On 10 May, the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries began. Chamberlain’s instinct, in view of the expanding crisis, was to remain Prime Minister. But his close friend, Kingsley Wood, disagreed, telling him that a National Government was needed to confront the new situation. Chamberlain took the advice and tendered his resignation to the King.
Two small events that fateful day give a sense of contemporary British attitudes. Jeffrey Quill was the chief Spitfire test pilot, working for Vickers Supermarine. Early on the morning of 10 May, he called in to see an elderly couple, old friends of his parents, and casually said, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if old Churchill doesn’t get into power.’ ‘Good heavens, I hope not!’ exclaimed the husband. ‘It made me realise,’ says Quill, ‘how greatly his generation of Englishmen distrusted Churchill. In their eyes, he was a wild man politically.’ And later that day, once the British public had learned of the German advance, Conservative politician Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, an American with a cut-glass British accent, wrote in his acidic diary: ‘Another of Hitler’s brilliantly conceived coups, and of course he seized on the psychological moment when England is politically divided, and the ruling caste riddled with dissension and anger . . .’ Here are the widespread views of Churchill as a liability, and of Hitler as the ultra-human genius, the sorcerer divining Britain’s weakness from afar.
With Chamberlain’s resignation, the path was now open for Churchill. When he arrived at Buckingham Palace later the same day, some banter played out between the King and his new First Minister. ‘I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?’ asked the King.
‘Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.’
The King laughed and said he wanted Churchill to form a government.
There was less humour in an exchange between Churchill and his bodyguard, Walter Thompson, as they drove away from the Palace. ‘I only wish,’ said Thompson, ‘that the position had come to you in better times for you have an enormous task.’
Tears welled up in Churchill’s eyes. ‘God alone knows how great it is,’ he said. ‘I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best . . .’*
At the age of sixty-five, Churchill had the job that he had long coveted, and which his father had never attained. And though Thompson was right about the task ahead, it is hard to imagine it being offered to Churchill in any other circumstances.
It was the British soldiers, currently in France but about to move to prearranged positions in Belgium, on whom the responsibility would fall. Second Lieutenant Jimmy Langley of the Coldstream Guards, stationed near Lille, was woken as usual on the morning of 10 May by his chatty batman who handed him his tea, reported on the weather, informed him that his bath was ready, and mentioned, in passing, that the Germans had invaded France, Belgium and Holland.
Further west at Bailleul-lès-Pernes, Second Lieutenant Peter Hadley of the Royal Sussex Regiment began hearing a vague but very persistent rumour that the Germans had invaded. When he discovered that it was true, he had a sense of relief coupled with a sinking feeling; what, after all, would the future hold? But his men were given a sense of purpose, and the area was soon humming with excitement and anticipation.
The BEF’s advance into Belgium was led by 12th Lancers’ armoured cars. On 11 May, the River Dyle was reached, and thousands of men began digging new positions on the twenty-two miles of land between Louvain and Wavre. The purpose of holding this stretch was to keep the overall front short and to use as few divisions as possible. Lieutenant General Alan Brooke’s II Corps held the left of the line, with its 3rd Division in front and 4th Division in reserve, while Lieutenant General Barker’s I Corps held the right, with its 1st and 2nd Divisions in the front line and 48th Division in reserve. To the British left were the Belgians and to the right were the French, holding a line from Wavre to Namur then along the River Meuse, passing through the fateful town of Sedan.
Royal Engineers officer Anthony Rhodes remembers the welcome from Belgian civilians while the BEF was moving forward. As a member of the British army – and an officer – he was feted. Inside a café, he was mobbed by a cheering crowd, offered cigars and bought drinks. ‘The good old Tommies!’ someone shouted. ‘They’ll win the war!’
Rhodes’s unit medical officer, elsewhere in the café, was being treated even better. A young woman was being ordered to kiss him by a young man, who told her that she should be happy to kiss one of her country’s saviours. Eventually the woman did as she was told – at which point the young man insisted that she spend the night with the doctor. He assured the doctor that he would enjoy the young woman, and he ought to know; he was her husband. The doctor was very keen to accept the offer. It might be considered rude, after all, to spurn such hospitality. But Rhodes pulled him away. There was, after all, a war to fight.
Shortly afterwards, the same doctor believed that he had caught a spy – a Belgian fifth columnist, a concealed supporter of the Germans.* A local newspaper seller, who had somehow managed to get hold of copies of the Daily Mail, said in passing that he had lived for two years in Lincoln. The doctor, a Lincolnshire man, grew suspicious, and asked the paper seller about a particular Lincoln street. The seller replied that he had never heard of it. With an air of triumph, the doctor announced that the seller was lying, that he must be a spy. The seller might have been handed to the army’s Field Security Police for examination, had it not been discovered that he was telling the truth. He had lived in Lincoln: Lincoln, Nebraska.
In fact, spy paranoia was as rife in the BEF as it would become in Britain in the coming months. Rhodes attended an examination of suspected spies by the divisional Field Security Police. One officer and ten NCOs had the job of interviewing hundreds of suspects. The first suspect was a deserter from the Belgian army. An old woman said that she had seen him entering a house with a box containing a portable wireless set. No, said the man, the box contained food – some of which the old woman had eaten. (Doubtless numerous private grudges were elevated to fresh heights during this period.) Instead of releasing the man, the Field Security officer ordered that he be handed over to the local police – who would give him a few minutes to prove that he was not a spy before executing him.
It was not just the Field Security wing who dealt with alleged spies. The Provost wing, the red-capped military police, also dealt with the problem. Rhodes recalls hearing of a dinner conversation between his adjutant and the divisional provost officer, which left him at once disturbed and reassured:
‘Do you really shoot spies?’ asked the adjutant.
‘Of course,’ said the provost officer.
‘And do you do it entirely on your own? I mean the trial and all that sort of thing?’
‘Of course.’
‘But I suppose you take good care that they really are spies, don’t you? I mean, it’s an absolute power of attorney, isn’t it?’
‘It’s absolute, all right,’ said the provost officer, grinning.
Spies were arrested on the flimsiest of evidence. Leon Wilson was a member of a French heavy artillery regiment. Near Armentières, he saw a man ploughing a field in a particular direction, and concluded that arrows were being drawn ‘to show the Stukas where we were’. The man was arrested and led away. And justice could be even more summary. Private Edgar Rabbets of the Northamptonshire Regiment remembers, ‘If I noticed anybody ploughing wrongly, he got shot. I shot two men who were doing that. They knew what they were doing, and I knew what they were doing – so there was no need for discussion.’
Mistakes were made, of course. Two spies dressed as Jesuit priests were about to be shot by British gunners when their regimental padre intervened. He quizzed the spies in Latin – and discovered that they were perfectly genuine priests. And it was not just local people who came under false suspicion; on 23 May, an RAF pilot who had bailed out of his aircraft was captured and shot by French soldiers as a spy.
The British arrival on the Dyle went smoothly – for the most part. 3rd
Division found its proposed position already occupied by a Belgian division, and a standoff occurred between Major General Bernard Montgomery and his Belgian counterpart, until German shelling began, at which point Monty’s troops were allowed to take over.
On 14 May, a sunny late spring day, British troops made their first contact with the enemy. In 3rd Division’s sector, Captain Humphrey Bredin, a Royal Ulster Rifles company commander, was sitting on the far side of the river reading a newspaper. A cavalry colonel came past with the news that the Germans were approaching. He wished Bredin good luck; Bredin thanked him and carried on reading his paper.
A while later, Bredin’s batman said, ‘Can you see? I think there’s somebody coming!’ Through his binoculars, Bredin saw a German motorcycle and sidecar coming up the road. He waited for a few moments before ordering the batman and another soldier to open fire. The three then crossed the river to their platoon position, where Bredin told a Royal Engineers NCO to blow the already-primed bridge.
For three days, the Germans tried to break the line. They seemed well trained, says Bredin, but predictable. There was a four-storey building to the front right of the Rifles’ position, about a hundred yards away, which the Germans wanted to take. But to get there, they began advancing across open allotments, dotted with wooden sheds. Bredin’s men were expert marksmen, they had recently been issued with Bren guns, and they had little difficulty picking off the Germans in their polished helmets as they ran in ones and twos towards the building. Some took shelter behind the sheds – but .303 bullets were not stopped by wooden planks, and the Germans suffered heavy casualties.
Bredin’s men were suffering as well, however. The Germans were using a heavy machine gun that made an alarming g’doonk g’doonk g’doonk noise as it fired. Enemy soldiers began reaching the four-storey house, and snipers took position on its roof with its clear view of the Rifles’ position. A number of riflemen were picked off – including Bredin’s batman, shot through the head – as the Germans consolidated the position.
The following day, the Germans mounted a charge that was knocked back, almost single-handedly, by a corporal firing magazine after magazine of Bren gun rounds. This charge was only a prelude, however. The Germans were clearly preparing for a major assault. Bredin’s position was connected to divisional headquarters by cable, and he telephoned to say, ‘Please bring down an uncle target onto a spot approximately a hundred yards in front of our position.’
An ‘uncle target’ was an emergency call for all the division’s guns to fire at a single spot for two or three minutes; Bredin was directing them to fire at the house. He realised that some of the shells were likely to fall short, but, he says, ‘we reckoned that it was better to be killed by our own shells than to be overrun by the enemy.’ In the event, a couple of shells fell behind, none fell on the Rifles’ position, and the house was obliterated. The rest of the day was quiet.
The following day, the Germans tried to steal through an imagined gap between the Rifles and a Grenadier Guards position to the right, but the Guards forced them back. Then, despite having successfully resisted the German attacks, Bredin received the surprising order to withdraw.
Subaltern Anthony Irwin of 2nd Battalion, Essex Regiment (nicknamed ‘the Pompadours’),* was arriving back from leave when the Germans attacked. He spent several days, with one of his sergeants, trying to catch up with the rest of the battalion. As the pair drove towards Brussels, Irwin and his sergeant noted the large numbers of Belgian civilians – and Belgian soldiers – moving the other way. ‘Look at them,’ said the sergeant, ‘it ain’t bloody right!’
Approaching the city, looking for his battalion, Irwin stopped at an army control centre. An officer inside would surely have the latest order of battle. And a friendly and helpful captain did indeed show him the battalion’s latest position on a map. Irwin thanked the captain before drawing his pistol and asking him whether he’d like to be shot, or to see Irwin’s pass – one of the two. ‘I’m awfully sorry, dear boy,’ said the captain, acknowledging how ‘silly’ he would have looked had Irwin turned out to be a German spy.
After another hour’s driving, Irwin reached the small village where the battalion was billeted, and found his ‘C’ Company commander. The battalion, he was told, was to defend bridges along the Charleroi Canal in a suburb of Brussels, slightly behind the Dyle. These bridges, he was ominously told, must not fall; they must be defended to the last man.
Irwin found his platoon drinking in a local bar, where, he was pleased to see, they were sticking to beer and avoiding the Dubonnet and anise. They were not, however, avoiding a young woman who announced that she was giving her body to the brave British Tommies fighting for her land. Three members of the platoon took her up on her offer. That night, the battalion was seen off by almost the entire village as it moved to the canal, and the bridges it would defend.
As soon as the battalion arrived, the bridges were prepared for demolition by French engineers, and Irwin watched with fascination as they did their work. The blowing of the bridge in his own sector caused particular problems; it was a large structure, carrying four railway tracks across the canal, and three tons of explosives were placed at the base of its two main supports. But the engineers found that they had only enough flex to stretch thirty yards from the firing box to the charge. The French sapper detonating the charge must have known that he could not survive the blast at that distance – but he dutifully pushed the plunger, destroying both the bridge and himself.
Irwin was five hundred yards away at the time. He watched the railway lines rise into the air noiselessly, slowly, before the explosion sounded, smoke blanketed everything, stone and metal rained down around him, buildings shook and glass shattered. Irwin buried himself into the soil as deeply as he could.
He then watched the next bridge being blown, this time by British engineers. But the charge was accidentally detonated while the bridge was still being used by Belgian refugees heading for France. Imprinted in Irwin’s mind was the snapshot of a cyclist, sitting on his bicycle, still pedalling, forty feet in the air, his clothes blown off.
Later that evening, Irwin led a patrol into the centre of Brussels. He returned to his position just in time. Despite the fact that he had not seen a German, orders had come through in his absence to begin withdrawing.
Humphrey Bredin and Anthony Irwin were both surprised by the order to withdraw. Two days earlier, on 14 May, Winston Churchill had been just as surprised to receive a telephone call from French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud informing him of the cause of these withdrawals – the German breakthrough. A diary entry on this day by Lieutenant General Henry Pownall, the BEF chief of staff, is telling. He wrote, ‘The Germans, inexplicably, have got across the Meuse.’ The word ‘inexplicably’ is key. Pownall and his commander-in-chief, Lord Gort, could not explain the breakthrough and had little idea how it was being countered. This was the alarming consequence of the BEF’s subordinate status and its inability to monitor its ally.
The following morning, Churchill was woken by another call from Reynaud, this time panic-stricken. The road to Paris was open, said the French leader, the battle was lost, and France would have to give up. Churchill tried to calm him down. But on the same day, Holland surrendered. Her army was overwhelmed, and an intense Luftwaffe raid over Rotterdam had killed almost a thousand people in just a few minutes. ‘There was no chance that she would hold on for long, but five days is a bit short,’ wrote Pownall.
On 16 May, the commander of French Army Group One, General Gaston Billotte (who was, in theory, responsible for ensuring that the BEF was kept informed), ordered the French, British and Belgian forces to withdraw in order to avoid being outflanked by the Panzer breakthrough at Sedan. These were the orders that surprised Bredin and Irwin. But when Churchill was informed, he was deeply unhappy; he could not understand why a hundred German tanks breaking through the line at Sedan should force the British to withdraw. It would surely expose the BEF to great risk.
Churchill decided to travel to Paris with his chief of staff, Major General Hastings Ismay, and the vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir John Dill. They flew from Hendon to Le Bourget in Flamingo airliners, and they were taken first to the British embassy and then to the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay. There he met General Maurice Gamelin, the overall commander-in-chief of the Allies, Édouard Daladier, the defence minister, and Reynaud.
Gamelin began the meeting by explaining the situation. In front of him was a map of the Allied front resting on an easel. The clearest feature on the map was a small but heavily outlined black bulge representing the German advance. When Gamelin finished speaking, Churchill asked, ‘Où est la masse de manoeuvre?’ Where is the strategic reserve? Gamelin shook his head, shrugged and said, ‘Aucune.’ There is none.
Churchill was dumbfounded. Where was the rest of the mighty French army? How could the commanders fail to place a reserve behind a vulnerable point in the front line? ‘The situation,’ wrote Churchill after the war, ‘was incomparably worse than we had imagined.’ So bad was it that a French request for six further RAF fighter squadrons was granted, despite severe misgivings that their loss would severely compromise the defence of Britain. After this meeting, Churchill flew home, acknowledging the need for the BEF to withdraw in order to maintain a continuous line. (In fact, the following day he asked Chamberlain – who remained in his War Cabinet – to study the feasibility of withdrawing the BEF from France altogether, possibly ‘by the Belgian and Channel ports’. As early as 17 May, an evacuation was being hesitantly mooted.)
The withdrawal began during the night of 16 May, and would conclude on the night of 18 May defending a line along the River Escaut. It was carried out brigade by brigade. Almost to a man, the soldiers could see no reason to retreat. Some wondered whether their unit was being sent rearwards as punishment for a misdemeanour, while others speculated that the enemy had made localised advances causing the line to be readjusted. Only when rumours began to circulate did any suspect that the Germans were close to outflanking the entire British army and cutting off its supply lines.
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