Over the next two days, Langley and his men watched as a continuous procession of British and French soldiers crossed the canal and moved on to Dunkirk. The men ranged from pristine Welsh Guardsmen who had been fighting at Arras, to disillusioned Frenchmen, to bedraggled British odds and ends. One corporal carrying two Bren guns whose straps had cut through to his collar bones particularly impressed Langley. When he had tried to requisition the guns, the corporal refused to part with them. His dead major, he said, had ordered him to take them back to England, where they would soon be needed. Langley poured some whisky into the corporal’s tea, put dressings under his straps, and wished him the best of luck.
Soldiers may have been pouring past Langley, but only one aeroplane flew overhead, and he fired furiously at it. Fortunately, it passed serenely on; it was a British Lysander giving Lord Gort a tour of the perimeter line.
Once Gort had moved out of range, and the stream of retreating men had reduced to a trickle, the Germans were spotted. Some of Langley’s men were positioned in the attic of the cottage, where they had removed roof tiles and created Bren gun nests. The Germans, standing in a field six hundred yards away, were easy targets. The result was, according to Langley, a massacre, and it made him feel sick.
Later that afternoon the battle began in earnest, with a German attack to the right of the cottage, a position held partly by No. 1 Company and partly by a Border Regiment company. As Langley’s Bren guns kept up a constant fire, trying to assist the neighbouring companies, the Germans wheeled up a large anti-tank gun and pointed it at the cottage. For a while nothing happened – until Langley heard a tremendous crash and a brightly coloured object started bouncing around the attic, stopping by the chimney stack. It was an incendiary anti-tank shell, and the attic occupants grabbed their guns and ran downstairs as four more shells were fired into the attic.
The German attack was growing more intense, and while Langley was seeking orders from Major Angus McCorquodale, the pair were approached by the captain in command of the Border Regiment company on the right. The captain said that the Germans were massing for an attack, and he was proposing to withdraw.
McCorquodale ordered him to stay put and fight, but the captain said this overrode his own colonel’s orders to withdraw when able. McCorquodale pointed to a large poplar tree further down the road, saying, ‘The moment you or any of your men go back beyond that tree, we will shoot you.’
The captain began to argue, but was interrupted by McCorquodale. ‘Get back,’ he said, ‘or I will shoot you now and send one of my officers to take command.’
The captain walked towards his company position in silence. McCorquodale picked up a rifle and told Langley to get one for himself. ‘Sights at two-fifty,’ McCorquodale said. ‘You will shoot to kill the moment he passes that tree. Are you clear?’
Very soon the captain appeared, accompanied by two men. They stood by the tree for a while as Langley and McCorquodale took aim. Then the captain walked beyond it. The Guards officers fired simultaneously, the captain fell, and his companions ran in the other direction. The Border Regiment battalion stayed where it was.
Shortly afterwards, artillery opened up across the length of the Guards’ position, and an attack followed – but was halted. When all had become quiet, the officers of No. 2 Company on the left came over for a visit. McCorquodale ordered his batman to fetch a bottle of sherry, glasses, and a table from the cottage. In the middle of a battlefield, four officers, three of whom would be dead within twenty-four hours, stood and toasted ‘the gallant and competent enemy’. And when firing started again, they returned to their positions and recommenced battle.
Later that afternoon, the officer in charge of No. 1 Company was killed trying to retrieve a Bren gun from an exposed position. There was now just one officer remaining on the right, Second Lieutenant Ronald Speed, who had only joined the battalion a few weeks earlier. Langley told McCorquodale that Speed wanted to withdraw to No. 3 Company’s position.
McCorquodale gave Langley his flask and told him to make Speed drink all of it. ‘If he won’t or still talks of retiring, shoot him and take command of the company,’ said McCorquodale quietly. ‘They are not to retire.’
Langley walked back to Speed’s position, handed him the flask and advised him to drink it. Fortunately, he did. Langley told him he was not to retire.
Speed nodded. He was killed half an hour later.
The next few hours were something of a blur for Langley. He remembers eating a chicken stew, allowing an old woman to take refuge in the cottage, delivering a furious rant at the Germans for taking over other people’s countries, setting three German tanks on fire with Bren guns – and crouching over Major McCorquodale as he died. ‘I am tired, so very tired,’ said the major, before smiling and ordering Langley back to the cottage with his last breath.
As he and his men made a last stand in the cottage, Langley was shot in the arm. The limb hung uselessly at his side, the wound leaving blood all over his battledress. He was brought downstairs and bundled into a wheelbarrow. He felt no pain, only thirst, as he was transferred into an ambulance, driven to the beach and then carried to the water’s edge on a stretcher. But unable to stand up, he was not allowed onto a boat. A stretcher would take the space of four fit men, he was told, and only the walking wounded were now being evacuated. Instead, he was brought to a casualty clearing station on the edge of Dunkirk. There, when the Germans finally arrived, Jimmy Langley was taken prisoner.*
Yet for all the Coldstream Guards’ efforts, and those of officers and men up and down the perimeter, there was a danger that political discussions taking place in London would leave them counting for nothing. On 28 May, Winston Churchill had spoken to Sir Roger Keyes, telling him that Lord Gort did not ‘rate very highly’ the BEF’s chances of survival. He had then spoken to Parliament, saying that the situation was ‘extremely grave’ but that Britain should remain confident in her power to make her way ‘through disaster and through grief to the ultimate defeat of her enemies’. From the chamber he went directly into meetings, first with his War Cabinet and then his wider Cabinet. It would be no exaggeration to describe these meetings as the most important political discussions to take place in Britain over the last hundred years.
With the War Cabinet, Churchill discussed Italy’s desire to act as broker in peace negotiations between Britain and Germany. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary and Churchill’s recent prime ministerial rival, believed that Britain ought to consider making concessions which did not compromise her independence. This, he felt, was common sense. Britain would receive better terms negotiating now than she would in three months’ time when her situation might have worsened. No, said Churchill. Hitler’s peace terms would put Britain completely at his mercy – whenever they were offered.
Neville Chamberlain now spoke up to say that he could not see what was so wrong with making it clear that, while Britain would fight to the end to preserve her independence, she would consider decent terms if they were offered.
The first response was pure Churchill. Nations that went down fighting rose again, he said, but those that surrendered tamely were finished. The second response, from Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee, was more practical. Once negotiations began, he said, it would be impossible to rally the morale of the British people.
Churchill’s style of oratory, usually pitched somewhere between Edward Gibbon and Shakespeare’s Henry V, could sometimes seem masterful and sometimes hollow. But nowhere was it ever used to better effect than in the meeting that followed with twenty-five members of his full Cabinet. Many of these men did not share Churchill’s views on peacetime issues. Some, such as committed socialists Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin, could never have imagined serving under him. But all now listened as Churchill set out the situation in France, and the likelihood that the Germans would attempt an invasion of Britain. They listened as he admitted having considered the possibility of negotiating with Hitler, whom he described as ‘T
hat Man’. And they listened as he warned that any peace would turn Britain into a slave state. ‘I am convinced,’ he told his rapt audience, ‘that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island history of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us is choking in his own blood upon the ground.’
The attitudes in Churchill’s rarefied War Cabinet were one thing. But in his full Cabinet, a better microcosm of the country, he could begin to gauge the reaction his words would receive in British pubs and living rooms. And the ministers loved what they heard. ‘There were loud cries of approval all round the table,’ wrote Hugh Dalton, the Labour Minister of Economic Warfare, adding that ‘no one expressed even the faintest glimmer of dissent.’ Churchill was able to return to the smaller War Cabinet later that evening to inform them emphatically that there would be no surrender. The fight would continue. The war was not over.
Had these meetings ended differently, had Britain decided to speak to ‘That Man’, the sacrifices made by the men of the British, French and Belgian armies would have amounted to little – because the war would almost certainly have come to an end shortly afterwards. We forget nowadays how close Britain came to making peace with Hitler, how close she came to a puppet government, to round-ups of Jews, dissidents and anybody else who displeased the authorities, to the suppression of ideas and dissent, to the implementation of the kinds of laws described in a previous chapter of this book.
For Lord Halifax, Britain was a geographical entity, a place of hills, dales, moors and tors, an H. E. Bates world durable enough to resist whatever brutal regime was in effective charge. For Churchill, Britain was more than this. It was the original model of liberty, a land whose existence depended on freedom and the rule of law. If these were extinguished, her survival meant nothing. And while both views were rosy and sentimental in their different ways, the latter was closer to the truth – and a great deal more humane.
Eight
No Sign of a Miracle
In the opening scene of Chris Nolan’s film, Dunkirk, we see Tommy entering Dunkirk through a section of the perimeter held by French troops. Once inside, he finds himself in the Dunkirk bubble, a world of misrule populated by the men (and, occasionally, women) we have met in the pages of this book, whose initial goal has been to reach Dunkirk, but who, once there, are desperate to leave again. Wandering down onto a beach, Tommy is confronted by queues of soldiers leading to the water. They are hoping to be picked up by a small ship which will take them offshore to a bigger ship, which in turn will take them back to England. Tommy is turned away from the first queue he attempts to join, before teaming up with another soldier and becoming an ad hoc stretcher bearer. He has already been papered with enemy propaganda leaflets, helped the other soldier to bury a body, been attacked by a Stuka, and tried to relieve himself on several occasions.* These were the sorts of incidents experienced inside the perimeter by hundreds of thousands of people over the days of the evacuation.
It can hardly be overemphasised how the experiences of these people varied. A private of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment arrived on the beach only to be turned away from several queues, like Tommy, by men saying, ‘Find your own unit, chum! Not here!’ Other soldiers, in contrast, were able to join the first queue they saw, while others still were so appalled by the length of the queues that they settled down in the sand. Some saw no queues at all.
Some veterans will set aside their pride and tell you how they went to the toilet. But another told me vehemently that nobody had eaten anything for days, so there was absolutely no need for anybody to do so. Captain Humphrey Bredin of the Royal Ulster Rifles, whom we last met fighting doggedly on the River Dyle, speaks of small groups of British soldiers sitting on the beach playing cards in the sun as though at a holiday resort. Others tell of impromptu cricket matches, Royal Engineers stunting on motorcycles in the sand, and an ex-circus performer doing tricks on the back of a horse as soldiers watched appreciatively.
Sub-Lieutenant John Crosby came ashore at La Panne on Wednesday 29 May from a Clyde paddle steamer. With his ship grounded by the tide for most of the day, he made his way to the Hotel Splendide, where he sat lazily with a bottle of wine alongside two British soldiers who were drinking lemonade because, they complained, there was no beer left in the town. There were, however, brothels, and men could be seen waiting patiently in queues – a peculiar parallel of those on the beach – to receive a last taste of the continent.
It was here, too, that Fred Carter of the Royal Engineers had his first taste of champagne. Having dug a foxhole in the sand dunes with his hands, Fred and his friends decided to visit an estaminet a little way away. They ‘had a good feed’, spending all of their remaining cash. Fred decided to try some champagne to see what all the fuss was about. It was, he discovered, ‘glorious’.
Yet men were simultaneously arriving in Dunkirk so shattered, bloodied and demoralised that the offer of a quick one before Blighty would have been meaningless. One soldier describes his uniform as being so battered and dirty that it had lost its colour, while his socks and feet had merged into a single bloody, woolly mess. An officer who jumped from the mole onto a ship crumpled in a heap on landing. When his boots were removed, the bones of his feet were visible. Vic Viner, a beachmaster responsible for order and discipline, recalls experienced NCOs breaking down in tears in front of him. ‘It’s hard to express how gruesome it was,’ he says.
Elsewhere, a platoon found a tin of baked beans and shared it; they ended up with three beans each. Several men, meanwhile, were seen sitting in a circle on the sand, maddened by days without food, pretending to eat a meal. They mimed the use of knives and forks, and chewed imaginary food. Another man was seen trying to eat the leather strap of his helmet. Robert Halliday of the Royal Engineers scoured Dunkirk for food, entering one house after another. He found nothing at all – and his search was interrupted by a falling bomb that tossed him fifty yards down the road, blowing out both of his eardrums.
After this, Halliday and fifty other Royal Engineers built a raft on the beach at Bray Dunes. Made from the floorboards of lorries and buoyant petrol tins, it was held together by scavenged rope. The plan was that one member of the team would swim out to contact a boat, while the non-swimmers were placed on the raft and pushed towards the boat by those who could swim. The men spent two busy days building the raft before a naval officer ordered them to stop immediately. ‘What I want you to do,’ the officer said, ‘is to file straight out into the sea as far as you can go and stay there.’
While Halliday and his friends were working in vain, countless others lay around on the sand doing nothing, or burying themselves in sandy trenches. ‘Blimey, he’s dug himself in well,’ said one joker, staring at a helmet sitting on the beach.
Here are just a few tastes of Dunkirk’s messy paradox. Life is always complex, nuanced and contradictory. We instinctively know this. But too many modern politicians and media sources would have us believe that it is straightforward and monochrome. If one thing alone is remembered about Dunkirk, then it should be this: there was no single story. And this is a theme reinforced by Chris Nolan’s film, which takes place in three realms: land, sea and air. In each of these realms, people were having very different experiences. And they are all equally valid.*
The evacuation, as we have seen, was being tentatively contemplated as early (in relative terms) as 17 May. And two days later, the sending home of the ‘useless mouths’ had begun. This was the unflattering description given of anybody considered peripheral to the essential running of the British Expeditionary Force. By the end of 26 May, almost twenty-eight thousand butchers, bakers and candlestick makers had been sent from Dunkirk home to England. But now, the real evacuation – of as many soldiers as possible – was to start.
On 26 May, Lord Gort received two telegrams, one from Anthony Eden, another from the War Office. The first warned him that evacuation might prov
e necessary, the second confirmed that it was now necessary. In overall charge of the evacuation would be a fifty-seven-year-old vice-admiral, Bertram Ramsay, a meticulous and impatient man who had only recently been persuaded by his friend, Winston Churchill, to return to the Royal Navy.
Ramsay’s headquarters would be in Dover Castle’s Dynamo Room. Once the home of the castle’s lighting generator, it now lent its name to the daunting effort of organisation, improvisation and willpower that lay ahead. The evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force began a few minutes before seven o’clock in the evening of Sunday 26 May with a signal sent by the Admiralty: ‘Operation Dynamo is to commence.’
The first ship to sail after the signal was sent was the Isle of Man steam packet Mona’s Isle, which embarked 1,420 troops from the harbour; twenty-three of them were killed on the voyage home by artillery fired from the shore at Gravelines and a machine-gun attack from the air. This set the tone for the days to come – but Mona’s Isle, which eventually arrived back in Dover at noon the following day, was not the first ship to sail on 26 May. Even before the sounding of the signal, a number of other passenger ships had set off for Dunkirk. These included ships with soon-to-be-familiar names such as Mona’s Queen, King Orry and Maid of Orleans, which would each bring many thousands of men to safety over the next nine days.
At the start of the evacuation, British expectations were low. The Allies were trapped in a narrow pocket, fighting for their lives against stronger forces. The Germans were ten miles from Dunkirk and victory. Winston Churchill believed that thirty thousand troops might be rescued, while Ramsay hoped for forty-five thousand. But this would depend on many variables. How many troops could reach Dunkirk? How long could the French and British soldiers hold out on the perimeter? How effectively could the Luftwaffe neutralise soldiers, ships and equipment within the perimeter, at sea, and perhaps at receiving ports in England? Would a truly effective means of evacuation be found, allowing large numbers to be evacuated every day? Would the weather favour the evacuees or the attackers? On the evening of 26 May, nobody knew the answers.
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