Never Surrender

by John Kelly

  III. Lloyd George was not in favor of an immediate settlement. Like Churchill, he believed that Britain should fight its battle and demonstrate that it could not be beaten before sitting down at the negotiating table.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  END OF THE AFFAIR

  Whensoever the last day of the Kingdom of France cometh, it will undoubtedly be the event of the destruction of England.

  —Sir Walter Raleigh,

  English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century

  Later, when men who had been at Dunkirk spoke of their time there, often they spoke first of the nights, of the exploding parachute flares that hung in the night sky like “young moons,” of the tracer bullets that cut silvery tracks across the face of Venus and Mars, and of voices singing in the darkness to cheer themselves up. One evening a lone voice sang: “Oh, I do like to be by the seaside. . . . I’ll be beside myself with glee” in a thick Yorkshire accent. Then there were the beaches at night: “black with great columns of men, some five miles long and a hundred yards wide,” and illuminated by enormous pillars of fire, the front ranks of the column thrusting out into the water, among bomb and shell splashes . . . shoulder deep moving forward . . . heads just above the little waves that rode up to the sand.” And behind the front ranks, mile after mile of men passing the Ferris wheel and bandstand near the beaches and stepping down into the sand, their boots making a crunching sound as they crossed the dunes to the water’s edge. “Then moving into the water, from ankle deep to knee deep. From knee deep to waist deep, until they . . . came to shoulder depth” and a friendly hand reached out of the darkness and pulled them onto a trawler or schooner, where, shivering, wet, and exhausted, they lay on the deck, looking like sea creatures crawled up to the shore to die.

  Saturday, June 1, the day after the Paris meeting, was among the most deadly days of Operation Dynamo. The Luftwaffe was over the beaches early that morning. The destroyer HMS Keith was first hit at around seven thirty, and by 10:00 a.m., when the sky cleared, the Keith and half a dozen other vessels were underwater and the sea around Dunkirk was filled with corpses in bright yellow life jackets bobbing up and down on the morning tide. One sailor, both arms blown off at the elbows, was simultaneously screaming and attempting to stay afloat in his life jacket. Just before the German attack broke off, the sailor disappeared beneath the sea. If he cried out for help before he died, there is no record of it.

  In Paris that morning Churchill had an early breakfast, then was driven out to Villacoublay Aerodrome for his return flight to London. Events in Dunkirk had not yet fully revealed themselves, which left the prime minister free to contemplate the previous day’s session of the Supreme War Council. The meeting had provided several particularly striking examples of the new hierarchy of intimidation that had developed among the great democracies of the West. Paris pressured London for military aid with threats of surrender; London pressured Washington for assistance with threats of a German-controlled Royal Navy; and, atop the hierarchy, Washington pressured the Canadians to have the British fleet transferred to North America. The previous day had provided one particularly dramatic example of the first type of intimidation, French-on-British pressure. During the council meeting no one on the French side had played the armistice card, but later, during an informal discussion in the conference room, a high-ranking French official took Churchill aside and said, in the “polished way” French officialdom spoke of unspeakable things, that “a continuation of military reverses might, in certain eventualities, enforce a modification of the foreign policy on France.” Spears, who was standing next to Churchill, immediately calculated the diplomatic etiquette of the situation. It would be better if he, not the prime minister, who spoke for the British nation, responded, and the response should be directed not at the official, who was an impudent functionary, but to the most important Frenchman in the room. Fixing his gaze on Pétain, Spears said, “I suppose you understand, M. le Marechal, that [a French surrender] would mean a British ‘blockade’ and not only ‘blockade’ but ‘bombardment.’ ”

  When Churchill’s car arrived at Villacoublay at about 10:00 a.m., an escort of nine fighter planes was drawn up in a wide semicircle around his Flamingo. “Grinning and waving his stick,” Churchill emerged from the backseat and walked toward the pilots, who were standing at attention in front of their planes. Spears, who had come to the airport to see the prime minister off, watched each “handsome young” face light up as Churchill stopped to exchange a word or two. A moment later, the door of the Flamingo slammed shut, a smiling face briefly appeared in one of the windows, and then, like a mother hen gathering up her chicks, the Flamingo led her escorts up into the morning sky. By the time it set down in London around 11:00 a.m., it was apparent that the Luftwaffe was making a supreme effort over Dunkirk that day. The attacks of June 1 sank or disabled thirty-one British vessels, including nine destroyers and personnel ships, cost the RAF several dozen aircraft, and halved the evacuation rate from sixty thousand men on May 31 to thirty-one thousand on June 1.

  Though the losses would take a day or so to tabulate fully, briefings by Anthony Eden, the secretary of war, and Lord Gort, who had been evacuated from the beaches the previous night,I left the war cabinet in no doubt that the final extremity had arrived. “Maximum efforts must be made to get as many troops off as possible” that night, said Eden, who was either unaware of or did not care about Churchill’s “Bras dessus, bras dessous” pledge. The previous day, in a dramatic display of Allied solidarity, the prime minister had shouted No! when Reynaud told the Supreme War Council that British troops would receive priority in the evacuation schedule. “Bras dessus, bras dessous,” Churchill insisted. Allied troops must leave the beaches arm in arm, French soldiers having equal priority with British.

  It was a gallant gesture, but not well thought out. During the morning cabinet, it emerged that tens of thousands of French troops were still making their way up to the beaches and would not arrive until the next day, June 2, or the day after, June 3. The choices confronting Churchill were stark: risk the RAF and the Royal Navy to keep Dunkirk open for the French, or evacuate the BEF and inflict a potentially mortal injury on the Anglo-French alliance. The cabinet transcript gives no hint of indecision. Churchill said that the evacuation must be finished that night. French troops not on or near the evacuation beaches by the end of the night would be left behind. In an urgent cable to Paris that afternoon, General Albert Lelong, the French military attaché, told his superiors, “I have insisted that the question [holding open the beaches] should be discussed by the Chiefs of Staff and the war cabinet. [But] I fear this will not change what I am telling you now.” Despite the negative tone of the cable, Lelong, who had been in London long enough to know what British buttons to push, had no intention of giving up. Later that afternoon, he told Dill, in that “polished” French way, that it was “one thing to be driven out and forced to evacuate, but it was quite different if an order were issued from London that the evacuation . . . should be completed that night. Such an order would have a disastrous effect on the Alliance, in view of the conclusions reached at the Supreme War Council [on May 31] to the effect that the evacuation should be continued until completed.”

  When Dill mentioned the conversation at a Chiefs of Staff meeting, it apparently pricked Churchill’s conscience. “As long as the front [holds],” he said, “the evacuation should be continued—even at the cost of naval losses.” General Harold Alexander, Gort’s successor as commander of the BEF, was instructed “to hold on as long as possible in order that the maximum number of French and British be evacuated.” The cabinet also gave Alexander final authority on when to end the evacuation. “Impossible from here to judge local situation,” his instructions read. “In close cooperation with Admiral Abrial [the French commander at Dunkirk], you must act in this matter on your own judgment.”

  By the evening of June 1, news of the crushing British losses at Dunkirk had reached Germany, and the Berlin papers were doin
g a war dance: CATASTROPHE BEFORE THE DOORS OF LONDON AND PARIS. FIVE ARMIES CUT OFF AND DESTROYED. ENGLAND’S EXPEDITIONARY FORCE NO LONGER EXISTS. Scanning the headlines in B. Z. a.m. Mitag at a Berlin newsstand that evening, William Shirer wondered where Germany would strike next: “across the Channel against England or roll the French back on Paris and attempt to knock France out of the war?” Shirer’s sources in the German High Command were predicting the latter course. For the past few days, German formations had been moving south, toward Paris. The French people were thinking something similar. In the panicked days that followed June 1, France ceased to be a nation and became a noise. “Ten million French people [are] rolling aimlessly along the roads with their mattresses and saucepans, jamming all communications, paralyzing every military movement, smothering like a thick torrent of mud what was left of the country, until the last twitch of life [is] gone,” wrote Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian refugee and author of Darkness at Noon. In the Lancashire town of Whalley, where the war was still something that people read about in the papers, Nancy Harker, a young nurse, spent the better part of one early June evening on a station platform, awaiting a hospital train carrying Dunkirk casualties. During the wait, Nancy asked a colleague: “Why ever have these poor things had to come all the way to the north of England after all they’ve been through?” “Because the hospitals in the south are being emptied for the invasion,” the colleague replied.

  At the end of May, Mass Observation had urged the government “to prepare the people now to the idea of imminent invasion. . . . Make [them] see that it is possible . . . to invade us, [that the Germans] want to invade us, [that] they can invade us. But we just bloody well won’t stand for it.” Margery Allingham had noticed a few small changes that made her think the government already was making invasion preparations. One was the new habit of previously anonymous wireless announcers to give their names before reading the news. Margery took that as a sly effort by the authorities to get people to recognize the voices of individual broadcasters so that, in the event of an invasion, they would not be taken in by Germans speaking unaccented English. The ban on bell ringing—the other government invasion preparation—was more obvious, and it saddened Margery. In her village, “church bells [were] a great part of normal life.” When she was a little girl, field hands would stop work and doff their caps in respect when the bells rang out to mark the passing of a villager; now, the next time they rang, it would be to signal the start of the invasion. Sometimes at night, when Margery’s imagination got the better of her, her head would fill with images of the bells “jangling horribly in the night or in the clear air of the dawn,” and she would have to cry herself back to sleep.

  The North Country woman Nella Last had nights like that, too; but they were offset by days like June 3, when the radio announced that most of the BEF had gotten away safely. “This morning,” she wrote in her diary, “I lingered over my breakfast, reading and rereading the account of the Dunkirk evacuation. I felt as if deep inside me was a harp that vibrated and sang—like the feeling on a hillside of gorse in the hot bright sun, or seeing suddenly, as you walk through a park, a bed of clear thin poppies in all their brave splendor. I forgot I was a middle-aged woman who often got up tired and had a backache. The story made me feel part of something undying and never old—like a flame to light . . . warm but strong enough to burn and destroy trash and rubbish. It was a very hot morning and work was slowed a little but somehow I felt everything to be worthwhile, and I was glad I was of the same race as the rescued and the rescuers.”

  In the British version of Operation Dynamo, the evacuation ended on the night of June 2–3, with General Alexander, microphone in hand, sailing along the Dunkirk shoreline, shouting into the night: “Is anyone there?” In the French version, Dynamo ended the following night, June 3–4, when three thousand French troops were taken off the beaches by British destroyers; and in the German version Dynamo ended on the morning of June 4, when the Oberkommado der Wehrmacht, the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces, issued a victory proclamation: “Dunkirk has fallen after a furious battle.” The bulletin singled out “the brilliant operations of the Luftwaffe” for special praise. This challenged the British version of the battle, which depicted the RAF as the master of the Dunkirk sky. Both versions contained a measure of truth. In terms of the number of planes shot down, the Luftwaffe did prevail over Dunkirk. According to the British Air Historical Branch Narrative, arguably the most authoritative source, the RAF lost 145 planes during the battle (not including the losses sustained by the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, which also fought at Dunkirk); the Luftwaffe, 132. Strategically, though, Dunkirk was a British victory. Under an umbrella of Spitfires and Hurricanes, the Royal Navy, the French Navy, and the small boats were able to evacuate more than 338,000 Allied troops. “The root, branch, and heart” of the British army had been preserved to defend the home island against invasion.

  “I have myself, full confidence,” Churchill said in a June 4 speech on Dunkirk, “that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if all the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government, every man of them. . . . 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 streets, we shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, in all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.

  “At any rate that is what we are going to try to do.”

  * * *

  Dunkirk was not only a triumph for Britain, it was also a personal triumph for Churchill. The success of the operation solidified the agreement the war cabinet had reached after the last formal discussion of a compromise peace on May 28. Even if France fell, Britain would remain in the war for now. The historian Guy Esenough has called this policy “Wait and See,” and it represented a compromise between the Churchill wing in the cabinet and House of Commons that was prepared to fight a war of years, continents, and oceans—and figures such as Halifax and Lloyd George, who wanted to save what still could be saved of Britain’s wealth and position in the world. For the present, both sides agreed to put aside their differences and allow Churchill to have his battle, the Battle of Britain. Questions about Britain’s future role in the war would be held in abeyance until the outcome of that contest was known.

  The decision to stake everything on a great air battle was largely dictated by the importance that British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality and British Strategy in the Near Future attached to airpower; and the special weight both the British and the Germans gave it can be explained by a popular fable of the time. It concerned an elephant and a whale who go to war. Though both are formidable creatures, the only way the elephant, who cannot survive in the deep ocean, and the whale, who cannot walk on land, can bring their power to bear in mortal combat is through the medium of the air. Applied to the British skies, this meant that, as long as the RAF maintained air superiority over the home island, Britain could bring its formidable naval power to bear on a German invasion force. Conversely, if Germany dominated the British sky, it could bring its formidable land power to bear. “Supposing Germany gained complete air superiority [over Britain], we consider that the Navy could hold up an invasion for a time, but not for an indefinite period,” the Chiefs of Staff noted in Near Future, which devoted seven of its eleven paragraphs to the importance of airpower in
a battle of national survival.

  In early June, the war cabinet’s hopes of keeping the elephant at bay—or perhaps even defeating him—rested on two factors. The first was the setting of the coming contest. Over Dunkirk, where the Germans had enjoyed most of the advantages, the RAF had fought the Luftwaffe almost to a standstill. The next time the two air forces met, it would be over Britain, and in a British sky the RAF could rescue a higher percentage of its downed pilots and fully exploit the advantages of radar—and fuel considerations would limit the flying time of the German fighters to twenty to twenty-five minutes over Britain. The increase in British air production also enhanced confidence. In June 1940, Britain produced 1,163 aircraft; in July, 1,110; and in August, 1,087. However, the aircraft production numbers do not say much about the number of aircraft immediately available for combat operations. And it was this that occasioned Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding’s visit to Downing Street on the afternoon of June 3.

  A tall, thin man with an unconvincing mustache and a lugubrious manner, Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, was singularly lacking in the physical glamour that airmen of his generation were famous for. If he suggested anyone, it was a bachelor uncle, a resemblance his colleagues had taken note of. Behind his back, they called Dowding “Stuffy.” In the suave, testosterone-rich environment of the RAF, Dowding’s interest in spiritualism, theosophy, and his membership in the Fairy Investigation Society secured his reputation as the oddest of odd ducks. He also had an affectless monotone voice that could make a Dowding briefing excruciating to sit through, though, on June 3, he had no trouble holding the war cabinet’s attention. All the charts and statistics Dowding had brought along supported the conclusion he presented to the cabinet. At Fighter Command’s present strength level—280 Spitfires and 224 Hurricanes immediately available for combat operations—he could not guarantee air superiority over Britain for more than the first forty-eight hours of the air battle. At the end of the presentation, the cabinet imposed a ban on further transfers of British fighters to France. The six RAF bomber and three fighter squadrons already operating in the country would be brought up to full strength, but there the British commitment ended. No further fighting machines would be allowed to leave the home island.