Blood out of a Stone

By PETER FLEMING

IN Operation Sea Lion (Oxford University Press, 305.) Mr. Ronald Wheatley presents a detailed study, and an objective interpretation, of the German plans for the invasion of England in 1940. It is impossible to praise too highly the scholarly craftsmanship with which he has mar- shalled his evidence. His work was not originally intended for publication. Mr. Wheatley is a young member of the staff which, under the regis of the Cabinet Office, set out in 1948 to unravel the great hoard of military archives captured by the Allies at the end of the last war. Sir James Butler, the editor of the military series of the United Kingdom Histories of the Second World War, tells us in a foreword to Operation Sea Lion that it was 'written primarily for the benefit of' the authors of two volumes in that series. Mr. Wheatley, in fact, was devilling.

He was however allowed to submit his ad- mirable work in 1954 to Oxford University for a B.Litt. degree. 'Seeing,' Sir James explains, 'that it was written from official sources and as part of a government undertaking, leave has been necessary for its publication and this has now been given.'

It may strike the casual reader as odd that an Interval of four years should have elapsed be- tween the completion of Mr. Wheatley's study and the granting of leave for its publication. He may wonder why material which deals with an abortive German operation in 1940 should have had to be kept so long on ice, especially since the two volumes of the Official History (for whose authors Mr. Wheatley's researches were under- taken in the first place) were finished in 1956 and appeared last year.

It so happens that I was indirectly concerned With various phases of Operation Sea Lion's long Period of gestation in Whitehall, and I think some Of my experiences are worth recounting for the light they throw on current Government practice regarding the custodianship of national archives.

In the autumn of 1954 I began to collect • material for a book which was eventually called Invasion 1940 and which dealt with events on both sides of the Channel during a memorable summer. I began by foolishly assuming that, as a more or less reputable writer, I should be allowed access, within reason, to such British and Ger- man documents of the period as no longer needed to be treated, for one reason or another, as secret +or confidential. It was explained to me, with the u tmost kindness, that this was not the form at all. I was not a Cabinet Minister or a senior commander wishing to refresh his memories of events which were within his knowledge at the time; I was a private individual 'writing for gain' and as such had no right of access to official sources of any kind. The authorities added how- ever that they would help me as far as they could within the letter of the regulations. If I could show that a document had been 'published' in any way—even if it had only been shown to one war-correspondent when it was captured—I should be allowed to see it.

Thus began a sort of game of Happy Families. Whenever the Official Historians held the docu- ment I asked for (and whenever I could prove that it had been referred to in a published source) I was always shown it; but it was a slow and roundabout way of getting at a tiny fraction of the vast mass of material which (on the Ger- man side) Mr. Wheatley has analysed with such lucidity.

At an early stage I heard of the existence of his thesis and asked if I could see it, since I could not see the documents on which it was based. I was about to leave for Germany; the fuller my knowledge of the German plans, the better-placed—obviously--I should be to question those who had had a hand in making them or carrying them out. I was told (this was in early 1955) that my request was likely to be granted, as approval for the eventual publication of Mr. Wheatley's study was being sought. But in the end this approval was not given, and I abandoned all hope of reading Mr. Wheatley's magnum opus.

Several months passed. One day I went into the Admiralty to try and clear up some obscure naval point. Tni afraid nobody here's much of a specialist on 1940,' said the nice man who dealt with me, 'but if we have got what you want it's pretty sure to be in here'; and he placed before me a stout docket containing Mr. Wheatley's thesis.

I read it through twice, feeling guilty; and two days later told the Cabinet Office (through whom all dealings with the Official Historians are for some odd reason channelled) what had happened. The Cabinet Office took the news as well as could be expected, but everyone concerned now found themselves in a somewhat unreal position.

For instance : my next list of requests included one for a German map of the United Kingdom showing what they believed to be the dispositions of Home Forces in September 1940. This had to be refused, as I could not have known of the map's existence if I had not read the forbidden thesis. So I wrote to a friend, a British officer serving in Washington, and asked him to find out whether by any chance there was a copy of this obscure (but to inc intensely interesting) map in the Pentagon; if there was, and he could get a sight of it perhaps he would make notes which would give me a rough idea of the lessons to be learnt from it. Shortly afterwards the map itself arrived by post; a note from the Adjutant- General's Department in the Pentagon expressed the hope that I would not need to keep it for more than a month or two.

It seemed to me slightly absurd that I should be given by a foreign government assistance which the British authorities felt obliged to with- hold. But the height of absurdity came when my book was finished and I asked for official help in wording ,my acknowledgments to Mr. Wheat- ley; brief though my glimpse of his work had been, I was in his debt for several details which were not available from other sources.

Whitehall, in the person of an irritable bureau- crat whom I did not know personally, pointed out over the telephone that Mr. Wheatley's thesis was a restricted document, that I had seen it without authority, and that if I published any reference to it I might be involved in proceedings under the Official Secrets Act. Later pronouncements were less apoplectic, and just before I sent my proofs to the printer the decision was taken to allow Mr. Wheatley to publish his thesis.

I have dealt at some length with ihese ludicrous transactions because it seems to me wrong that Whitehall should have the un- challenged right to sequester indefinitely rich deposits of the raw material of the history of our times. Clearly the Official Historians must, after a war, have priority of access to the docu- ments dealing with it. Clearly some of those docu- ments must continue for some time to be treated as secret or confidential. To grant even the most limited access to them would raise the administra- tive problems which a library has to face; and such access could obviously not be granted to every applicant. (This last point could be met by a selection committee who would vet the creden- tials of candidates and reject those whose aims were unworthy.)

Most of the official histories have now been published or at least completed. Surely it is time that some less negative and more liberal dis- positions were made of the documents on which they are based? Mr. ,Wheatley's study of the German invasion plans is a definitive work, a cool, well-ordered assessment of all the written evidence. It is difficult to applaud a system which has held up its publication for four years; and although I may be wrong I do not think I am being unfair in suspecting that, if I had not been accidentally shown it in draft three years ago, it might never have seen the light at all.

In The Silent Victory (The Bodley Head, 21s.) Mr. Duncan Grinnell-Milne is also concerned with Operation Sea Lion. His main purpose is to prove that it was British sea power rather than British air power which played the decisive part in thwarting the Germans. This thesis has not been entirely neglected by other historians, official and unofficial; at least three of the former have followed Mr. Wheatley in believing that 'lack of sea power was the root cause of the abandon- ment' of Sea Lion. Mr. Grinnell-Milne supports his rather repetitious arguments with (in par- ticular) some useful evidence from British naval archives; but the total impression produced is one of slightly pedantic partisanship, as though somebody had written a book to prove that the wicket-keeper really won a match in which the fast bowler took all the wickets, because if the wicket-keeper hadn't been there the consequences would have been disastrous.