ABSTRACT

The fall of France in June 1940, coming hard on the heels of Hitler’s seizure of Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries, left the whole coastline of western Europe from the North Cape to the Spanish frontier in hostile hands. It was as great a strategic threat to the British Isles as any since the Spanish Armada. Even the Channel Islands, whose seamen had so often over the previous two-and-a-half centuries kept watch for any concentration of enemy shipping in neighbouring French ports and far down into the Bay of Biscay, had been abandoned as indefensible in the face of air power.