Later that evening, Churchill dined with Eden, Ironside – whom he had just sacked as CIGS, replacing him with Dill – and Ismay. He knew by then that Calais would surely fall and that, with it, would be lost all of 30th Brigade and the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment. Earlier, at 6.57 p.m., the signal had been given for the Royal Navy to begin Operation DYNAMO, the evacuation of Dunkirk. Much of the BEF would surely follow the Calais garrison into captivity. How else could it be otherwise? And the worse the news from France, the harder it would be to prevent Halifax from getting his way. That night, he barely touched his food or drink. Afterwards, he stood up, a sad expression on his face. ‘I feel physically sick,’ he said.
17
Black Monday
MEANWHILE, IN BERLIN there was no mention of the fact that the panzers had been brought to a pointless halt. Rather, William Shirer was given a communiqué that the fate of the Allied armies in Flanders was sealed. ‘Calais has fallen,’ he noted on 26 May. ‘Britain is now cut off from the Continent.’ There were even reports in the Völkischer Beobachter that the Luftwaffe had bombed south-east England.
The fate of the Allied armies in Flanders would have been sealed had von Rundstedt not been such a pig-headed fool. Not until 1.30 p.m. on the 26th did he finally lift the order; however, it was not until 8 p.m. that night that Panzer Group Kleist was finally given operational orders, and they were not to begin until the morning of 27 May. In other words, the panzers had been idle for three whole days. By then, Gort’s men, as well as the French, had been organized and had dug in along the Canal Line. As Halder noted, ‘On [the] left wing, von Kleist seems to encounter stronger resistance than expected.’ He was still steaming.
The Royal Navy had not been idle since the opening of the offensive. Still heavily engaged around Norway, it had also been involved in blowing port installations and fuel depots in Holland to prevent the Germans getting their hands on them, ferrying Queen Wilhelmina to safety, and taking more troops and supplies to France and then evacuating them back to Britain too, whether it be from Cherbourg, Dieppe, Boulogne or Dunkirk; 5,000 refugees and nearly 3,000 troops had been lifted on 23 May, for example. There were also minelaying and minesweeping duties and coastal patrol work to be carried out.
Gort’s warning on 19 May that the BEF might need to consider evacuation had been passed on to the Admiralty, where a meeting had immediately been held to discuss the matter. It had been decided that, should it come to it, an evacuation operation should be controlled by the Naval Sub-Command of Dover, under Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay. Representatives from the War Office Movement Control and Ministry of Shipping had met Ramsay at Dover on the 20th to discuss the many thorny problems involved in such an operation. The first was that the sleek destroyers and minesweepers that made up most of the navy’s ships were filled with guns and depth charges and not designed to carry large numbers of men. That meant using merchant ships, fishing vessels, cross-Channel ferries and pleasure boats to carry out most of the work. Small boats would also be called upon, particularly to lift men from the gradually sloping beaches. Ramsay, for one, knew only too well from his experiences in the last war that the shoal-ridden coast off Dunkirk was rarely more than two fathoms deep and a notorious graveyard of ships.
The problems facing them on 20 May had multiplied by the morning of 27 May, when Captain Bill Tennant reported to Admiral Ramsay, some thirteen hours after Operation DYNAMO – as the evacuation had been called – had officially begun. Until 6 p.m. the previous evening, Bill had been Chief Staff Officer to the First Sea Lord at the Admiralty, but as something of a navigation expert – not least as Navigator on HMS Renown on the Royal world tour of 1921 and as a naval instructor at the Imperial Defence College before the war – Bill had been plucked from that job and sent instead to report to Admiral Ramsay in Dover. From there he was to be sent to Dunkirk to organize the shore end of the evacuation as Senior Naval Officer (SNO) there, where his navigation knowledge would prove invaluable. Lean-faced, with dark determined features, the 49-year-old had immediately packed a few things and by 8.25 p.m. had set out first for Chatham and then gone on to Dover.
It was not until 9 a.m., however, that he finally reached Ramsay’s headquarters, a warren of rooms carved into the high chalk cliffs at Dover at the beginning of the last century by French prisoners of war, and at a time when Britain had last faced the threat of invasion. Ramsay’s own office had a window and a small iron balcony overlooking the Channel; a cannon here had once pointed towards France, but now it was guns across the sea that could be clearly heard. Further inside the cliffs was a large chamber that in the last war had housed an electrical power generator, and so it was called the ‘Dynamo Room’. Now, it was the nerve centre of the evacuation plans – hence Operation DYNAMO. It was here, at Ramsay’s HQ, that Bill was briefed by the Vice-Admiral. When DYNAMO had been first conceived, Ramsay had expected to be able to use a number of Channel ports. Now, it seemed, they could barely use one. The port at Dunkirk had already been so badly hit that it was felt, for the time being at any rate, that it would be impossible to use the harbour. Instead, they would begin lifting troops from the long, ten-mile beach to the east of the port. This was difficult enough but, because of the secrecy of the operation, they had not been able to put out a call for boats and volunteer crews until it had begun – and this obviously took time. Thus on this morning of Monday, 27 May, only 129 of the Merchant Navy’s 10,000 vessels were available. More were coming, but whether they would arrive in time was another matter.
And there was worse news. ‘The Boche has got as far as Gravelines,’ Ramsay told Bill. ‘That’s the worst blow yet.’ There were key French guns at Gravelines, but with the coast west of Dunkirk now in German hands it meant the short thirty-nine-mile sea route from Dover to Dunkirk now lay within reach of powerful coastal batteries as well as from the air; some forty coastal guns were already operating by early that morning. Route Z, as it was called, would have to be abandoned. There were two alternatives. One, Route Y, was eighty-seven miles long and involved a dog-leg off Ostend and approaching from the east. The other, Route X, was fifty-five miles and hit the coast between Dunkirk and Gravelines. Route Y passed through minefields and Route X was as yet untested. Both, however, would have to be used. The crossings would take longer – much longer – but that could not be helped. They would have to do what they could, although that might well not be enough; Ramsay told Bill they could expect to lift only some 45,000 men of the BEF.
Accompanying Bill was a team of twelve officers and 160 ratings. They left Dover at 1.45 p.m. aboard the destroyer Wolfhound and following Route Y. The first Stukas attacked them at 2.45 p.m. and they were harried and bombed the rest of the way, although they managed to dodge and weave their way out of trouble. Above the din, Bill began organizing his men: each officer would have twelve ratings and was given a stretch of the beaches or part of the port to reconnoitre and manage. As they drew near Dunkirk, a vision of hell awaited them. The entire coast seemed to be ablaze. The oil refineries at St Pol were burning, thick black smoke pitching thousands of feet into the sky. Flames spewed from warehouses and buildings. Above, aircraft thundered over, bombs whistled down, and explosions erupted as bombs hit the ground and as guns boomed out. They finally pulled into Dunkirk harbour at 5.35 p.m., miraculously intact, as another stick of bombs fell on the quayside nearby.
Only once the raiders had passed did Bill disperse most of his men, then head off towards Bastion 32, the underground bunker of Admiral Jean-Marie Charles Abrial, the French Amiral Nord and naval commander at Dunkirk. Picking their way through rubble and shards of broken glass, burned-out vehicles and snapped tram wires, they reached Bastion 32 and were led through the heavy steel doors into a long, damp corridor lit by candles that took them to the Operations Room. Here Bill met with Brigadier Reginald Parminter from Gort’s staff, Colonel G. P. H. Whitfield, the Area Commandant, and Commander H. P. Henderson, the British Naval Liaison Officer to Admiral Abrial. They all told him tha
t there was no chance of using the harbour for evacuation. Bill asked how long they had got. Twenty-four to thirty-six hours was the reply. After that, the Germans would probably be in the town.
Dunkirk was in a bad way. The water supply had been cut off by bomb damage and there was only one telephone link left between the town and London. On that Monday alone, the Luftwaffe had hit the port with some 30,000 incendiary bombs and more than 15,000 high explosives. The railhead was largely destroyed and the docks and quays now lay ruined.
For those on the receiving end of this onslaught, Göring’s boast to Hitler seemed justified, yet there was no denying the disquiet amongst the commanders carrying out this sustained aerial assault. Operations had begun against Dunkirk almost immediately Göring had given orders to Kesselring, but other demands upon his planes – Calais, Boulogne and operations in support of the army – meant that it was not until 26 May that the town became the main target. Even then, many of Kesselring’s aircraft were too far back to be able to operate effectively over Dunkirk. On the 25th, General von Kluge had met with General Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of VIII Fliegerkorps, and had sarcastically asked whether he had already taken Dunkirk. ‘No, Herr Generaloberst,’ von Richthofen had replied, ‘I have not yet even attacked it. My Stukas are too far back, the approach flights too long. Consequently I can use them twice a day at most, and am unable to focus them at one point of effort.’
And the weather was terrible. All month, one fine day had followed another but now the weather had turned. Low cloud hung over most of Flanders and that included Dunkirk. It made accurate bombing very difficult indeed. Furthermore, the Luftwaffe had now lost nearly a thousand aircraft since the campaign had begun. On top of that, a large number more were damaged or becoming increasingly hard to keep serviceable. Almost every single unit was operating below full strength, most at between half and three-quarters strength.
Stuka pilots were also finding that it was very difficult to successfully hit enemy shipping. It was one thing wreaking havoc on a concentration of troops in fine weather and with little opposition but quite another hitting a narrow destroyer that was pumping out anti-aircraft fire, as Major Oskar Dinort and the men of St.G 2 had discovered on the morning of 25 May, when they had been ordered to attack British destroyers off the coast of Calais.
Thick smoke had been the first obstacle but then, offshore, the air cleared and they saw the tiny thin specks below. Oskar felt a thrill at the prospect of attacking something new but he also wondered how they were ever going to hit their target. They had never ever bombed shipping before; they had not needed to. What was the procedure, he wondered? At thirty-eight, he was a hugely experienced pilot: he had begun flying gliders in the 1920s and held the world record for gliding for nearly fifteen hours. Joining the clandestine Luftwaffe in 1934, he had since seen action in Poland as well as earlier working with Udet in the Office of Air Armament. Now, though, despite his experience, he felt unsure how to carry out his mission. He screwed up his eyes; the diffused light off the sea was blinding.
‘Attack by Gruppen,’ the Stuka commander ordered over the R/T. ‘Choose your own targets.’ At this, the other two members of Oskar’s section turned their machines in behind him. Throttling back, they began to lose height. Oskar knew that a dive on such small targets needed to be started as low as possible – the 12,000 feet at which they had been flying was way, way too high.
At what he judged to be the right height, Oskar rolled over his Stuka and began his dive, aiming for the largest ship. Almost immediately, his target disappeared out of his bombsight beneath his engine cowling. He decided instead to make a ‘staircase’ attack. This meant diving until he lost sight of the target, pulling out, re-sighting, then diving again. At last, he began his final dive, the target now thankfully larger but still horribly thin. As he hurtled towards it, his Jericho trumpet – the Stuka’s distinct siren – screaming, the ship loomed ever closer, increasingly filling his bombsight with every nano-second. But then suddenly it moved, veering rapidly away. Oskar tried to follow but failed. Cursing, he knew there was only one thing he could do, and that was climb and dive again. He saw that most of the other forty Stukas were similarly struggling. Bombs were hitting the water, sending huge fountains of spray into the air, but none seemed to have hit the destroyers. A transport was claimed as hit but if true the damage seemed to be minimal.
Oskar made another dive but again failed, then ordered the Staffeln to re-form at sea level and head back south. This was the Stuka pilot’s most dangerous moment. Speed was reduced and the pilot was distracted by reseating the diving brakes, reopening the radiator shutter, readjusting the bomb-release switches and changing the airscrew and elevator trim.
And at this moment, Oskar heard someone shout, ‘English fighters behind us!’ Immediately, he pulled his Stuka into a turn then craned his neck to look above him. High overhead, fighters were glinting in the sky, circling and weaving, but others were now diving down towards them. Oskar throttled back again and stall-turned to starboard, aware that he had no hope of escaping clear away from a fighter. It was a Hurricane of 17 Squadron bearing down upon him and the sleek machine now overshot and flew past; Oskar’s trick had, for the moment at any rate, saved him. A few seconds later the Hurricane became engaged with a waiting Me 109 instead. Oskar made it safely back that day, but four other Stukas were destroyed. No doubt from the ships below, the sight of forty Stukas diving on them with their sirens wailing would have been terrifying; but the attack was not terribly effective. As Captain Bill Tennant had discovered on his trip across the Channel, a destroyer could get out of the way of a Stuka assault reasonably easily.
Even so, when Göring visited the Führer later that day, he was in a jovial mood and confident his Luftwaffe was doing all he had promised. ‘Only fishing boats are coming over,’ he joked with Hitler, ‘I hope the Tommies are good swimmers.’
Just as British Hurricanes had often found themselves distracted from their main missions during the opening stages of the campaign, so too were Luftwaffe fighters as they now headed towards Dunkirk. On 26 May, I/JG 21 had been given the job of escorting Stukas to the port. Subordinated to JG 27 and part of von Richthofen’s VIII Fliegerkorps, the Staffel had barely formed up and was at around 12,000 feet over Cambrai when one of the pilots cried out, ‘Enemy above!’
These were French fighter aircraft, some five US-built Curtiss Hawks and a dozen Morane 406s that happened to have been escorting a lone French reconnaissance aircraft. The French dived down on the Messerschmitts, for once able to begin a dogfight with the advantage of height. Forgetting their escort duties, each German pilot now found himself engaged in a fierce mêlée with the French attackers. Hans-Ekkehard Bob managed to get on the tail of one of the French Curtiss Hawks, but although his Me 109 was faster, the French pilot seemed to have the more manoeuvrable aircraft, turning and weaving so that Hans was unable to get a clear shot.
Hans was another of the Luftwaffe’s pre-war regular pilots. Born and brought up in Freiburg in the Black Forest, the 23-year-old was an only son, but with four much older sisters. ‘My youngest sister was seven years older,’ he says. ‘They all spoiled me.’ Blond, good-looking and intelligent, Hans had grown up to become a confident, headstrong young man. He had first become interested in flying in 1927, when he had been just ten. One of his sisters had become friends with the famous stunt pilot Erich Haal, and he then invited her and her little brother to go for a flight in his biplane. It had been the most exciting thrill of his life, but it was another seven years before he flew again – and this time in a glider he had made himself whilst in the Hitler Youth. It was, then, hardly surprising that he volunteered for the air force after leaving school, and after three months’ labour service began his training in December 1936. He soon proved himself to be a natural and extremely gifted pilot, taking his first solo after just seventeen flights. It had always been his intention to become a fighter pilot and that was what he did, joining his first Staffel i
n September 1938.
Hans knew he was a good pilot; knew he had plenty of experience too. He had flown every single mark of the Messerschmitt 109 and knew the latest model, the 109E, or ‘Emil’, so well that he could make his machine do what he wanted without even thinking about it. Now, more than two weeks after the start of the offensive, he had combat experience too: thirty missions and three aerial victories to his name. But the French pilot ahead of him was good too, and after twenty minutes of twirling and weaving through the sky without Hans getting a shot or the Frenchman able to get away, they had fallen so low that they were now flying over the treetops and spires of northern France. Hans was now beginning to tire and so decided to disengage. After another evasive manoeuvre from the Hawk, Hans did not try and follow but instead opened the throttle and turned east. Thinking his pursuer had given up, the Frenchman turned west.
However, seeing this, Hans decided to have another go. Turning 180 degrees, Hans opened the throttle and chased after the Hawk once more. This time the Frenchman failed to keep an eye out because creeping up below and behind him was Hans. When the Hawk filled Hans’s sights, he opened fire with both his cannon and machine guns.
Belching smoke, the Hawk lost height rapidly and glided down, landing with his wheels up in a field. Hans circled the downed Hawk and saw that the pilot was alive but injured. Without a second thought, and safe in the knowledge that they were still in German-occupied territory, Hans lowered his undercarriage and touched down beside the Frenchman. Grabbing his first-aid kit, Hans clambered out of the cockpit, jumped out on to the ground and hurried over to the French pilot. Having tended to his wounds he then took the pilot’s name – Sergent-chef Bés – and promised to write to his parents to let them know he was safe. This done, he clambered back into his Messerschmitt, took off and headed back to base.
The Battle of Britain Page 27