by Andrew Marr
The story of Dunkirk remains a miniature epic. One can peel away the layers of misremembering for ever. It was not true that the soldiers simply lined up patiently on the beaches as the Stukas screamed down at them. Men did fight for places on the boats. Others became wildly drunk, or broke down. It is not true that the British army was saved by flotillas of little pleasure boats taken across the Channel by their plucky owners. Many fishermen, lifeboatmen and commercial boat owners refused point blank to help. Many of the boats which were assembled at Sheerness were then lost while being towed across the Channel. The Royal Navy was always in the lead, taking absurd risks and suffering severe casualties to get the troops away. Nor is it true that the BEF returned home full of contempt for Jerry and determined to get back to Europe and fight as soon as possible. There are many eyewitness and first-person accounts of demoralized, angry, near-mutinous men, shattered and humiliated, returning to the English ports. One entertainment officer, sent down to Bridport in Dorset, found a town crammed with seething soldiers expressing ‘blasphemous resentment’, including one in a bar making ‘loud-mouthed criticism of the junior officers of his ack-ack unit in seizing the only available transport and making for the French coast, leaving their NCOs and men to fend for themselves . . . These dismayed men, savagely wounded in their pride, were seeking relief in bitter criticism of those set over them. We promised each other that whilst the war lasted we would never speak of what we had seen and heard that night, and we never did.’141 Though the RAF fought hard over the beach, the short range of their aircraft meant the Germans often got through. After Dunkirk, far from fighter pilots being heroes, they were the object of bitter and public derision by soldiers.
Yet when all this is admitted, and so is the skilful propaganda use to which the defeat and evacuation were put, there remains the kernel of something rare. The evacuation was a feat of improvisation and doggedness. When the BBC appealed for small boats of any kind to help save the army, they were never intended to bring troops back across the Channel. For that, larger vessels were required. But they were desperately needed to go in to the shoreline and ferry the soldiers to the waiting passenger ferries, destroyers and requisitioned Dutch motor boats. Those ‘little boats’ – yachts, cockle boats, fishing smacks, private motor and pleasure cruisers from the Thames – which were led across the Channel, were then cut adrift to reach the sand and the Dunkirk mole, and bring men back. Some were crewed by navy men and had been requisitioned. Others were crewed by retired watery potterers, Essex fishermen and amateur sailors who had never heard a shotgun fired at a rabbit, never mind seen a shooting war at first hand. There were groundings and much chaos. But without them, the evacuation would have been far, far smaller. Nor would it have happened had General von Rundstedt’s German tanks not halted before a final assault. Later Hitler would claim that this was out of some kind of strategic tenderness: he had not wanted to destroy the British Empire, because Germany would not have been able to pick up the pieces; it was ‘fair play’. More likely the halt order was given by Rundstedt himself, out of caution and because the Germans thought that with the British beaten and hemmed in, the priority was now to attack south, demolishing the remaining French resistance.
Back in London there was still optimism that the French would fight on. The politicians were out of touch and Churchill did not like the hard truths being relayed back to him by his commanders on the ground. He had, however, kept French requests for ever more squadrons of RAF fighters at arm’s length, after the man in charge of the RAF, Sir Hugh ‘Stuffy’ Dowding, insisted he needed them at home to defend Britain. An idea of the foresight on that, at least, comes from Colville’s Number Ten diary for 6 June: ‘We should be insane to send them all our fighters, because if they were lost this country would be beaten in two days, whereas even if France surrenders we shall still win the war – provided our air defences are intact.’ This presumably reflects the conversation in Downing Street. Even in the last hours before the surrender of France Churchill was making plans to go over himself to rally the French premier Paul Reynaud, and there were desperate hopes that President Roosevelt would offer active American support for France. The British general Sir Alan Brooke had been sent back to France to command a ‘second BEF’ consisting mainly of Scots and Canadians. Some, bizarrely, sailed in grand style, taking their dress kit and dining on the way over. Yet this was mere politics, Churchill’s attempt to keep the French fighting. Brooke himself arrived on a Dutch steamer, soon concluded the position was utterly hopeless and, after an angry half-hour with Churchill on the phone, ordered another evacuation from further down the French coast. He himself only returned later by fishing boat, after the French war hero, now collaborationist leader, Marshal Pétain had ordered all French troops to lay down their arms: nobody had thought to warn the notional British commander first.
The hopelessness of the fight was underlined by the heroic rearguard action of the 51st Brigade, Camerons, Seaforths, Black Watch, Argylls and Borderers, who held St-Valéry under dreadful conditions, after running out of water and food, and often ammunition too, until their evacuation was made impossible by the arrival of German artillery on the cliffs. After the French around them had surrendered, they did too, and 8,000 men spent the war in captivity. They were luckier, however, than the majority of the soldiers, airmen, sailors, women and children who got aboard the Cunard liner Lancastria at St-Nazaire. After she was hit by bombs and sank, around 3,500 people died, many of them burned to death, some beheaded by their life jackets and a few by shooting each other in suicide pacts: this, not the Titanic, was probably the greatest British maritime disaster ever.142 In London, Churchill made one final attempt to keep the French in the war. As Colville excitedly put it on Wednesday 19 June 1940: ‘Apparently there is a stupendous idea of declaring the political unity of England and France.’ Edward Bridges, the cabinet secretary, came out of the cabinet room and dictated a Declaration of Union: ‘It sounded inspiring, something which will revive the flagging energies of the French and invigorate our own people. It is a historic document and its effects will be more far-reaching than anything that has occurred this century – and more permanent?’ (Colville did at least put a question mark, though it is interesting that the French inspiration for this came from a young Jean Monnet, who later became a founder of the EU.) Meanwhile, nobody had told King George what was being done to his empire; a minister was despatched to see him that evening. He need not have worried, since the following day Reynaud resigned and Pétain surrendered.
In Britain, three famous pieces of instant propaganda were woven from the Dunkirk experience, and they have all lingered long. The most famous was, of course, Churchill’s speech to the Commons on 4 June: ‘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.’ He went on to promise that, in ‘God’s good time’, America would come to rescue and liberate the Old World. Britain was about to stop fighting in France. Churchill’s reference to ‘growing strength’ in the air refers to his thirties obsession with building up the RAF, the still-secret radar network, and perhaps encouraging reports about its performance over Dunkirk. Yet talk of fighting on beaches, landing grounds, fields and streets implies that he thought invasion would follow, despite the Spitfires. General Thorne, who had fought at Dunkirk and was now commanding troops south of London, told Churchill on 30 June 1940 to expect a landing of 80,000 German troops between Thanet and Pevensey. Churchill was less pessimistic, but not optimistic about Britain’s ability to hold the whole expanse of beaches: Thorne warned him his troops were ‘scarcely equipped at all . . . The German left wing could be held in Ashdown forest, but he did not see what could prevent the right wing advancing
through Canterbury to London.’143
There was a rival belief that mass landings by gliders and parachute troops would be the next event of the war. Many English sports and cricket grounds were littered with pieces of derelict machinery, timber and agricultural equipment to stop gliders: golf courses were officially vandalized and iron barriers were spread over roads. The police were armed to shoot parachutists and once the Local Defence Volunteers, soon the Home Guard, were formed, the country was alive with rumours of white objects floating from the sky, to be pursued by locals with shotguns or clubs. On the same reasoning, road and railway signs were torn up and destroyed lest they tell invading Germans where they were. Factories and hotels had their names painted over. Even war memorials, with village names attached, were gouged. ‘We shall – neva – suwendda’ was hurled at the Commons and the microphone on the assumption that, after Dunkirk, the next land battles must take place across southern England. This seemed perfectly likely. Jitteriness should be seen in the light of the astonishing German progress across Belgium and France. That the Germans were not ready for such an invasion and could not get safely over the Channel was at the time unclear. The code-word ‘Cromwell’ was prepared for an imminent invasion and on 7 September 1940 it was actually issued, albeit prematurely. Churchill’s novel technique was to rub the nation’s nose in likely disasters ahead while promising a dramatic denouement at the end of the film – an epic imagination which Hitler would have understood but which was underpinned by ‘the half-breed American’s’ realistic assessment of the real strengths of Britain and the US.
The second famous act of Dunkirk propaganda came a day later from the only broadcaster to rival Churchill in effectiveness and popularity at the time – the maverick socialist writer J. B. Priestley. His tone could hardly have been more different. He focused on the little boats: ‘We’ve known and laughed at them, these fussy little steamers, all our lives. We have called them “the shilling sicks”. We have watched them load and unload their crowds of holiday passengers – the gents full of high spirits and bottled beer, the ladies eating pork pies, the children sticky with peppermint rock.’ The Gracie Fields, an Isle of Wight ferry, had been sunk: ‘But now – look – this little steamer, like all her brave and battered sisters, is immortal. She’ll go sailing proudly down the years in the epic of Dunkirk. And our great-grandchildren, when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.’ Both men took for granted that they were living through historic days. (And do the great-grandchildren learn, by the way?) But where Churchill mingled defiance with dark warnings, Priestley was chirpily optimistic. Where Churchill swept the world with rhetoric, Priestley was local. Which was the more moving, the more effective? Churchill’s ‘we’ and Priestley’s ‘we’ are very different. The first really means ‘I’ – ‘I shall never surrender’ – and challenged worried listeners to identify themselves with that ‘I’. The second was a real ‘we’, sentimental perhaps, but pointing more surely towards the democratization this war would bring.
The third act of post-Dunkirk propaganda was a yellow-covered tract by three young journalists who worked for Beaverbrook – Michael Foot, the later Labour leader; Frank Owen of the London Evening Standard and Peter Howard. Writing under the pseudonym Cato they called their book, written in the four days after Dunkirk, Guilty Men. They listed fifteen people, including Ramsay MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain, plus another ten cabinet ministers and a couple of others as being responsible for Britain’s failure to rearm or confront aggression, beginning with the Japanese assault on Manchuria in 1931. Published by Victor Gollancz, it was a crude, sarcastic and often unfair attack, written in the heat of anger and fear. It included some bizarre targets – Sir Thomas Inskip, for instance, who had directed Britain away from focusing on bombers to the fighters needed so badly later the same month that Guilty Men was published, and the entirely obscure Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, blamed for poor food production. But it was a slashing attack at the right moment and hugely popular – some 200,000 copies were sold even though it was banned by W.H. Smith, which was then even more important in bookselling than it is today. Its prose now seems overblown and oddly grandiose for journalists of the centre and left. ‘A great empire supreme in arms and secure in liberty’ had been brought ‘to the edge of national annihilation’.
Its technique of using the words of the condemned against them was effective and its conclusion savage, if badly written: ‘One final and absolute guarantee is still imperatively demanded by a people determined to resist and conquer; namely that the men who are now repairing the breaches in our walls should not carry along with them those who let the walls fall into ruin . . . Let the Guilty Men retire then . . . and so make an essential contribution to the victory on which we are all implacably resolved.’ The trio pinned on the pre-war appeasement generation, largely Conservatives, full blame for the disaster of Dunkirk and so laid the foundation for an analysis shared in due course by Churchill and which helped bring about the political revenge of 1945. Among those who lived to feel ostracized and humiliated by the Guilty Men analysis was Baldwin himself. This was, as it were, the serrated cutting edge coming days after the democratic sentimentality of Priestley’s Dunkirk. It prefigured Churchill’s great domestic dilemma – that he found himself as Conservative leader leading a ‘People’s War’ defined in opposition to his own party. In July 1940, however, Churchill was not thinking of that. Like the rest of the country, he was raising his eyes to the skies.
Spitfire Magic?
The Battle of Britain, the single most important battle this country has fought, is part of the private furniture of most of our minds. It is settled there, our Thermopylae. What do we see when we close our eyes? The Spitfire, turning in a glint of sunshine, surely. Of all the weaponry and machinery that men have made to kill other men throughout history, the Mark 1 Supermarine Spitfire, balletic and simple, is probably the prettiest, and it was the one which won the battle. We see posh young men with tousled hair and moustaches, toying with a pipe or finishing a pint before scrambling for the waiting aircraft – perfect examples of plucky British amateurism, heading off to hunt the ruthlessly well-organized and overwhelmingly more powerful Luftwaffe. Against terrible odds they fight, return, snatch a quick sleep and fly again. For every one of ours brought down, we account for – what is it? – three or four of theirs. We hear, rather than see, those most famous Churchillian words: ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’ We perhaps have a vague sense of taciturn RAF leaders, shoulder to shoulder, in the background. But they were a few, and in this rare clash of modern chivalry, the rest of the country could only stand, stare upwards and wonder.
Most of that paragraph is untrue. This was the most important battle and the Spitfire is beautiful. But it was not the plane that won the Battle of Britain. Twice as many Hawker Hurricanes were involved, and though they were not quite a match for the best German fighter, the Messerschmitt 109, their pilots included as many of the top aces as Spitfire men. Hurricanes could be built faster and, furthermore, Spitfires were extremely difficult to repair, so that when damaged they were out of action for far longer. What about those public schoolboys? The RAF did have a ‘chaps’ ethos, with a tradition of favouring hunting-and-shooting types who it was thought would fly better. Flying generally was expensive and glamorous – the RAF pilots were sneered at by the other services as ‘Brylcreem Boys’ and its code was full of the stiff upper lip, its jargon nonchalantly offhand. Yet around four in ten were working-class sergeants or flight sergeants. And a fifth of those who fought were not British at all – they were New Zealanders, South Africans, Poles, Czechs, Canadians and French. They may have smoked, but during the battle they rarely drank. They were too tired. It is not true that everyone behaved heroically. On 12 August, at an RAF airfield in Kent, repeated bombing sent airmen into sh
elters, and some refused to come up, despite pleas from their officers. On 15 September some Hurricane pilots saw Messerschmitts ahead and, instead of roaring ‘tally-ho’, turned smartly for home.144 This was a battle, not a picture book.
Nor were the RAF pilots either amateur or ill-trained. As the battle continued and the losses mounted, training was slashed back. But the RAF which went into the fight was very well trained and highly professional; if anything the cult of knightly amateurism was found more in the Luftwaffe, with its obsessive interest in aces and decorations. The odds the RAF faced were not appalling, either. If you discount the cumbersome Stukas, which were essentially cannon-fodder for fighters, and the German bombers, which were targets too, the Luftwaffe had 963 fighters available, against 666 British fighters. Yet the German figure includes the unwieldy double-engined Me-110. Of aircraft directly equivalent to Britain’s Fighter Command they had 702, roughly the same number. It is true that, at any one time, the Spitfires and Hurricanes were likely to be outnumbered, since the Germans were attacking over a large area of southern England. Against that, the Germans had little time in the air before their fuel ran out, and they had to head home – oddly, they did not use drop-tanks. So the fight was not so one-sided as is usually assumed.