Dunkirk 1940

by Tim Lynch

  After a fitful night’s sleep, Coster was sent out again the next morning:

  Under a hot, cloudless sky lay a wide field of high grass, simply covered with the English dead and wounded, and wounded and dead cattle. The British boys had been massacred by the tanks, as they had no artillery, only a few light machine guns to supplement their rifles – about as effective against a tank’s armour as a pea-shooter. Their only hope had been to score a lucky hit through a gun slit. Here as last night we didn’t find a single dead or wounded German. Out of possibly 300 British, we picked up maybe 25 or 30. The rest had all been killed. Many of the wounded had been run down by tanks, their bodies flattened like pancakes. Others, caught by the cross machine-gun fire of the encircling tanks, had been almost cut in two before they fell. Every fourth or fifth bullet from these guns is a tracer which burns through the body like a white-hot poker. It was hard to locate all the wounded in the high grass; the hot sun was overhead when we got the last of them up, and I don’t have to remind you what that means in a battlefield.

  The work of recovering the Sussex’s dead and wounded continued for days. Coster would particularly remember the behaviour of Captain George Cook of HQ Company who had lain on the field for two days before being found. Despite several wounds to his arm he walked himself to the operating theatre, passing a group of French soldiers on the way. Hearing the French complaining about the war, the lack of facilities and the lack of food available in the makeshift hospital, an exasperated Cook asked Coster ‘What are we expected to do – sail our English fleet right up the bloody Seine to cheer these chaps up?’

  2100–2200hrs

  The Dukes’ trains began their slow journey back along the track at 2120hrs with enthusiastic volunteers working the second engine. With two trains coupled together, the strain on the couplings was enormous and there were frequent breaks. Colonel Llewellyn would recall how the couplings would then be repaired only for the sudden jerking movement of the train to break another almost immediately and that they could move only at a snail’s pace, all the while very much aware of how vulnerable they were. As darkness fell, the risk of air attack lessened but progress remained slow. The lack of water and the incline they were attempting to reverse up threatened to burn out one engine and the fires had to be drawn, leaving just one engine to pull the whole train. Then, close to the crossing point of St Marc, another sudden jerk ripped the floor of the mess truck out completely, dumping the passengers and their kit onto the tracks. The line ahead was blocked by the wrecks of trains hit by bombing and others that had run into the back of the bombed trains. This was the end of the line. It was midnight.

  2200–2359hrs

  12th Division’s last two battalions, 2/6th East Surreys and 4th Buffs, had been ordered by Arras to move from Rouen to Montreuil where they were to protect GHQ at their planned new location but reached the Somme too late to get across. Instead they reported to 12th Division at 1900hrs and were sent to guard the crossing of the Bresle, the next river south of the Somme. Soon afterwards they were joined by some light anti-aircraft guns which had escaped from Abbeville airfield and had crossed the river at Port le Grand. By late that night, they were the only planned positions holding the northern flank of the Lines of Communication.

  At Amiens, Lieutenant Sevenoak and his platoon emerged from their thicket and began to trudge south, hoping to reach British lines below the Somme.

  Around Ficheux, stragglers made their way back towards Arras, among them Private Thomas Dabner. Dabner would be captured the next day and ordered to drive a truck filled with wounded men at the rear of a German convoy. That night, seizing his chance, he skidded around a road junction and drove off at speed, later delivering the wounded to a British hospital.

  At Doullens, Brigadier Roupell and his staff were picking their way through the woods to evade their attackers. A German patrol had reached brigade HQ early in the evening and had been held back by a single sentry, but it was now a matter of personal survival for what remained of 36 Brigade.

  To the north, 137 Brigade HQ and the 2/5th West Yorkshires steamed on towards Boulogne whilst the KOYLIs prepared to begin the long walk back to Dieppe and the Dukes set up all round defence, now at least with some idea where they were thanks to a copy of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide to Central Europe donated by a officer’s batman.

  Coster noted the comment of one of his patients when asked about the German panzer columns; ‘Beautiful to watch, but terrible to receive.’ In the last eighteen hours, the untrained men of the digging divisions had had their first taste of combat and had been slaughtered. ‘Not even during the murderous engagements on the Somme or at Passchendaele’, wrote Basil Karslake of the loss of the Royal Sussex, ‘had any unit suffered such casualties.’31 Accurate figures are hard to come by. The dates of death of many casualties could only be estimated later as sometime in May or even June. Some died of wounds days or even weeks later, others in captivity later in the war. The best estimates suggest that around 131 men of the 7th Royal Sussex are known to be buried in Commonwealth War Graves, along with a possible further 38 men marked as unknown who may well be linked to the Amiens action. What is known is that 701 men were embarked on the train and only 70 could later be accounted for when the battalion regrouped. For the 6th West Kents, 75 men returned to England, 503 men were posted as missing.32 Of the Buffs, 80 got back, leaving behind 525 of their comrades.33

  British POW after the battle. The German caption simply says he is ‘a survivor’.

  A makeshift cemetery at the Prunier Farm for casualties of the Ficheux battle.

  German troops in the ruins of Amiens.

  Elsewhere, 70 men of 7RWK under Captain Newbury reached Boulogne. They and the 50 men of the rear party left in Rouen were all that could be found. Of the Tyneside Scottish, over 100 men were known to have died in the fighting along with 50 of the attached 10DLI company and an unknown number of the RAOC and AMPC troops – around 450 men of the battalion were lost. Of 35 Brigade’s 2,400 men, almost half were lost – 1,234 made it to Rouen. By midnight, 12th Division had been destroyed as a formation; 23rd Division had lost one of its two brigades and 46th Division had been scattered across France, all cohesion lost. In contrast, the BEF’s fighting in Belgium over the past ten days had cost the entire force some 500 men.

  They had achieved all that had been expected of them – although that wasn’t much – and had bought a few hours for Gort to strengthen his southern flanks. For the Germans, the resistance they met was both surprising and pathetic, their histories referring almost sadly to what they called ‘the children’s division’. Clearing the field at Amiens, Coster noted how German troops responded sympathetically to the wounded. ‘“Very brave,” one of the Germans remarked to me, “but very, very stupid.”’

  NOTES

  1 Coilliot, A. Mai 1940: Un Mois Pas Comme Les Autres Arras 1980 p68. As Coilliot explains, the date of death for these men is given as 23 May but this is almost certainly the day of discovery. German war diaries show that 7 Panzer Division were in this area at 0500hrs on the 20th and firmly in occupation by the 23rd. No offensive Allied action took place in this area after 21 May.

  2 Harder Than Hammers. See also Rissik, The DLI at War

  3 Blaxland p127

  4 Ibid p119

  5 Ellis, The War in France and Flanders p80

  6 Rolf Hertenstein, Interview with Mulcahy, R. ‘Blitzkreig’s Beginnings’ in World War II magazine March 2006 p55

  7 Coilliot p72

  8 Accounts supplied by Adrian Noble, whose father, Lieutenant Noble, served with 1TS

  9 Harder than Hammers, p15

  10 Archivist and Librarians’ General Series 1200/21(B), pp113–114. W.D./B.E.F./131/7/E, 70th Bde., May. Quoted in Ellis p79

  11 War Diary 7th Royal Sussex. WO167/837

  12 Blaxland p121

  13 Shaw, F. & J. We Remember Dunkirk Oxford 1997 p162

  14 Blaxland p122

  15 Ellis p80–81 notes that the ‘German Wa
r Diary says they met for the first time “English troops who fought tenaciously (a battalion of the Buffs) … The battle for Doullens claimed the whole attention of the troops. In spite of the use of numerous tanks it was only possible to break down their resistance after about two and a half hours.”’ Archivist and Librarians’ General Series. 1200/21(a), p32; A.L. 748; A.L. 2012. See also Glover p55.

  16 Coster, D.Q. Behind German Lines In Readers’ Digest, November 1940

  17 Glover, p56

  18 Martineau, GD. A History of the Royal Sussex Regiment Chichester 1953 p232

  19 Barclay, History of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment p250

  20 Flowers. Unpublished account

  21 Barclay p201

  22 Summary of operations by units of 12 Division May – June 1940 WO 197/98

  23 War Diary 7th Royal Sussex. WO167/837

  24 Summary of operations by units of 12 Division May – June 1940 WO 197/98

  25 Barclay p250

  26 Report prepared at Oflag 1XA in August 1942. WO167/837

  27 Colonel Taylor’s report to HQ L of C dated 2 Jun 40. Gawthorpe papers IWM 78/44/1

  28 Ibid

  29 Cohen survived captivity despite having proudly stepped forward when German officials demanded to know if any Jews were held in his camp.

  30 Coster, op cit.

  31 Karslake, p67

  32 Chaplin, H.D. The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment 1920–1950 London, 1954 p32

  33 Knight, C.R.B. Historical Record of the Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) 3rd Foot 1 919–1948 London 1951 p76

  Chapter Nine

  ‘We happen to be going that way’

  Oblivious of the disaster behind them, 137 Brigade HQ and the West Yorkshires continued north via Etaples, Boulogne and Calais before turning inland to St Omer, which they reached in the early hours of the 21st after three nights aboard the train and having had very few rations during that entire period. ‘By this time,’ wrote Brigadier Gawthorpe:

  I felt it was desirable to be in touch with someone in authority instead of just in the hands of the French railway authorities, so I used the station telephone and got put through to Movement Control at GHQ … I gathered they were glad to hear of my whereabouts, but would have preferred to hear of an armoured brigade, which was being sought.1

  Instead of the hoped for orders, Gawthorpe was told to make for Hazebrouck and to get in touch with any British HQ he could find there. Leaving the train, he then drove by car through Merville and Estaires and finally found his way to 46th Divisional HQ at Sailly-sur-la-Lys, an area Gawthorpe was familiar with; like many of the older men he had fought there many years before.

  Gawthorpe found his Divisional Commander, General Curtis, in a reflective mood. He had been called forward earlier and ‘his breezy greeting on arrival at GHQ, Arras, from the base area – “Well, where’s the enemy? What am I to do?” – came like a gush of mountain air through the oppressive gloom of the vaults of St Vaast.’2 Even his enthusiasm, though, was blunted by the role assigned to him. He was now to command ‘Polforce’, another improvised unit presented with the task of defending the right flank of the BEF and preventing the enemy reaching Dunkirk. By now, Curtis seems to have been regretting his flamboyant claim to have a combat-ready division at his disposal and it is noticeable that the official record has since been amended to read that his mission was to ‘try defending’ the line of the La Bassee Canal between Aire and La Bassee itself. This line was eventually extended to reach Watten in the north – a distance of around 40 miles and at the moment all he had been given to achieve this was one battery of 25-pounder guns and ‘units of the division at present en route by rail to the Seclin area.’3 Since those elements sent to Seclin had already been taken into Macforce, Curtis was left with 137 Brigade and the KOYLIs – if they could be found. With just one battalion under command, Gawthorpe found he was to expect reinforcements when they could be located but for now he was to hold the line just north of Bethune from Hinges to St Omer – a distance of 24 miles and with no fewer than eighteen bridges. With communications between brigade and battalion HQs limited to what could be achieved by a few officers on borrowed bicycles, it was immediately clear that the best they would be able to do would be to deny them the bridges and force the Germans to mount a river crossing operation – a delay of a matter of hours.

  The West Yorkshires, in the meantime, had been taken off the train and told to take up defensive positions around the town with orders to hold it ‘to the last man, the last round.’4 Lieutenant-Colonel Pulleyn and the officers of the battalion began hastily making hand drawn copies of the only available map on scraps of paper to help organise the perimeter.5 It was with some relief that they now found themselves told to reboard the train and head for Hazebrouck and on to Bethune where they arrived at 1500hrs to face their next problem. The battalion stores amounted to some seventeen tons of equipment but in the chaos behind them the battalion transport had been cut off and they had just two small trucks with which to shift it. Taking only the essentials and pausing to take cake, tinned fruit and cigarettes from an abandoned NAAFI canteen they set out to a position in woods outside the town where almost immediately they came under air attack. It was met with a barrage of small arms fire and they were excited to see one bomber burst into flames. Although secretly they suspected a nearby anti-aircraft gun had scored the hit, several riflemen claimed it for themselves.

  At 1700hrs the battalion received orders to take up a defensive position covering 6 miles of the La Bassee Canal between Hinges just outside Bethune and the Lillers–St Venant road bridge. Colonel Pulleyn and his second-in-command Major Parks set out at once for the village of Robecq leaving orders for Captain Dunscombe-Anderson and their French liaison officer, M. Taupin to bring the battalion to the village later. After a confused night march, HQ and two rifle companies reached their position just after midnight but their two other companies got lost and wandered into Calonne, 2 miles away. It was not until dawn that they finally found the battalion again.

  Their front now covered two main roads and several smaller bridges over the canal, all crammed with refugees. The canal itself was filled with French and Dutch barges and Gawthorpe considered what to do about them. Permission to attempt to burn the wooden boats was denied – in any case they would not be fully destroyed that way while they were in the water and there were not enough explosives available for a more thorough job. A further problem lay in the fact that the metal barges only had to sink a matter of 2 or 3 feet before settling on the bottom of the canal and forming pontoons for any attacker to cross. The only solution, it seemed, was to keep them moving and to prevent any tying up side by side and effectively bridging the canal. Having been allocated just two military policemen on motorcycles for the entire area, Gawthorpe realised that traffic control was beyond them and used them instead as dispatch riders, sending out infantry patrols to try to keep the canal as clear as possible.

  By the evening of the 21st Gawthorpe was painfully aware that the West Yorkshires were desperately short of weapons and that further north several bridges along his sector were unguarded except for small parties of Royal Engineers preparing them for demolition. Promised that more troops were on the way, he was able to gather together a small force of experienced men from the leave transit camp at Don and these ‘Don details’ were quickly fed into the line to plug the many gaps.

  The 22nd was spent putting the canal line into a state of defence as GHQ moved to the Hazebrouck area with the news that more troops from the regular divisions were on their way. The canal line was the first of many waterways between La Bassee and Dunkirk and only around St Omer was there a direct route that might allow the panzers to strike. Three lorry loads of anti-tank mines had been sent out and all the bridges prepared for demolition. Armoured support had been promised for the next day and French troops were arriving to take over. Better news came with the arrival that evening of four French 75mm guns under Lieutenant Vibert and a company o
f Renault R35 light tanks belonging to the 9eme Bataillon de Chars de Combat (9th BCC or Combat Tank Battalion). Each carrying a death’s head badge modelled on that of the German hussars who had burnt down the family farm of its commander, Colonel Gauthier in 1914, the tank battalion had also had a confusing war having been sent north from St Omer to try to link with the Dutch at Breda and had been directed to the North Sea coast at Ijzendijke on the 17th before turning back south. They had been south of Ostend by the 20th and had arrived in the Lillers area late on the 21st before being dispersed around Bethune. Elements of the 2nd Company under Lieutenat Braillon had been assigned the Robecq region but were still under the command of the local French HQ and expected to head north again the next day.6 Like the British, the French were now improvising forces. General Tarrit of 1e DINA (Division d’infanterie Nord-Africaines), whose men had been among the very few to hold their ground at Sedan, was now in command of ‘Groupement Tarrit’ with his Moroccan and Algerian riflemen taking position between the village of Cuinchy and the West Yorkshires’ flank at Robecq. They were supported by a small number of guns and elements of 22eme BCC, also equipped with R35 light tanks. Commandant St Leger made a reconnaissance with Captain Dunscombe-Anderson to see how the posts could be strengthened.7

  Map of the Canal Line sketched by Brigadier Gawthorpe.

  As Gawthorpe struggled to fill the gaping voids in his defence line, the German advance had passed to the south of Arras and was swinging northwards. Heading straight towards him were three heavily armed divisions – the Wehrmacht’s 3rd Panzer Division and two SS formations, the SS-Verfugungsdivision (SS-VT – literally ‘Special Reserve Troops’ and later renamed the ‘Das Reich’ Panzer Division) and the SS-Totenkopf (Death’s Head). Unlike the SS-VT, the Totenkopf had not been raised as a military unit but as a police unit to provide concentration camp guards, and had already earned the distrust of their Wehrmacht colleagues for their thuggish behaviour in Poland – instead of hunting down resistance in the countryside as ordered they had spent their time swaggering around the towns bullying Jews. Under their fanatical commander, Theodor Eicke, recruits had been required to renounce their religion and swear loyalty only to the Führer and were well versed in Nazi ideology. Following much political manoeuvring, Eicke had had his unit assigned combat duties after a winter of intensive military training. Held in reserve during the first attacks, the Totenkopf were humiliated by rumours – fuelled by Rommel and his men – that the SS had turned and run in their first encounter with British tanks at Arras. Their response had been to murder 92 civilians in the town of Aubigny-en-Artois and another 45 in the villages of Vandelicourt and Berles-Montchel, both acts committed early on 22 May as they headed towards the canal line.