Winston Churchill - Their Finest Hour (Complete Edition)

Ceaseless additions and refinements to this first plan were effected as the weeks and months passed; but the general conception remained. All troops, if attacked, should stand firm, not in linear only but in all-round defence, whilst others moved rapidly to destroy the attackers, whether they came from sea or air. Men who had been cut off from immediate help would not have merely remained in position. Active measures were prepared to harass the enemy from behind; to interfere with his communications and to destroy material, as the Russians did with great results when the German tide flowed over their country a year later. Many people must have been bewildered by the innumerable activities all around them. They could understand the necessity for wiring and mining the beaches, the anti-tank obstacles at the defiles, the concrete pill-boxes at the cross-roads, the intrusions into their houses to fill an attic with sandbags, on to their golf-courses or most fertile fields and gardens to burrow out some wide anti-tank ditch. All these inconveniences, and much more, they accepted in good part. But sometimes they must have wondered if there was a general scheme, or whether lesser individuals were not running amok in their energetic use of newly-granted powers of interference with the property of the citizen.

There was however a central plan, elaborate, co-ordinated, and all-embracing. As it grew it shaped itself thus: the overall Command was maintained at General Headquarters in London. All Great Britain and Northern Ireland were divided into seven Commands; these again into areas of Corps and Divisional Commands. Commands, Corps, and Divisions were each required to hold a proportion of their resources in mobile reserve, only the minimum being detailed to hold their own particular defences. Gradually there were built up in rear of the beaches zones of defence in each divisional area; behind these were similar “Corps Zones” and “Command Zones”, the whole system amounting in depth to a hundred miles or more. And behind these was established the main anti-tank obstacle running across Southern England and northwards into Nottinghamshire. Above all was the final reserve directly under the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces. This it was our policy to keep as large and mobile as possible.

Within this general structure were many variations. Each of our ports on the east and south coasts was a special study. Direct frontal attack upon a defended port seemed an unlikely contingency, and all were made into strong points equally capable of defence from the landward or the seaward side. It astonishes me that when this principle of fortifying the gorges was so universally accepted and rigorously enforced by all military authorities at home no similar measures were adopted at Singapore by the succession of high officers employed there. But this is a later story. Obstacles were placed on many thousand square miles of Britain to impede the landing of air-borne troops. All our aerodromes, Radar stations, and fuel depots, of which even in the summer of 1940 there were three hundred and seventy-five, needed defence by special garrisons and by their own airmen. Many thousands of “vulnerable points”, bridges, power-stations, depots, vital factories, and the like had to be guarded day and night from sabotage or sudden onset. Schemes were ready for the immediate demolition of resources helpful to the enemy if captured. The destruction of port facilities, the cratering of key roads, the paralysis of motor transport and of telephones and telegraph-stations, of rolling stock or permanent way, before they passed out of our control, were planned to the last detail. Yet despite all these wise and necessary precautions, in which the civilian departments gave unstinted help to the military, there was no question of a “scorched earth policy”; England was to be defended by its people, not destroyed.

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