by Tom Keene
To begin with, of course, very little happened. War may have been declared, but it was hardly being waged. In one of the wettest and coldest winters on record, British troops simply dug in and waited out a miserable, muddy Sitzkrieg, their line of further advance hindered by Belgian neutrality: only if German troops invaded Belgium would French and British troops move forward in the execution of ‘Plan D’. To the British left and right were the French Seventh and First armies, units of what was commonly recognised to be the best army in the world. But, as cursing British troops hunched down into their greatcoat collars, stamped frozen feet on wooden duckboards and rubbed wet, gloved hands together for warmth, they were aware of a niggling and growing unease about the calibre of the much-vaunted poilus on their flanks: the French soldiers they saw manning concrete defences and on muddy route marches did not look to them like the best soldiers in the world, not at all. Slovenly, ill-disciplined, permitted to smoke on duty, poorly dressed, the word that came down the line was that some sentries even stood guard in bedroom slippers. And no one seemed to mind. Senior officers noticed too. General Alan Brooke of 2 Corps and subsequently 2 BEF wrote after watching a parade of French troops:
Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly and badly turned out. Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, clothes and saddles that did not fit, vehicles dirty and complete lack of pride in themselves and their unit. What shook me most however was the look in the men’s faces, [their] disgruntled and insubordinate looks, and, although ordered to give ‘Eyes Left’, hardly a man bothered to do so.1
It was not just the French rank and file who preferred not to look their allies in the eye. The malaise of martial disinterest, of a basic reluctance to fight, it transpired, was a contagion that infected the entire French chain of command; a chain of command, moreover, that Britain had agreed could control the tactical deployment of all British troops in France. It was an agreement that was based upon the premise, the unquestioned British assumption, that France would fight and that France would hold. Yet it was a premise that would prove to be fatally flawed. That process of realisation began on 10 May 1940 when Sitzkrieg exploded into blitzkrieg. The waiting war was over.
As the German High Command had both hoped and predicted, France’s generals fell for the sucker punch, the feint. As Generalfeldmarschall Von Manstein’s Fall Gelb (Plan Yellow) kicked into action, the twenty-nine divisions of General von Bock’s Army Group B stormed across Holland and the northern Belgian frontier supported by massed formations of Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, the Luftwaffe’s aerial artillery. As they did so the BEF carried out their pre-planned Operation David: they left their carefully prepared defensive positions and lumbered forward obligingly towards the River Dyle in Belgium to block the threat to their front. Even as they abandoned those carefully prepared positions, far to their right, the forty-five divisions and massed armoured units of von Rundstedt’s Army Group A poured through Luxembourg and the supposedly impenetrable forests of the Ardennes to hook right into the British rear and crash north-westwards towards Calais and the coast. It was what Generalfeldmarschall Erich Von Manstein, the author of Fall Gelb, called Sichelschnitt – the ‘sickle cut’ – and sickles have sharp edges. In the days of terror, rout and onslaught that followed, French units collapsed and British forces found themselves in chaotic, headlong retreat westwards towards the coast, their corridor of access through to the channel port of Dunkirk held open by an ever-shrinking British and French rearguard who sacrificed their own chances of escape so that comrades could move back to the coast. These harassed units retreated down a pinched and shrinking corridor that initially was 60 miles deep and between 15 and 25 miles wide. They struggled north-westwards under constant attack from three sides as German artillery, infantry and armoured units hacked into the retreating columns where a rag-tag of jumbled, exhausted and often leaderless units wrecked and then abandoned their weapons, stores and vehicles as they edged closer to the sea.
The leading German Panzer units of General Heintz Guderian’s XIX Panzer Korps reached the Channel coast at Abbeville, west of Dunkirk, on 20 May after just ten days of brutal, exhilarating advance. To those dust-caked, red-eyed, sleep-starved, deafened tankers gazing out across the Channel in sudden, bruising silence as engines were switched off after advancing 180 miles since crossing their start lines on 10 May, it must have seemed that the end of the war was in sight.
Yet, if there was a miracle of Dunkirk, then perhaps it was the controversial German ‘halt order’ of 25 May that stopped German armoured units at Gravelines south-west of Dunkirk for three days to regroup and permit their rear echelon of supplies, ammunition and replacements to catch up. That, and the gift of good Channel weather that ensured mostly light winds and flat seas, permitted that armada of ‘little ships’ and Royal Navy warships to pluck a weary BEF from those sandy, smoke-shrouded beaches and shuttle them back to England. Most returned with their personal weapons, yet many came home with little more than helmet and damp, salt-stained battledress to be greeted with buns and sandwiches, hot tea, survivor postcards and a cheering crowd at every railway halt who hailed them as the returning victors they manifestly were not.
At the outset it had been hoped that perhaps 30,000 men might be evacuated in two days by the Royal Navy’s well-organised Operation Dynamo before German intervention made further evacuation impossible. In the event – and after nine days and nights of heroic endeavour, shared by the French whose First Army, surrounded at Lille, fought on alone for four vital days thus delaying the advance of seven extra German Divisions to Dunkirk – 338,226 French and British troops were lifted off the French beaches and moles of Dunkirk and spirited away to England. Yet 68,111 members of the BEF did not return home. Excluding combat casualties, 41,030 British soldiers were left behind to be either wounded or marched into a long captivity. Also left behind were most of the British army’s weapons, cased food, ammunition and vehicles. The statistics of loss make sober reading, for every round of ammunition, every Bren gun and rifle, every hand grenade, mortar round and field gun would be needed in the fight to repel the invasion of Britain which must now surely follow. Yet left behind in France were 2,500 artillery pieces, 377,000 tons of stores, 162,000 tons of petrol and 68,000 tons of ammunition. Britain’s military cupboard was now bare. Little wonder then that the early Local Defence Volunteers drilled with broom handles while troops on the south coast practised rapid deployment from corporation omnibuses. And 65,000 vehicles and 20,000 motorcycles had also been left behind for the Germans.
It was the loss and self-destruction of the cars and lorries under his own command that one particular subaltern, 24-year-old Second Lt Geoffrey Appleyard, RASC, found particularly shaming. Vehicles, after all, were to that particular corps what field guns were to the Royal Artillery and field dressings were to the Royal Army Medical Corps. A Cambridge University Engineering graduate with First Class Honours, Appleyard had heeded the climate of an increasingly war-nervous Europe and volunteered to join the Supplementary Reserve of officers in the Royal Army Service Corps in 1938. On 1 September the following year he and his fellow Reservists were mobilised. He soon found himself at Bulford Camp, Wiltshire, commanding the skilled mechanics, fitters, turners, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, carpenters, drivers and mobile workshop personnel who made up his forty-five-strong unit in the Workshops of ‘E’ Section, No 6 Sub Park, 11 Ammunition, RASC. A week earlier, on 23 August 1939, Molotov and von Ribbentrop had stunned the world by signing their two nations’ non-aggression pact, thereby virtually guaranteeing both the German invasion of Poland and the world war that would follow. Appleyard was one of those who permitted himself to peer into a bleak future, writing home to his family in Yorkshire:
So Russia is in. How awful. And what a swinish thing to do. It means a long war, but I’m sure we must win. I’m certain we’ve got right on our side and I even feel we’ve got God on our side – if God could conceivably be on any side in anything so bloody as a war. We must win. Funny how relative everyt
hing is – you don’t really appreciate a holiday till it’s over. The same way you don’t really appreciate your liberty until it’s threatened. But I’ll never be made to say ‘Heil Hitler’. I’d sooner die.
The Germans invaded Poland, Britain’s ultimatum ran its course, the war began and a weary, self-pitying, lacklustre Neville Chamberlain addressed the nation on the wireless. On 29 September 1939, crammed with 1,500 other mobilised troops into the SS Lady of Mann, one of the early vessels to be pressed into service to carry the BEF to France, Appleyard and his unit endured a rough crossing to France. There they joined the rear echelon in support, for they did not form one of the front-line fighting units: they were tail, not teeth. They spent that long, cold and muddy winter moving from billet to billet behind the static front line repairing vehicles and supplying various artillery units with ammunition from the railhead and waiting for something, anything, to happen. Transferred by his colonel without the option from Workshops to Ammunition Section and then to Headquarters, Appleyard was an inveterate letter-writer to a loving family back home in Linton-on-Wharfe, near Wetherby, Yorkshire. Prohibited by the censor from disclosing his exact location, he left them in no doubt about conditions, writing in October:
With the arrival at this village quite a lot of the fun has gone out of this war. Quite suddenly winter has come with a bang, and there is mud everywhere. Mud, mud, mud wherever you go. It rains off and on all through the day and the sky is heavy, misty and overcast. Cheerful prospect! The village here is much smaller than Linton and consists solely of farms … The first night here the men were billeted in a cowshed – absolutely filthy.
He added a little later: ‘I’m not learning to love this mud-soaked corner of Europe any more – it must be the most utterly God-forsaken piece of land in the world. Did someone say something about “La Belle France”? I prefer La Bl… France.’
As the months dragged by, Appleyard’s thoughts turned increasingly to home and an overdue leave. In April 1940 he was writing: ‘My leave prospects are very bright! There is every chance that I should get home on my original date; that is, leaving here the 8th May, home 9th, which is sensational.’ On 25 April he felt confident enough to write:
Hurrah! My leave date is now definitely confirmed. I am leaving here May 7th, arriving home May 8th – possibly very late as it is a late boat that day, I think. That’s terrific, isn’t it! I’m thrilled to have so early a prospect of seeing you all again … Just think – only twelve days hence! And the date is quite definite unless leave is suspended again, or something else very untoward happens!
Unfortunately for Appleyard and his eagerly anticipated home leave, something very untoward did happen. The British anglicised it to blitzkrieg but it meant the same thing: lightning war – the German thunderclap advance into Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France by a co-ordinated force of tanks, motorised infantry, artillery and on-call air support. As German mechanised units smashed across the Belgian border and headed deep into France to start their swing towards the Channel coast, Appleyard and his unit were caught up in the initial advance to contact. He wrote about those dangerous days – perhaps with an eye to an anxious family waiting at home – in terms that suggested he might almost be on some sort of private Grand Tour:
I am very well, fairly comfortable (at times) and having a terrific experience. There will be masses to tell you when I am home again, but I am afraid it must all wait until then. Sufficient to say that my days are very full and very interesting. I am very brown with continually being out in the open air in the open car … You know, in spite of everything, this is an amazing and invaluable experience for me and in certain ways will be of immense value in later life. I had better stop – things are beginning to happen again.
No mention, then, of wailing, gull-winged Stukas or of thundering German armour hacking into soft-skinned British columns; no mention of collapsing French armies amidst rout; of valiant last-ditch, last bullet stands by both French and British troops; no mention of British units in chaos or nervous officers relieved of their command and sent home, or British rifles being turned on fleeing British officers and soldiers with orders to shoot to kill.
Appleyard’s RASC unit had reached Armentières just before the evacuation of Dunkirk began. By then the chatty letters home had ceased. Armentières was at the western edge of the Gort line of five interlinked British divisions that hooked in a sickle of their own to the north and east protecting Lille. Armentières was bombed into ruin and Appleyard and his men did what they could to help, then headed north-west down the corridor towards Dunkirk taking with them all their vehicles and ammunition stores. It says much for his early skills as both leader and young subaltern that not a man of his unit was lost in what is arguably that most difficult of all military manoeuvres, the fighting withdrawal. His letters do not describe that fighting retreat to the coast, nor the eventual link-up with the crescent-shaped, shrinking perimeter that guarded Dunkirk itself. When he got there, every lorry and car lovingly intact, his CO told him to take his vehicles to a nearby canal, destroy them with fire and pick-axe to make them useless to the enemy and then tip them into the canal. Appleyard’s father was to write later:
The Commanding Officer later, with some amusement, recounted to Geoff that he seemed dazed by the order, that his jaw dropped, his eyes opened wide with horror and, forgetting military discipline, he ejaculated ‘What? Me destroy my cars, my lorries!’ On these vehicles Geoff had laboured through days and nights of the long rigours of winter and the rains of spring, to keep them in the pink of perfection on the road. The shock of the order was to him as to a father told to ill-treat his children.2
Second Lt Appleyard followed his orders. Then, on foot, he led his men into the Dunkirk perimeter. On 30 May, that perimeter stretched from Mardyck, 5 miles west of Dunkirk’s west mole, to Nieuport Bains 23 miles to the east and inland to a depth of 6 miles. Three days later those 23 miles of British-held shoreline had shrunk to a perimeter just 10 miles long and, at its maximum, 4 miles wide. Amidst the chaos of the evacuation from Dunkirk we do not know exactly where or when Appleyard and his men entered the perimeter down roads lined with wrecked vehicles, spilled stores and guns of every description as they straggled down to the beach in the hope of possible evacuation. But we do know from contemporary accounts that, by then, the once-pleasant summer resort that held fond memories for thousands of European holiday-makers had descended into a vision of Hell itself. More than a thousand of its civilians were dead, many lying bloated in the heat, disfigured and stinking in their own streets. Under incessant German shelling, hundreds of homes and municipal buildings had been shredded and blasted into ruin. One French officer wrote about entering Dunkirk:
Entire columns of soldiers have been annihilated by the bombardment. Not far from Bastion 32 lay a line of corpses who had fallen on top of each other. It was as if a gust of wind had blown over a row of wooden soldiers. The dark road was so full of obstructions that it was impossible to avoid some of the corpses, which were run over by my car.3
Now, shattered glass crunched under hob-nailed boots; bricks, piles of rubble and tangled telephone wire lay everywhere, impeding progress. There was no electric street light or running water, the town was lit at night by the lurid flickering glow of many fires, the streets were thick with the cloying, throat-greasing, back-of-the-mouth taste of death and burning oil that drifted in on the wind from the storage tanks to the west of the town. Another French officer observed approaching the west mole:
We walk along the beach which is obstructed by isolated soldiers, cars, English cannons, dead men and horses … This suburb is sinister. It is completely ruined, and burned, with more dead horses and unimaginable disorder. None of the cars have tyres anymore; they have been taken and used as lifebelts.4
No 3 Brigade’s headquarters was moved to the beach at Bray Dunes just inside the eastern perimeter on 31 May. The unit’s war diarist recorded:
The scenery provided a … picture of th
e abomination of desolation. Ruined and burnt out houses … salt water spreading everywhere, vehicles abandoned, many of them charred relics of twisted metal on the roadside and overturned in the ditches. Light tanks and guns poking up out of the floods. Horses dead or dying from want of water. Here and there civilian or French army corpses lying in the open. An unforgettable spectacle.5
A few days later a German Officer would concur as he reviewed the abandoned beaches after the last grey British warship had slid back over the horizon:
It’s a complete mess. There are guns everywhere as well as countless vehicles, corpses, wounded men and dead horses. The heat makes the whole place stink. Dunkirk itself has been completely destroyed. There are lots of fires burning … We moved to Coxyde Bains by the beach [4 miles west of Nieuport] but we cannot swim since the water is full of oil from the sunk ships, and is also full of corpses … There are tens of thousands of cars, tanks, ammunition cases, guns and items of clothing.6
Above all, Dunkirk was, as it had always been, a place of beaches and sand dunes but with this difference: now it was also a place of patient and sometimes not-so-patient evacuation where long black lines of soldiers, three or four abreast, waited their turn for salvation. Weary, thirsty men were standing up to their chests in water or queuing for hours on life-saving piers of lorries: these had been driven out into the sea, lashed together with their tyres shot out, filled with sand and then topped off with planks to provide a shallow-water jetty for the heroic ‘little ships’ that had put out from a dozen English ports to ferry what remained of the BEF to deeper-draught vessels waiting offshore. Others, crammed with troops, sailed straight for England. German aircraft and artillery had bombed the beaches incessantly, lobbing bomb and shell into the packed clusters of waiting troops. They could hardly miss. Many men had died there on the beaches within sight of rescue. But if there was a third miracle, it was that the beaches at Dunkirk were soft. Many bombs and shells had simply buried themselves deep in the sand before exploding.