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GERMANS SURRENDER, INVASION DEFEATED
The final enclave of German forces remaining in Britain surrendered last night, bringing a definitive end to nearly two weeks of heavy fighting in Kent and Sussex. Mr Churchill addressed the nation at nine in the evening to confirm the news. “May it always be remembered as our finest hour,” he said; “we faced them squarely, and we have proven to all the world that the mighty German war machine is no such thing.” Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt signed the surrender instrument at six in the evening at Dover Castle in the presence of General Brooke and his staff. It marks a colossal military disaster for the assembled forces of Germany, who lost an estimated 75,000 men in the fortnight-long struggle while the German navy is, according to an Admiralty source, “irreparably mauled.” Fighting has continued since the surrender with a significant Luftwaffe bombing raid striking the East End of London at midnight causing significant damage, but this did little to alter the sense of elation across the country at the deliverance of October 4th. President Roosevelt described the British victory as “our best hope that peace may soon settle once more on Europe,” but already there is much agitation within the Ministry of Defence to “get stuck in” and begin a more offensive campaign against the Axis Powers, especially with fighting continuing day by day against Italian forces in North Africa.
- The Times, October 5th, 1940
“The defeat of the German invasion rattled Hitler’s nerves to an almost crippling extent, especially amid the post-defeat rumours of plots around every corner to oust him. Naturally, blame was dished out by the Nazi Party on the senior military leadership. Raeder, who had so vainly protested launching the invasion in the first place, was shot and Doenitz took over to oversee the effective abandonment of the Kriegsmarine’s surface fleet and shifting to an almost all-submarine program of construction which would have significant repercussions for the Allies. In the last months of 1940, the Wehrmacht was seeing its near-total absorption by the Nazi Party with any semblance of separation vanishing. By 1943, the Heer was abolished and the SS was the standing army of the Reich.
But with Germany so badly mauled by the defeat, she had little appetite to extend her reach across another body of water; the Mediterranean. Hitler was seemingly unprepared to risk an intervention in North Africa to help his struggling friend Mussolini, despite his desperate and ultimately fruitless efforts to get a thoroughly unimpressed Franco to join him. Indeed, many in Hitler’s court believed a British victory in North Africa could actually be of benefit to the Reich; “it will increase a sense of stalemate in the British mind; with no new land available for either side to wrestle over we will be reduced to glaring at each other across the Channel,” wrote Goebbels. By the time of the final Italian surrender in April of 1941 with the liberation of occupied Tunis, Hitler seemed convinced that peace would soon come. This is enough to explain his repeated overtures to Britain; he even offered to evacuate German forces from Norway and France according to one sensational paper made public in 1996. But Churchill was only prepared to accept total victory, and defeat of the invasion and liberation of Africa had convinced him that it was possible. Yet still Hitler held out hope; losses had been significant enough in the invasion of England, especially among the Luftwaffe, that his planned conquest of the Soviet Union had been delayed until 1942 at the least. Circumstances would ensure it never happened, with Turkey to be the chosen victim instead as Hitler dived for the oil of Mesopotamia.
- U. Taylor, A Brief History of the Second World War, p.28.
“The Glorious Revolution doesn’t count,” he asserts to me sternly. “Parliament invited the Dutch in.” Professor Kirkland seems to think I’m one of those typical lefty journalists always looking to talk Britain down, and I must say I’m still unconvinced by his claim that not since 1066 has England been conquered. “And even then, our ancestors were the conquerors, not the victims,” he says. I feel anyone who wears a tweed jacket with a tie emblazoned with charging redcoat cavalry isn’t going to give much quarter in arguments of a patriotic flavour, so I drop it. It’s best not to be too questioning of Britain’s wartime past here anyway; Dover is a proud, proud town. The enormous firework display over Dover Castle to celebrate seventy years since the German surrender rivals those in Westminster on New Year’s, and the town has made much of its status as the site of the first truly catastrophic Axis defeat. “Welcome to Dover: The town that saved the world,” declares a hopelessly over the top sign next to a preserved Centurion tank on the motorway in. It’s a type of patriotism you only really find in those slices of the Home Counties which experienced German occupation firsthand; a pride in surviving which personifies itself in patriotic feeling unusual in such a reserved country. “It’s like walking into fascist Russia,” one fellow journalist tells me of the military worship in the town. “The people here aren’t really fascist, of course not, but they can really worry you sometimes with how obsessed they can be.”
But dig deeper, get past the south’s tallest statue in the form of a twenty-six metre high rearing white horse or the undeniably impressive military parade and RAF flypast, and you’ll find much of the populace feeling grim about the whole situation. “It really is a bit off-putting, coming into town and every day there’s just Union Jacks everywhere,” says Nicole. “I know people are proud of the history, but you can get self-conscious after a while. I think people are compensating for the town declining; the ferry services are half what they used to be these days and the big army barracks [Dover Garrison] don’t help; you’re always seeing lads in uniform on the street.”
- The Guardian: Dover celebrates wartime victory - October 4th, 2010