Their Funniest Hour

OPERATION SEA LION (323 pp.)--Peter Fleming--Simon & Schuster ($5).

Britain's famous Finest Hour, in the happy hindsight of peace, was also one of its funniest.

That the grim period from Dunkirk into the Battle of Britain brought out the most eccentric as well as the best qualities of the British is a major part of the thesis of Writer-Adventurer (Brazil, Tartary, etc.) Peter Fleming. The invasion-threatened British were often funny in the way in which a man, scrambling out of mortal danger, sometimes forgets his pants, and the Germans achieved heights of sinister absurdity. These facts, in focus with Fleming's sharp eye, make sprightly reading of what would otherwise be simply a well-organized and well-informed piece of contemporary narrative.

Directive No. 16. On June 22, 1940, the French signed their armistice with Hitler, and even in the friendly U.S. at that time, one-third of George Gallup's opinion staters thought the British were licked. For some Nazis, it was a simple matter of crossing the Channel in the wake of the Dunkirk evacuees. The British, who knew the trick was one too many even for Napoleon, were slow to convince. Hitler thought the British would give up, and so it was not until July 16 that he issued Directive No. 16: "As England, in spite of the hopelessness of her military position, has so far shown herself unwilling to come to any compromise, I have decided to begin to prepare for, and if necessary to carry out, an invasion of England." This was to be "Operation Sea Lion."

After the French armistice, Hitler moved his headquarters to the depths of the Black Forest, there perhaps to brood on his proposals to seize Iceland and settle

Jews on Madagascar. The British too began their period of desperate farce. Survivors of an early Commando raid on the French coast on June 25 could not regain foothold on British soil for some hours because the heroes could not establish their identity with the authorities at Folkestone harbor.

According to Fleming, the "mixture of esteem and spite" Hitler had for the British gave him no clue as to what they would do. When he might have tried to lull them into defeatism, he chose instead to try to scare them with a policy of "fee-fi-fo-fum." This "minatory tone" was a bad mistake. "The menace of invasion was at once a tonic and a drug," writes Fleming. "It braced the islanders to exertions whose necessity seemed beyond question, and it expunged the memories of the disasters they had suffered." The British began to stir themselves.

Phony Fog-Pills. For the next perilous months, the realities of war took place in the air. Fantasy possessed the ground. Historian Fleming acknowledges that Evelyn Waugh's fictional persiflage, Put Out More Flags, is an excellent guide to the spirit of the period. The Home Guard went into action, some appearing on horseback with bowler hats and shotguns. Others (including Author Fleming) were organized into guerrilla bands with underground hideouts like "the Lost Boys' subterranean home in the second act of Peter Pan", with the object of harassing an invading army. The General Staff puckishly referred to this as "scallywagging." Smart shops advertised that beneath their millinery could be found lightweight steel caps. By German "black" radio, the British heard that the Germans had a "fog-pill" by which parachutists would float down in the semblance of a small cloud. Actually, at the time, Hitler's Chiefs of Staff were toying with a "War Crocodile"--a huge reinforced-concrete tank designed to crawl across the Channel on the sea floor. The public was officially warned against strange gossamer-like threads seen floating in the air. They turned out not to be a secret weapon but something to do with the mating of spiders.

Script Change. By this time, Hitler was parachuting spies into Britain, and the script changes from Waugh to something by Olsen and Johnson. One spy. half-Japanese, was captured with binoculars and a spare pair of shoes hung around his neck. Another dropped in Ireland wearing a beret and high boots, lost his invisible ink swimming the River Boyne. As part of his design to scare the British, Hitler ordered "pack assembles'' dropped at random over the countryside. They included radios, maps and instructions to imaginary secret agents. Unmanned parachutes were dropped to spread the notion that a secret paratroop invasion was afoot. Some fell in fields of standing grain, where the absence of tracks leading away from the parachutes encouraged the British to believe that no parachutists had been attached to them.

A water-diviner was given temporary prominence when he claimed to be able to detect ammunition dumps on the French coast. Since Hitler was queer for occult arts, Military Intelligence was told to furnish a Hungarian astrologer with the birth dates of high-ranking German officers. This piece of nonsense led to the useful discovery that the War Office's list of enemy officers was pretty much made up of dead or retired Germans.

No More than Fantasy. Journalist Fleming, who, as Strix, writes a weekly essay for the Spectator, has composed a tragicomic record, a record in which the farcical is merely punctuation. If it is often the comic more than the serious that comes through, it is in part because of his own ingrown habit of mocking at perils--including his own--and, more important, because the world already knows well the sorrows and dangers and heroics that went into Great Britain's rise from disaster to victory, and needs no somber reiteration of them. Better, perhaps, to be able to smile now when told that the British collected assagais, ancestral sabers, golf clubs, and Indian Mutiny rifles, and chuckle when reminded that only yesterday the Germans were hatching elaborate plans for kidnapping the Duke of Windsor out of Portugal. For beneath the fun, Fleming makes clear how narrow was the margin of victory at sea and in the air.

When all is said and done, Britain's achievement in 1940 was one of character. Fleming shows his own special character in his assessment of this, resorts neither to Freud nor to any mythological flimflam, but to an editorial in the London Times. It was neither pride nor preoccupation with a job to do that gave the British their strength, says Fleming, citing the Times with approval; it was the universal understanding that all had lost something and would lose more, and that "now the days are all lived for their own sake."

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