Dunkirk 1940

by Tim Lynch

  By now, the Dukes had taken up position on the coast road at Veules-les-Roses with their left flank on the coast and the 4th Seaforths on their right on the Blossvale-Bourg-Dun road. As the remainder of the troops arrived, a thin screen formed around St Valery, its sides 11 miles apart. An hour after the message, the first bombs fell on Veules-les-Roses. It was a hot day and the strain of the operation was beginning to show. The men were tired and struggled to stay awake as they lay in their positions. At 1630hrs, a brigade conference took place with half a dozen German tanks visible just two fields away. Taylor was told that the division was now surrounded and that the intention was to evacuate across the beach as soon as the navy could get there. All vehicles were to be destroyed along with any spare stores.

  The battalion was deployed with ‘Y’ Company on the right, ‘W’ Company in the centre and ‘Z’ Company on the left with ‘X’ Company held in support near Battalion Headquarters in a sunken road on the outskirts of Veules-les-Roses. Heavy small arms fire began against ‘Z’ Company at about 1700hrs and was followed by a mortar barrage. At 1800hrs, a group of up to 40 tanks was spotted approaching along the main Dieppe road. Although they had no artillery or heavy machine gun support, the Dukes had been given two 20mm anti-tank guns which managed to get off one shot each before being destroyed.13 Despite this, ‘Z’ Company were able to stop five or six tanks and the rest pulled back. During the attack, Captain R.H. Royds, commanding ‘Y’ Company, was hit three times just above the knee and had his arm broken by a bomb splinter but continued in command until two NCOs ‘almost forcibly dressed his arm’. Managing to hide the relatively light leg injuries he was able to direct his men back to Veules after dark and was later prevented by the chaplain from venturing out to try to locate any missing men.

  St Valery.

  Sketch map of the St Valery area.

  Elsewhere, Private L. Smith’s section was pinned down by an LMG that had dismounted from the cover of a tank. Armed with a rifle and bayonet, Smith set out to find it. He failed, but as his Company Commander put it, ‘it may be assumed that the gun crew retired rather than face cold steel.’ In any case, there was no more fire aimed at his position. Lance Corporal Bill Gamble, in position at a roadblock, attempted to hold position against a tank attack with a Boys rifle until he was told that the battalion’s entire supply of ammunition was gone. All across the battalion front clerks and cooks were acting as runners under fire and refusing to leave their comrades. In close fighting, Lance Sergeant J. Illingworth had killed several enemy soldiers when he was hit in the mouth by a spent bullet which broke his jaw and smashed his teeth into his mouth.14 He refused to be evacuated and was later found trying to hide his injuries when he disembarked at Southampton. But despite their courage the end was coming.

  Air activity had increased and Colonel Taylor refers to ‘fireworks’ being dropped. These are described as sounding like firecrackers and imitating the noise of heavy gunfire up to twenty minutes after the aircraft had passed over; the Dukes assumed that it was to undermine morale but in all likelihood it appears that what seemed to be the sound of gunfire behind them may well have been simply that, rather than any special weapon. In any case, only two casualties are attributed to ‘cracker bombs’, both suffering slight burns.

  The basics of the evacuation of St Valery.

  At 1800hrs, Captain Hurst, the battalion’s adjutant, reported a ‘dogfight’ overhead but noticed that none of the aircraft wore British markings and that a Henschel spotter aircraft flew over immediately and identified positions where troops had emerged to watch the air battle. Despite a few more probing attacks, Hurst says that by around 1900hrs, the battalion realised ‘its leg was being pulled’ and withdrew as many reserves as possible back to the sunken road. Crossing the open field towards the road, Arnold Straw came under fire and threw himself to the ground, only to find his knee landing in a pile of what he thought must be human excrement. Unpleasant, but the least of his worries. Once in the sunken road, most fire passed over the heads of the young men who were experiencing combat for the first time. Unable to fight back, many found this the hardest time of all.

  Shortly after 2045hrs, the OC of HQ Company was organising listening posts when he saw a red flare fired in front of the forward positions. This was followed by three green flares around ten minutes later and immediately a heavy mortar barrage fell around him. Then, at 2110hrs, a fire so intense that one survivor likened it to ‘somebody using a watering cart’ opened up. Taking reports from company commanders, Hurst estimated up to 200 AFVs approaching. ‘The outstanding feature of the German attack,’ wrote one company officer ‘was the incredible length of time such an enormous fire production can be maintained from AFVs. This gives rise to speculation as to the ammn position.’15

  Among Peter Walker’s company, sheltering in woods alongside ‘Y’ Company’s position, the greatest number of wounds were caused by splinters from the shells as they burst among the trees, and minor wounds when the explosions blew chips off the trees with enough force to penetrate the skin. With the attack developing to their left and largely out of range, Walker’s group took shelter in a slit trench. After days without sleep, one by one they drifted off to sleep, waking at dawn to find their position had been overrun. With further resistance useless, Walker and his friend John Marsland, together with Platoon Sergeant Major Douggie Harper and Captain Warton of ‘Y’ Company surrendered.16

  Meanwhile, Colonel Taylor had been instructed to wait until darkness before finally giving orders for the battalion to make a break, telling them to withdraw to the beach near St Valery in small parties and wishing them Godspeed. One by one, sections began to pull back. Arnold Straw recalls being briefed by the padre before being handed over to the care of Lance Corporals Bill Gamble and Draper, both Sheffield men with previous military experience in India. Having had a chance to get his bearings, Gamble time and again acted as guide through the shattered streets and scattered rose petals of the burning Veules and towards the harbour where the men could see a destroyer standing off shore. With fires all around, the men ran the gauntlet across brightly lit streets where they made perfect targets for any German marksmen but fortunately few enemy patrols had yet penetrated this far. Even as Battalion HQ gathered its equipment, tanks were closing in on the sunken road. Only the lightly wounded stood a chance of escape; those too badly hurt to walk were left in the care of the padre to await capture.

  Straw and his party reached the beach and scraped a shallow trench but despite their exhaustion were too tense to sleep. To the west, the men could see the flames of St Valery and hear the firing still going on there. Behind them the battle continued late into the night. Late in the evening, Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant Oakes was approached by the commander of a French artillery unit behind the Dukes’ lines. He explained that enemy machine gunners were working their way around the seaward side and asked for help to dislodge them. Despite being under treatment for varicose ulcers contracted in the retreat from Abbeville, Oakes gathered a mixed force of 28 batmen, cooks and store men and led them in a counterattack lasting over an hour, securing the left flank and covering the retreat.

  On the cliff tops above the beach, other Dukes were still trying to get away from the relentless onslaught. Cut off from the town and access to the beach, Company Quartermaster John Smith of the 4th Seaforths was also attempting to escape through the Dukes’ positions that night. Like many others, he was unable to reach the town and desperately sought a way to climb down the cliffs instead. He unloaded a stock of army blankets from a truck and began knotting them together, strengthened them using rifle slings and secured one end to a three-ton truck:

  We had no idea if the first rope had hit the bottom, and the first few who volunteered to go down didn’t know where they were in the dark. Of the first twelve, I think seven were killed. One shouted up ‘we need more length at the bottom.’ So we passed more rifle slings to the boys who were going down, and they tied them until they eventually ma
de the ground. Quite a number got down that way along with me.17

  The route was still in use seven hours later in broad daylight.18 Private Jukes of the DWR would later report that he had climbed down ‘a rope made of Frenchmens’ belts.’19

  All night the gathering groups of survivors were joined by men walking along the beach from St Valery. Captain Derek Lang of the 4th Camerons recalled walking along the foot of the cliffs:

  Evidently some of the troops had tried to descend the three hundred foot high cliffs on ropes. Few could have succeeded judging by the smashed bodies lying on the beach, while a hundred and fifty feet above we could see the frayed ends of their broken ropes.20

  In the early morning mist, ships could be seen off shore but whether they were Allied or German was unclear. Unable to bear the wait, Arnold Straw’s friend Doug Dart decided to find out. Stripping to his underwear, he set out to swim to the nearest ship, over half a mile away, returning some time later with the good news. The evacuation was on.

  Troops retreat past a crater caused by the demolition of a roadway.

  As dawn broke, the men on the beach faced a new menace. German infantry had reached the cliff tops and were firing down on them. Men sheltered in sea caves at the foot of the cliffs but had to race across the beach under fire to reach the small boats coming to collect them. For the crews of some of these ships, the St Valery operation was considered to be far worse than Dunkirk had been. Already that morning, the ship they had sailed to France aboard – SS Bruges – had been sunk by bombers off Le Havre as it waited for the division to reach that port. A queue formed on the nearby jetty and on the beach as naval gunfire rained in to suppress the German positions. As fire came in, the lines scattered, only to reform as soon as the attack passed. Some decided to stay put rather than risk losing their place and stood patiently in the water as bullets whistled around them.

  At sea, Arnold Straw was unceremoniously dragged aboard a boat by a Canadian sailor and taken to the steamship Princess Maud. He had just got below deck when the ship was hit by a shell just above the waterline. With the hole plugged with mattresses and sealed with a tarpaulin, the ship headed home. He was, he found out later, lucky. Many ships had sailed direct to Cherbourg and unloaded men there to wait for days to be taken home.

  St Valery after the battle.

  British POWs in St Valery.

  Lying on the beach, already wounded in the arm and chest, Lance Corporal Dickinson suddenly felt a powerful ‘kick in the pants’. A few coins in his hip pocket had just stopped a German bullet which hit with enough force to imprint the design of one coin on the face of another. Dickinson would not make his escape. Nor would Bandmaster Doyle. His horse turned loose, Doyle volunteered to stay with the wounded as the Germans closed in. Colonel Taylor had not been seen since he left his HQ and was later reported captured. Captain Gerrard, who had led the rescue of the instruments, was dead. The battalion’s war was already over.

  NOTES

  1 Barclay p252

  2 War Diary 2/7th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment WO167/737

  3 Beauman p128

  4 Barclay p253

  5 Glover p168

  6 Ellis p283

  7 Ibid p283–5

  8 Ibid p285

  9 See Glover p173 and Blaxland p367

  10 Jackson, J. The Fall of France 2003 p103

  11 Ellis p285

  12 Barclay p254

  13 Ibid p254

  14 Accounts taken from After Action Report signed by Major Hirst 26 June 1940. Gawthorpe Papers IWM 78/44/1

  15 Ibid

  16 Peter Walker account accessed at www.dwr.org.uk

  17 Saul, D. Churchill’s Sacrifice p219

  18 Williams, D. The New Contemptibles London 1940 p77

  19 Private Jukes’ statement. WO361/45

  20 Lang, D. Return to St Valery London 1989 p33

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Non-swimmers stay back!’

  Like their counterparts in the 2/7th, the men of the 2/6th Dukes began their long march back down the railway lines on the morning of 21 May. Lieutenant-Colonel Llewellyn had told his officers that ‘if the men were to be … moved at all, they would have to do it on their feet, and soon.’1 A foraging party had been sent out by truck to try to establish contact with any higher formation and to find food supplies but Llewellyn and Taylor had agreed that they could not stay put. Laden with everything they could carry, with no maps or even an idea of the distances to be covered, the lead company set out to navigate by the sun, keeping the railway line on their right as far as possible.

  It was an impossible task. With German aircraft overhead constantly, the battalion moved into the cover of nearby woods. The countryside was described as ‘so complicated’ that contact between companies and platoons was lost, re-established, lost again until it seemed a hopeless task to try to keep the men together. Two platoons of the rearguard company went out to reconnoitre a village and could not find their way back to the main body. As they continued, Llewellyn’s men found the commanding officer and ‘ten very weary men’ of the 2/7th Queen’s Regiment who reported having spoken to Colonel Taylor’s battalion and that they had just evaded tanks nearby. Llewellyn invited them to join him but the Queen’s CO declined, saying he ‘wished to take a straight line’.2 Oddly, Llewellyn doesn’t appear to have enquired what was meant by this and instead set out again on his by now chaotic cross country march.

  At one point, with his band reduced to just 20 men, Llewellyn stopped to collect stragglers and after a while had increased his force to around 100. Behind him, ‘D’ Company had taken up position to guard the flanks from the threat of attack from the Abbeville–Rouen road. As they pressed on, the numbers fluctuated as Dukes were lost but stragglers from other units joined until, tired and thirsty, they reached Gamaches. There, two dispatch riders from the Grenadier Guards were waiting with orders for any units arriving to head for a line between Dieppe–Neufchatel. Congratulating himself on ‘anticipating these orders to the letter’,3 Llewellyn was disappointed to read that no transport would be available. At his current speed, it would take two days to cover the 25 miles to Dieppe.

  By early afternoon, the party had reached Guerville but by now the heat was beginning to affect several men. No food was available and the water supply was found to be contaminated. Two miles further on a special halt had to be called to treat several men who had collapsed. In the distance, troops could be seen and these proved to be a French machine gun section with horse-drawn guns heading in the direction of the nearby village of Melleville. A reconnaissance party made contact and heard from them that Gamaches was now in German hands. The Dukes’ rearguard moved into Melleville at around 2030hrs and was fed by the inhabitants with eggs and milk but there was no bread to be had. An hour later, they pushed on towards Ville de Bas and found an excellent defensive position across the Fleuve L’Yeres stream at Val du Roi late that night. Around midnight, the three officers and 62 men still in contact with the CO settled down in barns as torrential rain began outside.

  The scattered companies had made varying degrees of progress that afternoon. ‘A’ Company had reached a wood near Lemesnil and would be on their way again by 0300hrs the next morning. ‘B’ Company had strayed from the line of withdrawal and were sheltering in the Haute Forêt d’Eu. ‘C’ Company pushed on through the night, marching from the vicinity of Eu to Criel in six hours – a distance of less than 10 miles – and resting for just five hours before setting out again. HQ Company were at Grandcourt, estimated to be about two hours ahead of the rearguard.

  In fact, setting out at 0600hrs, it took the rearguard three hours to reach Grandcourt, finding the place cleared of any food supplies after refugees had passed through ‘like a plague of locusts’. By 1400hrs progress had dropped to around one mile per hour. Any food supplies left were pooled to provide a hot meal which restored spirits, as did the arrival of Lieutenants Lawson and Smith with a truck filled with beef, biscuits, canned fruit and cigarette
s after a successful foraging operation. They also brought news of the other companies and that the Germans were at Eu. That night, at Bethencourt, still more stragglers arrived and guards that night were drawn from the 2/6th, the 2/7th Queens and Engineers.

  As the companies reached the British line, they immediately found themselves co-opted for other tasks. ‘A’ and ‘B’ Companies arrived at Neufchatel and were put to work loading heavy weapon ammunition supplies from the St Martin dump and digging positions to defend the stores not yet moved, constantly subject to air alerts and grabbing whatever sleep they could. When HQ Company arrived, 33 specialists were taken to join Vickforce and the remainder sent on to Rouen.

  ‘D’ Company, still acting as rearguard, was yet to reach the relative safety of Neufchatel. They had woken at 0400hrs to hear machine gun and rifle fire from the direction of Les Vieuxifs. Setting out an hour later, they were met at Envermeu by dispatch riders with the welcome news that transport was on its way from Dieppe to meet them. Llewellyn perched on the back of one of the motorcycles and went into Dieppe for orders. On 24 May, a week after setting out on their journey and three days after being stranded, the last of the Dukes were finally back under British command.

  That night, reports began to filter in of German patrols just north of the Neufchatel line but no attack developed. The next day saw air raids over Dieppe but again, no ground attack came. On the 25th, Llewellyn was told to take the 2/6th and the attached men of the Queens to St Etienne du Rouvray, setting out from Rouxmesnil junction after dark. In pouring rain and with an air raid in progress behind them, the troops began the five-mile march past the aerodrome where damaged planes lay on the grass and through a wood where two young civilians on bicycles were seen acting suspiciously at a crossroads and narrowly escaped capture. A low flying plane failed to spot the battalion but rifle fire erupted around them as other units opened up on it.