There was danger behind as well as in front. A single rifle shot behind was followed by a shout of ‘Fifth column!’ After the battle was over, there would be many stories of mysterious gunmen appearing out of nowhere, some in German uniform, sniping at the defenders. They would reinforce the impression growing among many of the British troops that the French made unreliable allies. ‘B’ Company were deployed ahead on the far side of the railway bridge around an improvised road-block and facing down the Route de Boulogne. The Searchlights Bren teams reached their first-floor positions, smashed the windows and began to lay down supporting fire. Their eagerness and inexperience soon brought shouts of protest from the 60th on the far side of the bridge. Crouched in a doorway, Neave ‘could hear hoarse shouts: “F---ing well look where you’re shooting!”’16
In a lull in the fighting, he dodged across the boulevard to the corner of the Rue Edgar Quinet, a side street next to the bridge. From here he could see that the company’s position was critical and the weight of enemy fire seemed certain to break the defenders soon if they did not drop back. The situation seemed to improve a little when, at 4 p.m., one of the British cruiser tanks arrived at the railway bridge and fired two or three rounds towards the attackers. The German response was furious: ‘Tank shells and machine-gun bullets came thick and fast for twenty minutes. Ricochets off the walls and flying glass made my situation in the Rue Edgar Quinet … rather exposed … It was now without a sign of life, save for a young girl’s white face at a cellar grating. The wall which sheltered me had ragged gaps where mortar bombs had flung bricks into the street. I began to look for a safer position.’
He could see nothing but clouds of smoke and dust, and the enemy felt horribly close. The Searchlight men were firing through the lace curtains, bravely but inexpertly, endangering defenders as much as attackers. One of the Brens began to fire fitfully, then jammed. He was acutely conscious of his lack of training and his impotence, able only to observe and offer encouragement. The sun beat down and the air throbbed with the heat from burning buildings. His thirst became unbearable. He had to get something to drink. He decided to make a dash for the café. He waited for a lull in the firing and was about to run when he ‘felt a sharp, bruising pain in my left side. I collapsed to the pavement, my rifle clattering.’ He tried to get up and found that he could still walk.
He staggered across to his original destination, the café on the corner, and took shelter in the side street, gratefully accepting a large cognac from the proprietor. A bespectacled medical orderly appeared, opened Neave’s battledress and examined the wound. He pronounced him lucky – the bullet had passed half an inch from his heart. The orderly’s cheerfulness and inclination to ‘talk professionally about the condition of the wound’ grated on Neave’s nerves. His great fear was ‘that the Germans would break through in the next few minutes, that I should be left behind and captured’. He swore at the medic and ordered him to take him to the next street. There they were joined by a Frenchman and between them they walked him away.
There was no sign of a regimental aid post (RAP), and he knew the nearest hospital was a mile away. He was calmed by the arrival of a scout car carrying a young officer of the 60th, Michael Sinclair, who like him was captured and ended up in Colditz, where he was shot dead while trying to escape in 1944. Sinclair ‘smilingly drew my attention to a van flying the Red Cross’. The improvised ambulance, ‘smelling strongly of stale vegetables’, carried him at high speed back into the centre to the Pont Georges Cinq, the central of three spans that connected Calais-St-Pierre to Calais-Nord. They halted by a group of soldiers seeking directions to the 60th’s RAP, but no one knew its whereabouts and an argument broke out as to which of the three hospitals in town he should be taken to.
Lying in the back, listening to the confused voices, Neave ‘was suffering more from anger than pain’. He was still tortured by the thought that he might be captured. ‘My chief interest,’ he admitted frankly, ‘was in evacuation by sea to England.’ Eventually it was decided to take him to the Hôpital Militaire, a former convent only a few hundred yards away in the Rue Leveux, under the eastern wall of the Citadel. He was unloaded under the supervision of the 60th’s medical officer, Lieutenant A. F. Stallard, who after examination told him he had received a ‘penetrating flank wound’ that would require an operation. He was ‘carried, protesting, into the dark interior of the hospital where grinning French surgeons in white caps, and smoking Gauloise cigarettes, awaited me’.
Beyond the ramparts of Calais, great strategic events had conspired to cancel all hope of evacuation. Throughout the day, the realisation had penetrated the heads of those directing events in London that the BEF was facing extinction. Unless it could be saved, Britain’s continuation in the war was seriously in doubt. Calais now assumed a new and different importance. It had become a key element in the struggle to bring the BEF home through the port of Dunkirk, thirty miles to the north-east. Their job was to drag the 10th Panzer Division into a fight to the last ditch, man and bullet, in order to delay it moving north and adding its weight to the enemy forces closing on the 200,000 beleaguered British troops.
Although the British did not know it, the threat of an armoured onslaught had temporarily subsided. That morning, Guderian had been ordered to halt his other Panzer divisions on a line on the river Aa, just to the east of Calais. Hitler had decided to give his exhausted soldiers a brief respite before moving against the French armies to the south. The British were beaten and he was prepared to allow Hermann Goering the chance to make good on his promise that the Luftwaffe would finish them off.
A further great decision settled the Calais garrison’s fate. Lord Gort, the BEF’s commander, came to the conclusion that the idea of attacking south to join up with the French army on the Somme was a fantasy. On the 25th, on his own initiative, he took what Neave described as ‘the most vital decision of the entire campaign’17 and ordered his army to fall back to the north and Dunkirk and prepare for evacuation. It was also one of the fateful decisions of the war. Had he prevaricated, the BEF would have been lost and with it perhaps any realistic hope that Britain could stay in the war and establish the conditions for eventual victory. But in order for the BEF to be saved, the Calais garrison had to be sacrificed. It became the tethered goat to distract the Panzers from the greater prize ahead.
The drastic change in thinking was signalled in orders which arrived late on the night of the 24th, crushing hope of an evacuation and telling Nicholson that he must fight on ‘for the sake of Allied solidarity’. This was a reference to the furious reaction of the French to the news that Calais, like Boulogne, was about to be abandoned, scuppering their plans to establish a bridgehead that could be supplied by sea and keep resistance alive in the north-east. The theme was repeated the following day in a message to Nicholson from Anthony Eden, which arrived at 2 p.m., stating ‘Defence of Calais to the utmost is of highest importance to our country as symbolising our continued co-operation with France. The eyes of the empire are upon the defence of Calais and HM Government are confident you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.’
That day saw the launching of the evacuation plan, Operation Dynamo. There would be no further reference to Allied solidarity, and the signal drafted in London that night by Churchill, Anthony Eden and the Chief of the General Staff, Edmund Ironside, was stark. It read: ‘Every hour you continue to exist is of greatest help to BEF. Government has therefore decided you must continue to fight. Have greatest possible admiration for your splendid stand.’
Nicholson needed no exhortations to keep fighting. That morning, the attackers broke into Calais-St-Pierre and at 8 a.m. the swastika was flying from the Hôtel de Ville. Three hours later, the Germans sent the town mayor, André Gershell, to Nicholson at his headquarters in the Citadel to demand his surrender. His reply was that ‘If the Germans want Calais they will have to fight for it.’18 A German officer led a second deputation in the afternoon,
which was similarly rebuffed.
Neave spent the night of the 24/25th recovering from his operation in a ward in the cellars of the Hôpital Militaire. In the next bed lay a young Hurricane pilot who knew he was dying. He ‘could still speak and begged me to keep talking to him’.19 As it grew light, ‘his body shuddered and his mouth fell open. The orderly saluted and, for a few minutes, the ward was very quiet.’ He passed the rest of the day there, with the sounds of the fight piercing the thick walls and the occasional shell bursting in the vicinity, one of which showered his bed with broken glass. Outside, the defenders were being forced back street by street. Much of the town was choked with smoke and fire. In the early evening, the town was shaken by a prolonged artillery bombardment. Above the crackle of burning houses, Neave heard the ‘groans and cries’ of the wounded as they were brought down to the cellars.
At 9.30 in the morning, Stuka dive-bombers descended on the town, and an hour later enemy troops began crossing the bridges to Calais-Nord. The bombs shook the hospital and in the basement ‘the smell of wounds and fear was overpowering.’ Just before 10 a.m., a bomb landed in front of the hospital, blowing in the main doors. Fear seized Neave. He was ‘terrified that with the next direct hit the wounded would be buried alive’. When the Stukas finally departed, he left his bed and found he could walk unaided. He decided to head for the Gare Maritime and find transport. He fixed on the hope that ‘it might still be possible to evacuate the wounded by sea. Anything was better for them than entombment in the ruins of the Hôpital Militaire.’20 He seems to have discussed the idea with an unnamed fellow patient, a corporal who volunteered to go with him. Dressed in what he could find – shirt, battledress trousers and steel helmet – he left the shelter. The hospital garden was a shambles of uprooted trees, with shattered masonry and glass lying around the graves dug for five riflemen who had died of their wounds in the cellar. The French military doctor commanding the hospital listened to his plan with amazement, telling him, ‘You are crazy, mon lieutenant. You do not know what is happening in the town.’ Neave repeated that the men would only be taken prisoner if they remained and insisted on his belief that it was still possible to get hospital ships in the harbour. ‘You are absolutely determined to sacrifice your life?’ the doctor asked. ‘I was not interested in anything of the kind,’ Neave recalled. ‘I was irrationally confident that I could get through.’
The two injured men picked their way through the shattered and burning streets, Neave doubled up from the wound in his side and his companion limping. Calais-Nord was deserted after the dive-bombing, but as they passed the old fisherman’s quarter called the Courgain which abuts the Gare Maritime, ‘without warning, shells whistled and burst near us … The corporal vanished in the blinding flash and dust.’ Neave fell to the ground unhurt and crawled to the side of the street where, miraculously, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac from a cellar window.21 He drank from it and staggered on until he reached the Pont Vétillard swing bridge which led to the Gare Maritime, where he could see British troops of the QVR in front of the station.
His ‘apparition caused a sensation’. However, the reception he got was cold. The rumours of spies and German agents were now treated as established fact and his identity card was inspected several times. His demand that transport should be sent to collect the wounded from the hospital cellar ‘was thought to be peculiar. Obviously I was either a fifth columnist or delirious.’ Neave’s pleas were ignored and he was packed off to another cellar, beneath the Gare Maritime, to join rows of wounded. The stay was short. The area came under intense mortar fire and he was soon moved to a tunnel under Bastion 1 of the enceinte, which had been transformed into a regimental aid post.
At 4 p.m. the Citadel where Nicholson made his final stand fell. Shortly before, the Rifle Brigade fought their last gallant action around the Gare Maritime, with some units fighting literally to the last round. Lying on his cot, Neave heard ‘the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung on the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came field-grey figures waving revolvers.’22 His war as a fighting soldier was over. His direct engagement with the enemy had amounted to a few futile shots, fired at a spotter plane.
3
‘In the Bag’
The adrenaline that had carried Neave through his ‘suicidal’ stagger to the docks soon dissolved. His injury was serious and he had no choice but to accept defeat. He lay on his stretcher in the pungent gloom of the cellar ward, listening to the groans of his comrades, depressed, and fearful of what might happen next. In the morning, the Germans moved them to a makeshift field hospital in the Calais-St-Pierre covered market.1 There was nothing to do but brood and endlessly go over the details of the battle. The siege of Calais had taught many brutal lessons. Neave’s schooldays and TA experiences had made him sceptical of authority and disinclined to give those who wielded it unquestioning respect. The debacle could only reinforce that attitude. The heartache felt by Churchill and Eden over the decision to sacrifice the garrison was genuine. Nonetheless, their grasp of the situation had been tenuous and their reactions clumsy and slow.
Neave looked and sounded like an Establishment stalwart, but his judgements were often robust when he delivered his verdict on events. ‘Churchill was often wrong about Calais,’ he wrote years later,2 citing as an example an intemperate memo the prime minister sent to his military assistant, General Ismay, on 24 May complaining of what he saw as the lack of enterprise in the defenders and the BEF in breaking the German siege. Churchill in time admitted the injustice of his remarks, but for Neave it was evidence of ‘the terrifying ignorance of those conducting this campaign from Whitehall’.3 If anything, the performance of the army chiefs had been worse. Calais was a ‘melancholy story of … hesitation and bad staff work’, exemplified by the shambles of departure. The manner in which the QVR had been rushed to war was ‘shameful’. Their embarkation recalled the black comedy that suffused the adventures of Evelyn Waugh’s hero Guy Crouchback ‘in which farce and tragedy are intimately combined’. The same went for the tank units, whose ‘orders were depressingly obscure and they had no idea what to expect on arrival at Calais.’
On the other hand, among those fighting on the ground there were more than enough examples of bravery and devotion to duty, carried out in a spirit of humanity and cheerfulness, to preserve the reputation of the British Army and sustain Neave’s belief in the nobility of the profession of arms. His admiration for Claude Nicholson – his spirit of defiance and loyal attempts to execute the confused orders arriving from across the Channel – bordered on hero worship. His devotion to his memory was intensified by the tragic nature of Nicholson’s end – dying in Rotenburg Castle, as a prisoner of war, in June 1943, at the age of forty-four.4
The defenders of Calais had much to feel proud about. They had accepted a hopeless situation without complaint and had fought with great effectiveness and determination. Once again, upper-class men were learning that gallantry was not the preserve of the privileged. Neave recalled how, at a corner of the Rue Edison, Captain Claude Bower of the 60th Rifles had defended a barricade of vehicles and sandbags for hours until he fell, mortally wounded. The street was lashed by machine-gun fire, which made it seemingly impossible for stretcher-bearers to bring him in. Then ‘Rifleman Matthews drove in a truck across the open street. He backed it into position to rescue Bower, but he was already dead. Matthews removed several others badly wounded, and got away unscathed. Those who witnessed this wonderful achievement never forgot it.’5
Six years before, in his school essay making the case against pacifism, Neave had expressed the hope that no Briton would fight for France. Now he and a host of his countrymen had done just that, giving their lives and liberty in defence of a French town. The same could not be said of many of the French troops. Hundreds sheltered in cellars while the battle raged. There was some redemption, though, in the performance of a hard core of patriots, who fought almost to the last ma
n on the ramparts in defence of Bastion 11, determined to preserve ‘the honour of France’. Neave chose to see these men as the true representatives of their nation. He would come to rely on their sort – and their female counterparts – when organising escape and evasion networks on his return to the war.
With capture, Neave had his first encounter with Germans since his 1933 visit to Berlin. The soldiers who guarded him and the medical orderlies who tended his wound seemed civilised enough. But as he recuperated and thought about the future, ‘It was the Nazis I dreaded, not the front-line troops who behaved well to the wounded.’6 He claimed to have remembered the First World escape stories he read as a schoolboy and that his ‘thoughts turned quickly to the chances of avoiding the inevitable journey to a prison camp’. At this early stage, when German control had not yet set hard, escape was easier to pull off and less hazardous than it soon became. Some of the defenders did manage to get away. A group of forty-seven men who had taken shelter under a pier in the port were picked up under fire by the Royal Navy yacht Gulzar in the early hours of 27 May.7 A young Searchlights officer, Lieutenant W. H. Dothie, after leading a dogged resistance from the village of Marck, east of Calais, was finally captured, but escaped from a prisoner-of-war column and eventually made his way back to England after an epic journey by foot, bicycle and boat.8
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 6