Bugler Edward Watson of Queen Victoria’s Rifles remembers watching a sergeant major yelling at a man with a large hole in his back. The man was flat on the ground crying as the sergeant major screamed at him to get up. And, to Watson’s amazement, the man did as he was told: ‘I thought this sergeant major was a rotten sod – but he really made the fellow move!’
Along with a small group of riflemen, Philip Pardoe walked into a square – where he came upon a large group of Germans with armoured vehicles. Both groups spotted each other at the same time, leaving the riflemen to run down a street as the Germans jumped into their vehicles. Pardoe and his men quickly dived into the cellar of a house – but instead of staying there, they climbed up to the first floor and lay down in a bedroom. ‘Don’t ask me why,’ says Pardoe, ‘we just did.’ Moments later Pardoe heard one of the German vehicles coming down the road. It stopped at every house and opened up with machine guns. When it arrived at Pardoe’s house, the cellar was machine-gunned, and then the ground floor. Upstairs, Pardoe waited for his turn – but nothing came. The vehicle moved on to the next house, and started firing again.
Edward Watson, meanwhile, was in the cellar of a house somewhere else, having his first taste of wine. He did not like it much, it was too bitter, so he was not too concerned when his officer said, ‘You can drink as much as you like, but if you’re drunk, I’m going to kill you.’ But when Watson needed the toilet, things became trickier. He tried to hold it in, as it meant going outside, and mortar shells were coming down. After a while, when nature called too loudly, he ran as fast as he could to the outside toilet. But, opening the door, he found a dead Frenchman sitting on the seat. He ran back inside and did his business in the corner of a room.
After a while, Watson’s group noticed a team of Germans a hundred yards away. They were coming round a street corner, carrying an anti-tank gun. Watson watched closely as the Germans set up the gun and began firing – unaware that they were observed.
‘What do we do?’ he asked.
‘This is your job,’ said the officer. ‘But you must kill! There mustn’t be any missing, because if you miss, they’ll know where the shots are coming from.’
Watson rested his rifle on the window sill. It was set at a convenient height to allow him a good aim. Frightened at first, he relaxed into the job, and started to enjoy himself. ‘After a while it felt quite fun just to kill them,’ he says. Three, four, five men fell dead, and he vividly remembers the looks on the faces of the living who could not work out where his shots were coming from, but feared they were next. Eventually they moved around the street corner out of Watson’s sight.
Soon, however, when Germans started running up the street in numbers, the officer gave the order that it was every man for himself – except for Watson, whom the officer wanted to accompany him.
‘No!’ said Watson. ‘I want to go on my own!’
‘You come with me!’ insisted the officer, and together they ran out of the back door of the house, while snipers fired at them. Running into another house, they saw a German sniper at a window with his back to them. The officer shot him straight away. ‘I’d never seen it before at such close quarters,’ says Watson. ‘There were no questions. No “What are you doing?” Just – BANG!’
On the night of 25 May, a War Cabinet Defence Committee meeting took place in London, discussing whether to attempt a last-minute evacuation of Calais or instead to order the troops to hold on at all costs – on the understanding that this would mean the loss of the entire garrison. The latter course of action was agreed upon. The troops would hold Calais to the very end. ‘If we attempted to withdraw our garrison from Calais,’ the meeting’s minutes surmised, ‘the German troops in Calais would immediately march on Dunkirk.’
This was a decision that found favour with Churchill. Earlier that day, when shown the initial War Office telegram informing Brigadier Nicholson of the impending evacuation, he had reacted furiously. ‘This is no way to encourage men to fight to the end!’ he wrote to Anthony Eden, adding, ‘Are you sure there is no streak of defeatist opinion in the General Staff?’
The following day, as the garrison’s defence continued, Guderian, commander of XIX Panzer Corps, became impatient with Schaal, commander of his 10th Division, asking him whether Calais should now be left to the Luftwaffe. Schaal argued that this would be counterproductive; bombs, he said, would not be effective against the thick walls and earthworks of the medieval fortifications, and an air assault would necessitate the withdrawal of German troops from advanced positions which would then have to be retaken. Guderian accepted the arguments – and that afternoon, the garrison finally surrendered. Almost four thousand British prisoners were taken.
Second Lieutenant Philip Pardoe was one of the prisoners. He and his men had sat in their bedroom for half an hour, waiting for darkness before heading out. But before they could move, they heard German shouts, and realised that a party of Germans was searching the next-door house. ‘This was,’ he says, ‘the worst decision I’d ever had to make in my life.’ He could kill the leader when he came in. But what good would it do? Was it worth sacrificing the lives of his three men – who would do whatever he told them – just in order to kill a German or two? In the end, he told his men to put away their weapons, and when the Germans opened the front door, he went downstairs with his hands up. His men followed. ‘This was, to me, the most dreadfully shaming moment in my life.’
Edward Watson was also taken prisoner inside a house. German soldiers stood in the street yelling and throwing grenades. ‘Tommy, for you the war is over,’ they shouted, satisfying a stereotype. ‘They must have been taught to say this,’ says Watson.
It is worth asking whether Philip Pardoe, Edward Watson and so many others were sacrificed to any purpose. Winston Churchill was clear that the sacrifice was worthwhile. In the second volume of his history of the Second World War, he would write:
Calais was the crux. Many other causes might have prevented the deliverance of Dunkirk, but it is certain that the three days gained by the defence of Calais enabled the Gravelines waterline to be held, and that without this, even in spite of Hitler’s vacillations and Rundstedt’s orders, all would have been cut off and lost.
Perhaps Churchill’s sentimental attachment to historical events led him to attach greater significance to Calais than it deserved. It was, after all, England’s final possession in France, lost in 1558, its name engraved on Mary I’s heart. And it is not entirely clear why Brigadier Nicholson’s garrison had to be sacrificed in order to achieve the aim of holding up 10th Panzer Division. Had it been evacuated on the night of 25–26 May, its influence on subsequent events would hardly have been lessened. Certainly Heinz Guderian did not agree with Churchill’s analysis, writing that, although he considered the defence of Calais heroic, it did not influence the progress of events around Dunkirk.
This assertion seems logical. Guderian was, after all, intending to attack Dunkirk with a different division from the one attacking Calais. Yet had 10th Panzer Division achieved a quick victory at Calais, surely it could have moved quickly along the coast to assist 1st Panzer Division, thus having considerable influence on ‘events outside Dunkirk’.
In the end, given that Guderian’s Panzers were already at the gates of Dunkirk when they were stopped by Rundstedt and Hitler, the halt order seems to have exerted a greater influence on the salvation of the British Army than the defence of Calais. All the same, Guderian cannot be correct when he writes that the defence had no influence on events.
There is a sad postscript to the tale of Calais. On 26 June 1943, Brigadier Claude Nicholson committed suicide in his prisoner-of-war camp in Rotenberg. It seems that he had long suffered from depression intensified by a feeling of responsibility for the loss of Calais. Yet whatever Brigadier Nicholson told himself in his darkest moments, it is abundantly clear that he behaved honourably and courageously throughout the defence. He is one of the heroes of our story.
The publi
c mood in Britain, meanwhile, as gauged by Mass Observation on 25 May, was one of confusion and growing pessimism. Even the strongest optimists (generally working-class males) were beginning to express doubts about the future. Confusion was chiefly expressed as a failure to understand why the Germans were relentlessly advancing and the British retreating. Perhaps, some wondered hopefully, this was part of a preconceived British strategy.
Pessimism chiefly took the form of fatalism, as though people were increasingly prepared for any bad news. ‘The whole structure of national belief would seem to be rocking gently,’ notes MO’s daily report. But not everybody felt this way. In rural areas, the mood was lighter. A gardener in East Sussex, for example, a soldier of the last war, was recorded as saying, ‘A feller from London was down here last week and he asked me if we weren’t afraid of being invaded. I said that’s an insult to the British Navy!’
One frequently discussed topic on this day was a speech given by King George VI to mark Empire Day. ‘The decisive struggle is now upon us,’ he told his subjects, adding that the enemy was seeking ‘the overthrow, complete and final, of this Empire, of everything for which it stands, and after that the conquest of the world’. The King, with the help of his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, had been rehearsing his words for days, and was pleased with his performance. The British people seem to have agreed, many commenting on the improvement in his delivery. They were generally less impressed with his content, however. It was too much of a sermon, said some, while others complained that it did not say very much that they did not already know.
An interesting perspective comes from British photographer and costume designer Cecil Beaton. He was due to sail from Britain on 22 May to fulfil a work contract in the United States – but felt reluctant to go. To leave careworn Britain for the untroubled New World, he fretted, would surely be wrong. He asked a friend, Viscount Cranborne, for advice. ‘Well, the news is howwid,’ said Cranborne, ‘but . . . I should go, as by the time you come back the news will still be howwid.’ So he went.
In New York, the disconnect between the relaxed luxury of Fifth Avenue and the bleak news reports coming from Europe was unsettling to Beaton. ‘Nowhere could one find solace from the prevalent gloom,’ he writes. ‘One’s worst fears were confirmed each hour by friend and news bulletin.’ When the time came to return to Britain, well-meaning American friends tried to persuade him to stay. ‘What are you going back to?’ they asked. But Beaton was impatient to return to desperate Blighty.
As his liner pulled out of New York, it passed a pleasure cruiser manned by a German crew – who grinned happily as they poked their thumbs down at the liner’s passengers. Beaton said that his spirits soared on arrival at his Wiltshire home. ‘The future might well be gruesome,’ he wrote, ‘but, somehow, to be in the midst of this maelstrom was far less painful than to hear it from afar.’
On 25 May, in the midst of the maelstrom, the British received a stroke of fortune. In a village along the River Lys, a sergeant of the Middlesex Regiment opened fire on a large blue car containing two German officers. As one of the officers, Eberhard Kinzel, ran away, he left behind a briefcase containing two documents, along with a boot jack. On examination by II Corps’ senior intelligence officer, the documents were found to include details of the German order of battle, as well as plans for an imminent attack on the Ypres–Comines front.
At first, Lieutenant General Alan Brooke was concerned that the papers might be a plant, an attempt to deceive the BEF into expecting an attack that would in reality never come. But Brooke soon decided that the plans were genuine (the presence of an incongruous boot jack seems to have convinced him). Unfortunately, there was only one brigade defending the Ypres–Comines canal, and a gap seemed to be growing on the BEF’s left where the Belgians were losing cohesion. All this meant that if the German attack were to succeed, it would cut off the BEF from the sea.
These facts finally killed off the Weygand Plan as a rational possibility in Lord Gort’s mind (although Weygand himself would not give up on it; two days later, he was still sending messages urging strong British participation in his forthcoming attack). This meant that 5th Division, which Gort had unwillingly earmarked for the attack, could now be sent to defend the Ypres–Comines front, and 50th Division to defend the area around Ypres itself. The next morning, Gort visited General Georges Blanchard in his headquarters. Blanchard was now commander of the French First Army, after Billotte’s death in a road accident, and the two men agreed that an attack southwards was impossible. Instead, a further withdrawal was necessary.
While Gort and Blanchard may have seemed to be in agreement, they were actually thinking differently. For Blanchard, a withdrawal meant a retreat to a safer position. But for Gort, it represented the start of an evacuation. Without the approval of the politicians in London or of his French and Belgian allies, Gort was deciding to retreat to Dunkirk – the only Channel port still in Allied hands – in the hope of bringing as many of his troops as possible back to Britain across the Channel. Perhaps his leadership style was disorganised. Perhaps the evacuation could have started sooner. And perhaps a number of stars had collided to ensure that an escape route remained. But on 25 May 1940, Lord Gort made an exceptionally courageous decision, with consequences that endure to this day.
As 1st Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry moved towards the Ypres–Comines line, it had to struggle through ‘a traffic jam of vast proportions’ to reach its destination. Lance Corporal John Linton had marched nearly sixty miles over the previous week, and he was exhausted. His latest defensive position was a dry canal that did not look difficult to cross. He lay across a railway line, men on either side, waiting for the enemy to attack. Just as Major Bill Reeves and his men had held up Army Group A moving towards Dunkirk from the west, so now Lance Corporal Linton and his comrades had to block Army Group B as it attempted to force its way through to Ypres and on to Dunkirk.
Tired, unshaven and hungry, Linton had eaten only a few pieces of dried fruit that day. He and those alongside him were responsible for holding the line while tens of thousands of soldiers streamed towards the coast behind them. Yet Linton was desperately short of ammunition – with only six rounds in his rifle. ‘What are we going to do when the Germans come?’ he wondered. ‘Bite them?’
Elsewhere along the front, the Germans were gaining the upper hand, but 50th Division was finally arriving to take its position to the north around Ypres. As dawn broke, Linton could hear the battle raging nearby. Later in the day, as the valley grew quieter, he watched as a small German patrol moved slowly towards him through tall grass. He had been told that his company was expected to fight to the last man, but he could not afford to waste ammunition, so he waited before firing. Suddenly, German artillery opened up. At first the shells exploded to the rear, but Linton felt a shock running through his body. He had been hit by a piece of shrapnel.
The next thing Linton knew, he was being carried along by two privates. They were taking him to the regimental aid post. But then an officer ordered them to put him down and return to their positions. The brigade, it seems, was being outflanked by the enemy, and wounded men were not a priority.
In the meantime, Brooke had visited General Alexander at 1st Division HQ. Alexander came to his assistance with three battalions, a yeomanry regiment and a number of tanks, all of which were put to work reinforcing the canal line and gaining back ground that was being lost to the enemy. Help had arrived for 5th Infantry Division – if not yet for Lance Corporal Linton.
One of these battalions, marching ten miles to the rescue, was Lord Gort’s old unit of Grenadier Guards. For a night and a day, the guardsmen fought courageously in an attempt to win back ground. In the late evening of 27 May, they mounted an attack. For half an hour resistance was mild, but it grew steadily heavier until the guardsmen reached their objective, the canal. The Germans soon countered ferociously, and they began pushing the Guards back – until a company commander, Captain
Stanton Starkey, came up with a plan.
Opening one of the battalion’s final ammunition boxes, Captain Starkey had been devastated to find that it contained not bullets but flare cartridges. A supply error had been made. But rather than bemoan his luck, Captain Starkey thought laterally. The enemy’s effective mortar fire, he had noticed, was always signalled by a red-white-red pattern of flares. After a while, this would be replaced by a white-red-white pattern, signalling the mortar fire to stop and the infantry to attack.
Captain Starkey, with his huge supply of coloured flares, waited for the German infantry to advance before firing a red-white-red pattern over their heads. German mortars duly opened fire, hitting their own men. The Germans quickly fired off a white-red-white configuration to rectify the situation. The mortars stopped and the surviving infantrymen moved forward. Captain Starkey waited a moment before sending up another red-white-red pattern. The mortars opened fire once more, and the infantrymen were again bombarded. The chaos continued to grow until the mortars ceased firing and the infantry stopped advancing. Cunning had overcome strength.
By now, ferocious struggles were taking place up and down the front, until the two brigades of 5th Division had been reduced to a fraction of their fighting strength. But by the evening of 28 May, the Ypres–Comines line had been held, protecting countless soldiers as they retreated north towards Dunkirk.
The remains of 5th Division would eventually withdraw to the line of the River Yser, just west of the French-Belgian border. In the meantime, however, Brooke had ordered Montgomery’s 3rd Division to carry out an extremely difficult night-time move in an attempt to fill a gap along the canal to their north. Starting from the area around Roubaix, 3rd Division crossed the River Lys near Armentières, moved north through Ploegsteert, and slid into position north of Ypres before daybreak. Even though the entire formation was moving within a few thousand yards of a battle front, the Germans had no suspicion that it was there. ‘The division was like a fine piece of steel,’ wrote Monty, who showed great pride in his men. If the move had been suggested by a student at staff college, he added, the man would have been considered mad. The retreat was encouraging a great deal of improvisation.
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