Invasion attempt? - Shingle street

Discussion in '1940' started by 51highland, Mar 18, 2006.

  1. sapper

    sapper WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    Its no good getting niggled with me matey! I can assure you that no German set foot on England's sacred soil ...Only as a prisoner, or preferably..6 feet to bury them in.

    It is impossible to stifle news of invasions, or anything else in a free society. No more than the German nation did not know about the Concentration camps. Men go on leave families talk....
    So being I was very much around at that time...... Despite your annoyance..It never happened.

    Over the last 70 odd years, these so called "Secrets" surface... Mostly the feverish imagination of some wishful thinking...Interesting as they may be.
    Sapper
     
  2. Drew5233

    Drew5233 #FuturePilot 1940 Obsessive

    Brian - Germans did set foot in the UK during the war as Spies :D
     
  3. sapper

    sapper WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    With respect Drew my old sausage....The only spies here, were turned and used.
    Very successfully I may add... None, it would appear did any damage to the countries defences. Not one succeeded in their aims.
    Oddly enough... it was one area where the Enemy failed...And miserably
    :)
    Sapper
     
  4. Mark Hone

    Mark Hone Senior Member

    The idea of a secret, covered-up German coastal commando raid or attempted invasion has had a tenacious hold on the popular imagination. Not only 'The Eagle has landed' (itself inspired by the wartime propaganda film 'Went the Day Well') , but as I was recently reminded, the fondly-remembered ITV Childrens' drama from the early 1970s 'Timeslip' featured this as a plot device. Incidentally, the 'Timeslip' story which has German marines taking over a secret British coastal base, 'The Wrong End of Time', was broadcast in 1970, five years before the publication of 'The Eagle has Landed'.
    Anyone interested in 'Timeslip' can find an informative website at:
    Timeslip - The Official Website
    The series is now available on DVD, although sadly mostly in Black and White as the original colour tapes have almost all been lost.
     
  5. gaspirator

    gaspirator Member

    One thing I've learned from my own research in East Sussex is that rumours spread like wildfire, as did alerts. Had something happened at Shingle Street, then the country would've been on alert to meet further threats elsewhere. No document I've seen from GHQ down to Division - Brigade - Battalion mentions any alert on 31 Aug 1940 when the Germans supposedly 'invaded'. Everyone was nervous at this time, but 'Cromwell' was only issued on 7 Sept in response to the attack on London - but why not a week previously? Because the Shingle Street 'invasion' never happened. Full stop.

    I've found evidence of the authorities trying to get to the bottom of rumours that 20 Germans had been captured on the beaches of East Sussex. A bit of investigation reveals that around the same time, a party of British Commandos had beached their landing craft in the area in question after engine failure on returning from a raid in France.

    In other Sussex incidents 1940-42, some young Frenchmen fleeing occupation landed in a small boat, numerous bodies of seamen and airmen were washed up, small objects of ships' cargo caused concern over secret weapons, a German Kriegsmarine jacket washed up on a beach followed by a cap the next day, and one suspected 'enemy agent' apprehended by the police turned out to be an escaped lunatic...

    Add to all this numerous false alarms of paratroops landing, high lorries cutting through field telephone wires, reports of suspicious flashing signal lights at night, U-boat sightings and you have sabotage, intrigue and the start of an invasion. Then add a few decades, an element of secrecy and journalists looking for a sensational story and the sort of rubbish written about Shingle Street could be written about almost any stretch of coastline...


    He says that troops told his parents that if they saw yellow lights on the sea horizon this was a signal an invasion had started.

    This is probably a reference to the 'golden rain' rocket. Every 1,000yds of beach was given a designation (eg, 'C26'), which was allotted to the artillery as an SOS task. If a platoon commander saw his beach under (or about to come under) attack, he would fire the rocket, whereupon those guns tasked to fire on that beach would do so according to a set pattern and number of rounds. By then, the OPs would hopefully take over direction of fire, but if comms failed, the SOS task could be repeated by firing another rocket.

    The story goes, my father, who was a POW, was shown a photograph by a camp guard later during the war taken supposedly during an aborted landing on the English coast. My father recognised the site.

    It is vaguely possible the camp guard had a photo from some of the intelligence material (http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/great-britain/17616-milit%E4rgeographische-angaben-%FCber-england.html). These booklets were seemingly issued (I have one with unit stamps on) and some pages were perforated for quick extraction of individual photos. The 'aborted landing' may have been a general reference to Sealion not going ahead, perhaps lost in translation??? Just a thought...


    Not exactly concocted - the flame barrage existed on the South Coast. Here's an example..

    TIME TO REMEMBER - STANDING ALONE ( 1940 ) - reel 2 - British Pathe


    The 'Sea Flame Barrage' did indeed exist as the footage shows and as mentioned in Sir Donald Banks' 1947 book 'Flame Over Britain'.

    However, trials showed that oil floating on water tended to disperse after a while, reducing the effect. The propaganda effect of a burning sea has a greater impact, though, which is why the idea of 'Sea Flame Barrage' persists.

    South East Command documents show they actually rejected sea flame, and used the weapon to burn the oil on the beach instead. These weapons were known as 'Flame Barrage, Land' (FBL). I don't know if 'sea flame' was ever deployed operationally elsewhere in the UK.

    There were 17 FBLs in Kent and 2 in Sussex being installed in late 1941, but every so often I get contacted by people who have found evidence of large oil tanks on the coast and who get excited about 'sea flame'. These tanks always coincide with documented locations of landing craft facilities dating to 1942-44 and were simply used to store fuel for LCTs.

    - Pete
     
  6. PsyWar.Org

    PsyWar.Org Archive monkey

    Not exactly concocted - the flame barrage existed on the South Coast. Here's an example..

    TIME TO REMEMBER - STANDING ALONE ( 1940 ) - reel 2 - British Pathe

    Fair comment John, I do explain it better in my Whispers of War article. The UPC rumour speaks specifically of a special mine which ignites a fast area of sea at will. It was part of wider propaganda campaign to exaggerate our defensive capabilities. Other rumours included such things as we were receiving quantities of Tommy guns from the US, had a new highly-accurate anti-aircraft gun, special tanks for ramming gliders on the ground, etc.

    Lee
     
  7. JohnV

    JohnV Junior Member

    I liked an earlier comment about the 'wooden bomb' tale - while researching background detail on the two 14" guns of the RMSR at St Margaret's Bay in Kent I kept coming across the (unsubstantiated by the War Diaries) story of the Luftwaffe comedian who dropped a wooden bomb on the wooden 'dummy' of Pooh. As if anyone would face the RAF and the gunners on the ground to to that...
     
  8. PsyWar.Org

    PsyWar.Org Archive monkey

    I liked an earlier comment about the 'wooden bomb' tale - while researching background detail on the two 14" guns of the RMSR at St Margaret's Bay in Kent I kept coming across the (unsubstantiated by the War Diaries) story of the Luftwaffe comedian who dropped a wooden bomb on the wooden 'dummy' of Pooh. As if anyone would face the RAF and the gunners on the ground to to that...

    Nice, I hadn't head a version of this tale from a German perspective before.

    The UPC version is the RAF dropping a wooden bomb on a German airfield in France (Normandy).

    Shirer version the airfield is in Holland.

    Another version doing the rounds changes the RAF to the USAAF.

    Of all this rumour-mongering, the most intriguing one for me is successfully planted story of Udet's suicide and then apparent real suicide a few months later. (I'm sure this is more of story to tell about this if the required amount of research could be done).

    Lee
     
  9. sapper

    sapper WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    NOW !!! If you had said "there were rubber tanks and cut out planes" plus huge efforts to create an imaginary army around Dover, by the name of 1st United States army group that never existed ??? Then you would be dead right. Or if you had said "we dropped dummy Paras on D day"? Then again, dead right
    Sapper.....
     
  10. Drew5233

    Drew5233 #FuturePilot 1940 Obsessive

    With respect Drew my old sausage....The only spies here, were turned and used.
    Very successfully I may add... None, it would appear did any damage to the countries defences. Not one succeeded in their aims.
    Oddly enough... it was one area where the Enemy failed...And miserably
    :)
    Sapper

    You didn't read the thread I posted on Spies in Kent then Brian ;)

    Cheers
    My old Bacon and Eggs ;)
     
  11. sapper

    sapper WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    Big Grin
     
  12. PsyWar.Org

    PsyWar.Org Archive monkey

    <<< STOP PRESS >>>
    ...Photographic evidence of German soldiers landing on British soil at Shingle Street has come to light...

    [​IMG]

    They don't like it up'em!

    :)
     
  13. PsyWar.Org

    PsyWar.Org Archive monkey

    A more serious post this time. I'm just collating some of the rumours the Underground Propaganda Committee put out. (I will be publishing a collection of them in a little book with my Whispers of War article. It should contain over 1,000 different subversive rumours.)

    Anyway this is one rumour, disseminated in June 1942, I have just stumbled across that might be relevant to the Shingle Street conspiracy:

    "The bodies of over twenty German seamen have been washed up on the British channel coast. Five of them had bullet wounds in the head."

    Lee
     
  14. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Very Senior Member

    I've been reading throgh Operation Sealion again, and have just come across the couple of pages Peter Fleming devotes to this. Means a lot of typing, but worth it...

    His style is (sadly) nowadays a bit turgid in places, but here we go...

    "In one strange case credulity found itself allied not with fear but with hope. At the beginning of Septembera rumour spread swiftly through the country that large numbers of dead German soldiers had been washed up on the south coast. In many accounts the corpses were said to be burnt or charred, and it was widely believed that the RAF had somehow "set the sea on fire" at the very moment when an invasion was being launched. "The Channel is white with dead" was a phrase in common use to describe a grim but satisfactory spectacle; and although watchers on the south coast could see for themselves that the story was quite untrue as far as their own sector was concerned. the rumour ran as strongly there as in other parts of the country. No corpses came ashore here, the enquirer would be told at A.; but further along the coast at B. sappers had been called in to clear the harbour. From B. he would be redirected to C., where (it was said) a large part of the civilian population had been evacuated because of the stench. A characteristic (and from a psychoanalytical standpoint perhaps a significant) feature of the rumour was that the corpses were always supposed to have arrived not on deserted stretches of coast, but in harbours, on municipal seafront, and at other places where they were a public nuisance."


    This LATER solicitied this "official" response, in his "Their Finest Hour", and Fleming proceeds to quote it...

    "Churchill afterwards gave this account of the rumour and its origins:

    " During August the corpses of about forty German soldiers were washed up at scattered points along the coast between the Isle of Wight and Cornwall. The germans had been practising embarkations in the barges along the French coast. Some of these barges put to sea in order to escape British bombing and were sunk, either by bombing or bad weather. This was the source of a widespread rumour that the Germans had attempted an invasion and had suffered very heavy losses either by drowning or by being burnt in patches of sea covered with flaming oil. We took no steps to contradict such tales, which spread freely through the occupied countries in a wildly exaggerated form and gave much encouragement to the oppressed populations.""


    Finally, Fleming sums up the event thus...and I've decided to break it up into stylised "points" so that nothing is lost in the reading -

    "In fact the whole business was much odder than would appear from Churchill's narrative, for his first sentence- which gives the rumour some foundation in fact-has no such foundation itself. The recovery from the sea of forty dead German soldiers would have had at least four consequences which would still be traceable today.

    (1) It would have been reported in the war diaries of the Army formations in whose sectors they were washed up;

    (2) the casualties would have been notified to the German government through the International Red Cross in the same way as casualties to air-crews or prisoners of war in British territory;

    (3) the paybooks and other personal documents of the dead men would have been studied and commented on by M.I.14;

    (4) and particulars of the West Country churchyards or cemetaries where the bodies were buried would have been recorded by the Imperial War Graves Commission.

    None of these consequences ensued.... "
     
  15. Zeppman

    Zeppman Member

    Phylo-Roadking. I merely repeated a story my father told my cousin many years after the war, unless you're calling him a liar? Maybe what he was shown was a trick, we'll never know, but he claimed he recognised the area. That aside POWs could write home. I have a box of POW letters my Dad wrote all on German Issued and approved letterhead. Want to come and see?
     
  16. PsyWar.Org

    PsyWar.Org Archive monkey

    Excuse the plug but as it's slightly related to this thread ( :) )I thought I'd mention my new paperback containing a collection of over 1,500 of the most noteworthy, provocative and amusing subversive rumours concocted by the British Government's Underground Propaganda Committee throughout the Second World War. As a way of an introduction, the book includes an updated version of my 'Whispers of War' article: Whispers of War - The British World War II rumour campaign by Lee Richards

    Some example rumours we put out:

    UPC rumour, September 1940:
    "The Germans are going to take down the Eiffel Tower to use the metal for munitions."

    UPC rumour, August 1942:
    "Italian battalion at Split mutinied after human finger nail discovered in canned meat."

    UPC rumour, September 1943:
    "Hand grenades issued to Germans in Russia explode immediately the pin is drawn out. This is a result of the Trojan horse methods employed by French workers in Germany."

    UPC rumour, July 1944:
    "The flying bombs consume as much petrol a day as 100 tanks."


    This paperback book contains 236 pages, size 6" x 9". Available directly from the printer for $14.99:
    Whispers of War by Lee Richards in History


    [​IMG]


    Lee
     
  17. aldersdale

    aldersdale Senior Member

    I live about 2 miles from Shingle Street, and have spoken to a number of people, not the least my next door neighbour who has lived here all her life and is now getting on for 90, All it is, is a legend there were a number of German corpses was up in the area this was about October 1940, The area was under the control of the Liverpool and Scottish one Private Tom Abram remembers seeing a corpse but it was that of an airman, 3 other bodies were washed up one each at Bawdsey, Hollesley, and Landguard point nr Felixstowe, thy were sailors thought to have come from an E-Boat, The area was then used by Chemical Research Defence Est to test a new bomb, with Barnes Wallis.

    They used the Lifeboat Inn and Cottages as a Target and the Lifeboat Inn was destroyed, So as Redcoat rightly says it is complete B......
     
  18. 51highland

    51highland Very Senior Member

    My father was in the Liverpool Scottish at the time.!!! Thats why I started the thread.
     
  19. sapper

    sapper WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    No enemy ever set foot on the UK mainland EVER...... Not at any time,except as a prisoner

    These Authors stories have been going the rounds for many years just like the crop circles ans the UFOs..Its utter rubbish. Under the thirty year rule it would have been fully revealed by now for something of that importance could never be kept a secret... Rubbish!
     
  20. 51highland

    51highland Very Senior Member

    Agreed, but after 30 years the files were locked away again.!!! I know that Barnes Wallace was in the area at the time, the whole of Shingle street was evacuated of civilians. My Father spent several guard duties on the only road in and out of Shingle Street. Like to know what really was developed there, as the file have gaps in them. Tons of shingle was shifted too.
     

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