Three and a half years later, he was a lieutenant in a fighter squadron flying over Dunkirk; and as a pre-war regular with two years’ flying since being posted to the fighter Gruppe, he was an experienced pilot too. What he lacked was combat experience. Over Dunkirk, it seemed that was about to change.
Helmut Kühle was leading the Staffel. A Condor veteran, he now held the others back from diving down on the mêlée below, instead circling carefully above. Ulrich was chomping at the bit. He had been waiting in the sidelines for so long and wanted his chance of gaining his first victory. ‘As we wheeled around the dark cloud over Dunkirk,’ noted Ulrich, ‘Kühle cautioned us to stay well clear of its sinister billows.’ If they wanted surprises, he warned them, there were plenty around the edges of the forbidding mass of cloud.
Their fifteen minutes up, they returned to Charleville having had a whiff of the action to come but once again without having fired their guns. Debates over tactics raged once they were back at their billet, but Kühle held his ground; he would only attack when there was a reasonable chance of success and equally the risk of losses was less. There was no point plunging down into the fray only to be outnumbered and shot down. His policy, he insisted, ensured that the Staffel would gain experience without suffering losses. However much Ulrich and his fellow pilots might have been itching to get amongst the enemy, Kühle’s stance was a sensible one. They would all get their chance soon enough.
Back in London, the Ministry of Information had promised openness and that was what the British public were getting. In his broadcast on 22 May, Duff Cooper had admitted that not only was the situation ‘grave’, but it was also a fact that the enemy’s intention was to take the Channel ports and from there ‘launch war upon this island’. On the 23rd, the King broadcast to the nation and called for a National Day of Prayer to be held the coming Sunday, 26 May. The following day, Friday the 24th, The Times ran the headline ‘Germans on the coast’, while Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard warned people that ‘We would do better to prepare for the worst’. Nonetheless, most newspapers tried to remain as upbeat as possible, pointing out that the game was not up yet, that France was expected to rally, and that the RAF was blowing up targets and shooting down enemy planes at an impressive rate.
Even so, neither the news emerging from France nor the fact that the King felt an appeal to God was necessary was hardly encouraging. Most British people did appear to be keeping calm, but few could have doubted the seriousness of the situation, even if perhaps not just how grave it was. Daidie Penna, for one, was not sure what to think. On the 22nd she and her husband were wondering whether she should take the children back to Port Isaac in Cornwall, where they had evacuated to the previous autumn. The next day, things seemed brighter again. She met one man who said, ‘Yesterday we reached rock bottom – now the tide will turn.’ By the 24th, she felt even more encouraged. ‘News fairly good,’ she noted. ‘Apparently we are holding them again and also cutting in on the spearhead of their attack.’
Those close to intelligence sources, however, were struggling to see much cause for hope. Britain appeared to be gripped by the biggest threat to her independence she had ever faced, one that was eclipsing the Spanish threat in 1588 and even that of Napoleon’s France at the turn of the previous century. Deputy Director of Air Intelligence at the Air Ministry was Group Captain Tommy Elmhirst. It was Tommy’s job to head the German Section, responsible for calculating the strength and potential of the Luftwaffe, a position he had held since the middle of January. This he had found a singularly depressing job, for by the spring the section had a reasonably accurate picture, albeit slightly overestimated, of the German air force, its formations, reserves and, above all, its strength and the location of front-line units. Compared with the RAF, the Luftwaffe strength seemed so immense Tommy feared the outlook appeared very depressing.
His sources were mostly from signal intelligence, or ‘sigint’. Since 1935, the RAF had maintained a radio intelligence service known as the ‘Y’ Service for listening in to and collating low-grade wireless traffic, usually between aircraft, low-grade radio and telephone traffic, and other signals traffic such as navigational beacons. More recently, the service had acquired high-grade ciphers encrypted by German Enigma coding machines. The Government Code and Cipher School (GCSC) at Bletchley Park had begun to break general Enigma traffic regularly during the Norwegian campaign and the Luftwaffe key fairly regularly since January. Luftwaffe Enigma traffic was not yet being deciphered with particular speed, but, combined with Y Service sigint, it had enabled Tommy and his team to build up a picture of the Luftwaffe that was disturbing to say the least. What worried Tommy was that should Britain be left to tackle the German air force on its own, the chances of the RAF beating it seemed slim indeed.
Aged forty-five, diminutive and quietly spoken, Tommy had a good-humoured face and large, bushy eyebrows that lent him an air of sagaciousness that was not without foundation. His background was naval – from ships he had been transferred to airships in the Royal Navy Air Service, and by the end of the last war found himself part of the newly formed Royal Air Force. And although an experienced pilot, since 1925 he had worked in intelligence, first under Boom Trenchard on the Middle East section, and most recently as air attaché at the British Embassy in Ankara.
A naturally positive person, he would attend his daily Air Staff meetings desperately trying to find something encouraging to say, but since the start of the Norway campaign in April he had struggled to find ways to lighten proceedings. ‘The meetings,’ he noted, ‘were conducted in an atmosphere of unrelieved gloom.’ His job as Deputy Director of Air Intelligence also meant a seat on the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) that met daily as well, and whose task it was to provide daily intelligence summaries for the Chiefs of Staff and War Cabinet as well as appreciations of Germany’s probable intentions. As a member of the JIC, Tommy was thus amongst the very few to know the true state of affairs. Now, he felt more gloomy than ever. He simply could not see how the BEF could ever be evacuated. ‘It looked,’ he noted, ‘as if the whole British field army, men, guns, vehicles, ammunition, tanks, everything, would cease to exist.’
It was armed with the kind of intelligence that Tommy and his colleagues were providing, combined with increasingly dire messages from France, that the Prime Minister and his Cabinet had lurched into a new, deeper level of crisis.
Saturday, 25 May, was another glorious day, ‘if,’ as Daidie Penna noted, ‘one really noticed the weather’. Certainly the Prime Minister and his senior ministers had little opportunity to enjoy the early-summer sun. Weekends had traditionally been sacrosanct and kept free of politics but not any more. During the day, first at Cabinet, then at Chiefs of Staff meetings, and as reports and messages arrived, and finally at the Defence Committee meeting, it became increasingly clear that the French were not being entirely straight with them. As General Dill’s report showed, Gort had kept Blanchard informed of all his decisions, which made it seem clear that the French had merely been looking for a pretext for cancelling the Weygand Plan and turning the blame on to Gort. ‘The information given us by Weygand himself,’ Chamberlain noted, ‘as to the capture of Amiens, Albery and Peronne on May 23rd turned out to be false.’ Reynaud’s complaint about Gort of the previous day was looking rather hollow.
The truth was that neither Weygand nor Marshal Pétain were very keen on continuing the war. Pétain was a national hero in France, the saviour of Verdun in the last war, and newly appointed Vice-Prime Minister by Reynaud. It had been a move to try to stiffen the resolve of the French, but Reynaud now found himself faced with the two most powerful soldiers in the country presenting the united front of two Anglophobes who had been opposed to the Anglo-French alliance from the very start. Since both had been senior commanders in the 1914–18 war, both were indelibly scarred by the experience and agreed on one thing: the appalling loss of life could not be repeated. In Paris on the 25th, at a meeting of the Comité de Guerre, Weygand told R
eynaud, Pétain and the President, Albert Lebrun, that the situation was hopeless. France had committed the immense mistake of entering into the war without the materiel or the military doctrine that were needed, he told them. He was right about the second point, wrong about the first. ‘It is probable,’ he added, ‘that we will have to pay dearly for this criminal thoughtlessness.’ Weygand, supported by Pétain, urged them to make a separate peace, which would go against the terms of the alliance with Britain. The rest of the Comité was not so sure. What was recognized by Reynaud was the need to explain the situation to the British. The next day he would go to London.
Of course, Churchill did not know about this discussion but it did not need a fly on the wall to know that the French will was crumbling and that they might soon seek terms. The Prime Minister put this to the second meeting of the Defence Committee at around 10 p.m. that night. ‘If France went out of the war,’ he told them, ‘she must, however, make it a condition that our Army was allowed to leave France intact, and to take away its munitions, and that the soil of France was not used for an attack on England. Furthermore, France must retain her Fleet.’ Clearly, both Britain and France had now accepted that there could be only one result in France itself. It was a question of when, not if. The alliance still stood, but both countries now had to look after number one. Gort thought most of the BEF would be lost; so too did Churchill. Then the mighty Luftwaffe would be unleashed against Britain. Would British will then crumble too? There were also the Italians to consider. On 16 May, Churchill appealed to Mussolini, the Fascist dictator, not to enter the war. ‘Down the ages,’ he wrote, ‘above all other calls came the cry that the joint heirs of Latin and Christian civilisation must not be ranged against one another in mortal strife. Hearken to it, I beseech you in all honour and respect, before the dread signal is given. It will never be given by us.’ Mussolini replied that Britain had entered the war to honour her treaty with the Poles and that Italy felt bound not to dishonour her treaty with Germany – the Pact of Steel, made back in March the previous year. ‘The response was hard,’ wrote Churchill. ‘It had at least the merit of candour.’ So that was that: Italy would soon be in too. The outlook was grim, very grim.
It was thus not surprising that certain men and leaders in Britain now began to think rather like Weygand and Pétain: that the situation was hopeless, and that surely it was better to come to terms with Germany – terms that might not necessarily be too bad – rather than drag the war on, with all its terrors and loss of life, especially when the outcome, now or later, looked so certain to end in German victory.
Earlier on that Saturday, Lord Halifax had met with Signor Giuseppe Bastianini, the Italian Ambassador in London. He had told Churchill what he was doing and the PM had agreed to the meeting so long as no word of the meeting got out, as that would be seen as a confession of weakness. They met that afternoon and, in a conversation shrouded in diplomatic euphemism, Halifax asked Bastianini whether there was any way in which Italy could be persuaded to stay out of the war. Bastianini replied that he would, of course, pass on any offer, then asked whether Halifax thought Britain might be open to a broader discussion not just with Italy but with ‘other countries’ as well. They were now talking about Germany. Halifax said that would be difficult while there was a war still going on. ‘Once such a discussion were begun,’ Bastianini told him, ‘war would be pointless.’
Both agreed that their countries would be willing to discuss any settlement that protected European peace for the next century. Halifax, for one, was beginning to explore the chances of finding a way out. And he was not only the Foreign Secretary; he was also one of the most respected men in Britain.
16
Crisis
THE AMERICAN JOURNALIST William Shirer had been given a guided tour of the front thanks to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. On the 20th, he had been taken to the Albert Canal then on to Brussels and Louvain and across war-torn Belgium. He had seen close up the powerful effects of the German war machine. The next day he had even witnessed at first hand the fighting along the River Scheldt. ‘You have to see the German army in action to believe it,’ he noted. He was hugely impressed by the power of the Luftwaffe, by the fitness and high training of the infantry, and by Germany’s machinery. ‘All day long at the front,’ he noted, ‘you pass unending mechanized columns. They stretch clear across Belgium, unbroken … It is a gigantic, impersonal war machine, run as coolly and efficiently, say, as our automobile industry in Detroit. Directly behind the front, with the guns pounding daylight out of your ears and the airplanes roaring overhead, and thousands of motorized vehicles thundering by on dusty roads, officers and men alike remain cool and business-like.’ Of course, this is exactly what Goebbels wanted him and other journalists to see and believe. The trip had been orchestrated very carefully. A single motorized division would have given William the impression of German mechanized might. And over Belgium, where the Germans had been pushing back the weak Belgian army, it was an easy task to make the conquerors look impressive. The German army was clearly better than any other they were up against, but that did not mean it was a superbly refined and highly mechanized fighting machine by any means. But the world believed in its military might and it was essential that they continued to do so. The psychological overpowering of their enemies remained an important weapon for Nazi Germany.
Gort had given the order for the evacuation of all ‘useless mouths’ through Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk on 19 May. These were non-combat troops as well as the sick and wounded. At Boulogne, two Guards battalions had arrived fresh from Dover on the 21st to help cover the evacuation; then, when this was completed, and having fought a valiant rearguard, they re-embarked on the night of 23 May. Calais was also reinforced, with a battalion of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and 30th Brigade hastily despatched from England to hold the town, block the roads in, and then help relieve Boulogne. By the time 30th Brigade reached Calais on 23rd May, it was too late to save Boulogne and instead Brigadier Claude Nicholson began organizing the defence of the port. Later that day, Nicholson received fresh orders to try to force a desperately needed convoy of rations and fuel through to Dunkirk. By the following morning, with Guderian’s panzers already surrounding the port, this too proved impossible. Instead, the order to evacuate the port was given in principle.
However, on the 24th, control of all the Channel ports was handed to Général Marie-Bertrand-Alfred Fagalde of the French XVI Corps and he immediately forbade the evacuation, which was upheld by Churchill. The old port now became something of a personal concern to the Prime Minister. To evacuate would be madness, he said. ‘The only effect of evacuating Calais would be to transfer the forces now blocking it to Dunkirk,’ he told Ismay. ‘Calais must be held for many reasons, but specially to hold the enemy on its front.’ This was relayed to Nicholson on the morning of 25 May, with orders that in essence told him he was on his own and could expect no reinforcements, but was to hold out for as long as possible.
Later that day, Guderian’s 2nd Panzer sent a surrender demand to Nicholson. The brigadier replied stoically, ‘The answer is no, as it is the British Army’s duty to fight as well as it is the German’s.’
Having enforced the halt decision on the panzers on the afternoon of 24 May, Hitler then gave von Rundstedt complete authority to lift the order whenever he saw fit. The outrage within the German units ranged along the Canal Line was intense. Von Bock, commander of Army Group B, was incensed. His infantry divisions, still mostly on foot despite the large number of captured bicycles, had to advance fifty miles to reach Dunkirk, and through organized and dug-in British divisions. The panzer and motorized divisions, on the other hand, were all lined up almost within spitting distance. General von Kluge, who had originally suggested the close-up, was as one with von Kleist that the order should be rescinded immediately. He had planned to push through the narrowest point of the corridor in which the BEF and French First Army were now trapped, capturing the low heights around the tow
n of Cassel, then heading straight to Courtrai and linking up with Army Group B – and, in so doing, cutting off the British retreat to Dunkirk still some thirty miles to the north-west. Fully armed, highly confident panzers, a-brimming with supplies and ammunition against infantry low on rounds and increasingly hungry would have been no contest at all. The BEF would have been annihilated.
Even more galling was that for a number of units who had already made it across the Canal Line, the order was not a halt but, rather, a retreat, as they had to pull back across the water. Early on the 25th, Guderian visited the Waffen-SS Leibstandarte Division and found them crossing the River Aa in defiance of the order. Guderian crossed too and eventually found the commander, Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, in the ruins of a castle on a well-placed hillock called Mount Watten. When Guderian asked him why he was disobeying orders, Dietrich pointed out that Mount Watten commanded a very strong position and that the task of crossing the Aa would be very much harder if it was in enemy hands. Guderian not only approved Dietrich’s action, but ordered some of 2nd Panzer to move up in support.
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