Even wartime censorship had failed to stop people knowing that the Germans had effectively isolated the main British concentrations of troops in the south of England since their surprise landings in Harwich, the Channel ports, Portsmouth and Plymouth.
German air strike power was superior, crackly English-language broadcasts by the enemy on captured Belgian transmitters pretended to carry the urgings of patriotic Britons for rejection of Churchill and the war effort. Almost all the French forces that had been standing alongside their British allies had retreated to the other side of the Channel, thanks to a remarkable evacuation from Folkestone and Dover.
But as this month of June began 67 years ago, some hope lingered. This was Britain, the British were time-honoured warriors and would never succumb to an evil foreign invader. In our time of need, the Americans would rush to our aid.
Yet each day brought glummer news of the fighting, and of the relentless advance of the enemy to within striking distance of the capital, and a mass exodus duly began.
At first by train and bus, then in cars and vans and lorries, eventually on horse-drawn carts and finally by bicycle and on foot, people were leaving with what belongings they could take. In Golders Green and elsewhere, Jewish families grew nervous, and many joined the flow to the country.
And everyone knew the writing was on the wall when Churchill rose in Parliament and said gravely: "Britain cannot die. And if one day I were told that only a miracle could save Britain, that day I would say, 'I believe in the miracle because I believe in Britain'."
Those, save for the obvious changes, were the words used by the French prime minister Paul Reynaud to members of his national assembly on May 21. As Herbert R Lottman indicates in his utterly fascinating book, The Fall of Paris, which I have belatedly been reading, they sent shivers down the spines of Frenchmen able to strip away the bold coating to reveal the true level of threat. One only a miracle could repel.
There is only so far you can take the trick of substituting British for French references to imagine a scenario such as the one sketched out above. But let me continue for a little while longer, to explore what might have been had London and not Paris fallen on June 14 1940........
It did happen, of course. And alongside countless displays of courage and steadfastness by the Resistance, and by those hopelessly overwhelmed military units, there was to be craven collaboration with the enemy, both in the occupied territory and in Vichy France. More than 75,000 Jews would be deported to the death camps, only about 2,500 of them returning.
But while I am no scholar*, I have a theory that had events played out in line with the fictionalised account with which I began this posting, Britain would not have responded so differently.
There would have been those willing to deal with the enemy, seek an armistice on the best terms possible and try to get on with life.
Getting on with life would have included policemen and officials actively cooperating with, and helping to execute, German plans to round up British Jews and dispatch them to Auschwitz and elsewhere, just as gendarmes and fonctionnaires did in France.
The Resistance, in Britain as in France, would have been brave but patchy. It would have been led and populated essentially by people of the Left, not by the sort of self-styled superpatriots who belong these days to such parties as the BNP and Front National (and who, in all probability, would have found themselves more comfortable by the side of the occupying authorities).
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We like to think that collectively we would have done no such thing as acquiesce, let alone collaborate. Most of us would also say that, as individuals, we would have fought like tigers against the invaders by whatever means we had at our disposal and regardless of the enormous personal risk. However, we have no proper way of knowing whether our actions would always have corresponded to those lofty principles any more than they did in wartime France.
None of this is designed to reopen war wounds. After all, 67 - 2,007 minus 1,940 - is hardly the most evocative of anniversaries, and I harbour no lingering hatred of Germans or Germany and feel no contempt for the way France fell. There were good Frenchmen as well as bad in the government that fled to the Loire as the Germans neared the gates of Paris.
I was drawn to the subject by my reading of a great book, and by the fact that I was writing elsewhere about Jean-Marie Le Pen and his latest brush with French courts, this time for his suggestion that the German occupation of France was relatively benevolent. As these things go.
But while condemning Le Pen for his rotten views now, and lamenting the capitulation of his country in 1940, let us remember that in the approach to war, there were in Britain plenty of sneaking regarders - and worse -for Hitler and facsism.
Perhaps we could also ask ourselves at what point the human instinct for self-preservation triumphes over nobler values?
And reflect on what evidence we see, on a regular basis in peacetime, from assorted pillars of British society - judiciary, police, officialdom, politicians and, yes, newspaper proprietors and their editors - that under no circumstances would some of them have wilted in the face of German coercion?
* No scholar, to the extent that I am not even sure, as I write, that it was such a glorious spring in London. I have read the occasional references to lovely, balmy days in May but have, for the purposes of this posting, exported across the Channel the excellent spring that Paris indeed enjoyed. Anyone with better references must feel free to correct my assumption/blogging licence.
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