Dunkirk

by Joshua Levine

  Later that day, Ironside and Pownall met with Blanchard and Billotte. The latter was trembling and emotional, yelling that his infantry could not withstand any sort of attack at all. Ironside, whose nickname ‘Tiny’ was an ironic reference to his huge physical presence, could not bear the self-pity. He grabbed Billotte by the lapels and shook him. This seemed to have an effect; Billotte calmed down, and agreed as the British generals urged him to mount an attack towards Cambrai, and to contribute two divisions to the British attack.

  Even if Churchill’s favoured attack was not feasible, the British commanders understood that some form of action must be mounted. An Allied attack had been feared by the Germans – not least of all Hitler – for some days. And with good reason: as the Panzers pushed to the coast, the more stretched and vulnerable their flanks became. With its infantry lagging far behind its motorised formations, the German thrust could be compared, as Churchill wrote, to a tortoise whose head had protruded far from its shell. And if the Allies did not mount a substantial attack soon, the head would be drawn in, and the shell would remain impervious.

  There was, meanwhile, a new French Supreme Commander; General Maxime Weygand had taken over from Gamelin, and he assured Ironside that the Germans could be halted by simultaneous attacks from the north and south. (This – ‘the Weygand Plan’ – was substantially identical to the existing plan.) But Ironside had grown privately disillusioned with his ally. ‘God help the BEF,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘brought to this state by the incompetence of the French command.’ And on the same day, disappointment began to emerge publicly as the usually impeccably courteous Gort harangued the French liaison officer about the quality of the French army and its desire to fight. If the French would not fight, Gort threatened, the British would have to evacuate.

  Despite Billotte’s assurances, the forthcoming British attack would have to go ahead without the two promised divisions. The French corps commander reported that his troops simply refused to take part – though a French light mechanised division would, ultimately, assist the British force.

  The attack would focus on the BEF’s only current cause for hope: its continued possession of the town of Arras. The plan was to reinforce the town’s garrison, to hold the line of the River Scarpe, and to take the area south of the town, cutting the Panzers off from their communications. The attacking force would be split into two mobile columns. Each column would have an infantry battalion, a motorcycle company, a battery of anti-tank guns, a field artillery battery and a tank battalion. Of the eighty-eight British tanks available, fifty-eight would be Matilda Mark Is (slow and armed only with machine guns), sixteen would be Mark IIs (far quicker and armed with 2-pounder guns), and fourteen would be light tanks.

  While this British force was not strong, the Germans’ nervous anticipation meant that they risked treating it as something far greater than it was. But if the Germans were overestimating the British, it seems that the British were underestimating the Germans, entirely unaware of the presence of Generalmajor Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division in the sector.

  The British columns set off on the left and right. On the left, the motorcyclists of 4th Battalion, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers went forward alongside a scout platoon in Daimler Dingo cars. Behind were the tanks of 4th Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment, one of which – a light tank – contained Second Lieutenant Peter Vaux, the battalion reconnaissance officer. Behind them were the soldiers of 6th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry.

  Coordination of the tank squadrons was extremely difficult without wireless communication – and the tank crews had been ordered to maintain silence. There was also little coordination between the tanks and the infantry, and an almost total lack of orders and advanced information. So when Vaux’s tank climbed a crest at Dainville on the southern outskirts of Arras, he was astonished to drive into the flanks of Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division and the SS Totenkopf Division. Neither the Germans nor the British had any knowledge of the other’s existence – but the Royal Tank Regiment had the upper hand in the exchange. British tanks opened fire on motorcycles, lorries and half-tracks towing anti-tank guns, and the German machines burst into flames. A motorcyclist in front of Vaux was desperately trying to kick-start his engine, but could not get it going. ‘My gunner was laughing so much,’ says Vaux, ‘that he couldn’t shoot the gun. Eventually the German threw the motorcycle into a ditch and ran away. We hadn’t fired on him at all!’

  The chance success of this section of the advance was extremely significant. The headquarters of 7th Panzer Division began receiving terrified radio messages – ‘Strong enemy tank attack from Arras. Help, help.’ German gunners were unable to penetrate the armour of either mark of Matilda, and the tanks started to gain for themselves, for the division, even for the BEF, a lofty reputation among the enemy.

  The tanks’ advance continued. Vaux soon arrived at a crossroads where he noticed a lorry with a large ‘G’ painted on the door. As his mind played little games with itself (he imagined the ‘G’ standing for German), the lorry’s driver suddenly jumped out wearing an enemy uniform. ‘Shoot!’ yelled the suddenly focused Vaux, and his gunner fired at the lorry. The terrified lorry driver ran down the street, the gunner firing, tracer bullets zipping past him. He jumped into a garden, managing to get away – at which point a woman who had been waiting patiently for the excitement to stop, calmly stepped out of her house and emptied a bucket into a dustbin.

  A while later, Vaux’s tank was shot by ‘some wretched small weapon’ which missed him and his gunner by inches and made a hole in either side of their turret. Without a word, the gunner reached into his pack and fetched out a pair of socks. A sock was stuffed into each hole. ‘It seemed somehow a bit better that way,’ says Vaux.

  Between Beaurains and Mercatel, the battalion was ambushed by several batteries firing at once; twenty tanks were destroyed. Among those killed were the battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Fitzmaurice, and a squadron commander, forty-seven-year-old Major Gerald Hedderwick, who had fought the Germans over the same ground twenty-three years earlier. Shortly afterwards, Vaux drove through this valley of death, without realising at first that the tanks were knocked out. Only as he drew closer did he notice men lying next to their machines and hanging out of their turrets. Vaux stood up in his seat, shouting instructions to his driver and gunner – unaware that a German soldier was on the ground nearby, lining up a shot at his head. Vaux’s life was saved by his adjutant, Captain Robert Cracroft, who spotted the man and shot him dead.

  Shortly afterwards, having taken some revenge on nearby batteries, the tanks fell back to Achincourt. There were good reasons for this; the infantry was still a long way behind, and forward units of 5th Panzer Division were beginning to arrive on the scene. The tanks withdrew to act as a rearguard alongside the motorcycles and Daimler Dingos of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers.

  John Brown was guarding a crossroads in his Dingo when a tank appeared along the road. Some of Brown’s comrades opened fire with their Bren guns until others started shouting; the tank, it turned out, was British, and the men stopped firing before any damage was done. When another tank followed, the men opened fire again. There was more yelling, and the firing stopped once more. But this time, the tank was German. Stopping at the crossroads, it opened fire in turn. ‘The first shot got my mate,’ says Brown, ‘and he blew up.’

  At another crossroads nearby, Peter Vaux, Robert Cracroft and every surviving member of the battalion gathered. A Matilda Mark II had broken down some way ahead, and could now be heard clattering towards them in the gloom. Cracroft walked up to the Matilda and waved some maps in front of the driver’s visor. The hatch opened, and enemy heads popped out. It was another German tank. Cracroft shouted a warning and raced 250 yards back to his tank – while several German tanks lined up along the road and began firing. After almost ten minutes of heavy but futile firing by both sides in near darkness, the Germans withdrew.

  During the fire fight, V
aux had run out of ammunition, and pulled out. With him were his driver, Corporal Burroughs, and Major Stuart Fernie (the battalion commander following the death of Lieutenant Colonel Fitzmaurice), who had replaced his gunner. As Vaux drove, he passed through a scene of spectacular confusion. British Bren carriers and German motorcyclists mingled on the road without any apparent idea where they were going or what they were meant to be doing. He turned off onto an unfamiliar road and soon found himself passing a steady stream of German traffic – none of which recognised him for what he was. He finally ran out of petrol in a small village forty miles west of Arras. Vaux, Burroughs and Fernie quickly found an empty house and spent the next night and day inside.

  Despite the haphazard nature of 4th Battalion’s advance, it had unsettled German troops with little experience of armoured warfare. And the tanks of 7th Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment on the right were having the same effect – even though their advance was even more chaotic. They lost their way repeatedly, first drifting too far west, then too far east, bypassing Warlus, one of their objectives, where they would have encountered 25th Panzer Regiment, one of Rommel’s units.* Instead, they wandered off in three separate directions.

  Two of the groups, mainly Matilda Mark Is, began moving towards the village of Wailly from the north and the west. Wailly was defended by the tanks of 25th Panzer Division – all of which were currently carrying out an attack elsewhere. This left the village defended by a few infantry platoons, and some anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. Tom Craig, advancing in his Matilda Mark II, was fired on by an armoured car, but the shell made no impact. When he fired back, the car burst into flames.

  With the British tanks about to overwhelm his position (and compromise his growing reputation), Rommel took personal control of the defence from a nearby hill. He brought every gun, anti-tank and anti-aircraft, into action, giving each gun a target and orders to fire as rapidly as possible. Gun commanders who complained that the range was too short were overruled. And he called up a secondary line of heavy guns from divisional headquarters.

  In this fashion, Rommel saved the position, although he was almost killed twice, once when his aide, Leutnant Most, was shot dead standing next to him, and again when he and his telegraphist were trapped by a British tank, only for the crew to surrender rather than shoot him or take him prisoner.

  And it is worth considering what might have happened had the position not been saved. The breakthrough of the tanks at Arras might have joined the breakthrough at Sedan as the twin turning points in the campaign. With the Allies pouring through a breach in the German line, Guderian and his forces would have been trapped in a pocket by the sea, praying for an evacuation. In this parallel world, however, it is hard to see where the German evacuation fleet would have sailed from.

  Such an outcome was not to be, however, despite further heroics by two Matilda Mark IIs, commanded by Major John King and Sergeant Ben Doyle. Operating entirely on their own at Mercatel, they drove through enemy territory firing at anything that moved.

  As they charged on, they were fired at by three or four anti-tank guns. Rather than firing back, they simply drove over them. For ten minutes, machine guns popped up and fired at them; each was silenced in turn. When two German tanks swung their guns round to fire at them, the shells bounced off – but their guns destroyed the German tanks.

  Driving deeper into enemy territory, breaking through roadblocks, they encountered a convoy of tanks and put at least five out of action. (They lost count.) Even when King’s tank caught fire, he carried on for another hour. ‘We just kept on, letting them have it,’ says Doyle. Eventually, like so many other members of the tank battalions, he and King were both taken prisoner. They had finally been stopped by 88mm flak guns. The remainder of 7th Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment, just like the remainder of 4th Battalion, was ordered to withdraw. Between them, they had lost a large number of their Matilda Mark Is and all but two of their Mark IIs.

  Put simply, the Arras counter-attack was a British failure. A brave failure, certainly, given that the attacking force was facing five times as many infantry soldiers and ten times as many tanks. But a failure nonetheless. None of the original objectives were achieved. The attackers ended the day exactly where they had begun – and the Germans were not cut off from their communications. Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division suffered heavy casualties, but so did the BEF – and the German war machine could replace its losses far more easily. From a British perspective, such losses put an end to the prospect of another substantial attack.

  Yet the Germans, usually so keen to claim victory, were not treating Arras as a British defeat. A study of German war diaries for 21 May makes interesting reading. The 6th Panzer Division diary records a ‘strong enemy force’ making an ‘armoured breakthrough from Arras to Doullens’, while Guderian’s XIX Corps notes that ‘Numerous individual reports about the breakthrough of the English tanks are further received – which has apparently caused nervousness throughout the entire Kleist Group area.’

  So nervous was Kleist that he ordered 6th and 8th Panzer Divisions to move east to counter the danger of a British breakthrough – long after any danger had passed. And on 22 May, the day after the counter-attack, Rundstedt vowed to deal with the ‘situation at Arras’ before allowing Guderian’s Panzers to move on to the Channel ports. In his post-war evidence at Nuremberg, Rundstedt admitted fearing ‘that our armoured divisions would be cut off before the infantry divisions could come up to support them’. Even after the counter-attack was over, German commanders still feared that it would defeat Blitzkrieg.

  The counter-attack certainly gave the Germans their first genuine fright. Had it been better organised, had more divisions and more tanks been employed, then it might have broken through the German lines. As it was, Rommel’s division suffered over four hundred casualties, and the elite SS Totenkopf Division lost hundreds of men to captivity. But it was not nearly as successful as the German commanders believed. So why were their reactions so extreme?

  Partly it was because the German thrust had created a vulnerable extended limb that the Allies ought to have been able to pierce. The longer the limb grew, the more vulnerable it became, and the more apprehensive the generals – and Hitler – grew. And as Halder noted, Hitler was becoming increasingly scared by his own success.

  But there was another reason. In his reports of the fighting, Rommel exaggerated British strength and numbers. The attack was made, he claimed, by five divisions and hundreds of tanks. Yet as well as bolstering his reputation, Rommel’s embroidery also served to confirm senior generals’ fears about the vulnerability of Blitzkrieg. It seems little wonder, in all the circumstances, that the attack on the Channel ports was delayed, that Guderian’s 10th Panzer Division was not allowed to advance on Dunkirk (a crucial misjudgement), and that the Arras sector was heavily fortified by troops who might have been better deployed elsewhere.

  The manner of defeat was, ultimately, a blessing for the BEF. Its commanders had already lost faith in their French counterparts. Now they were clear that they could not fight their way out of their predicament. They had insufficient strength to force a breakthrough to the south. Only one realistic alternative to surrender remained – evacuation. For this to be achieved, more time was needed. And thanks to the counter-attack at Arras, more time was bought.

  Six

  Halting the Panzers

  On 21 May, the War Office issued a memo concerning the possible emergency evacuation ‘of very large forces’ across the Channel. It drew up a list of ferries and transportation ships available to sail at short notice, and noted that smaller ships – Thames barges and Dutch schuits (coastal vessels) – were currently being collected together by the Ministry of Shipping.

  The memo calculated that thirty thousand troops might be evacuated over a twenty-four-hour period from three French ports – presumably Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk. No mention was made of possible beach evacuations but smaller ships, it was proposed, could be used to ferry so
ldiers to larger ships anchored outside the ports.

  ‘It will be realised,’ the memo warned, ‘that these notes provide for an emergency which may arise only in certain circumstances.’ Yet even this was a significant change of tone from a note made the previous day which considered a large-scale evacuation ‘unlikely’. It was starting to dawn on all concerned that an evacuation might actually be necessary.

  On the same day, General Weygand called a meeting of Allied commanders at Ypres town hall to discuss his plan – an attack south by all available British and French forces, while the French forces in the south simultaneously attacked northwards. Unfortunately, Gort – the victim of habitual organisational difficulties – did not initially show up at the meeting, so it went ahead without a crucial participant. Only after Weygand had left did Gort finally arrive.

  At the meeting, it was agreed that the British would retreat from the River Escaut to precisely the same line on the French-Belgian border that they had occupied before 10 May. This was a practical necessity – the three British corps commanders were in agreement that a shorter front line would free up divisions to be used when necessary. They were – in theory – available to take part in Weygand’s attack. Yet in spite of Gort’s belief that the attack could no longer succeed, he did not make his views known. He simply pointed out that the BEF could not contribute its most effective fighting formations to the attack. Had he taken a firmer stance, and vetoed the attack at this moment, the evacuation of the BEF might have begun sooner.

  As it was, Churchill arrived back in France the next day. He met Weygand, who assured him that the attack would go ahead the following day with eight divisions. On his return to London, Churchill was in good spirits as he passed on this news to the War Cabinet. If an attack was mounted, after all, victory seemed possible. Without it, he felt, defeat was surely certain.