They shoved on anyhow, with Smyth at the tiller and the men at the oars. After a few strokes the “crew” began falling over backwards; the oars were tangled up; and the boat was turning in crazy circles. As he later recalled, “We must have looked like an intoxicated centipede.”
There couldn’t have been a worse time to give a lesson in basic rowing. The Luftwaffe chose this moment to stage one of its raids, and the Brigadier’s instructions were punctuated by gunfire, exploding bombs, and geysers of water. The men tried again, this time with Smyth shouting out the stroke, “One-two, in-out!” The crew caught on, and the boat moved steadily toward a waiting destroyer. They even made a real race out of it, beating an overloaded motor launch carrying their division commander.
Farther along the beach, Private Bill Stratton of the RASC helped haul an abandoned lifeboat to the water’s edge, then watched a stampede of men jump in and take it over. Determined not to let all his hard work go for nothing, Stratton made a flying leap and landed on top of the crowd. Predictably, the boat soon swamped. Stratton was a good swimmer, but his greatcoat dragged him down. He was about to go under when a navy launch appeared. Someone pulled him over the side and flung him down on the bottom, “like a fish.”
Inevitably there were confrontations. Near Malo-les-Bains a column of wading men retrieved two small rowboats lying offshore. Suddenly a voice called, “Halt, or I fire!” It was a Scots colonel heading up an adjoining column, and he clearly felt his men had first call on the boats. Finally, a compromise was worked out allowing both columns to use them.
Near La Panne, Yeoman Eric Goodbody set out in a whaler with eight naval signalmen from GHQ. As they shoved off, an officer on shore ordered him to bring back four soldiers who had also piled in. Goodbody refused—he was in charge of the whaler and everybody in her, he declared. The officer pulled a gun … Goodbody drew his … and for a moment the two stood face to face, aiming their pistols at each other. At this point the four soldiers quietly volunteered to go back, and another crisis was passed.
At Bray-Dunes Sapper Joe Coles was aroused by a friend who had found a large rowboat swamped and stranded on the beach. They bailed it out, then were hurled aside by a mob of soldiers piling in. About to swamp again, it was emptied by a Military Policeman at pistol point.
Order restored, Coles and his friend tried again. This time they shoved off safely and took a load of troops to a skoot, then headed back for another load. Dozens of men were swimming out to meet them, when they were hailed by an officer floating nearby on a raft. Brandishing his revolver, the officer ordered them to take him first. Coles felt the swimmers should have priority—the raft was in no trouble—but that pistol was very persuasive. The officer had his way.
One reason for frayed nerves was the state of the sea. For the first time since the evacuation began, the wind was blowing onshore, building up a nasty surf throughout the morning of May 31. The loading went more slowly than ever, and at Bray-Dunes Commander Richardson finally decided that nothing more could be done. He ordered the troops on the beach to head for Dunkirk: then he, Commander Kerr, and the naval shore party salvaged a stranded whaler, rounded up some oars, and began pulling for England.
They didn’t realize how tired they were. Every stroke hurt. Soon they were barely moving, and they probably would have broached to and swamped; but the Margate lifeboat spotted them in time. It hurried over and picked them up.
At 10:35 a.m. Admiral Wake-Walker radioed the situation to Ramsay at Dover.
Majority of pulling boats are broached to and have no crews: Conditions on beach very bad owing to freshening onshore wind. Only small numbers are being embarked even in daylight. Consider only hope of embarking any number is at Dunkirk. …
By “Dunkirk” he of course meant the eastern mole. For Tennant and his aides, the mole was more and more the answer to everything. They were constantly trying to concentrate the boat traffic in that direction. Ramsay knew its importance too, but he also guessed that there were still thousands to be evacuated, and everything had to be used—including the beaches, even though the going was slow.
At 11:05 a.m. Wake-Walker tried again. “Dunkirk our only real hope,” he telegraphed Ramsay. “Can guns shelling pier from westward be bombed and silenced?”
This was a new problem. Until May 31, the German guns had been a nuisance, but that was all. Their aim was haphazard; the shells usually fell short. Now, batteries had been planted this side of Gravelines; and the result was soon apparent.
At 6:17 a.m. the minesweeper Glen Gower lay alongside the mole, ready to receive her first troops of the day. As the skipper Commander M.A.O. Biddneph waited on the bridge, he suddenly heard a whistling noise … then a bang, quickly followed by several more bangs. A mass of black fragments leapt up on the foredeck, just where the gunnery officer, Sub-Lieutenant Williams, was standing. At first Biddneph thought it must be a stick of bombs, but there wasn’t a plane in the sky. Then he realized it was a salvo of shells, one of them piercing the deck exactly between Williams’s feet. Miraculously, the gunnery officer wasn’t touched, but twelve men were killed or wounded in the explosion below.
The mole itself continued to lead a charmed life. Since its discovery by the Luftwaffe on May 29 it had been bombed by Stukas, pounded by artillery, and battered by rescue ships coming alongside too heavily. Rammed by the minesweeper King Orry, the seaward tip was now cut off completely. Yet for most of its length, it remained usable. Here and there gaps appeared, but they were bridged with boards, doors, and ships’ gangplanks. The loading went on.
Still, the dash to the waiting vessels was always unnerving. None felt it more than Private Alfred Baldwin of the Royal Artillery. He was carrying on his shoulders his friend Private Paddy Boydd, who had smashed a foot. Stumbling along the walkway, Baldwin came to a gaping hole, bridged by a single plank. Two sailors standing by said, “Take a run at it, mate,” adding, “don’t look down.” Baldwin followed their advice, except that he did look down. Dark water swirled around the piles twenty feet below. Somehow he kept his balance, and another pair of sailors grabbed him at the far end, cheering him on: “Well done, keep going!”
He struggled on, panting and stumbling, until he ran into two more sailors, who helped him maneuver Boydd up the gangplank to a waiting ship. She turned out to be the Channel packet Maid of Orleans, the very same vessel that had brought him to France at the start of the war.
Baldwin made his dash when the tide was high. At low tide the mole could be even more trying. Corporal Reginald Lockerby reached the destroyer Venomous, only to find there was a fifteen-foot drop to the ship’s deck. Several telegraph poles leaned against the side of the mole, and the troops were expected to slide down them to get aboard. Trouble was, neither ship nor poles had been made fast. Both were unpredictably swaying and heaving up and down. One slip meant falling into the sea and being crushed between boat and dock.
“I can’t do it, Ern,” Lockerby gasped to his friend Private Ernest Heming.
“Get down there, you silly sod, or I’ll throw you down!” shouted Heming. “I’ll hold the top of the pole for you.”
Somehow Lockerby mustered the strength and courage. He slid down the pole, then held it from the bottom as Heming followed.
No French troops were yet using the mole, but starting May 31, the new policy of equal numbers was very much in evidence along the beaches. When the motor yacht Marsayru arrived from Sheerness about 4:00 p.m., her first assignment was to help lift a large number of French waiting at Malo-les-Bains. The yacht’s civilian skipper G. D. Olivier sent in his whaler, but it was stormed by about 50 poilus, and immediately capsized. He edged farther east, “where the French troops appeared to be a little calmer,” and tried again. This time no problem, and over the next 48 hours he lifted more than 400 French soldiers.
Nearby a small flotilla of Royal Navy minesweeping craft was doing its bit. The Three Kings picked up 200 Frenchmen … the Jackeve, 60 … the Rig, another 60. The same sort of t
hing was happening at Bray-Dunes and La Panne.
How many French troops remained to be evacuated under this policy of equal numbers? Neither Paris nor Admiral Abrial in Bastion 32 seemed to have any idea. To the weary organizers of the rescue fleet in London and Dover, it didn’t make much difference. They were already sending everything that could float. …
In all her working years the 78-foot Massey Shaw had never been to sea. She was a Thames fire boat—or “fire float,” as Londoners preferred to say—and until now her longest voyage had been down the river to fight a blaze at Ridham. She had no compass, and her crew were professional firemen, not sailors.
But the Massey Shaw drew only 3.9 feet, and to the Admiralty this was irresistible. There was also a vague notion that she might come in handy fighting the fires sweeping Dunkirk harbor, an idea that conveys less about her effectiveness than it does about the innocence still prevailing in some quarters at the Admiralty.
A call for volunteers went out on the afternoon of May 30. Thirteen men were picked, with Sub-Officer A. J. May in charge, and in two hours the Massey Shaw was on her way. There had barely been time to buy a small marine compass. On the trip down the river, the crew busied themselves boarding up the cabin windows and dabbing gray paint on the various brass fittings and hose nozzles. The situation must be serious indeed: the Massey Shaw’s bright work had always been sacred.
At Ramsgate she picked up water and a young Royal Navy sub-lieutenant with a chart. Then across the Channel with the additional help of a pocket tide table that somebody found. Arriving off Bray-Dunes late in the afternoon of May 31, the crew studied the beach with fascination. At first glance it looked like any bank holiday weekend—swarms of people moving about or sitting in little knots on the sand. But there was one big difference: instead of the bright colors of summer, everybody was dressed in khaki. And what first appeared to be “breakwaters” running down into the surf turned out to be columns of men, also dressed in khaki.
The Massey Shaw sent in a rowboat toward one of the columns. It was promptly swamped and sunk by the troops piling in. Then a stranded RAF speedboat was salvaged in the hope it might be used, but 50 men crowded aboard, putting it out of action too. Toward 11:00 p.m. still another boat was found. A line was now strung between the Massey Shaw and the beach, and the new boat was pulled back and forth along this line, rather like a sea-going trolley car. The boat carried only six men at a time, but back and forth it went, ferrying load after load.
Finally the Massey Shaw could hold no more. There were now 30 men packed in the cabin, which had seemed crowded with six the night before. Dozens more sprawled on the deck; there didn’t seem to be a square foot of empty space.
It was dark when the Massey Shaw finally weighed anchor and started back for Ramsgate. So far, she had led a charmed life. The Luftwaffe was constantly overhead, but not a plane had attacked. Now, as she got under weigh, her screws kicked up a phosphorescent wake that caught the attention of some sharp-eyed enemy pilot. He swooped down and dropped a single bomb. It was close, but a miss. The Massey Shaw continued safely on her way, bringing home another 65 men.
Like the Massey Shaw, the Tilbury Dredging Company’s steam hopper dredge Lady Southborough had never been to sea. Plucked from rust-streaked obscurity in Portsmouth harbor, she checked in at Ramsgate, then set out for Dunkirk with three other Tilbury hoppers early on the morning of May 31. Arriving at 12:30 p.m., Lady Southborough anchored off Malo-les-Bains, lowered her port lifeboat with three hands, and began lifting troops off the beach.
As the Lady Southborough hovered several hundred yards offshore, a German plane dropped a stick of four bombs. No hits, but they lifted the ship’s lifeboat clear out of the water and whacked it down again, springing every plank. Nobody was hurt, but the boat was finished. Seeing that it was ebb tide, skipper Anthony Poole now drove Lady Southborough head-first onto the beach, so that he could pick up the troops directly from the water. They swarmed out, and one Frenchman—who evidently had not heard of the new British policy of equal numbers—offered to pay acting Second Mate John Tarry to get aboard.
Nearby, another Tilbury hopper dredge, Foremost 101, lay at anchor. The usual signs of disorder were everywhere: boats swamped by the surf … others sinking under the weight of too many men … others drifting about without oars or oarsmen. Amid this chaos was a single note of serenity. A petty officer had found a small child’s canoe in some boating pond ashore. Now he was ferrying soldiers one by one out to the waiting ships. As he threaded his way through the debris, none of the swimmers ever bothered him. By common consent he seemed to have a laissez-passer to work in peace, without interference.
Going home in the dark was the hardest part. As Lady Southborough groped uncertainly through the night, a destroyer loomed up, flashing a signal. None of the dredge’s crew could read Morse; so there was no answer. The destroyer flashed again; still no answer. Finally one of the soldiers on board said he was a signalman: could he help? Some more flashes, and the soldier announced that the destroyer had now demanded their identity three times; if they didn’t answer at once, she would blow them out of the water. Watching the signalman flash back the ship’s name, Second Mate Tarry cursed the day she had been christened Lady Southborough. Those sixteen letters seemed to take forever. But at last the destroyer was satisfied, and Lady Southborough crawled on to Ramsgate.
Meanwhile the cascade of little ships continued in all its variety—the stylish yacht Quicksilver, which could make twenty knots … the cockle fleet from Leigh-on-Sea … the Chris Craft Bonnie Heather, with its polished mahogany hull … the Dutch eel boat Johanna, which came complete with three Dutch owners who couldn’t speak a word of English … to name just a few. Countless other boats, which Admiral Ramsay called “free lances,” were now heading out of south coast ports like Folkestone, Eastbourne, Newhaven, and Brighton. Most never bothered to check with Dover; no one would ever record their names.
The French and Belgian fishing vessels requisitioned by Captain Auphan were beginning to turn up too, adding an international flavor to the rescue effort. Names like Pierre et Marie, Reine des Flots, and Ingénieur Cardin joined Handy Billie, Girl Nancy, and at least nine Skylarks. The French mailboat Côte d’Argent began using the east mole like any British steamer.
Most of the French crews were from Brittany and as unfamiliar with these waters as the cockle boatmen from the Thames estuary, but there was the inevitable exception. Fernand Schneider, assistant engineer on the minesweeping trawler St. Cyr, came from Dunkirk itself. Now he had the agony of watching his hometown crumble into ruins, but at the same time the comfort of visiting his own house from time to time.
Knowing the area, Schneider also knew where food was to be had, and the St. Cyr’s skipper occasionally sent him on foraging expeditions to bolster the trawler’s meager rations. He was on one of these forays on May 28 when he decided to check his house on the rue de la Toute Verte. It was still standing, and better yet, his father Augustin Schneider was there. Augustin had come in from the family refuge in the country, also to see how the house was faring. They embraced with special fervor, for the occasion was more than a family reunion, more than a celebration that the house was intact—it was Fernand’s 21st birthday.
The old man went down in the cellar and brought up a bottle of Vouvray. Then for an hour the two forgot about the war while they joyfully killed the bottle. Parting at last, father and son would not see each other again for five years.
Fernand Schneider was the only sailor at Dunkirk who celebrated his birthday at home, but the rescue fleet was full of improbable characters. Lieutenant Lodo van Hamel was a dashing Dutch naval officer, always conspicuous because he flew the only Dutch flag in the whole armada. Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Hutchens was an old Grenadier Guardsman, mired in a dull liaison job at the Admiralty. An experienced weekend sailor, he headed for Dover on his day off; now he was in charge of the War Department launch Swallow. Captain R. P. Pim normally presided over Winston Ch
urchill’s map room; today he wallowed across the Channel commanding a Dutch skoot. Samuel Palmer served on the Plymouth City Patrol, but he was an old navy “stripey,” and that was good enough. In charge of the seven-ton Naiad Errant, a cranky motor yacht that was always breaking down, he split up the cabin door and told the soldiers on board to start paddling.
Robert Harling was a typographical designer, but as a student in Captain Watts’s navigation class, he had volunteered with the rest. Now he found himself one of four men assigned to a ship’s lifeboat stripped from some liner at Tilbury docks. His companions turned out to be an advertising executive, a garage proprietor, and a solicitor. They had practically nothing in common—yet everything, joined as they were in an open boat on this strange adventure.
The boat was one of twelve being towed across the Channel by the tug Sun IV, skippered at the moment by the managing director of the tugboat company. The afternoon was beautiful, and the war seemed very far away. For a long time there was little to do but shoot the breeze. As they neared the French coast, marked by the pillar of black smoke over Dunkirk, the conversation fell off, and the mood in Harling’s boat became tense.
“There they are, the bastards!” someone suddenly called, pointing up at the sky. Harling looked, and soon made out more than 50 planes approaching with stately precision. They were perhaps 15,000 feet up, and at this distance everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Gradually the planes drew closer … then were directly overhead. Fascinated, he watched the bombs fall lazily toward the earth. Then suddenly they were rushing down at breakneck speed, crashing into the sea, just missing two nearby destroyers.
Soon some RAF fighters appeared, tearing into the German formation. Harling was mildly surprised that the Hurricanes and Spitfires really did rout the enemy—just as the communiqués said. But that wasn’t the end of it. In a last gesture of defiance, one of the German fighters swooped down, strafing the Sun IV and her tow. Watching it come, Harling felt mesmerized—he couldn’t even duck in time—then in a second it was over. The bullets ripped the empty sea; the plane zoomed up and out of sight. Sun IV and her charges steamed on untouched.
The World War II Collection Page 21