Most esteemed Labour Führer of the Reich!
Everything that has happened since 10 May seems even to us, who had indestructible faith in our success, like a dream. In a few days 4/5 of the English Expeditionary Army and a great part of the best mobile French troops will be destroyed or captured. The next blow is ready to strike, and we can execute it at a ratio of 2:1, which has hitherto never been granted to a German field commander… You, too, Herr Labour Führer of the Reich, have contributed significantly to this greatest victory in history. Heil Hitler.37
The hubris of the letter is undeniable, especially since the BEF had started to embark from Dunkirk on 26 May, but equally there is not the slightest sense that the OKW were holding back from attempting to ‘destroy or capture’ as much of the Allied force as possible; evidently they believed total victory to be in their grasp.
Although it was Rundstedt’s initial decision to halt Kleist’s Panzers outside Dunkirk on 24 May, it took the Führer’s influence to silence the opposition from Brauchitsch, Halder, Guderian and Rommel. ‘We could have wiped out the British army completely if it weren’t for the stupid order of Hitler,’ Kleist later recalled.38 Certainly, if the BEF had been captured wholesale – more than a quarter of a million POWs in German hands – there is no telling what concessions must have been wrung out of the British Government, or whether Churchill could have survived as prime minister if he had demanded a continuation of the war. Hitler knew how to use POWs as a bargaining tool, as he was soon to prove with his 1.5 million French captives. Kleist’s belief that after the capture of the BEF ‘an invasion of England would have been a simple affair’ is harder to accept, as the RAF and Royal Navy were still undefeated, and the Germans had no advanced plans for getting men across the Channel.
Although the Allied forces were overwhelmed at Boulogne and Menin on 25 May and at Calais on the 27th, Dunkirk was to hold out until the day on which all the Allied troops in the pocket who could embark to Britain had done so. Ramsay and the British Government initially assumed that no more than 45,000 troops could be saved, but over the nine days between dawn on Sunday, 26 May and 03.30 on Tuesday, 4 June, no fewer than 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued from death or capture, 118,000 of whom were French, Belgian and Dutch. Operation Dynamo – so named because Ramsay’s bunker at Dover had housed electrical equipment during the Great War – was the largest military evacuation in history so far, and a fine logistical achievement, especially as daylight sailings had to be suspended on 1 June due to heavy Luftwaffe attacks.
The Halt Order was finally rescinded by dawn on 27 May and heavy fighting took place along the shrinking perimeter, as the Allied rearguard – especially the French First Army near Lille – bought precious time for the rest of the troops to embark on several hundred ships and boats. That same day ninety-seven British prisoners of war from the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Norfolk Regiment were massacred in cold blood by the 1st Battalion of the SS Totenkopf Division’s 2nd Infantry Regiment, machine-gunned in a paddock in the inappropriately named hamlet of Le Paradis in the Pas-de-Calais. The next day, ninety POWs from the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment were executed by grenade and rifle-fire by the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment in a crowded barn at Wormhout, near the Franco-Belgian border.39 On seeing two grenades tossed into the crowded barn, Sergeant Stanley Moore and Sergeant-Major Augustus Jennings leapt on top of them to shield their men from the blasts. These despicable, cold-blooded massacres give lie to the myth that it was desperation and fear of defeat towards the end of the war that led the SS to kill Allied POWs who had surrendered; in fact such inhumanity was there all along, even when Germany was on the eve of her greatest victory. Although the officer responsible for Le Paradis, Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Fritz Knochlein, was executed in 1949, Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Mohnke, who commanded the unit that carried out the Wormhout atrocity, was never punished for this war crime and died in 2001 in a Hamburg retirement home.40 Already perilous as the Dunkirk perimeter came under full-scale assault, the Allies’ situation worsened at 11.00 on 28 May when, with minimum warning, King Leopold III of the Belgians agreed his country’s unconditional surrender. This suddenly opened up a 30-mile gap in the Allied line which was swiftly, but necessarily only partially, filled by Alan Brooke’s II Corps.
As well as 222 Royal Navy vessels, some 800 civilian craft of every type were called upon by Ramsay to sail across the Channel to bring the troops home. Some refused to heed the call – including some lifeboatmen and much of Rye’s fishing fleet – but an armada of 860 vessels did take part, including pleasure steamers, liners, troopships, trawlers, barges, ferries and forty Dunkirk coasters. Larger ships sometimes towed smaller ones across, and many went back and forth several times. In this they were hugely helped by the weather in the Channel. ‘For days it suddenly remained calmer than a millpond,’ recalled Signalman Payne. ‘During the entire lift-off of that multitude not a ripple was seen. This allowed men to stand up to their shoulders in water and boats to operate within a few inches of freeboard, loaded to double and treble their safe carrying capacity. The calm sea was the miracle of Dunkirk. ’41 Pausing only to cut his many medal ribbons off a jacket he had to leave behind – he’d won the vc and DSO and was mentioned in despatches nine times in the Great War – ‘for of course he would take home nothing more than any private soldier’, Gort boarded with his troops.42
Of the fifty-six Allied destroyers that played a part in the operation, nine were sunk and nineteen damaged; of the thirty-eight minesweepers, five were sunk and seven damaged; of the 230 trawlers, twenty-three were sunk and two damaged; of the forty-five ferries, nine were sunk and eight damaged. Of the eight hospital ships – each of which was emblazoned with large Red Cross markings easily visible to the Luftwaffe – one was sunk and five damaged.43 It was quite untrue, as the BBC was to allege in 2004, that the British civilians who sailed to Dunkirk to save the BEF did it ‘because they were paid’. They were indeed paid for their service, as was the entire BEF for theirs, but there were far easier ways of earning a living during those nine days in May 1940.
For all the inspiring, Victoria Cross-worthy stories of men like Sergeant-Major Augustus Jennings or Lieutenant Dickie Furness of the Welsh Guards, who led a suicidal attack on a German machine-gun post, there were others who tried to rush the embarkation stations at Dunkirk in order to get home safely. ‘While a mixed party of men was forming up to embark,’ recalled Sam Lombard-Hobson, First Lieutenant of the destroyer HMS Whitshed, ‘a single soldier, unable to take any more, broke ranks and made a dash for the gangway. Without a moment’s hesitation, the subaltern in charge took out his revolver and shot the man through the heart, who lay motionless on the jetty. The young officer then turned to his section, and calmly told them that he wanted only fighting men with him. The effect was electric, and undoubtedly prevented a stampede by other troops awaiting evacuation.’44 Although there were occasional scenes of panic and drunkenness – ‘I saw chaps run into the water screaming because mentally it was too much for them,’ recalled Sergeant Leonard Howard – overall the long queues that snaked over the sand dunes, especially those officered by Regular Army regiments, were patient and orderly, despite the exhausted, defeated men occasionally coming under fire from German fighters and dive-bombers that broke through the RAF cordon. Captain E. A. R. Lang, a Royal Engineer who came off on 29 May, recalled that when the Navy – nicknamed ‘blue jobs’ – came to the rescue, ‘As soon as our Cockney boys met the sailors, a verbal battle started and the jokes were cracked in good taste and bad language… “Blimey, chum, what about a trip round the lighthouse?”, “Bye, bye china, where’s yer little boat?” ’
The RAF was less popular with the Army than the omnipresent Navy, because it was not so visible and was incapable of protecting the beaches from attack by the Luftwaffe round the clock, although it shot down 150 German planes during the operation, at the cost of 106 of its own. The RAF assigned sixteen squadrons to cover the Dunkirk evacuati
on; however, because of the distance from England, very few airfields could be used, allowing a maximum of only four squadrons to be engaged at any one time, and often only two. It did not help that the Royal Navy continually fired at RAF fighters, shooting down three, and the paramount need for home defence had anyway to be considered. Many of the dogfights took place far from the beaches, where the Army was unable to witness what the Air Force was doing for it, but when the German fighters and especially Stuka dive-bombers did get through to the embarkation points, massacres resulted. ‘I hated Dunkirk,’ recalled an unusually sensitive Flugzeugführer (pilot officer) called Paul Temme, who flew an Me-109. ‘It was just unadulterated killing. The beaches were jammed full of soldiers. I went up and down at three hundred feet hose-piping.’45
The experience of being dive-bombed by Stukas was never forgotten by a BEF lorry-driver, Tom Bristow: ‘They looked like filthy vultures, their undercarriage not being retractable so that their landing gear reminded one of the cruel talons in which they held their victims. What was held between the wheels, however, was not a victim but a big fat bomb. My eyes became riveted on that bomb… it held a strange fascination for me, it was my executioner. And I could do nothing about it.’46 The bomb missed Bristow, but Lance-Corporal John Wells of the South Staffordshire Regiment was not so lucky: ‘I was up on the prow of the ship when we were dive-bombed,’ he recalled years afterwards.
A Stuka dropped its bomb straight down the aft funnel. Direct hit. The ship literally folded in about three seconds. I was fortunate because being up in the front end, I just fell off. The fuel tanks had been ruptured, so the sea was a mass of diesel oil. I took an involuntary swim and managed to get ashore but I still twinge a bit with pain nowadays because I swallowed a lot of that diesel oil and most of the lining of my stomach’s gone west.47
Yet, for all the Luftwaffe’s successes, Göring could not make good his boast to destroy the BEF from the air, as Hitler discovered too late. ‘Even if the waters had parted, like the Red Sea before Moses, to allow the soldiers to walk home,’ one military historian has noted, continuing the miracle analogy, ‘the watching world could hardly have been more surprised.’48 Nonetheless the BEF lost 68,111 men in the campaign, of whom 40,000 were marched into five years of captivity.
As importantly for the Army in the short term, the British were also forced to leave behind 65,000 vehicles, 20,000 motorcycles, 416,000 tons of stores, 2,472 guns, 75,000 tons of ammunition and 162,000 tons of petrol. They destroyed as much as possible with petrol poured over food and grenades thrown down the barrels of artillery pieces, but essentially the soldiers of the BEF returned with little more than their rifles – indeed some officers said they would not be allowed to embark without them – and what they stood up in. The British Tommy of that period wore or carried a steel helmet of 2½ pounds in weight, a haversack of 5 pounds, an anti-gas cape of 3½ pounds, a respirator of the same weight, straps and belts ditto, two pouches containing sixty rounds each, weighing 10 pounds each, a bayonet and its scabbard of 1¾ pounds and boots of 4¾ pounds, and a rifle of nearly 9 pounds. Together these added up to 53½ pounds, or nearly 4 stone. The last man off the beaches at Dunkirk was Major-General Harold Alexander, commander of the 1st Division, who showed superb sangfroid throughout the evacuation. ‘Our position is catastrophic,’ a Staff officer told him there. ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied. ‘I don’t understand long words.’49
On 4 June, the day the operation ended, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons and the nation that they ‘must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.’ He did not deny that being expelled from the Continent was ‘a colossal military disaster’, but he did produce the most sublime passage of all his magnificent wartime oratory when he said:
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
The words that Churchill used in these short, punchy sentences were all but two derived from Old English. ‘Confidence’ derives from Latin and ‘surrender’ comes from the French. In November 1942, the Conservative minister Walter Elliot told Major-General John Kennedy that after Churchill had sat down he whispered to him: ‘I don’t know what we’ll fight them with – we shall have to slosh them on the head with bottles – empty ones of course.’50
Churchill’s public insistence on continuing the struggle represented a victory for him inside the five-man British War Cabinet, which for five days between 24 and 28 May discussed the possibility of opening peace negotiations with Hitler, initially via Mussolini.51 The proponent of this course, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, nonetheless always made it clear that he would not countenance any peace that involved sacrificing the Royal Navy or essential national sovereignty, but Churchill – eventually supported by the other three members, Neville Chamberlain and Labour’s Clement Attlee and Arthur Henderson – opposed holding any discussions, at least until it was seen how many troops could be evacuated from Dunkirk. Churchill was right; any public accommodation with Germany would have destroyed British morale, legitimized Hitler’s conquests, alienated American sympathy and allowed the Germans later to concentrate their entire might – rather than just the great bulk of it – against the USSR. Although the initial terms might have been favourable, in the long term a disunited Britain would have had to maintain an onerous level of defence spending for decades, or until such time as Germany was victorious in the east and turned to settle her scores against British bourgeois democracy. ‘The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war’, wrote the Irish literary essayist Robert Wilson Lynd, ‘appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.’
Instead the Ministry of Information, in co-operation with the War Office and the Ministry of Home Security, put out a leaflet entitled ‘If the Invader Comes: What to Do – and How to Do It’. This began confidently enough, stating that if the Germans arrived ‘They will be driven out by our Navy, our Army and our Air Force,’ but because the civilian populations of Poland, Holland and Belgium had been ‘taken by surprise’ and ‘did not know what to do when the moment came’, certain instructions were laid down. (Of course the Ministries also meant French civilians too, but since France was still nominally in the war they could not be mentioned by name.) The first instruction was: ‘If the Germans come, by parachute, aeroplane or ship, you must remain where you are. The order is “Stay Put”.’ The High Command wanted to avoid the scenes of millions of refugees clogging the roads, as had happened on the Continent. ‘Do Not Believe Rumours and Do Not Spread Them’ was the next invocation, although identifying a rumour was left to the individual: ‘Use your common sense.’ Some of the other instructions amounted to just that – common sense – such as ‘Do Not Give Any German Anything.’
*
Dunkirk fell on 4 June to General Günther von Kluge, who marched in under a massive pall of acrid smoke from burning ships and oil installations, and the next day the Germans put Fall Rot (Plan Red) into operation, with Army Group A swinging south to try to break Weygand’s line of forty-nine divisions along the Somme and Aisne rivers. Despite their still healthy numbers, the French were in a hopeless situation. The BEF had disappeared, leaving only one infantry division and two armoured brigades on the Continent; the Belgians had surrendered; the French had lost twenty-two of their seventy-one field divisions, six of their seven motorized divisions, two of their five fortress divisions and eight of twenty armoured battalions.52 Furthermore, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding of RAF Fighter Command adamantly refused to send over any more Hurricanes or Spitfires to the battle of France, correctly assuming that the forthcoming battle of Britain would require every plan
e he could deploy. He had already committed the Advanced Air Striking Force squadrons at the start of the battle of France, but with Hurricanes being lost at the rate of sometimes twenty-five per day – when the factories were producing only four or five – he was right to threaten to resign rather than sacrifice any more.53
On Monday, 10 June, Mussolini declared war on the Allies, which seemed more serious at the time than in retrospect, coming at a bad moment psychologically. The Italian armed forces comprised 1.5 million men, 1,700 aircraft and a navy of six capital ships, nineteen cruisers, fifty-nine destroyers and 116 submarines.54 It was nonetheless an opportunistic and short-sighted move that was to cost Italy dear. That same night the French Government quitted Paris, with Weygand declaring it a demilitarized ‘open city’. Three million of the city’s five million inhabitants also fled, amid terrible scenes. Nurses gave lethal injections to patients who could not be moved; babies were abandoned; a tank commander preparing to defend a bridge across the Loire was killed by local inhabitants who wanted no bloodshed.55 Mayors were particularly desperate that the French Army should not make stands in their towns.
Churchill made the fourth of five trips across the Channel during the battle of France for a meeting of the senior Allied decision-making body, the Supreme War Council, on 11 June at the Château du Muguet near Briare, south-east of Orléans. Reynaud, Pétain, Weygand, the British War Minister Anthony Eden and General Charles de Gaulle were all present, as was Churchill’s personal representative to Reynaud, Major-General Louis Spears. Spears recorded in his autobiography Assignment to Catastrophe that ‘The Frenchmen sat with set white faces, their eyes upon the table. They looked for all the world like prisoners hauled up from some deep dungeon to hear an inevitable verdict.’ (By the end of the war, Reynaud, Weygand and Pétain had indeed all been imprisoned by one side or the other.) For relief from the woeful sense of defeatism emanating from Pétain and Weygand, the British turned to de Gaulle, whom Spears described as:
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 9