Strix
A Quest for Corpses
JUST over fifteen years ago a rumour swept through the British Isles with astonishing speed. It was to the effect that very large numbers of dead German soldiers had been washed up on the south coast. In some versions these corpses were said to be terribly scorched. Their arrival on our shores was attributed either to the interception by the Royal Navy of the long-awaited spearheads of the German invasion force, or else to the RAF having 'set the sea on fire' in the ports in which for some time past the enemy had been mustering the barges and other craft in which he hoped to cross the Channel.
Estimates of the total number of corpses involved were not, 1 think, a normal feature of this rumour. The general im- pression given was that they arrived in unmanageable and indeed embarrassing quantities. 'The Channel is white with dead' was a common phrase. People living or stationed on the south coast could see for themselves that this was at best only partly true, but there was no trace of scepticism on the cliff- tops. No, the inhabitants of A— would tell inquirers, no corpses had arrived with them: but farther down the coast, at B—. the Sappers had had to be called in to get the har- bour clear of dead. The inquirers, proceeding to B—, learned that they had been misinformed. C— was the place they wanted; there the civilian population had been evacuated from the waterfront because of the stench. And so on.
People tend to believe what they want to believe, and the content of this rumour could hardly have been more acceptable to the hard-pressed islanders. Most Britons at that time led very restricted, self-contained existences. Petrol was severely rationed; the use of the telephone was officially discouraged and sometimes rendered impossible by the effects of bombing; the newspapers worked under a censorship. A rumour, not in itself unlikely, which no one wanted, let alone was able, to disprove, could hardly have had more favourable conditions under which to propagate itself. 'We took no steps to contra- dict such tales,' Sir Winston Churchill wrote afterwards, noting that they `spread freely through the occupied countries in a wildly exaggerated form and gave much encouragement to the oppressed populations.'
Sir Winston describes the origin of the rumour thus in Volume II of The Second World War: `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 prac- tising embarkations in the barges along the French coast. Some of these barges put out to sea in order to escape British bombing and were sunk, either by bombing or bad weather.' What I have been trying to find out (for the purposes of a book on the period) is : What happened to those corpses?
So far I have had no luck. Someone, obviously, buried the bodies somewhere, on someone's authority and at someone's expense. But these dead soldiers should, in the normal course of events, have left other and more easily discoverable traces than their obscure and scattered graves. If they came ashore `during August' they could not have been in the water for very long, since the RAF only began its attacks on barge con- centrations late in that month; the corpses and their clothing would not have been badly decomposed. The soldiers would have been carrying their pay-books (and probably, since they were only on an exercise, letters, diaries, and other grist to the mill of intelligence). At the very least they should have furnished MI 14 (the section then responsible for such matters) with interesting order of battle intelligence in the shape of unit identifications. At intervals throughout that summer brave men in small boats had risked their lives for the chance of ransacking the pockets of one dead German soldier; the delivery of forty such prizes on our doorstep would seem not only to have added nothing at all to our knowledge of the enemy's dispositions, but to have gone quite unnoticed by the officers most likely to be most interested in them.
A belligerent has other responsibilities towards his enemy's dead besides taking their pay-books and finding them graves. The casualties must be notified, through the International Red Cross, to the government of the country to which they belong. This was automatically done in the case of German airmen who crashed, or prisoners of war who died, in the UK during 1940. As far as I can discover, it was not done in the case of the forty German soldiers washed up by the sea.
There is no trace of them in the statistics kept by the War Office Records Centre. The War Graves Commission know nothing about them, nor do the Home Office, nor Somerset House. Their recovery from the sea would normally have been noted in the war diaries of the units or formations responsible for guarding the sectors in which they came ashore. (In May, 1942, for instance, 240 Independent Brigade, comprising the 7th Wiltshires and 527 Coast Regiment, RA, recorded the arrival of several German corpses on the coast of the Isle of Wight.) Preliminary researches suggest that no similar entries were made in August, 1940, in the war diaries of units stationed on the coast 'between the Isle of Wight and Cornwall.'
Was this (while we are about it) a very likely part of the world for the corpses to finish up in? Most of the barge concentrations, most of the amphibious training and most of the bombing attacks were in and around the ports of Northern France, Belgium and Holland. The 6th Army, which by about the end of August had dropped out of the German plan because of the lack of shipping, probably did some exercises off the Cherbourg Peninsula. But if a barge is wrecked five or even ten miles off that coast, its drowned occupants still have to travel at least fifty miles north before fetching up in England; from Boulogne the distance is one hundred miles and the direction due west. I know nothing about tides and currents in the Channel, but I should have thought that the odds against forty corpses reaching the West Country from tither starting-point were fairly heavy.
What did happen? I suspect the answer is that no dead German soldiers arrived on our shores in 1940. The rumour could easily have started from nothing; in the First World War it did not need forty real Russian soldiers to launch an equally widespread rumour that a Tsarist army corps (with snow on its boots) was moving through England en route for the Western Front. It is certain that, as a result of mishaps to unseaworthy barges, a fair number of dead Germans were washed up on the coasts of France and the Low Countries; and it is possible that the British rumour had in some queer way a continental origin.
But where, when all was over, did Sir Winston get his forty corpses from, and what became of them? If any reader thinks he can throw light on this minor but curious problem of contemporary history, I shall be delighted to hear from him.
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