That same evening, Ramsay, from the Dynamo Room at Dover, asked that every available shallow-draft power boat should be sent to the beaches as soon as possible. Despite the embargo on the news of the evacuation, the Admiralty responded by combing the entire coast from Portsmouth to Norfolk for motor boats, lighters and barges, and, of course, their crews. And these were now heading to Dunkirk too.
HMS Icarus had now reached Dunkirk too, having reached Dover in the early hours and then steamed off with four other destroyers, including her sister ships Ivanhoe and Intrepid. They arrived at the mole at around 5.30 a.m. just as a personnel vessel filled with water and waiting outside the harbour for a berth hit a magnetic mine. ‘She just erupted into a thousand pieces,’ says Andrew Begg, who saw her go. The Mona Queen sank in about two minutes. Earlier, the destroyer HMS Wakeful had also sunk, hit by a torpedo on her return to Dover; more than 600 troops on board were drowned.
Only two hours after drawing alongside the mole, Icarus sailed away again with some 950 men on board, reaching Dover at around 11.30 a.m. Quickly unloading, she then turned round and sped back, this time heading not for the mole but for the beaches at Bray Dunes, where the shortage of shallow-draft boats was still causing major difficulties. ‘It was chaos,’ says Andrew Begg, ‘because there was no way of getting large numbers of men out to the ship.’ Icarus dropped two whalers and a motor boat. ‘We couldn’t anchor and daren’t anchor because of the constant aerial activity,’ says Andrew. ‘There was continuous bombing and periodic dive-bombing. The Stukas would come over and have a go and so you had to keep moving – going round in little circles backwards and forwards.’ They were there for about six hours – it had taken around four hours just to fill the two whalers and get the men on board. Then having taken 450 men from the Dutch skoot Doggersbank, they set off back to Dover once more.
By this time, Andrew was back down in the engine room, where he and his fellows had been joined by a couple of dozen troops. A number were in severe shock and shivering. ‘They needed some heat,’ says Andrew, ‘and it was warm enough there.’
One of those watching Icarus was Sid Nuttall, who, with his fellows from ‘C’ Company, was amongst the 25,000 now at Bray Dunes. It was bewildering emerging through the dunes and suddenly seeing the scene before them: vast numbers of troops, ships out at sea, men firing wildly at any aircraft that flew over them. Smoke still billowed from the port and houses all along the seafront. At first, it seemed to be utter chaos, but actually there was some attempt being made to bring about some order. Someone was directing RAOC men to an assembly point, but Sid now felt more Border than RAOC, and so stayed put with his company. There were around eighty of them now, mainly from ‘C’ Company. Most were all very much worse for wear. Sid only wore his battledress on his top; his shirt had become infested with lice and although he’d been taught how to get rid of them, it got to be so bad he had thrown it away. He still had his rifle, but almost no other kit. His mates were in much the same boat. ‘A regular officer came down,’ says Sid, ‘and told us no man from the Border regiment would be evacuated until he was in possession of a full set of equipment. We went on the scrounge and everything was there. We made up our kit from things people had thrown about.’ Having done this, the officer inspected them again, and ordered them to shave, but with no water they had no choice but to use the sea. Eventually, the officer seemed satisfied. Bringing them into line, he marched them back into defensive positions in the dunes.
Sid noticed that a large number of men were drunk. Because there was no water, soldiers had been breaking into bars and cellars and had stolen beer, wine and spirits – anything they could get their hands on. Despite this, however, Bill Tennant’s men had begun bringing some order to the beaches at Bray. Sid saw queues of people forming down to the waterline, and destroyers and other ships moored offshore. Overhead, the Luftwaffe seemed to be near-constant companions. ‘The destroyers were being dive-bombed at regular intervals,’ says Sid, ‘but luckily most of the dive-bombing was being done on the ships.’
He had absolutely no idea how long they would be there on the beaches or what their chances were of ever getting away. There was no food and no water, and the beach seemed to be getting busier by the minute. All he and his mates could do was wait and hope for the best.
During the morning of 29 May, Lord Gort heard news that Général de la Laurencie’s III Corps had decided to have a dash for it and had severed itself from the rest of the French First Army and was now heading towards Dunkirk alongside the last of the BEF. The rest of First Army, however, was now entirely surrounded, just as the BEF would have been had Hitler not sided with von Rundstedt in halting the panzers.
Henry Pownall had received orders that he was to set sail for England that evening, but first there were several ‘flaps’ to sort out. The first was that Admiral Abrial had not been told by his government that the British were evacuating. He had understood that non-combatants would be shipped home, but not fighting men. Furthermore, he told them, according to French practice, he was in charge of defending Dunkirk and he expected the British to pull their weight rather than leave it to the French. Patiently, Gort explained that British troops were now defending the perimeter, most of it, in fact, except for the area west of the port and the very north-west, which was held by the French. Had Abrial ventured out of his bunker at Bastion 32, he could have seen this for himself. Gort sent General Adam to explain this to Abrial in person then spoke to Dill and asked him to get Reynaud or Weygand to put the Amiral Nord in the picture properly.
Then came word that there were some 1,500 French soldiers on the beach at La Panne who were rushing the boats. Two little ships were so swamped by French soldiers they sank. Another air raid fortunately dispersed them, but as a result of this Gort now agreed that French soldiers should also be evacuated and that this should be done from the mole and around Malo-les-Bains in turn with the British troops there.
Most British troops were now within the perimeter. The policy of fighting by day and falling back by night seemed to have largely worked. The last line of defence south of Dunkirk held by 50th and 3rd Divisions had suffered heavily but the line had held. Throughout the afternoon, they began falling back across the River Yser, still held by the 42nd and 5th Divisions, and then, as evening came, it was time for them to fall back too.
Also now at Bray Dunes was Gunner Stan Fraser. The battalion colonel had not arrived during the night. The men had waited until 11 a.m. the following morning, then gave up and decided to head for the sea without him. The trek seemed to last for ever. It was bad enough trudging along with their kit, and taking turns with the Bren and Boys – the Bren weighed more than ten kilos – but with waves of German bombers flying over they were continually diving into the side of the road to take cover. And the sun was hot on their backs. At one point Stan found a cart horse in a field, so gave it some biscuits in the hope of befriending it. Managing to lead it back to the road, he then spent ten minutes trying to get on its back. Eventually, he got himself on, exhausted, but the beast was hard to ride bareback and after a mile or so he slipped off and continued on foot.
It was about four in the afternoon when they eventually reached Bray Dunes, only for another wave of bombers to drone over. They all flopped down into ditches and holes in the dunes whilst bombs whistled and exploded and naval guns and any artillery still functioning pounded away. When the raiders eventually passed, they stumbled on to the beach. Stan was also astonished by the vast numbers of men there. More bombers came over. Stan watched the bombs fall, and then the resulting spout of sand or water. ‘When the bombs dropped close,’ he noted, ‘when we could hear the long whine as they descended, then we pressed down flat waiting – waiting for the explosion which sometimes lifted us off the ground.’
As dusk fell, a ship out at sea was ablaze, casting a flickering orange glow across the sky. Stan still had his sleeping bag, a piece of kit he’d not thrown away, and now was thankful for his foresight. Scooping out a
hole in the sand, he laid it out and clambered in. Already he had written up his diary. ‘I will never forget that day,’ he wrote, ‘as long as I live.’
20
Dunkirk: The Middle
THERE WAS STILL no mention of any evacuation in the British newspapers on Thursday, 30 May, although there was much about the heroics of the RAF and the bravery of the BEF still fighting in Flanders. There were, however, the usual listings: births, deaths, marriages. There was sports news – racing at Bath, and although there was no longer any first class cricket, the schools were still reported; the MCC was playing Winchester College. As in Berlin, the theatres were still running in London and West End shows were listed. At the New Theatre, George Bernard Shaw’s new play, In Good King Charles’s Golden Day, had opened, starring, amongst others, the well-known actress Margaret Rawlings.
It was a busy time for Margaret, who, just a few days short of her thirty-fourth birthday, had only finished her previous West End play, A House in the Square, five days before. Amongst her admirers was John Dundas, the older brother of Cocky, and she had arranged for him and two of his friends to see her in the play’s final night. Afterwards, she had accompanied all three of them to a party. ‘You looked your most beautiful last night,’ John wrote to her the next day, ‘and ever so you!’
The two shared an unusually close friendship. Ten years older than John, Margaret already had a failed marriage behind her, and was now having an affair with the playwright and novelist Charles Morgan, who was married and refused to leave his wife. There was another admirer, Robert Barlow, a businessman, who ran Metal Box Company, a tinning manufacturing business already turned over to war work, but he too was married and fifteen years her senior. If John minded this rather complicated tangle of lovers and admirers, he did not say so. Instead, he was grateful to have a friend and confidante from the glamorous world of the theatre, and someone who enjoyed intellectual debate as much as he.
John had got to know her two years before, having met her after a performance in Leeds, which he had been reviewing for the Yorkshire Post. Two days later he had written to her asking to see her again. ‘Don’t you think,’ he had written, ‘that on Monday we left a good many intellectual (or mainly conversational) loose ends lying around, which might be fun to pick up?’ She had taken up his offer and he had duly become smitten. This beginning of their friendship had also coincided with his first solo flight with his Auxiliary squadron, 609 (West Riding) Squadron. The two experiences, he told her, ‘have succeeded in raising the beat of my pulse (permanently I believe) by several strokes a minute’.
Their friendship had soon flourished. She enjoyed his company and loved him dearly, but they had not become lovers. In any case, he had barely seen her since the beginning of the war because he had been stationed at Drem near Edinburgh. He had written her reams of letters, but now that his squadron had been moved south, to Northolt, in northwest London, he was excited by the prospect of seeing more of her.
These past ten days, the pilots had been allowed into town as often as they liked in the evening, because although 609 Squadron had moved south on 19 May, it had yet to fly an operational patrol. Now, however, on 30 May, 609 Squadron was finally called to stand by for a patrol over Dunkirk. It had been a long time in coming, but it was time for 609’s pilots to enter the fray. They hoped they were ready.
John Dundas’s younger brother, Cocky, was also over Dunkirk again that day. The two were close – brothers amongst three sisters. Brought up in rural north Yorkshire, theirs had been a comfortable, idyllic upbringing in which sport and country pursuits had been an accepted way of life. Cocky certainly looked up to his older brother, first joining him at Stowe school and then hoping to follow him to Christ Church, Oxford. John had graduated with a first in modern history and an award that had sent him for a year to the Sorbonne in Paris and then to Heidelberg, but during this time abroad he had lived far too wildly and racked up excessive bills so that their father told Cocky he could only afford for him to go to Oxford on condition he won a scholarship. This he did, but to Trinity rather than Christ Church. In the end, however, his parents were worried that Cocky might prove as profligate as his brother and so encouraged him not to take up the place. Bowing to the wishes of his mother and father, Cocky instead became articled at a solicitor’s firm, a job he loathed.
Meanwhile, John had joined 609 Squadron and Cocky had wanted to fly too. He had always been fascinated by war as a boy, although it was more because of the excitement of flying rather than the possible coming of war that had made him determined to join the Auxiliary Air Force. For some reason Cocky was never able to fathom, however, he failed his preliminary medical three times. Only on the fourth time did he pass, and although he was unable to join John in 609 Squadron as he had hoped, he was happy enough, in May 1939, to be sent to 616 Auxiliary Squadron at Doncaster as a pupil pilot.
A year on, he and his brother were fighting over Dunkirk.
Ambassador Joe Kennedy was very much with Halifax in believing that Britain’s leaders needed to look at the rapidly unfolding events both rationally and pragmatically, yet he feared they were viewing the situation far too optimistically. As far as he was concerned, defeat by Germany still seemed heavily on the cards. Thus, he had spent some energy trying to encourage the Government to send its gold reserves to safety in Canada and to make contingency plans for the future, such as sending the Royal Family there and making preparations for the Government to move there should it be necessary. This suggestion was sharply rebuffed by Churchill, who said that even shipping valuables might make the public think the Government was in a panic. What concerned Kennedy was not only the gold reserves falling into German hands but particularly the Royal Navy – a worry shared by the President. Of course, Churchill understood this – he had even dangled the threat of losing the British fleet before Roosevelt in an effort to get more help from the United States. Luring America in remained a key policy for Churchill, yet the Prime Minister knew that Kennedy was not the man to facilitate this. Kennedy was sensing this too. ‘My contacts with the Churchill Cabinet were certainly far less friendly than with the old Government,’ he noted. ‘Yet my first duty was to the United States and I had to tell them that they could not count on us for anything but supplies. And the worse the situation became, the harder it was to tell them.’
On the 30th, however, Kennedy visited the Palace to hand-deliver a letter from Roosevelt to the King. George VI was wearing his army uniform and looking fitter than Kennedy had seen him for some time. He told Kennedy that they had now lifted some 80,000 from Dunkirk, almost double what had originally been hoped. ‘Just think,’ said the King, ‘all this death and destruction due to the whim of one man.’
The King was right: the evacuation was going far better than had been first hoped – more than 33,000 had been lifted from the mole alone the previous day – and was continuing all that morning. Helping them once again was the weather. From dawn, a fog and sea mist had rolled in over the Flanders coast and, with the still heavy smoke, made it impossible for the Luftwaffe to see any targets at all. Twice formations of Stukas took off and on both occasions were forced to return.
There was nothing to stop the ground troops pressing forward, however, although the Germans attacking the bridgehead were finding it hard going. The panzers had brought chaos with their speed and drive, and would have continued to do so had they sped up the coast behind the enemy’s backs. But now they were facing determined troops well dug-in behind a considerable water obstacle, and the job of spearheading the attack had necessarily been handed back to the infantry with the artillery to help, just as it had been when they crossed the Meuse two weeks before. The gunners were doing a magnificent job, but many of the shells were falling in the waterlogged fields around the enemy positions and were thus not terribly effective. Mortars and small-arms fire were keeping up the pressure and night patrols were probing for weak spots, but this was old-fashioned attritional warfare. And it took time to wear t
he enemy down.
At OKH Headquarters, they were still livid about the missed opportunity of a few days before. Von Brauchitsch was in a foul mood, despite the remarkable victory his men would soon achieve. ‘We lost time,’ grumbled Halder, ‘and so the pocket would have been closed at the coast if only our armour had not been held back. As it is, the bad weather has grounded our air force and now we must stand by and watch how countless thousands of the enemy are getting away to England right under our noses.’ Nor was it helping that both Army Groups A and B were involved in the operation against the Dunkirk bridgehead, which, in the big scheme of things, was too small an area for two such large military machines to operate. Resentment was brewing. There was anger that the Luftwaffe could not do more, while, within Army Group A, the Fourth Army believed Panzer Group Kleist was not attacking hard enough, and that Army Group B was expecting Army Group A to do the lion’s share of the fighting. Panzer Group Kleist, meanwhile, complained to the Fourth Army that its panzers were ill-suited to the task. When its 20th Motorized Division began attacking around Bergues, it reported that it was unable to break through. A lack of unity in command was hampering German efforts.
The men on the ground knew nothing about this high-level testiness, however. Certainly the men of the Eighteenth Army attacking the eastern end of the bridgehead believed they were doing all they could. The 56th Infantry Division was now pressing on the bridgehead either side of Furnes. The 171st Regiment was given the small town of Bulscamp, defended by the 9th Durham Light Infantry and 1st King’s Own Scottish Borderers.
The Battle of Britain Page 31