THE following letter appeared in a recent issue of the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post and is printed through the kindly permission of the Correspondence Editor of that paper. The letter is written by Mr. A. T. Crowther, Deal:—”Mr. Herbert Johnstone’s reference to the “Guiding Hand” leads me to recall that the delay in following up Dunkirk was doubtless due to the fact that the unusually fine weather preceding it had facilitated the British defeat, and the German army was in advance of time-table. The time Hitler had fixed beforehand for the invasion was September 16th to 20th, when the tides are such that the attempts to swim the Straits used to take place. The weather then is always calm and there is a harvest moon. But the Unseen Hand intervened, and gales sprang up on the 17th and continued until after the 29th. The invasion boats collected at many points on the opposite coast, had to be taken into harbours, where they made good targets for the R.A.F., but many were swamped on the way. The Germans then announced that Providence had favoured the British twice (the first time at the Miracle of Dunkirk, when the sea went flat and the tide stood still for us), and that we were totally unworthy of the favours. We had only to wait for the November or December fogs, for which the Channel is well known, to get our deserts. But, for the first time in living memory, there were no fogs that winter in the Straits.
February 15th, 1941, was another invasion date, for which we were shockingly ill-prepared. But on February 14th a submarine earthquake occurred in the Atlantic, recorded at Kew, with hurricane damage in Spain. The effects on the tidal system round these islands was naturally censored, but it was immediate and prolonged. Ships were taken as much as 80 miles off their course, and on the River Stour here it was high water overflowing the banks, at times when the river should have been low. This was the last invasion (so-called) “scare” before the German armies marched east. Such deliberate acts of God with their powerful and far-reaching effects are not to be treated to the inane stupidity of the word “coincidence.”