Dunkirk

by Joshua Levine

  The reason for 3rd Division’s move was the difficulty in which the Belgian forces found themselves, leading on the night of 27–28 May to the nation’s surrender (or ‘capitulation’, as it was pejoratively described in Britain). And while the story of the surrender is barely remembered today outside Belgium, within the country it remains a contentious topic – particularly to those who believe that Belgian King Leopold III was the victim of ‘a great and scandalous lie’ perpetrated by Winston Churchill. This strange story is worth exploring as a study in the relationship between politics and war, and as an example of how an accepted history is created.

  Belgium is a divided country with a short and troubled history. Created in 1830 out of two distinct, mistrustful communities (the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemish), the First World War had turned it into a battleground for its foreign neighbours. ‘We suffered so hard,’ says Louis van Leemput, ‘and the Germans were brutal. It was a disaster. Ruins all over the country.’ Having experienced this horror so recently, Belgians were unusually united in the desire to prevent a repeat – but they understood the reality.

  This is why King Leopold and his government had chosen a stance of ‘armed neutrality’. Despite Churchill’s description of Belgium feeding the German crocodile in the hope that she would be eaten last, the Belgians clearly faced a dilemma. While there was no question in their minds that Germany would be the aggressor, by allying themselves with France and Britain they would simply be inviting the Germans to invade. By staying neutral there was at least a small chance that a repeat of the country’s destruction could be avoided. They therefore agreed to share military information with the Allies while preventing them from entering Belgium until an invasion came.

  When Germany’s advance began on 10 May, Belgium became an ally of Britain and France. ‘At the last moment, when Belgium was already invaded, King Leopold called upon us to come to his aid, and even at the last moment we came,’ writes Churchill.

  While relations were cloudy between Leopold and his allies, they were to grow positively frigid between Leopold and his own government. As the Germans advanced and the Allies retreated, the Belgian Prime Minister, Hubert Pierlot, urged Leopold to leave the country, both to escape capture and to lead Belgian resistance from abroad. But this was not Leopold’s intention. He intended, he said, to stay in Belgium and share the same fate as his troops.

  At a final meeting with his ministers, Leopold declared that the military situation was growing hopeless, and that Belgium would have to surrender. The ministers, frustrated by the King’s apparent disregard for the constitution, pointed out that surrender could not be decided by the monarch alone. And once again, when they urged the King to leave the country, he refused.

  Leopold had a number of reasons for acting as he did. For one thing, he was not merely the monarch but also the commander-in-chief of the Belgian armed forces, and he felt that an honourable commander did not abandon his troops. Second, he believed that Belgium’s own interests were supreme, and that once the battle was lost, no moral obligation remained to the Allies simply because they had come to Belgium’s assistance. But most importantly, Leopold felt that staying with his people was the right thing to do. He trusted his own sense of justice above the law.

  So Leopold confirmed to his ministers that he intended to stay in Belgium. He did not intend to set up a new government to achieve advantageous terms with Germany. He had no desire to become a Nazi puppet. But this is what Pierlot and his ministers feared, and they made it clear that they deplored his actions. Nor were they alone in trying to dissuade Leopold from his stance. Sir Roger Keyes, the admiral who had taken Churchill’s part so effectively during the Norway debate, and an old friend of the King’s, was now British liaison officer to Leopold. He suggested that the King take refuge in Britain – and he, too, was rebuffed.

  On 25 May, the day that the Belgian government went to France, Leopold wrote to King George VI confirming that Belgium’s surrender was inevitable and that he would stay with his people. He added that his entire army was fully engaged and that ‘Whatever trials Belgium may have to face in the future, I am convinced that I can help my people better by remaining with them, rather than by attempting to act from outside, especially with regard to the hardships of foreign occupation, the menace of forced labour or deportation, and the difficulty of food supply.’

  In his reply, George VI disagreed with Leopold’s course and said that no monarch should fall into the hands of the Nazis:

  In taking this decision your Majesty will not have overlooked the extreme importance of establishing a united Belgian Government with full authority outside territory occupied by the enemy . . . It seems to me that Your Majesty must consider the possibility, even probability of your being taken prisoner, perhaps carried off to Germany, and almost certainly deprived of all communication with the outside world.

  Between 24 and 27 May, the Belgian army was fighting desperately on the River Lys. Thousands of men were lost to the Germans, who eventually succeeded in crossing the river, and more than a million refugees were wandering through the towns and cities. At 12.30 p.m. on 27 May, Sir Roger Keyes, who was with Leopold, sent a cable to Gort, informing him that the moment was coming when the Belgian army, having fought continuously for four days, would no longer be able to continue. ‘[Leopold] wishes you to realise,’ wrote Keyes, ‘that he will be obliged to surrender.’ Two hours later, the French authorities were similarly informed that resistance had reached its limits. And at 5 p.m., Leopold sent an envoy to the Germans requesting terms for a ceasefire.

  An hour after that, Lieutenant Colonel George Davy, the War Office’s representative at Belgian army headquarters, reported the ceasefire request to Gort – although his message was not received. Churchill certainly discovered the fact, however, because at 7 p.m. he told a meeting of the Defence Committee of ‘disturbing news’ that the Belgians had asked for an armistice. Half an hour later, a Belgian emissary was received by the Germans and an unconditional surrender came into effect later that night.

  Meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Louis van Leemput was sheltering in the house of strangers near Ypres with his mother and brother. He remembers being woken early the following morning by people crying in the street, ‘The Germans are here!’ He is grateful to Leopold for ending the war. ‘He saved my life and the lives of my mother and my brother,’ says Louis.

  That day, Sir Roger Keyes arrived in London to speak to the War Cabinet. He was sharply defensive of Leopold, reporting that ‘only the King’s personality had held the Belgian army together for the last four days’. Once Keyes had gone, Churchill was relatively mild in his attitude towards the King, pronouncing that history would doubtless criticise Leopold for having involved Britain and France in Belgium’s ruin, ‘but it was not for us to pass judgment on him’. Shortly afterwards, Lieutenant Colonel Davy joined the meeting, giving an account of the bravery of the Belgian troops.

  Later in the day, however, the international mood began to turn against Leopold; the received wisdom painting him as a defeatist who betrayed the Allies was already falling into place. The French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, made a radio broadcast describing the Belgian surrender as secret and treacherous: ‘In the middle of the battle, without any consideration and without any notice to his British and French allies, King Leopold III of the Belgians laid down his arms.’ Reynaud was followed on air by Belgian Prime Minister Pierlot, now in exile, who said that the King’s actions had no ‘legal validity’ and accused him ‘of separate negotiations with the enemy’.

  The ferocity of these words is explained by a telegram sent on 29 May by Sir Ronald Campbell, the British ambassador to France, to Winston Churchill, warning that the French Minister for Information had urgently appealed to Campbell ‘to do everything possible to prevent prominence being given in the British Press and radio, and to omit any reference whatever in BBC news transmissions in French, to Admiral Keyes’ statements . . . urging the suspensio
n of judgement on King Leopold’. The reason for this is revealed as the message continues. If Leopold’s surrender was condoned, this would encourage defeatism in France ‘at the moment when French opinion has been roused to anger (with consequent improvement of morale) by disgust at the apparent treachery . . .’

  A similar message was sent to Churchill, on the same day, by General Edward Spears, the War Office’s liaison officer at the French War Ministry. Spears’ message read: ‘The fact that a very mild attitude towards the King of the Belgians is being taken in London is causing considerable concern here . . . a very great deal depends as far as morale here is concerned upon making him out to be the villain he certainly appears to be.’ In other words, in order to keep French morale from sinking further, and to deflect blame away from the French commanders and the French army, a scapegoat was needed – and King Leopold came along at just the right (or wrong) moment.*

  Thus is history made. On 4 June, Churchill told the House of Commons: ‘Suddenly, without prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his ministers and upon his own personal act, he [Leopold] sent a plenipotentiary to the German Command, surrendered his army, and exposed our whole flank and means of retreat.’ Churchill, after all, was desperate to keep France in the war, and the reputation of King Leopold III of Belgium was a small thing to sacrifice in order to do so. Perhaps the greater shame is that the Belgian army’s brave efforts to resist the Germans have been overshadowed – and sometimes denied – by the politics at play in late May and early June 1940, and again, several years later within Belgium when Leopold briefly returned to the throne before being forced to abdicate. A number of factors – from the halt order to the Arras counter-attack to Gort’s decision of 25 May – made the British evacuation possible, and we will encounter others. But an important factor that should no longer be overlooked was the contribution of the Belgian army.

  It is certainly possible to argue that Leopold hampered the Allies’ preparations for war with his policy of armed neutrality. One can criticise him for self-importance, for unconstitutional attitudes towards kingship, for a lack of gratitude to his allies. But Belgium’s surrender was militarily unavoidable. King Leopold did not enforce or manufacture it. And it is clear that he made efforts to keep the British and French informed of his army’s true situation, and of its inevitable fate. Indeed, if any information was being withheld on 27 May, it was that the British had begun to evacuate their army – and it was being kept from her allies.

  In March 2017, the National Archives in Kew released a British Foreign Office file on the Belgian surrender that had been closed for many decades. Hidden in the midst of the file, among myriad documents concerning the surrender and its post-war Belgian consequences, is a small note written in 1949 by a junior diplomat named John Russell (later Sir John Russell, British ambassador to Brazil and Spain). He writes:

  From some 18 months’ unhappy acquaintance with these files I have personally derived the impression that the surrender was inevitable from a military point of view: nor did it come as a surprise to us. However there is no point in going now into the rights and wrongs of this troubled story and I fully agree with [another diplomat] that we should in no event allow ourselves to be drawn into public argument.

  In its unassuming way, this note encapsulates the sorry tale. The surrender was inevitable. The British knew it was coming. But neither of these things could be admitted; there were just too many sensibilities in the way.

  Seven

  Escape to Dunkirk

  For those continuing to fight the Germans on 28 May, the Belgians were already a thing of the past. The chief consequence of Leopold’s surrender was a twenty-mile gap that had opened up between the left of Montgomery’s 3rd Division and the coastal town of Nieuport, only twenty miles east of Dunkirk. Monty’s reaction was to call on 12th Royal Lancers, a venerable cavalry regiment equipped with Morris CS9 armoured cars, with orders to demolish every bridge over the Yser Canal from the division’s flank to the sea.

  This was a very timely intervention – only ten minutes after the crucial Dixmude–Furnes road bridge had been destroyed, the first party of enemy motorcyclists arrived, followed by infantry in lorries. The Germans were surprised to find the bridge blown, and more surprised to find the 12th Lancers’ armoured cars lying in wait. All the motorcyclists and many of the soldiers were killed or wounded. Had 12th Lancers arrived any later, the Germans would have swept across the canal line towards Dunkirk.

  In Nieuport, however, only one bridge had been destroyed, while the other was still intact. And as 12th Lancers’ B Squadron fought an entire day to keep the Germans out of the town, no engineers could be found to blow the bridge. As darkness fell, an officer and two sergeants tried to destroy it with hand grenades, creeping as close as they dared. Just as they were about to throw their grenades, the Germans sent up a flare, and the three men became visible. They managed to hurl their grenades, but none of them damaged the bridge, and one of the sergeants was killed as the other two men ran for their lives. Before long, the town was on fire, and 12th Lancers were forced to withdraw. The way was worryingly open for the Germans to advance along the coast into Dunkirk.

  12th Infantry Brigade was immediately sent to Nieuport to block the Germans’ advance – but there was confusion in arranging their transport, and hours passed before they arrived. In the meantime, two field companies of the Royal Engineers were hurriedly sent to destroy the remaining bridges, and they managed to keep the Germans at bay until 12th Infantry Brigade finally arrived. And so, to the east of Dunkirk, the Germans had not yet broken through.

  To the south-west, 2nd Infantry Division had the job of keeping the Germans back from a fifteen-mile stretch of La Bassée Canal. This was a crucial task, and a difficult one. The main British forces were retreating directly behind the canal, and an astonishing variety of German forces were trying to break through – including 3rd, 4th and 7th Panzer Divisions, and the SS Totenkopf Division. Now that the halt order had been lifted, the Panzers were aching to make up for lost time.

  The town of St Venant, at the north of the canal line, held by the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Durham Light Infantry, was attacked on the morning of 27 May by German tanks and infantry. Although the British battalions managed to hold the Germans off for much of the day, most of their men had been killed or captured by nightfall. A machine-gun battalion of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders* failed in its attempt to reach Merville, while further south towards Bethune, 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment (with whom Peter Barclay, Ernie Leggett and George Gristock had fought so bravely on the River Escaut) was holding the line against a ferocious Stuka and Panzer assault.

  Robert Brown was a soldier in the 2nd Royal Norfolks. On the morning of 27 May, he was keeping watch near a farmhouse when he saw behind him a machine gun mounted on a German motorcycle combination. He quickly returned to battalion headquarters with the unwelcome news that the enemy had stolen in behind. For most of the day, he and another soldier took up position in an outside toilet, knocking out bricks to make loopholes. Other members of the depleted battalion had done the same in nearby stables, cowsheds and barns. Overall the battalion had created a solid defence, and they spent most of the day fighting.

  Late in the afternoon, the commanding officer came round asking for opinions: should they carry on or should they surrender? Some said surrender, but Brown opted to continue. ‘Morale was so high,’ he says, ‘that I had no thought of being taken prisoner, or being killed or wounded. We were just firing, and making a joke out of it, really.’ In the end, though, the officer ordered them to stop. But he said that if anybody thought that they could escape, they were entitled to try. Brown and two friends had noticed smoke billowing down a road, so they started walking in that direction, hoping to use the smoke as cover. But they were soon forced into a roadside ditch, where they were spotted by German soldiers who shouted at them to put their hands up.

  Brown stood with his han
ds in the air. As they reached him, he was immediately struck by their striking appearance, with their SS flashes, death’s head badges and automatic rifles. ‘But they treated us as reasonable as you’d treat an enemy,’ he says, ‘just the normal knocks and pushes and shouts.’ The rest of Brown’s battalion had been taken prisoner elsewhere – where their treatment would prove very different.

  By the end of the fighting on La Bassée Canal, only about 10 per cent of the division’s strength remained. Yet it had managed to protect the British army as it retreated, with the result that, by the night of 27–28 May, the bulk of the BEF was safely north of the River Lys.

  Contemporaneous German reports of the fighting make interesting reading. XXXXI Panzer Corps’ war diary for 27 May describes an enemy who ‘fights tenaciously and stays at his post to the last man’. Indeed, so tenacious was this enemy that ‘the Corps cannot gain ground to any extent worthy of mention eastwards or north eastwards.’ And XXXIX Corps’ diary records two important details. First it notes that the Germans ‘suffered considerable casualties when attacking over the stubbornly defended La Bassée Canal’, and second that ‘the flow of Anglo-French troops’ heading ‘towards the Channel could no longer be intercepted in time and with sufficient effect’.

  These are the sorts of reports one might expect to read after a German defeat – yet the Germans had virtually destroyed an entire British division. In fact, had the Germans mounted a concentrated attack on the flanks, they might well have broken through and ended the war. Even without a concentrated attack, a large part of the French First Army was now trapped to the south, under simultaneous attack from east and west, unable to reach the Lys.