Hitler’s British Traitors
TIM TATE
(ICON BOOKS, 480 PP, £10.99)
Tablet bookshop price £9.89 • Tel 020 7799 4064
The memory of Britain’s “finest hour” of unity and determination during the Second World War rightly endures: Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, and the renegade William Joyce (“Lord Haw-Haw”), have done nothing to besmirch it. It is, however, a picture that requires shading, to the point where its edges blacken.
Based on recently declassified official documents, Tim Tate’s new book takes in the whole panoply of wartime treachery. The wider group of traitors numbered many hundreds, maybe thousands, but the conspirators – he focuses on three – were what Tate calls “a small – but dangerous – sub-stratum which yearned for the day when [German] troops could goose-step down Whitehall amid an orgy of swastika flags”. There was also espionage and sabotage (damaging phone boxes, mapping the location of aerodromes and munitions factories, even setting fire to houses during the height of the Blitz to help guide the Luftwaffe towards its targets). Some of these actions led to the deaths of many British servicemen.