In Europe

of freedom, and therefore of the United States, but he still had to convince most Americans of that.
    From autumn 1940, planes began rolling off the American production lines by the thousand, as did trucks, jeeps and tanks. Without the American people realising it, a war force was being prepared. That America was able to leap immediately into battle as from late 1941 was due in large part to the production lines set up by Roosevelt, Monnet and a handful of others from 1938, at a time when most Americans were oblivious of the dangers ahead.
    ‘I knew that we were only at the beginning of a long effort,’ Monnet wrote concerning spring 1940,‘but the machinery for action was in place, and it would never stop.’

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
Brasted
    NEVER HAD THE BRITISH SENSE OF PECULIAR UNITY BEEN SO STRONG as it was in high summer 1940. After the fall of France, King George VI wrote to his mother about what a relief it was ‘now that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.’
    For the first time in many generations the British were once again preparing to resist an invasion from the continent. Signs and street markers were taken down. To keep gliders from landing, golf courses and cricket pitches were blockaded with carts, automobiles, beds and tree stumps. The civilians were instructed, in the event of a landing, to lay soup plates upside down in the streets: the Germans would think they were antitank mines. Everyone was under suspicion. When an English pilot was forced to make an emergency landing amid the hedgerows of Kent, he was immediately held at gunpoint by a ‘fairly elderly nurse’ who had climbed over a fence with a toy rifle and ‘pointed the weapon at him in a most threatening fashion’.
    At the University of Sussex a number of studies have been preserved, carried out by the British Mass Observation organisation, one of the world's first trend-watching agencies. On 16 May, 1940, the observers of ‘Morale Today’ noted: ‘It does not occur to people that we could be defeated. The former peace and quiet has been disturbed, but is still in place. Should that suddenly fall apart, a moral explosion will follow.’ 19 May:‘Outwardly calm, inwardly anxious covers the general tone of today.’ 21 May: ‘The fear that a Nazi invasion is possible is now beginning to appear. The bewilderment and distress is more severe today than ever before …The result of the speeches given in the last few days by Churchill … is to engender a feeling of relief, not because the situation is notserious, but because the people feel they know the worst, which is a new experience for them.’
    The writer Rebecca West saw, on evenings in June, pale-faced people sitting in Regent's Park. Some of them, she wrote, walked over to the roses in great earnestness and inhaled the fragrance, as though to say: ‘That is what roses are like, that is how they smell. We must remember that, down in the darkness.’
    The first German bombs fell in the Greater London area on 8 June, 1940, on a stretch of open countryside close to Colney. A goat was killed. In the months that followed the English people watched as a gigantic aerial battle developed above their heads, day after day. In his diary, Harold Nicolson wrote that he was sitting with friends in the garden at Sissinghurst when he saw the German planes approaching, ‘twenty little, silver fish in arrow formation’. During lunch there was a dogfight: ‘There is a rattle of machine-gun fire and we see Spitfires attacking a Heinkel. The latter sways off, obviously wounded.’ A Londoner, who had been talking at his club to a young man with a bandaged arm, noted in his diary: ‘Life is certainly exciting when a youngster can be shot down in the sea in the morning and be in a club in Berkeley Square the same evening.’
    The Battle of Britain was actually the battle for the Channel. As long as the much more powerful British fleet was still at sea, a German invasion could be ruled out. The Germans hoped to use the Luftwaffe to cripple that fleet, so that their landing troops could cross the Channel unchallenged. But before they could do that, they had first to dispense with the Royal Air Force.
    Robert Watson-Watt's invention played a major role in winning that battle. In deepest secrecy, a whole chain of radar stations – the first in the world – were built along the English coast. This allowed the RAF to remain perfectly informed of the arrival of every new wave of German