Dunkirk

by Joshua Levine

  After 2nd Division’s heroic stand, its meagre remains joined the British exodus north, living to fight (and evacuate) another day. The majority of those captured were marched away. But for the surviving members of Robert Brown’s battalion, captured by the SS Totenkopf Division, the day would end with horrifying abruptness. In a village with the ironic name of Le Paradis, the men were stripped to the waist, marched into a meadow, lined up against a barn and machine-gunned. Only two men out of ninety-nine, Signallers Bill O’Callaghan and Albert Pooley, survived. O’Callaghan was shot in the arm and Pooley in the leg, and they both lay, covered by the shattered bodies of their comrades, as SS men walked round finishing off anybody who moved or groaned.

  Both O’Callaghan and Pooley survived the war and were called as witnesses at the 1948 war crimes trial of Fritz Knoechlein, the commander of the company responsible. Explanations for his men’s behaviour have varied from a belief that the British had been using outlawed dum-dum bullets, to anger that the company had suffered heavy casualties during an earlier engagement with the Royal Scots. But no explanation could ever suffice. Knoechlein’s men were responsible for the cold-blooded murder of their prisoners. Of several SS officers present at the time, only one raised any protest at the murders, and he was dismissed as a ‘frightened rabbit’ for demonstrating concern. Knoechlein was found guilty at his trial and executed in January 1949.

  And this was not a lone incident. At Wormhoudt, the following day, men of the Royal Warwickshire and Cheshire Regiments, as well as a number of artillerymen and French soldiers, were murdered at Wormhoudt by members of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler – though the company commander responsible, Wilhelm Mohnke, was never brought to justice, dying in 2001 aged ninety.

  And while the German army cannot be blamed for these particular atrocities (the SS units responsible were Nazi Party organisations), the Wehrmacht was responsible for at least one massacre, at Vinkt near Ghent. Between 26 and 28 May, 337th Infantry Regiment murdered up to a hundred civilians. Some (including a man of eighty-nine) were shot dead while families and friends were made to watch. Others were used as human shields as the Germans crossed a bridge, before being executed at random. And even after the Belgian army had surrendered, some were shot dead after being made to dig their own graves.

  These were dark times for the BEF. Retreating under almost irresistible pressure, its allies surrendering and fragmenting, every hour brought further difficulty and bad news. The song ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, previously sung with hope, was now sung with dark irony. Yet as the days went by, the continued holding of certain key strongpoints, such as La Bassée, meant that the Allied corridor was strong enough for British troops to pass through German-held territory, like Israelites streaming across the Red Sea. And some of these strongpoints were growing stronger. Gravelines, the town blocked to the Germans on 24 May by Bill Reeves of the Royal Tank Regiment, was now defended in far more depth by the French 68th Division.

  Another strongpoint was the town of Cassel. Members of 2nd Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment and 4th Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Regiment, were ordered to hold the town – an elevated strategic point on the road to Dunkirk – against 6th Panzer Division. Companies of both battalions were scattered throughout Cassel, defending key points, and various platoons were stationed outside the town.

  On 27 May, 8 platoon of the Glosters’ ‘A’ Company, commanded by Second Lieutenant Roy Cresswell, moved into an unfinished concrete blockhouse north of the town. The blockhouse already contained Belgian and French refugees, and the platoon brought with them some biscuits, a nearly-full tin of meat paste and a few eggs. For the rest of the day, the soldiers turned the blockhouse into a defensible position, blocking up doorways with sandbags and creating firing slits for Bren guns and anti-tank rifles.

  That evening, Germans were seen moving forwards about six hundred yards away – and the platoon opened fire. Several Germans were seen to go down. Later that night, the enemy came back in greater numbers. A shell suddenly exploded inside the blockhouse, wounding a lance corporal in the head and throat. An attacker got close enough to start hammering at the door before he was killed by a hand grenade. Eventually, the attack was forced back. And it had given the Glosters one advantage: German incendiary bullets had set light to a nearby haystack which burned brightly, allowing the platoon to keep a careful watch throughout the night.

  On the morning of 28 May, the enemy attacked again. This assault too was resisted, but the number of casualties was growing, and most had now been painfully struck by metal shards and chips of concrete knocked from the walls by ricocheting bullets. In addition, food was running low, and with no new rations arriving, the platoon was living on rum and water (except for the wounded, who were denied the rum).

  The next morning, a Royal Artillery prisoner was brought to the blockhouse by the Germans to persuade the platoon to surrender. The prisoner, Captain Derick Lorraine, having been wounded two days earlier, had been sent in an ambulance to a casualty clearing station with three other wounded men. On the way, the ambulance was captured by the Germans and the driver taken away. The four wounded men were left inside the ambulance without treatment or food for two days and nights. On the third day, Captain Lorraine was ordered out of the ambulance by German soldiers, brought to the Glosters’ blockhouse, and told to walk around it and persuade the occupants to surrender. Captain Lorraine objected. His injured leg, he said, made walking impossible. But the Germans waved a gun in front of his face, making it clear what would happen if he refused.

  And so the wounded and hungry Derick Lorraine hobbled slowly around the blockhouse with the help of a stick, shouting, ‘Wounded British officer here!’ Cresswell started to speak, but Lorraine quickly replied, ‘Don’t answer back!’ in an undertone, before looking down at a dead German and saying, ‘There are many English and Germans like that round here.’ Halfway through the sentence, he raised his eyes meaningfully to stare at the roof.

  Cresswell understood what Lorraine was trying to tell him. Germans had climbed onto the blockhouse roof. Once Lorraine had hobbled away, there was a sudden explosion, and the blockhouse filled with acrid smoke. The Germans on the roof were trying to smoke the platoon out by unblocking a concreted observation hole, filling it with straw, rubble and petrol, and firing it with hand grenades. Cresswell and his men had their gas masks; they quickly put them on, and blocked the gap in the roof with a quilt. The fire burned throughout the night, but the smoke was just about kept under control.

  Aware that the occupants of the blockhouse would not give up easily, the Germans increased the scale of their attacks the following day. When the firing became so intense that bullets were flying through the gun slits, Cresswell told his men that they would try to make a break for Dunkirk after dark. By 5.30 p.m., however, it was clear that the blockhouse was heavily surrounded, and there would be no way through. Having had no food for three days, no medical aid, some rum but almost no water, the platoon finally surrendered.

  In the town of Cassel, meanwhile, the garrison had managed to hold out until an order was received to join the retreat to Dunkirk. Wounded men, along with a stretcher bearer who volunteered to stay with them, were left in local houses with some food and the hope that the Germans would treat them well. Second Lieutenant Julian Fane was one of several hundred Glosters joining the retreat. At one point, his company was spotted by the Germans, who called out, ‘Hitler is winning the war, you are beaten! Come out or we will shell you!’ Fane, who had heard stories of the SS massacres, told his men of the treatment they might receive. The men, unsurprisingly, chose not to surrender. Instead, they waited – before suddenly charging across open ground towards a wood. Many of them were killed and wounded by machine-gun fire as they ran.

  After four nights of retreat, Fane and his party, reduced to just nine men and himself, arrived in Dunkirk. He had watched an officer drown in his own blood, and an NCO explode when the rounds i
n his bandoleer were ignited by tracer bullets. He had eaten very little food, suffered agonising pain from his boots and received a wound to his arm. On one occasion, he had walked up to a German soldier, thinking him French, and asked him for directions. Yet he had survived.

  As the corridor held, the motley procession filed along. Sergeant Leonard Howard of the Royal Engineers remembers walking and running for sixteen hours. His small, dishevelled group only stopped when they came under attack from Stukas, shells, machine-gun or small-arms fire. ‘Survival,’ he says, ‘was the main object in everybody’s mind.’ And he remembers an experienced soldier, a warrant officer, walking along the road, tears streaming down his face, saying, ‘I never thought I would see the British army like this!’

  Private Fred Clapham of the Durham Light Infantry remembers a more prosaic problem. As he walked down the corridor, the early summer heat caused his woollen long johns to chafe his genitals. Officers and men were marching with their legs splayed as far apart as possible. ‘It must have looked quite comical,’ he says.

  The Germans, meanwhile, were dropping propaganda leaflets onto the Allied troops, encouraging them to surrender. The most common displayed a surprisingly accurate map of the surrounded British forces, and some accompanying commentary in English and French. The English section read: ‘British Soldiers! Look at this map: it gives your true situation! Your troops are entirely surrounded – stop fighting! Put down your arms!’

  The leaflets were so widely circulated that most British soldiers can remember seeing them. They were dropped in huge cylinders, each carrying 12,500 leaflets and held together with long steel bands. Luftwaffe air crew would load these cylinders into a bomber through the bomb bay doors in the same way as they would load bombs. At a prearranged altitude, the aircraft would drop the cylinders, fitted with fuses set to explode a certain height above the ground, breaking the steel bands. The leaflets would then scatter, landing forty or fifty feet apart over a distance of two or three square miles – although sometimes closer together. British soldiers tended to use them as toilet paper – or as maps to guide them towards Dunkirk given the almost complete absence of official charts.

  The Germans, meanwhile, were well aware that the British were trying to get away. As early as 26 May, only a day after Lord Gort had made his courageous decision, XIX Corps’ war diary was speaking of ‘the evacuation of English troops’, noting that they were ‘trying to escape in the direction of Dunkirk and that must be prevented’. Extraordinarily, the French had less knowledge of the coming evacuation than the Germans. General Blanchard, commander of the French First Army, was not officially informed of the British intention to evacuate its army until 28 May.*

  Often, however, the last people to learn about the evacuation were the British soldiers themselves. Until very late, some had no idea why they were retreating – perhaps it was punishment for a misdemeanour, or possibly their unit was due a rest. Even when told that they were on their way to Dunkirk, many soldiers had no idea what this meant. A few, particularly baffled, thought Dunkirk was in Scotland.

  On 27 May, Anthony Rhodes of the Royal Engineers was astonished to hear from his colonel that his unit would be evacuating from Dunkirk. ‘We are going to attempt something essentially British,’ said the colonel. ‘I daresay only the British would dare to attempt such a hare-brained scheme.’ He did not inspire much confidence in his men by explaining that plans for the evacuation had not yet been made, and that they were just going to have to chance it.

  Confusing to some and disheartening to others was the fact that they were told to ditch and destroy their vehicles and equipment. Five miles out of Dunkirk, Fred Carter and his party of Royal Engineers were told to leave their trucks behind and blow them up with hand grenades, and as Peter Hadley of the Royal Sussex Regiment retreated from Poperinghe, he walked past an unbroken line of shattered vehicles. Understanding why the vehicles had been destroyed (the Germans must not be allowed to use them), he was nonetheless stunned by the sacrifice of millions of pounds’ worth of virtually unused equipment.

  Working vehicles were now in short supply. On one occasion, a Bren gun carrier was stopped by soldiers asking for a lift down the corridor. When the officer in charge refused and the carrier drove away, one of the soldiers took a shot at it with his rifle. He hit the driver – who was left disabled for life.

  The chaos grew so great at times that soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans managed to escape in the mayhem. One man did three days’ kitchen fatigue as a German prisoner before slipping away. Those who remained free often went without sleep: a soldier found he could stay awake by rubbing coffee grounds in his eyes – though he might be considered lucky to have had coffee in the first place. And despite being warned to leave the wounded behind, men did not want to leave their friends, but nor did they have the strength to carry them for days. This explains why the wounded were often seen in wheelbarrows.

  Drawing nearer to Dunkirk, congestion on the roads became appalling. Men, horses and vehicles came together in the dark to create one huge fleeing organism. Peter Hadley found that the only way to keep his men together was to make them hold on to the man in front, while regularly shouting the name of the unit to attract those who had wandered off. But by this time, many groups of men had lost their battalions altogether, and were moving on in smaller groups. One soldier thought he was walking with four friends – until he turned round to see twenty strangers close behind. In circumstances such as these, anyone displaying natural authority became a leader. Rank was losing its influence.

  On entering Dunkirk on 27 May, Anthony Irwin of the Sussex Regiment stood on a ridge above the city and looked down at the docks, all but destroyed by Luftwaffe raids. As he hurried down the hill in the sunshine, he heard explosions, and minutes later arrived at their source. A convoy of ambulances, all displaying red crosses, was strewn across the road, mangled and burning. It had been bombed. Screams came from inside the ambulances, and bodies lay beside them, but there were already people helping, so Irwin moved on.

  Anthony Rhodes entered Dunkirk on the same day across a bridge over the Bergues Canal. He spoke to French civilians who seemed perfectly aware that the British were evacuating. Most of the civilians were heading out of town, nervous that the Luftwaffe would soon flatten the entire city and everyone in it. And sure enough, within moments, the sun was blotted out by German bombers whose sound grew to a crescendo. ‘A series of small earthquakes seemed to take place in succession all around us,’ Rhodes remembers. The bridge had been hit, and two large lorries next to it had disappeared, reduced to nothing in thirty seconds.

  Peter Hadley, meanwhile, arrived several miles to the east of Dunkirk, at a small village. From there he could see a strip of blue directly ahead. He halted his men, ordered them to close up, and marched them a few hundred yards in perfect order. The scene they encountered – at Bray Dunes – was striking. A sandy beach reached into the far distance to the left and right. Straight ahead was the sea, behind the beach were grassy dunes, and on it were the men of the British Expeditionary Force.

  Some few miles to the east was La Panne, a seaside town where Lord Gort was setting up his latest (and final) headquarters. On 30 May, Frederic Wake-Walker, a naval officer on board HMS Hebe, surveyed the scene from La Panne westwards. It was, he said:

  One of the most astounding and pathetic sights I have ever seen. Almost the whole ten miles of beach was black from sand-dunes to waterline with tens of thousands of men. In places they stood up to their knees and waists in water waiting for their turn to get into the pitiable boats. It seemed impossible we should ever get more than a fraction of all these men away.

  For the evacuation to have any chance at all, the perimeter around Dunkirk and the beaches would have to be defended to prevent the Germans from mopping up the soldiers who had entered down the corridor. The fighting was by no means over. Gort placed Lieutenant General Sir Robert Adam, commander of III Corps, in charge of the defences.

  T
he perimeter would have to be large enough to protect Dunkirk, the beaches and the mass of humanity within. It would also have to be large enough to prevent the Germans from shelling the beaches with anything but their heaviest guns. Yet it would have to be small enough to allow it to be defended with limited numbers of soldiers. And it would have to take advantage of the canal lines which provided ready-made defensive obstacles.

  To this end, the perimeter would be about twenty-five miles long and eight miles deep. It was agreed that French troops would man the sector from the port of Dunkirk to the west, while the British would defend the area from Dunkirk to Nieuport in the east. And the man given the critical tasks of, first, finding the troops to do the job, and then organising them, was Brigadier Edward Lawson, who in peacetime had been the general manager of the Daily Telegraph newspaper. The speed with which the perimeter forces were created and the tenacity with which the men defended their positions (in the full knowledge of the sacrifice they were likely making) are too often forgotten when the story of Dunkirk is told.

  While retreating near Poperinghe, Second Lieutenant Jimmy Langley of the Coldstream Guards was approached by his brigadier. ‘Marvellous news, Jimmy,’ said the brigadier, ‘the best ever!’ Langley wondered what could be so marvellous, short of an immediate German surrender. The answer was that the battalion had been chosen to man a section of the perimeter along the Bergues–Hondschoote Canal.

  Arriving on 29 May, Langley’s No. 3 Company dug in along the canal close to a large cottage which would house the company’s headquarters. The company had already been reduced by fighting to thirty-seven men, but by helping themselves to the contents of British lorries by the side of the road, they increased their arsenal, picking up twelve Bren guns, three old Lewis machine guns, an anti-tank rifle and thirty thousand rounds of ammunition. Langley also found some new battledress, a compass, a radio and five hundred very welcome cigarettes.