Dunkirk

by Joshua Levine

  At 5 p.m. a huge armada of ships set out from Dover to mop up the British Expeditionary Force – and to take as many French troops as possible. The first vessels reached Dunkirk at 6.45 p.m. and began boarding large numbers. From the mole, the Clyde steamer King George V brought 1,460 home, while the destroyer Venomous lifted 1,500. The last of the British rearguard, 2,000 men, was brought to England on the Channel Islands steamer St Helier. It left Dunkirk at 11.30 p.m. Captain William Tennant promptly sent the signal ‘B.E.F. evacuated’, and embarked for Dover in MTB 102.

  But that did not mean that the evacuation was at an end. It continued in an effort to rescue as many French troops as possible. The very last ship to depart the mole, at 3.05 a.m. on 4 June, was the Isle of Man steam packet Tynwald with her astonishing haul of 3,000 men on board. Twenty thousand French soldiers were taken off that night, and the very last ship left Dunkirk at 3.40 a.m. with the Germans only three miles away. About 12,000 French troops remained to be taken prisoner.

  At 2.23 p.m. on Tuesday 4 June, Operation Dynamo was terminated.

  Ten

  Where’s the Bloody RAF?

  As we have seen, many elements came together to create the miracle of deliverance. Some had more effect than others, but all played their part. The counter-attack at Arras; the several halt orders; Gort’s decision to evacuate; the defence of the corridor’s strongpoints and the perimeter around Dunkirk; the calm sea, cloud cover and smoke over the harbour; the degaussing of ships; Tennant’s discovery that the mole could be used to load troops; Churchill’s refusal to consider making peace; the efforts of the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy; the valuable work of the Little Ships – all of these factors together create our story. But another crucial factor has not yet been explored: the performance of the Royal Air Force.

  Strafed and bombed by the Luftwaffe, soldiers on the beaches and the mole were often heard to ask, ‘Where’s the bloody RAF?’ They carried on asking once they had returned to England. But the RAF was in France and its aircraft were parked up on French airfields long before this question first arose. RAF light bomber and fighter squadrons were sent out as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force, a joint French and British organisation that had been created in anticipation of war. ‘We went out as soon as we could in September,’ says Billy Drake of 1 Squadron. ‘We flew across in our aircraft. All the ground transport went by sea.’ His first job as a pilot was to ensure that the troop ships were protected as they crossed to France.

  Life was quiet at first. Drake was stationed on an airfield that his squadron shared with a nunnery. His mess was in Le Havre – where things were racier. ‘We took over a brothel,’ he says, ‘and two of the girls stayed on as waitresses to look after us.’ And as the BEF dug trenches and settled down to its strange holiday, the RAF, too, had little to do – mainly haphazard reconnaissance. ‘We had no early warning,’ says Drake. Most operational sorties were carried out in response to the noise of enemy aircraft. ‘Our activity consisted of endless patrols,’ says Roland Beamont of 87 Squadron, ‘and there was no radar to help. It was just a question of eyeballs.’

  There was confusion in London, meanwhile, about German intentions. Was the Luftwaffe going to come for the capital? And if it did, would anybody survive? This was no foregone conclusion. In 1932, Stanley Baldwin had told the House of Commons, ‘I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.’ In fact, believed Baldwin, it was going to wipe out European civilisation. Harold Macmillan, writing in 1956, explained that the pre-war generation thought of air warfare ‘rather as people think of nuclear war today’.

  So as Britain steeled itself for a catastrophic bombing campaign, many wondered why the Royal Air Force was not pre-empting Hitler by bombing Germany first. ‘We in Britain had organised a Bomber Command,’ wrote the aerial commentator J. M. Spaight. ‘The whole raison d’être of that Command was to bomb Germany . . . We were not bombing her. What, then, was the use of Bomber Command? Its position was almost a ridiculous one.’

  Other voices urged caution; there was no need to initiate an unnecessary fight. But why, Winston Churchill asked in January, did the Germans not attack? Perhaps they were apprehensive of starting a war they could not be sure of winning, or perhaps they were ‘saving up for some orgy of frightfulness which will soon come’.

  On the morning of 10 May, the orgy arrived. The Luftwaffe appeared over France. The night before, Joe Pengelly, an NCO at the RAF Forward Air Ammunition Park in Reims, was having a relaxing evening at an Ensa concert.* He got back late and fell asleep in his clothes. Woken at dawn by the sound of explosions, he went to the door and looked out. ‘It was a German aircraft,’ he says. ‘I went to the Lewis guns and started blasting away.’ Roland Beamont’s airfield came under low-level attack that morning, while for Billy Drake, 10 May brought a dramatic change of pace – but no information. ‘All that our HQ could say was take off and patrol such and such an area. I was bloody frightened,’ he says, before correcting himself: ‘No, I was apprehensive.’ For Beamont, that day marked the beginning of a ten-day battle. ‘Eighty-seven Squadron were in the thick of it,’ he says, ‘until we were pulled out on 20 May because we hadn’t enough aeroplanes or pilots to carry on.’

  The Royal Air Force was still flying some almost obsolete planes – such as the Hawker Hector, an army cooperation biplane in the process of being phased out. (Any that were left after Dunkirk, however battered, were sold to neutral Ireland.) The enchanting-sounding Fairey Battle was a light bomber introduced in 1937, but already outclassed by 1940. Like the Spitfire and Hurricane, it had a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, but it also carried a bomb load and a three-man crew. In combat against the Luftwaffe, it was slow and vulnerable. Vivien Snell, a Fairey Battle pilot of 103 Squadron who bombed the bridges across the River Meuse in a vain effort to prevent the German advance, was no fan of his aircraft: ‘It was unmanoeuvrable and had one .303 machine gun firing rearwards. It was kamikaze. Our losses were huge.’ The Fairey Battle was withdrawn completely by the end of 1940.

  Through a combination of surprise and superior machines, the Luftwaffe overwhelmed the RAF in these opening days, in the air and on the ground, where they targeted aircraft on airfields. The pressure on pilots became enormous. Beamont says his squadron of Hurricanes was on continuous patrol, such that ‘people were just not able to write up reports – there was too much action’. His squadron’s losses were heavy and its records were lost in the move from one base to another. ‘It was difficult to know what was happening,’ he says.

  In the meantime, a sense that German pilots did not play by the rules was growing among their British counterparts. Beamont witnessed deliberate German attacks on civilians. ‘If you jam the roads with refugees and overturned vehicles and slaughtered horses,’ he says, ‘the allied reserves are going to take longer to reach the front.’ Belgian refugees fleeing the invasion remember these aerial attacks. Louis van Leemput, then aged thirteen and escaping with his family, remembers being fired at on more than one occasion, once even after Belgium had surrendered. ‘The war was over!’ he says, still astonished nearly eighty years later. ‘There was a deep ditch nearby and we just had to jump in and the bullets went, “Tuck! Tuck! Tuck!” over the cobblestones. We could have been killed, even in that moment.’

  Allied pilots were beginning to hear other disturbing reports. Arriving in Lille, Harold Bird-Wilson of 17 Squadron made a bleak discovery: the Germans were shooting at pilots bailing out. ‘It was obvious that the esprit de corps and the rules of war were going to be very different in comparison with the fighting that took place in World War I,’ he says. He remembers that the pilots were shaken and angered by this and he took it as a warning to protect any parachutists who descended.

  By 15 May, the RAF had already lost 250 planes. Sir Hugh Dowding, the commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, lost patience and notified Win
ston Churchill that no more Hurricanes would be going to French airfields. If losses continued at this rate, Dowding feared that Fighter Command would be left unable to defend Britain. It was a decision Churchill struggled to accept. Desperate to keep the French fighting, he overruled Dowding, insisting on four further squadrons being sent out. A shambolic reorganisation resulted, as these new squadrons were created out of eight existing squadrons, with the result that pilots with different training and little mutual understanding were thrown into action together. Sir Cyril Newall, chief of air staff, subsequently ruled that no further squadrons would be sent to France; instead they would move to airfields in the south of England, from where they could make sorties over France.

  Neither Churchill nor the French leaders were pleased with this decision. In Whitehall, Roland Melville, Newall’s private secretary, was approached by a French liaison officer with a message from General Gamelin: without a further four squadrons being sent immediately, the battle would be lost. Melville told him there would be no more squadrons for France. The officer was clearly desperate so Melville telephoned Newall’s assistant, asking him to reconsider. But the answer, again, was no. ‘I reported it to this man who burst into tears,’ says Melville, ‘and he spent the rest of the night walking up and down the corridors outside my office weeping.’

  By resisting requests from the Prime Minister for more fighters to be sent to France, Sir Hugh Dowding shows himself to have been a brave and determined man. Nicknamed ‘Stuffy’ by his men, Dowding cut a very different figure to his flamboyant German counterpart, Hermann Goering. A socially awkward* widower, Stuffy cared deeply for his men, and they respected him back. He often referred to his airmen, including his son Derek, as his ‘chicks’. Goering could be energetic, inspiring even, but he was significantly less paternal. In persuading Hitler to allow the Luftwaffe to finish off the BEF* against the advice of his senior commanders, he placed personal ambition above the welfare of his men. Both Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, commander of Fliegerkorps VIII, and Albert Kesselring, commander of Luftflotte 2, objected. Kesselring complained that many of his gruppe were now heavily reduced in strength, and his bombers were still operating from Germany, which allowed for only one sortie a day. But Goering would brook no dissent, however sensible. He desired the prestige.

  These contrasting men, Dowding and Goering, led the war over Dunkirk, but what of the aircraft at their disposal? Another single-seat British biplane was the Gloster Gladiator. Described by one man as ‘no aircraft to go to war in’, this is precisely what a number of pilots did. James Sanders of 615 Squadron had been flying Hurricanes, but after falling out with a squadron leader, he was placed on Gladiators as punishment. The honorary commanding officer of his squadron was Winston Churchill, who visited the airfield with his wife, Clementine. When Mrs Churchill asked if she could sit in his Gladiator, a flattered Sanders agreed. She eased herself into the seat and began poking the controls, as curious non-flyers frequently do. Churchill, meanwhile, stood in front of the aircraft, looking down the barrels of the machine guns. Sanders did not realise until later that the guns were cocked and ready to fire. Had Mrs Churchill shown just a touch more enthusiasm, she would have removed her husband’s head.

  On 23 May, Sanders, now a Gladiator veteran and flight commander, took command of a detachment at Manston airfield in Kent. In the early days of the evacuation, ‘G’-Flight made eight patrols over the Channel, protecting ships, large and small, from attack. Sanders survived this dangerous period, and after the flight was disbanded on 30 May, he was placed back on Hurricanes. Gladiators remained in service, however, defending the Royal Navy Dockyard near Plymouth during the Battle of Britain.

  In the years leading up to the war, Dowding oversaw the introduction of the two great heroes of British fighter aviation – the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane. The Spitfire entered service in 1938. A monoplane, single-seat fighter with a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, it was loved by pilots for its handling and speed, and by the British public for its distinctive engine note, its elliptical curves and the confidence it inspired. Al Deere, a pilot officer with 54 Squadron who started out on Gladiators, remembers his Spitfire training as basic: ‘You learned the cockpit drill, you read the pilot’s handbook, and it felt right. It looked fragile but it was an amazingly tough aircraft.’

  Tough it may have been, but it was also responsive. George Unwin, a sergeant pilot of 19 Squadron, found the Spitfire so sensitive on the controls that he never needed to heave it or force it. ‘You just breathed on it,’ he says. ‘If you wanted to turn, you just moved your hands slowly and she went.’ For James Goodson, an American who flew with 43 Squadron later in the year, piloting the Spitfire ‘was like pulling on a tight pair of jeans’. Against regulations, Goodson would smoke his cigar in the cockpit, and when he dropped his lighter, he would move the stick a fraction of an inch, roll the Spitfire and catch the lighter as it fell from the floor.

  For Chris Nolan, the section of the film dealing with the war in the air is ‘all about the Spitfire’:

  It’s such a magnificent plane, one of the greatest vehicles ever designed. I went up in a Spitfire myself and the feeling of speed and power is unique. You feel very close to the elements, like you’re in a kite with an amazingly powerful motor. You feel the air rushing past the wings, and when you touch the stick, when you turn it, when you roll it, the responsiveness, its relationship with the atmosphere, is really quite incredible. But the confinement in the small cockpit, being strapped into that. There’s the feeling of power and control but there’s also isolation.

  One problem it posed was how to bail out. On 25 May, James Leathart of 54 Squadron (known as ‘Prof’ on account of his academic ability) was over Gravelines and Calais, when fellow pilot Johnny Allen’s Spitfire was hit by anti-aircraft fire. ‘Oh hell, my engine’s packed up,’ Leathart heard Allen say over the R/T. Moments later, with Allen’s plane now on fire, Leathart heard him again: ‘Yippee! There’s a destroyer downstairs. I’m bailing out. But how?’ Allen managed to execute a roll and drop out upside down. Three days later, according to Leathart, Allen showed up in the 54 Squadron mess wearing bits and pieces of naval uniform.

  While the Spitfire is the iconic British fighter of the Second World War, the Hawker Hurricane was just as important in the earlier part of the war. More angular and less structurally innovative than the Spitfire (it had a wooden-framed and fabric-covered fuselage as opposed to the Spitfire’s all-metal body), it was nevertheless an extremely agile and impressive aircraft.

  Geoffrey Page of 56 Squadron says, ‘The Hurricane was a bulldog and the Spitfire a greyhound. One was a tough working animal, the other a sleek, fast animal.’ He considered the Hurricane easier to fly but lacking the Spitfire’s speed and climb. ‘They were both lovable in different ways,’ he says. In the end, it is safest to say that those who flew Spitfires tended to prefer Spitfires, and those who flew Hurricanes tended to prefer Hurricanes.

  Another single-engine aircraft also made an impression during the Dunkirk evacuation: the Boulton Paul Defiant. Its partially rotating gun turret behind the pilot harked back to the Bristol Fighter, one of the most successful aircraft of the First World War – except that the Bristol Fighter also had a forward-facing machine gun. The Defiant had no forward-facing armaments; it was designed to position itself alongside a bomber and shoot it out of the sky. It was never intended to engage in hectic dogfights against Messerschmitts. We will soon discover how it fared.

  The most effective German fighter aircraft during the Battle of France and the Dunkirk evacuation was the Messerschmitt Bf 109. A single-seat fighter, it was less tight in the turn than the Spitfire and the Hurricane, but it had one distinct advantage – its fuel injection system. This meant that it could dive faster than either of the British fighters.

  The Bf 109’s job was to protect the slow, unwieldy bombers such as the Heinkel He 111, with its distinctive glass nose, and the Dornier Do 17, nicknamed ‘the flying penci
l’ for its sleek lines. Both of these were originally introduced as commercial aircraft. But the Heinkel, unlike the Dornier, had been designed to be converted easily into a military plane, at a time when, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was not allowed an air force. The most feared German bomber during this period, as well as the most vulnerable, was, as we have seen, the Junkers Ju 87 (Stuka) bomber.* With its Jericho trumpets sometimes operating and its ability to aim its bombs by aiming the aircraft itself, the Stuka terrorised civilians and soldiers on the ground. Yet it delighted opposition fighter pilots, who viewed it as easy prey.

  As the evacuation began on 26 May, it fell to Fighter Command’s 11 Group to combat the German attack on the port, shipping and the Dunkirk perimeter. Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park had just sixteen squadrons a day for Dunkirk. But the first meeting between a Spitfire and an Me 109 had already taken place on 23 May. In a patrol early that morning, Francis White, leader of 74 Squadron, shot down an observation aircraft, a Henschel Hs 126. But the Henschel put a bullet in White’s radiator, forcing him to land at Calais Marck aerodrome, which was still in Allied hands.

  The Germans were poised to capture Calais, so the RAF launched a rescue mission: a Miles Master (a two-seater, flown by ‘Prof’ Leathart), protected by two Spitfires, was sent to collect White. They all crossed the Channel, and the Master landed at Marck aerodrome to fetch White, while the Spitfires stayed airborne. One, flown by New Zealander Al Deere, maintained a patrol of the airfield, while the other, flown by Johnny Allen, went higher to check for German aircraft. Almost immediately, Allen radioed Deere that he had spotted Messerschmitts. He quickly shot one down and damaged two more, sending them into the clouds streaming smoke. Deere tried to warn the pilots on the ground that Messerschmitts were about but, as the Master had no radio, could only waggle his wings.