Captain Bill Tennant had watched the attack on HMS Worcester with both horror and anger. He had barely had an inch of sleep since arriving, but this attack was the last straw. Out of forty-one precious destroyers that had taken part in the operation only nine now remained – the rest were all sunk or damaged. Enough was enough; the price of daytime evacuation was becoming too great. ‘Things are getting very hot for ships,’ he signalled Ramsay at 6 p.m. ‘Have directed that no ships sail during daylight. Evacuation by transports therefore ceases at 0300.’ Then he added, ‘If perimeter holds, will complete evacuation tomorrow, Sunday night, including most French. General [Alexander] concurs.’
There was salvation for Sid Nuttall, however. Now that there were no more stretcher cases to take out to the shore, he and his remaining mates in ‘C’ Company were sent that night towards the mole. With the onset of darkness, the evacuation was once more accelerated. In the early hours, Sid was near the end of a long line of men on the mole. Now arriving at Dunkirk on her seventh trip was HMS Icarus. It was just after midnight on the morning of Sunday, 2 June. Two destroyers were coming out in reverse as Icarus and HMS Windsor entered. Watching out on deck was Andrew Begg. ‘There was no thought for safety,’ he says. ‘The skipper sat with his legs over the bridge yelling, “Come on! Hurry up! Get a move on!”’
Dunkirk was still blazing, great orange flames leaping angrily into the sky. It meant ahead of them, everything was swathed in an orange glow, but that behind it was pitch black. Now clambering aboard was Sid Nuttall, having first crossed the decks of the Maid of Orleans to which Icarus was moored. He heard the skipper urging them to load up quickly. ‘The captain wanted to get off before the Stukas came down at first light,’ he says. With a further 677 troops on board, Icarus cut her ropes and headed out of the harbour once more, but as she was clearing the harbour entrance astern, two more ships were coming in. Icarus then backed around out of the harbour and as she did so accidentally rammed a trawler, causing serious damage including to her gyro compass. Fortunately, she could still sail, however, and so set off for England once more.
Sid Nuttall collapsed on one of the lower decks, where he and his mates were given cocoa and thick bully beef sandwiches – both of which were most welcome after more than three days without food and barely any fluids at all. Sid drank and ate, blissfully unaware that because of the damage to the gyro compass Icarus managed to sail right through the middle of a minefield. Andrew Begg back down in the engine room had been told by the chief ERA. ‘That’s why we’re going at five knots,’ the ERA said in hushed tones. ‘Don’t let the rumour get around in case the soldiers panic.’ For the next hour, Andrew wondered whether they would blow up at any moment, but then the signal came to increase speed and they were clear.
They reached Dover around seven that Sunday morning. It was Icarus’s last trip. In all she saved 4,704 men, one of whom was Sid Nuttall.
During Churchill’s visit to Paris two days before he had promised the French that British and French troops would leave in partnership, arm to arm, and that it would be British troops that would form the rearguard and be last to leave, not the French. This pledge had not been passed on to Alexander and, in any case, would have been impossible such was the state of the last remaining Tommies. By that Sunday, and despite Alexander’s preparations around Malo-les-Bains, it was the French who were holding the final defensive line around Dunkirk – and doing so with a kind of steel too infrequently shown during the previous three weeks. Carrying out a number of local counter-attacks, they forced the Germans briefly on to the back foot. The remains of the First Army were also fighting fiercely in their pocket at Lille, despite the hopelessness of the situation. It was all too little too late, but it gave the men at Dunkirk – the last of the BEF – the chance to lie low during the day and ready themselves for one last night of evacuation. No-one was quite sure how many men remained but Bill Tennant and Alexander reckoned there were about 5,000 Tommies still remaining and some 30,000 French.
During the day, a naval demolition party carried out its work on the surviving port equipment and arrangements were put in place to block the harbour entrance once the last ship had sailed. Meanwhile, at Dover, Admiral Ramsay’s team had collected eleven destroyers, thirteen personnel ships, and a host of minesweepers, drifters, skoots and other little boats and these set sail around 5 p.m. that afternoon.
The first troops began boarding around 9 p.m., but already the harbour was under German artillery fire. Once again, the port was lit by the still-burning fires, which cast an orange glow over the column of troops inching their way along the mole. Miraculously, though, that narrow walkway had still not been hit, nor buckled under the strain of playing host to so many ships. At around 11.30 p.m., with the last British troops on board, Bill Tennant and General Alexander boarded a motor launch and began a last tour, first of the harbour, then along the beaches down to Bray, calling out to any last remaining British soldiers. Not one man replied. All that was left were the dark silhouettes of the abandoned lorry piers, other destroyed trucks, carriers and cars. Guns stood where they had been left on the beaches. That long strip of sand, in normal times filled with people enjoying the sun and the sea, was now littered with the debris of a proud army that had abandoned all but the men who fought within its ranks. Desultory shell fire continued, but otherwise the beaches were still.
It was time to go. Already Bill Tennant had sent his last signal to Admiral Ramsay, one of just four words. ‘BEF evacuated. Returning now.’
22
What Next?
THE RAF HAD continued to cover the evacuation right to the end, flying over at dawn and dusk when the lifting of men ended and began for the day. The fighter boys of 92 Squadron had flown their last Dunkirk sorties early on the 2nd, and they had been their most successful to date. For some reason Tony Bartley could not fathom, the fighter escort was hanging back, so the large formation of lumbering Heinkels posed a juicy target. And the pilots were learning, too. Over Dunkirk, they had cottoned on that it was best to dive down below a Heinkel then pull up and blast his underside at as close a range as possible. Without an under-gunner, the Heinkels could do nothing but take evasive action. They were also realizing that the more firepower they could bring to bear, the more likely they were to knock aircraft out of the sky. Tony’s section had raked six Heinkels in turn. ‘We silenced all six rear gunners,’ noted Tony, ‘and set five Heinkels on fire, before running out of ammo.’ These were bombers from KG 54, and of those five only one managed to stagger home.
Cocky Dundas and 616 Squadron had also flown their last combat patrol over Dunkirk that day, while Cocky’s brother John had flown his last the day before. On that sortie John had discovered just how hard it was for a single Spitfire to shoot down another aircraft. He had hammered away at a Heinkel, using up all his ammunition, ‘but the wretch refused to come down’. Like all the squadrons, 609 had suffered over Dunkirk. Five pilots had been killed – a third of their number. The excitement and bravado with which they had entered the fray had gone. Any small group of men in a time of war are tied by a unique bond, but those men in the fighter squadrons had mostly known each other a long time. This was particularly true of Auxiliary squadrons such as 609 and 616, whose number were close friends drawn largely from the same part of the country. Allan Wright in 92 Squadron had also lost his best friend when Pat Learmond had been shot down and killed. The first losses in war can be the hardest to take, and yet all were equally aware that a long, hard fight lay ahead of them. The air fighting over France had only been the beginning. It was a sobering thought.
It was a sobering thought for Air Chief Marshal Dowding too. It was true that the Air Ministry had agreed to form three new Spitfire squadrons and it was also true that he had gained those squadrons that had been operating in France, which, on paper, meant an overall gain of eleven squadrons, bringing Fighter Command up to fifty-eight squadrons in all. However, these figures did not mask the fact that many of these units were
unfit for operational service and that nearly all were now badly below strength. Cold statistics made for harsh reading: 106 fighters had been lost over Dunkirk, of which sixty-seven were Spitfires. In all, 396 Hurricanes had been shot down or destroyed in France. Two hundred and eighty fighter pilots had lost their lives or been taken prisoner. This meant that Dowding now only had 331 Spitfires and Hurricanes with which to defend Britain. Furthermore, the number of anti-aircraft guns was woefully inadequate. If the Germans attacked Britain right away, Dowding’s forces would be hard pushed to keep them at bay.
And it was an attack right away that Britain’s Chiefs of Staff thought most likely. On 29 May, they had put together a report on ‘Invasion of the United Kingdom’. The Germans had two options – either to continue the battle against France in an effort to knock her out of the war at an early stage, or to stabilize the front in France and concentrate a major attack on Britain. A counter-attack of sufficient strength by the French now seemed to them unlikely. Britain was also, in their view, Germany’s main enemy, and defeat of the United Kingdom would lead to the subsequent collapse of France as a matter of course. ‘In our view, therefore,’ they concluded, ‘it is highly probable that Germany is now setting the stage for delivering a full scale attack on England’ – an attack they believed they were neither prepared nor organized enough to repel. Their biggest fear was a lightning-fast Channel crossing of massed German forces in which they were able to establish a foothold. ‘We have ample evidence,’ they warned,’ of the difficulty of dislodging the German once he has established himself on enemy soil.’ They recommended that the country be ‘warned and roused to the imminent danger’, that the army at home – and that included the LDV – be brought to a high degree of alertness, and that defence works along the coast should be improved without delay.
It was with this in mind that beaches were mined and laid with barbed wire, signposts were taken down in an effort to confuse the enemy should he land, pillboxes began to be built along the coast, by rivers and at road junctions in vast numbers, and a series of new coastal gun batteries continued to be constructed; by 12 June, the first batch of forty-six new batteries, each comprising two six-inch naval guns and two searchlights, had been put in place along the south-east coast. Even a Petroleum Warfare Department was set up in early June, with the idea of burning the invader back into the sea. Short stretches of road leading inland from likely landing places were lined with perforated pipes, each connected with a fuel tank hidden nearby. If the enemy got ashore, waiting members of the LDV would then flood the road with petrol and ignite it by hurling a flaming missile.
One of the biggest problems was the shortage of trained men and equipment. There had, in fact, been one more night of evacuation of French troops, so that by the morning of 4 June, when Operation DYNAMO officially came to an end, a staggering 338,226 Allied troops had been brought back to England since 20 May.* However, the best part of 70,000 British soldiers were either dead, prisoner, or still stuck further south in France, which was a massive dent in Britain’s forces. On top of that, Britain had left behind nearly all her equipment. Having begun the campaign as the proportionally best equipped army in the world, she was now one of the worst. Sixty-four thousand vehicles were left, many of which were gleefully taken by the vehicle-starved Germans and continued to perform sterling service for years to come. In all, 76,000 tons of ammunition were lost; more than 400,000 tons of stores; 2,500 guns. This could not be replaced overnight. Far from it. The British army, in June 1940, was not good for very much.
Winston Churchill heeded the advice of the Chiefs of Staff when he finally addressed the House of Commons on Monday, 4 June, by giving a stark warning. There had been a ‘miracle of deliverance’, in bringing back so many from Dunkirk, he told them, but, ‘We must be careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of victory,’ he added. ‘Wars are not won by evacuations.’ There could be no doubting the extreme gravity of the situation, he told them, and an immediate assault upon Britain was now expected. Hitler, he said, was planning an invasion. He was, however, confident that such an invasion would be resisted. ‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule,’ he added defiantly, ‘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.’
Listening to this stirring defiance was Harold Nicolson, who believed it was the finest speech he had ever heard. ‘The House,’ he noted, ‘was deeply moved.’ So too was one of the Prime Minister’s young secretaries, Jock Colville, who had been listening from the Gallery. ‘It was a magnificent oration,’ he wrote in his diary. From sceptic, Jock had turned into one of Churchill’s most ardent admirers in the short time since the new PM’s appointment. Churchill had only been Prime Minister for twenty-five days, but having won over the Cabinet, he was now beginning to galvanize the rest of the nation behind him too. Both Hitler and Churchill were fine orators, although with very different styles. The Führer had been able to mesmerize his people with his changes of tone – quiet one minute, angry the next, often building to a climax of shouted phrases accompanied by exaggerated sweeps of his hands. Churchill was altogether more lyrical, more measured, making the most of his love of the English language and his deep sense of history. Churchill was romantic; Hitler more prosaic. Both had the ability to instil determination, pride and self-belief into their audience. These were rare skills.
Certainly Daidie Penna was impressed too when it was re-run over the radio. ‘I thought it was the finest bit of rhetoric I had ever heard,’ she noted. ‘Seems to have been received everywhere with enthusiasm. It’s what the country has been wanting for years, and I am reminded of Auntie’s remark when some months back, while inveighing against the hopelessness of the Chamberlain administration she said, “The time will produce the man,” and by George, it has in Churchill.’ She had noticed ‘a great heartening-up going on’, and felt an urge to somehow do her bit too. The nation was drawing together, and although she had absolutely no basis for thinking so, she felt, deep down, a conviction that Britain would undoubtedly win in the end.
Yet although the Government was now right behind Churchill in its determination to continue the fight, it was not so convinced by his belief that it should still help Britain’s ally, France. Churchill was the man who had faced the French Comité de Guerre on 31 May, and had witnessed their desperation. His Francophilia was also deeply felt, but, furthermore, he worried that if France made a separate peace, Britain might be faced with a country not just out of the war but with a government actively hostile towards its former ally. He also knew that the longer the French held out, the greater the chances of British survival. At that time, it was unclear whether Germany would try to finish off France or turn straight to Britain, but if the French made that decision for them by capitulating immediately, that would not help Britain’s cause. Already, one request after another was coming from Paris: for more troops, for twenty fighter squadrons, for a joint appeal to Roosevelt. ‘The French,’ noted Neville Chamberlain, ‘are hysterical in their demands for assistance for the attack which they expect at any moment across the Somme.’
Chamberlain was not alone in feeling both weary and wary of the French. While there was no doubt Weygand, Pétain and others believed the British had cut and run and left them in the lurch, there was an almost unanimous feeling amongst Britain’s political and military leadership that the French had badly let the side down with their feeble response to the German onslaught, their dithering, and their poor military leadership. The Cabinet was still fresh from hearing Henry Pownall’s withering view of the French performance on his
return from France when Lord Gort appeared and took an equally dim view. Everyone could see that France was now a busted flush. Only Churchill wanted to make an effort to keep them in the fight.
Not only did he propose sending three divisions via Normandy, but he also wanted to send over fighter and bomber aircraft, as requested. The Chiefs of Staff had already urged that no more squadrons be sent to France. Both Newall and Dowding, attending the War Cabinet, also argued strongly against such a move. Dowding even produced a graph showing that, on average, twenty-five Hurricanes a day had been lost in France from 10 to 18 May. Had more squadrons been sent there, he pointed out, there would have been no Hurricanes left by the end of the month. He told them that if the Germans launched an attack now, Fighter Command would be able to hold them for no more than forty-eight hours.
Despite these arguments and the opposition of both Halifax and Chamberlain to such a decision, Churchill insisted on helping the French. Both men and more aircraft would go to France.
On 5 June, Generaloberst Erhard Milch, number two in the Luftwaffe, flew over Dunkirk. He was struck by the enormous devastation he saw there: the thousands of abandoned vehicles and equipment, the charred rubble that had once been the old Channel port. What had surprised him more than anything, however, had been the absence of British troops.
That evening, he visited Göring aboard Asia. His boss had been back to Potsdam throughout the attack on Dunkirk but had now returned to France and was delighted that the BEF had been so routed.
The Battle of Britain Page 34