how to explain an extraordinarily unlikely coverup of a repulse of German forces, be it on however small a scale. What could possibly induce Churchill to skip the propaganda value of such an event?
 

Flubber

Banned
Those are technical errors and easily remedied.


Easily remedied and even more easily avoided. Easily avoided, of course, if you actually cared whether others will read what you posted.

By way of example, check out this thread. When you look over the multiple font shifts, execrable grammar, wildly random capitalization, horrific spelling, and other problems you suddenly realize that it was harder for the OP to type the material in the manner he did than it would have been to type it correctly. I can see writing poorly due to sloth, but writing poorly on purpose?

His big problem remains: how to explain an extraordinarily unlikely coverup of a repulse of German forces, be it on however small a scale. What could possibly induce Churchill to skip the propaganda value of such an event?
The events are somehow incredibly embarrassing to the government, Churchill, or both? Whatever the reason, you're entirely correct in pointing out the central problem with this idea.
 
The events are somehow incredibly embarrassing to the government, Churchill, or both? Whatever the reason, you're entirely correct in pointing out the central problem with this idea.

Maybe embarrass the Air Force and Royal Navy in the fact that the Germans got through? I know that is unrealistic mind.
 

Flubber

Banned
Maybe embarrass the Air Force and Royal Navy in the fact that the Germans got through? I know that is unrealistic mind.


The OP seems to be suggesting a raid of sorts, much like the 1942 movie and later Higgans book the other posters have mentioned.

How and why a raid could get through is dependent on many factors and the current thread examining German raids on UK radar stations has touched on several of them.
 

Coulsdon Eagle

Monthly Donor
IIRC their was a similar story earlier, with the bodies of German soldiers being washed up on beaches in southern England. Rumours of a failed invasion. In fact they had been victims of a training accident (embarking or disembarking) and the bodies had drifted across the Channel. Someone took photos and when these came to loght in the 1980s it was claimed to have been an attempted invasion - after all, who would be interested in a mere raid?
 
Also, if the Nazis invaded and were repulsed, especially in as little as a day, then that is so going to be fed into the propaganda machine.
Trotsky said:
He said "Great Britain" and "Mainland Britain." Neither of which technically the Channel Islands are geographically part of.

The Occupation of the Channel Islands (part of Britain and the British Isles) did get fed into the 'propaganda machines' of both sides;

In Britain it was downplayed, and tantamount to being 'justly abandoned', something that the government at the time severely criticised the war cabinet for doing so. While in a sense there was nothing that could be done for the Channel Islands at the time the historical record is that the British government continually denied the States in Guernsey, Jersey and Alderney for their requests for defensive arms, even after the islands had put up over £280,000 of thens money.

Thus, trying to prevent 'scare scaremongering' and defeatism in the UK they wished to downplay the fact the defence of the islands had been overlooked/abandoned and didn't wish Englanders to feel that preparations for the defence of England, Scotland and Wales was equally 'lacking'.


In Germany it was used as a massive propaganda win that 'Britons' had 'so easily fallen' and were 'so acceptive of German rule'. In general these were lies, but it doesn't withstand the fact that Hitler wanted to make a big thing over his little patch of British territories, and that solider in the German Armed forces would think of the Channel Islands 'like a stepping stone' since it would be a testing ground for British occupation techniques, and at the time served as a reminder that the British were only 'just across the Channel' and it was only a matter of time before the Blitzkreig would be brought to England’s shores.

As history thankfully turned out that was never the case.



My point in this thread is that if we are considering the 'psyche of the nation' the Channel Islands already proved that British Home Territories had been overrun, and that in Nazi Germany their 'psyche' was already buoyed up on a false impression on a successful invasion of an element of British home soil.

Thus the actions of Lympne in December 1941 are hardly going to change or be larger in psychological scope, than the Occupation of the Channel Islands was...

...As a reminder of the lengths Hitler considered the Channel Islands important, just under half of all earthworks dug on the Atlantic Wall happened in the Channel Islands, and 1/12th of all the concrete defences were built there. This shows how much resources were wasted by the Germans, and without such a waste D-day would have been far more costly to the Allies.


Hey feel free to have the opinion that 'it would have mattered terribly to British morale'. All I'm doing here is pointing out another much larger scale of Occupation of British Soil that had 'on record' effects that were wide reaching.
 
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