by Sean Longden
Many soldiers found their flight hampered by the lost and leaderless, some of whom – both British and French – seemed to have given up all hope of escape. Some towns seemed to be crowded with drunken gangs, all fully armed and many ill-disposed towards any displays of authority. One soldier recalled being sent into a town to work as a security guard at a gentlemen’s club. The owners were prepared to pay armed British soldiers to prevent intrusions by unwanted elements. The manager had come to the arrangement with a sergeant at the local British base, who provided guards in exchange for payment. The same soldier later found himself asked to escort a bus driven by a nun, carrying girls from a Catholic boarding school from Rouen to Argentan.
Even those men who did their best to remain disciplined were caught up in the chaos. Most found that whatever money they had been carrying soon ran out. Those who were unwilling to steal food discovered that, in order to eat, they could offer their services to cafe-owners and do the washing up in return for a meal.
Food became the question on every man’s lips when he reached a base or checkpoint. When one man asked a sergeant where he could get food he was told to hold out his cap as a corporal dished out raisins by hand from a sack. Most resorted to the time-honoured military tradition of foraging. Effectively, that meant scrounging from civilians, searching abandoned farms, picking fruit from orchards and vegetables from fields or stealing. Some attempted to shoot rabbits, only to discover that the impact of a .303 bullet left little worth cooking. One group used their lorry as a battering ram to smash down the wall of a French Army store, only to discover their loot consisted of box after box of tinned baked beans.
Fred Goddard had originally been told to head for Cherbourg and he and his crewmates had set out across Normandy on foot to reach the port. Relieved to be moving westwards, they also knew the German guns were getting closer:
We never went as the crow flies – sometimes we had to double-back on ourselves ’cause the Germans had got in front of us. We just walked. One night we went into a farmhouse, but the French were very wary of us because lots of Germans had been infiltrated into France dressed as squaddies. But this one family took us in, they were really good to us – we’d only asked for water for a wash and a drink – but they gave us a meal. I think that was the start of the French resistance. The next day they took us down to the Seine in a van and set us on our way.
Although the four men walked for what seemed like days on end, they did get another opportunity for mechanized transport. Finding an abandoned French tank that appeared to still be in working order, they commandeered it and made their way in the direction of Le Havre. They were soon stopped by a French officer who, though perplexed to see the Englishmen driving a French tank, explained that they had no chance of reaching Le Havre. Instead, he told them, they should join with him in fighting a rearguard action on the banks of the Seine. They prepared positions beside a demolished bridge, joining with a mixed bag of British and French stragglers. Goddard’s crew checked their guns and waited:
The Germans came in from the east with lorries and infantry. They got to the river and we were firing at the lorries. I was surprised at how much firing there was from our side and quite a lot of damage was inflicted on them. They must have been prepared for a rearguard and for the bridge to be blown. They brought up several tanks to return fire. The next thing they were launching pontoon boats filled with infantry. Most of the rearguard were now retreating on foot. Yorkie gave the order to Bill to turn around and get moving. We headed away west. It would take the Germans some time to build a temporary bridge and to get their tanks across. That French officer had done a good job.5
It was not unusual for troops of all nationalities to get mixed up during the retreat. Despite the efforts of most men to remain in groups of fellow countrymen, inevitably the marching columns became mixed. Some men recalled being in groups that seemed to be filled with all nationalities. Despite their governments having surrendered, soldiers from the armies of Belgium and the Netherlands joined the British and French as they retreated. Rather than accept captivity they had elected to seek sanctuary in England, in the hope of rejoining their army if it re-formed. Also on the roads were soldiers from Czechoslovakia and Poland, men who had escaped from their homelands when the Nazis had occupied them. They had been formed into units by the French and, like the Belgians and Dutch, were looking for another base from which to continue the struggle for freedom. Soldiers whose earlier experience of war had been in the company of their fellow nationals were shocked to see so many different uniforms and hear so many languages as they headed west.
Making good their escape, Fred Goddard’s tank soon ran out of petrol and they were once more forced out on to the roads on foot. The alternative was to give up and go into captivity, a fate none of them relished:
We had no idea what was happening from day-to-day. What was going through my head? I don’t know. It’s surprising, I never thought about being killed. We kept off the main roads because of the refugees – and other soldiers of all nationalities were on the roads – but they were being machine-gunned by Stukas. So we walked through woods and over fields. We kept ourselves to ourselves, just the four of us, we’d decided to do that at the beginning. We washed and shaved in streams, fortunately it was June so the weather was warm. I was exhausted. But we kept our spirits up because the crew remained together. We were used to each other. But we got so tired – I was sleepwalking half the time! I was lucky, I had a couple of pairs of socks. Each day I’d wash one pair out in a stream, then hang them round my neck as we were walking, so as they’d dry. Changing me socks as often as I could really helped me. Also, we were still wearing our tank overalls, rather than battledress – it wasn’t very comfortable. Luckily we still had our greatcoats and wrapped ourselves up in them to sleep at night. We thought we’d get away at Cherbourg, back where we’d first landed in France, but the Germans got there before us.
The discovery that the Germans had advanced to Cherbourg came as a shock to them. At first they spotted a military policeman directing traffic on a road heading in the direction of the town. Lieutenant York observed the policeman through his binoculars and casually informed his crew that they were right, he was an MP, the only problem was that he was a German. There was nothing for it; they turned around and resigned themselves once more to finding an alternative port. Fortunately they discovered they were not the only troops heading away from Cherbourg: ‘That was the only time we got a lift, we were picked up by an army lorry. This bloke had been landed at Cherbourg but he’d only just got out before the Germans arrived.’ Gladly accepting a lift, Goddard and his mates climbed on board and were finally able to get some rest.
As the remnants of the BEF – some in fully functional units, others in ragged bands of stragglers, many more hitching lifts in any vehicle heading west – converged on France’s western ports, the final evacuations got under way. There was a sense of dreadful urgency in the need to escape. One anti-aircraft battery arrived at Brest pulling two guns behind a Ford tractor they had commandeered from a French farm. On 17 June the inevitable happened and the French capitulated, with Marshal Pétain broadcasting an appeal for the French to lay down their arms while an armistice was negotiated with the victorious Germans. This was the culmination of the process of collapse that had been unfolding before the British politicians and generals. Britain’s abandonment of the planned Breton Redoubt and the removal of the BEF from French command were the result of the unshakable belief that France would capitulate. For all the later French complaints about betrayal, the British action had saved 160,000 men from captivity or death.
Despite the end of official Allied unity and the appeal for the French to surrender, many among the French forces continued to work alongside the British to complete the evacuation. At Brest the French attempted to form two defensive lines, the first in an arc 100 miles (thirty kilometres) from the port, the second forty miles (twelve kilometres) away. The British reached the port in large
numbers and were soon evacuated, with most having safely departed by 17 June. As in the other evacuations, vast amounts of material had to be abandoned in order to make space on board ships to carry the men. One artillery officer, sent ahead by his commanding officer to find out about arrangements for evacuation, was told they should destroy all their weapons and then proceed into the port by lorry. They were forced to destroy the six 3.7-inch heavy anti-aircraft guns and four Bofors guns that they had lovingly towed all the way from the Pas de Calais. The officer who gave the order was blunt, there was no time to be sentimental, if they did not destroy the guns and arrive in the port ready to embark by nine that evening, they would most likely end up as prisoners of war. When the artillery officer protested that they had not pulled the guns 400 miles only to blow them up, he was given written orders.
By the morning of the 18th over 28,000 British and Allied troops had disembarked in English ports. The operation was carried out despite the attentions of the Luftwaffe, who endeavoured to mine the waters around Brest. Hard-working French minesweepers kept the channels open, allowing the final ships – including those carrying the French gold reserves – to escape. With the evacuation complete, Royal Navy shore parties began the destruction of essential port facilities and the deliberate firing of the remaining stocks of petrol, causing a spiralling plume of thick black to obscure the skies above the departing ships. The Germans entered the town on the evening of 19 June.
The situation at Brest was repeated at other ports in western France; 21,474 soldiers were rescued from St Malo, another 2,000 escaped from La Pallice and around 19,000 were picked up at smaller ports. However, the busiest evacuation port was St Nazaire from whose quaysides over 57,000 soldiers were evacuated. It was also the scene of the greatest disaster of the entire evacuation from France.
From the 16th onwards the port of St Nazaire became crammed with soldiers and civilians all hoping for a passage out of a country that was obviously on the brink of defeat. Even before the troops entered the town they were struck by the chaos. As the 17th Field Regiment Royal Artillery reached the outskirts of the town on 17 June they were given orders for the destruction of their vehicles. The vehicles were soon rendered unserviceable. However, they were told the guns should be retained and manhandled to the docks for embarkation. When they arrived at the quayside they were informed the guns could not be loaded and they too should be destroyed. Unable to wreck the guns effectively, the gunners left them on the quayside with just their dial sights removed.
Such were the scenes when the exhausted Fred Goddard and his mates arrived at the port. Outside the town they found field after field of British vehicles, all abandoned by the escaping troops. The confusion over what the Royal Navy could transport back to England prevented large numbers of vehicles and vast stocks of essential war materials from being rescued. Instead hundreds of brand-new vehicles and guns, and millions of rounds of desperately needed ammunition, were abandoned in France. After his return, one soldier wrote home: ‘don’t say anything about it. . . the papers don’t say anything about the cars and tanks which were left in France, it must have cost millions. But as I say, keep it dark, or I will get shot, and that’s not very pleasant is it?’6
As Fred Goddard passed the field of vehicles he watched some men break away from the column and defy orders to take motorcycles, deciding it would be more comfortable to ride into town rather than walk. Elsewhere soldiers fired rounds from anti-tank guns directly into the cylinder blocks of vehicles as a spectacular way of disabling them. Fred Goddard was by now content to walk the final few miles:
There were brand-new lorries and staff cars – but all we cared about was that as long as we got away we’d live to fight another day. That’s what actually happened! We lost Yorkie about five miles outside the port. We were sitting on this bank beside the road – I was changing my socks again – and some other officers were there. They said we were going to form up in threes and march into town. Of course that was only any good until the Stukas started up! So Yorkie was at the front of the column with the other officers. Then we lost Dusty as well. They were asking for volunteers to blow up and wreck all these vehicles outside the town. But they only wanted reservists, not regular soldiers. They wanted all the properly trained blokes to get home. It was a relief for me – I said to Dusty, ‘It’s a relief to get away from you.’ But then he actually got home before me and Bill did! But it was a tremendous sense of relief – thinking we might actually get away.
On the first day of the evacuation over 12,000 troops were evacuated and during the night vast amounts of stores were removed from the port, with the RAF patrolling the skies above. Yet in the days that followed the situation in St Nazaire became increasingly fraught, first as the French surrender was announced and then as visits by the Luftwaffe became increasingly frequent. As queues of anxious soldiers snaked their way along the quaysides – looking desperately out to sea for the small boats ferrying men out to the larger ships offshore – they were besieged by civilians hoping to secure a place for themselves on whatever vessel might be leaving.
Though this evacuation saved large numbers from death or captivity, there were other activities that were less heroic and were subsequently swept under the carpet, for they hardly showed the British Army in a positive light. One of those who later recorded his disgust at the behaviour of some of the soldiers was Sergeant S.D. Coates, an instructor from the army’s Small Arms School. It was not until more than sixty years had passed that he wrote of his experiences, believing it was a shameful episode of which he was not very proud and one which he believed should not be given much publicity.
Having left Chanzy barracks near Le Mans, Coates eventually reached the holiday resort of Pornichet, outside St Nazaire. There, attempts were made to organize the assembled stragglers into ad hoc battalions, with Coates put in charge of a platoon. On 15 June they were told to leave the camp as it was being evacuated. Coates soon became disillusioned with the behaviour of the British troops following the announcement of their impending departure: ‘large numbers rampaged through the camp, looting the NAAFI stores and anything else to hand and respirators were being discarded from their haversacks to make room for looted cigarettes, beer etc. It was a scene I had not imagined possible. I was appalled and disgusted.’7
At another depot near St Nazaire the soldiers discovered a train carrying cases of spirits, including army issue rum. Soon gangs of drunken men were seen running riot through the camp. It seemed their frustration with the defeat, retreat and chaos of the BEF was firing their fury. Angered by the failure to provide transport home, the mood of the drunks – mostly still fully armed – seemed set to get violent. It was only the quick thinking of one soldier that prevented a complete breakdown of discipline. Seeing an officer failing to control the crowds, he suggested they should set fire to the straw that had been used to pack the spirits in the wagons. The resulting fire spread quickly, consuming the first wagon then spreading to its neighbours. It had the desired effect of driving the drunks away from the spirits but had one unexpected result. The fire caught a wagon being used to transport ammunition, that soon began exploding, sending bullets whizzing across the railway yards, driving back the crowds.
The following day they marched to St Nazaire, the warm weather soon resulting in the column leaving greatcoats, blankets, equipment, helmets and even rifles in their wake. French civilians scavenged at the roadsides, picking up whatever the troops abandoned. A few, Coates included, marched in full kit. Exhausted, he kept marching, preferring the exertion of carrying the kit rather than the shame of abandoning it.
At St Nazaire the weather was glorious, with civilians strolling around watching as the troops queued to be ferried out by destroyers to the waiting passenger ships, the Georgic and HMT Lancastria. Despite how close salvation seemed to be, Coates continued to be shocked by the behaviour of the soldiers. As the air was rent by the noise of explosions, he watched the queuing troops flee in panic, knocking aside civili
ans as they ran for safety. Waiting for transit out to the Georgic, Coates watched as one woman was pushed aside and her child’s pram was sent crashing to the ground. He also saw British soldiers cowering on the malodorous floor of a urinal: ‘I think then I was almost ashamed of the uniform I wore.’8
From 5 a.m. on Monday the 17th, British troops began to load into the Lancastria. Among them was Charles Raybould, a corporal in the 2nd Sherwood Foresters. The Foresters had fought a desperate fifty-mile rearguard action, in which soldiers had abandoned their cumbersome belongings, such as greatcoats and blankets, leaving behind anything that weighed them down and delayed their flight. All they cared about was clinging on desperately to their weapons and ammunition, knowing they might be called to fight at any time. As they retreated it seemed that discipline had begun to disappear, with soldiers calling their NCOs by their Christian names and vice versa. One corporal was spotted irreverently saluting a pig as it trotted past the marching men. Men were answering back to the NCOs and, it seemed to Raybould, had started to display a civilian outlook as they realized they were getting closer to home.