by Walter Lord
But even in the darkest days of the First War things had never been so bad that the battery had to blow up its own guns. A gnawing conscience told him that somehow he had “let the old man down.”
There was little time for such sad reflections in the rush of self-destruction that now swept the BEF. In towns like Hondschoote and Oost Cappel on the road to Dunkirk, the paraphernalia of a whole army was going up in flames. Thousands of lorries, half-tracks, vans, heavy-duty trucks, motorcycles, Bren gun carriers, mobile kitchens, pick-ups, and staff cars were lined up in fields, drained of oil and water, with motors left running till they seized. Mountains of blankets, gas capes, shoes, wellingtons, and new uniforms of every kind lay burning in the fields. Passing one clothing dump about to be blown up, Lance Corporal W. J. Ingham of the Field Security Police raced in, ripped open a few bales, found his size in battledress, changed, and within a few minutes rejoined his unit—“the only well-dressed soldier in our mob.”
NAAFI stores—the source of the BEF’s creature comforts—lay deserted, open for the taking. Bombardier May walked off with his valise crammed with 10,000 cigarettes.
The chaplains, too, joined the orgy of destruction. Reginald Newcomb of the 50th Division kept busy smashing typewriters and mimeograph machines, while his clerk went to work on the company movie projector. Later, Newcomb burned two cases of army prayerbooks. It was Sunday, May 26, but there would be no Divine Service today.
The smoke that towered over Dunkirk twenty miles to the north was no part of any BEF demolition scheme. Hermann Göring was trying to keep his promise that the Luftwaffe could win the battle alone. For nearly a week the Heinkels, Dorniers, and Stukas of General Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 had been pounding the town. At first the damage was spotty, but on May 25 a giant raid damaged the main harbor lock, knocked out all electric power, and left the port a wreck, with its forest of cranes leaning at crazy angles.
Corporal P. G. Ackrell, a 42-year-old Ordnance Corps man, had been waiting to evacuate with other “useless mouths”; now his unit was hastily drafted to help unload an ammunition ship by hand. The derricks weren’t working, and the regular stevedores had vanished.
Toward noon Ackrell’s mind began drifting to other matters. The enemy planes were gone for the moment, and he noticed some inviting warehouses nearby. He drifted over for a look-around and spied some large cardboard boxes that seemed especially enticing. He opened one up, but it didn’t contain wristwatches or cameras or anything like that. It was full of marshmallows.
Making the best of things, Ackrell took a carton of marshmallows back to the dock, where they proved an instant hit. Returning to the warehouses for more, he discovered a barrel of red wine. He filled his water bottle, then began to sample it. Once again he remembered his friends and took some wine back to them, too. They liked it enough to go back for more, and by the end of the day barely half the ammunition had been unloaded.
Next day, the 26th, the men went back to work, and once again Ackrell’s eye began to wander. This time he found a freight car full of underwear. Still exploring, in another car he located some shoes that were a perfect fit. Once again he shared his good fortune with his friends; once again the dock work stopped. That evening the ship put to sea with part of her cargo still unloaded.
Discipline was gone. Dunkirk was a shambles, and clearly the port could not be used much longer. As the Luftwaffe roamed the skies unchecked, bombing at will, a small British naval party launched an experiment that somehow symbolized the futility of the whole air defense effort. Commander J. S. Dove had arrived on the 25th, ordered by the Admiralty to erect what was called “a lethal kite barrage” around the port area. The kites would be flown somewhat in the manner of barrage balloons and, it was hoped, would ensnare unwary German planes. To accomplish this purpose, Dove had on hand 200 “lethal kites” and a small staff of assistants.
There was not enough wind to fly a kite on the morning of May 26, but early in the afternoon the breeze freshened, and Dove’s crew managed to rig two kites from the top of the two biggest cranes in the harbor. One bobbed uselessly up and down, but the other rose majestically to 2,000 feet.
No one ever knew what would happen if a Stuka flew into it, because jittery Tommies, ignorant of the experiment and leery of anything flying in the sky, brought it down with a fusillade of small arms fire. Commander Dove stayed on to help with the evacuation; his little team joined the ever-growing horde waiting for transportation home.
The Luftwaffe continued its methodical destruction. On the morning of the 26th alone it dropped 4,000 bombs on the city, plastering the docks, the ships, the roads leading to the port, the disorganized thousands streaming toward it.
“Where is the RAF?” The familiar cry went up again and again. In their exasperation one column turned on a hapless stray wearing air-force blue, who had fallen in with Corporal Lockerby’s unit. He was no pilot—just a clerk from some disbanded headquarters—but that didn’t help him. The enraged troops pushed and threatened him—the symbol of all their pent-up bitterness.
The man seemed in such danger that Lockerby tried to find a spare army uniform for him to change to, but ironically the search was interrupted by yet another Stuka attack. By the time it was over, the man had vanished, perhaps looking for more congenial companions.
Yet the RAF was there, although often out of sight and not yet very effective. For several days Fighter Command had been shifting its carefully hoarded squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires to airfields closer to the Channel, planning for a major effort to cover the evacuation.
When 19 Squadron was moved from Horsham to Hornchurch on May 25, Flying Officer Michael D. Lyne was immediately struck by the totally different atmosphere. Horsham had been all practice—little trace of the war—but at Hornchurch the field was full of battle-damaged planes, and the mess buzzed with talk of combat and tactics. For a young pilot with only 100 hours in Spitfires, it was a sobering change.
Early morning. May 26, Lyne was off on his first patrol over the beachhead. There was no special pep talk or briefing; the squadron just took off for France, as though they did it every day. They met some Stukas and Messerschmitt 109’s near Calais, gave better than they took, but lost two of their own, including the squadron commander.
That afternoon Lyne was back over Dunkirk on his second patrol of the day. Off Calais they again met a squadron of Me 109’s, and Lyne himself came under fighter fire for the first time, without at first even realizing it. Mysterious little spirals of smoke whisked past his wings; then came the steady thump-thump of an Me 109 cannon. It finally dawned on him that he, personally, was somebody’s target.
Lyne managed to dodge, but shortly afterward found himself in a duel with two Me 109’s circling above him. Trying to maneuver, he stalled, then went into a spin as a bullet or shell fragment hit his knee. The radio conked out … the cockpit filled with glycol fumes and steam … his engine quit.
His first thought was to crash-land in France and spend the rest of the war in some POW camp. On second thought he decided he didn’t want that; instead he’d splash down in the Channel, hoping someone would pick him up. Then he decided against that too—“I didn’t want to get wet”—and finally, his spirits returning, he decided he just might be able to nurse the plane back to the British coast.
He made it—barely. Gliding in a few feet above the sea, he crash-landed on the shale beach at Deal in a cloud of flying rocks and pebbles. Bloody and oil-soaked, he staggered from the cockpit into a totally different world.
It was Sunday, and Deal beach was filled with strolling couples—military men in their dress uniforms, girls in their frilliest spring creations—all enjoying a leisurely promenade under the warm May sun. Barging into this dainty scene, Lyne felt he was more than an interruption: he was an unwelcome intruder, thoughtlessly reminding the crowd that only twenty miles away there was a very different world indeed.
He was right. The people of Deal and Dover—all England, for that matter�
��were still living a life of peace and tranquility. The government had not yet announced any emergency, and the distant rumble of the guns across the Channel was not enough to break the spell. It was a typical, peacetime weekend: a Dover town team defeated the officers of the Dover Detachment at bowls, 88 to 35 … the local football club lost a match to Sittingbourne … roller skaters whirled about the rink at the Granville Gardens Pavilion … the weekly Variety show announced a new bill featuring those “comedy knockabouts” The Three Gomms.
The mood was different at Whitehall. A chilling awareness gripped the government that Britain was now on the brink of an appalling disaster. Reynaud, in town for a conference with Churchill, was gloomy, too. He felt that Pétain would come out for a cease-fire if a large part of France were overrun.
The time had come to act. At 6:57 p.m. this Sunday, May 26, the Admiralty signaled Dover: “Operation Dynamo is to commence.”
At this point Admiral Ramsay had 129 ferries, coasters, skoots, and small craft to do the job, but more were on the way and the staff in the Dynamo Room was clicking smoothly. Still, it was a monumental task. The Admiralty itself did not expect to lift more than 45,000 men in two days. After that, the evacuation would probably be terminated by enemy action.
“I have on at the moment one of the most difficult and hazardous operations ever conceived,” Ramsay wrote Mag late that night (actually 1:00 a.m. on the 27th), “and unless the bon Dieu is very kind there are certain to be many tragedies attached to it. I hardly dare think about it, or what the day is going to bring. …”
Yet the biggest crisis at the moment lay beyond Ramsay’s control. The crucial question was whether more than a smattering of men could get to Dunkirk at all. Hitler’s “halt order” had been lifted; the German armor was rolling again; thousands of Allied soldiers were still deep in France and Belgium. Could the escape corridor be kept open long enough for these troops to scramble to the coast? What could be done to help the units holding the corridor? How to buy the time that was needed?
4
Buying Time
TO WINSTON CHURCHILL, CALAIS was the key. The ancient French port, 24 miles west of Dunkirk, was besieged but still in British hands. The Prime Minister decided that it must be held to the last man. Taking it would chew up Rundstedt’s troops, slow down his advance, and buy the time needed to get the BEF back to the coast.
Still, it was not an easy decision. It meant deliberately sacrificing 3,000 highly trained troops at a time when Britain could ill afford to lose them. Rescuing any large part of the BEF was a long shot at best. Might not these men be better used on the home front in case of invasion?
For Anthony Eden the decision was especially bitter. He had long served in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, one of the regiments at Calais. Ordering them to fight to the end meant condemning to death or captivity some of his best friends.
It was a gloomy dinner at Admiralty House on the evening of May 25 when the step was finally taken. Churchill silently picked at his food, and on leaving the table, remarked to no one in particular, “I feel physically sick.” At 11:30 a last telegram went off to Brigadier Claude Nicholson, commanding the Calais garrison:
Every hour you continue to exist is of greatest help to the BEF. Government has therefore decided you must continue to fight. Have greatest possible admiration for your splendid stand.
For Brigadier Nicholson this was the latest in a bewildering series of messages that had tugged him this way and that. Until late April, his 30th Infantry Brigade had been slated for Norway. With the collapse of that campaign, Churchill decided it should be used to raid the German flanks along the French coast, the way his old Marine Brigade did in World War I.
The 30th was a brigade that should give the Germans a lot of trouble. Two of its three battalions—the 2nd King’s Royal Rifle Corps and the 1st Rifle Brigade—were crack regulars. The remaining battalion—the 1st Queen Victoria’s Rifles—was a Territorial unit of weekend soldiers; but one of the best in England. All were mechanized. To beef them up still more, Churchill added the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, already heading for Calais under separate orders.
The tank squadrons and the Queen Victoria’s Rifles left first, sailing from Dover for Calais at 11:00 a.m. on May 22. In the rush to get going, the QVR left all their vehicles behind. The 3rd Tank Regiment brought their tanks, but they were stowed in the bottom of the ship, and unloading them at Calais seemed to take forever.
This work had scarcely begun when a disconcerting figure arrived on the scene. Lieutenant-General Brownrigg, Gort’s Adjutant General, had been in Boulogne setting up a rear GHQ. Now he suddenly appeared in Calais, en route to England. Acting on his own authority as senior officer present, he ordered the tanks to head west for Boulogne and join the troops defending that port. It was just as well that the battalion was still unloading, since Boulogne was already cut off.
Later that night Major Ken Bailey arrived from Gort’s headquarters with entirely different orders for the tanks: they were to head south, not west, and join the BEF at Saint-Omer. Then from Brownrigg, now at Dover: they were to go to Boulogne, as previously ordered. Pulled this way and that, a squadron of the tanks finally set out for Saint-Omer at 1:30 p.m. on the 23rd, but were hurled back by a panzer column blocking the way.
That afternoon Brigadier Nicholson reached Calais with the rest of the 30th Infantry Brigade. He too had orders from General Brownrigg to head west for Boulogne, but while his troops were still unloading, the War Office ordered him to head east for Dunkirk (the opposite direction) with 350,000 rations for Gort’s army. During the night of May 23-24 the convoy set off, but soon ran into the inevitable panzers. In a slam-bang night action three of the escorting tanks broke through to Gort’s lines, but the rest of the convoy was destroyed or thrown back to Calais.
Clearly the town was cut off. Whatever Brownrigg or the others ordered, there would be no forays in any direction. Nicholson would have his hands full holding Calais itself. This he proposed to do, deploying his own three battalions, plus the 21 remaining tanks, plus some scattered units to form an “outer” and “inner” perimeter defending the port.
Some 800 French troops also rallied around, manning the town’s ancient Citadel and four old forts. Built in the seventeenth century by the great French military engineer Vauban, they were still amazingly strong. A few antique coastal defense guns, worked by French marines, completed the garrison.
Nicholson’s plan was to stand fast as long as possible. When enemy pressure became too great, he would gradually pull back toward the harbor. He would then be in position for a fast getaway, since a new message sent by the War Office at 2:48 a.m. on the 24th said that evacuation had been agreed on “in principle.”
By afternoon his orders had changed again. During the day Churchill had agreed to the appointment of French General Fagalde as overall commander of the defense of the Channel ports. Adhering to Weygand’s idea that these ports should be held indefinitely as fortified bridgeheads on the Continent, Fagalde forbade any evacuation of Calais. Normally British commanders were given some loophole in such a situation, but not this time. At 11:23 p.m. on the 24th, the War Office sent Nicholson new instructions:
In spite of policy of evacuation given you this morning, fact that British forces in your area now under Fagalde who has ordered no repeat no evacuation, means that you must comply for sake of Allied solidarity. Your role is therefore to hold on, harbour being for present of no importance to BEF. …
When Winston Churchill saw this message on the morning of May 25, he exploded in indignation. To him, the role of Calais was to tie up as many Germans as possible. The French said no evacuation, and that could well mean no escape. If so, “Allied solidarity” and calling Calais harbor “of no importance” were not the arguments to use to make troops fight to the end.
Churchill now drafted the kind of message he felt was needed. It was full of ringing phrases, which Anthony Eden deftly edited into a strong personal appeal from himsel
f to Nicholson. As a former member of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, Eden carried special weight:
Defence of Calais to the utmost is of highest importance to our country as symbolizing our continued cooperation with France. The eyes of the Empire are upon the defence of Calais, and H. M. Government are confident you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.
Nicholson understood without being told. At the very moment when Eden was sending his message—2:00 p.m. on the 25th—a Lieutenant Hoffmann of the 10th Panzer Division was being escorted under a flag of truce into the British lines by a French officer and a Belgian soldier. They guided Hoffmann to Nicholson’s headquarters, now at the Citadel. The Lieutenant came to the point immediately: unconditional surrender, or Calais would be destroyed.
Nicholson was equally quick in writing his reply:
1. The answer is no, as it is the British Army’s duty to fight as well as it is the German’s.
2. The French captain and the Belgian soldier, having not been blindfolded, cannot be sent back. The Allied commander gives his word that they will be put under guard and will not be allowed to fight against the Germans.
The weary garrison fought on. For three days they had battled the Wehrmacht’s tanks and Stukas, gradually yielding inch by inch. Now they were holed up in Calais-Nord, the old part of town by the harbor. The noise of battle gradually faded—Germans have to sleep too—and the only sound was the incongruous trill of nightingales in the Jardin Richelieu.
London’s last message had wider distribution than anyone in Whitehall thought. It was picked up and read with the greatest interest by German radio intelligence—especially the ringing exhortation, “Every hour you continue to exist is of the greatest help to the BEF.” It was the first convincing evidence that the British planned to evacuate. Until now there had been much speculation that the increased shipping activity in the Channel might be due to some Allied plan to make a surprise landing behind the German advance. Others felt that it meant preparations for a permanent Allied beachhead based at Dunkirk. But this new message seemed to rule all that out. The phrasing pointed to evacuation and nothing else.