by Walter Lord
There was not always such a happy ending. German troops surging across the La Bassée Canal caught the 2nd Royal Norfolks at Locon, wiping out most of the battalion. About 100 survivors fell back on a farm in the nearby village of Le Paradis. Trying to keep his men together, the acting CO Major Ryder sent Private Fred Tidey to make contact with some troops holding out on another farm across the road.
Private Tidey accomplished his mission, then couldn’t get back. The machine-gun fire was now too heavy for him to cross the road. Ryder and 98 of his men were soon surrounded in a cowshed by troops of the SS Totenkopf Division. The Germans set fire to the farm, ultimately forcing the Norfolks to surrender. They were immediately marched to a nearby barnyard, where a couple of machine guns mowed them down. The SS finished off those still alive with pistol and bayonet—except for Privates Bill O’Callaghan and Bert Pooley. Though fearfully wounded, they managed to survive by hiding beneath the bodies.
Across the road Tidey had the good fortune to be taken prisoner by different troops, who were not SS but in the regular German Army. His war was over too, but at least he was alive. The road, it turned out, was the dividing line between the two different German units, and he still marvels at how this narrow strip of dirt and gravel almost certainly made all the difference between life and death.
Le Paradis … Festubert … Hazebrouck—it was the fight put up at villages like these that bought the time so desperately needed to get the trapped troops up the 60-mile corridor to Dunkirk. The British 2nd Division, supported by some French tanks, took a merciless beating, but their sacrifice enabled two French divisions and untold numbers of the BEF to reach the coast. As the battered battalions swarmed up the corridor, the Luftwaffe continued to roam the skies unopposed. Besides bombs, thousands of leaflets fluttered down, urging the Tommies to give up. The addressees reacted in various ways. In the 58th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, most men treated the leaflets as a joke and a useful supply of toilet paper. Some men in the 250th Field Company, Royal Engineers, actually felt encouraged by a map that featured the Dunkirk beachhead. Until now, they hadn’t realized there was still a route open to the sea so near at hand. A sergeant in the 6th Durham Light Infantry carefully read the strident wording several times, then observed to Captain John Austin: “They must be in a bad way, sir, to descend to that sort of thing.”
The jumbled masses were approaching Dunkirk now, coming in every way imaginable—members of the 1st East Surreys on borrowed bicycles … a farmboy in the 5th Royal Sussex riding a giant Belgian carthorse … a hatless brigadier tramping alone up the road from Bergues. Just outside Dunkirk, artilleryman Robert Lee saw one fellow sweep by on roller skates carrying an umbrella. Another chap was hustling along with a parrot in a cage. But far more typical was Gunner P. D. Allan. When his feet developed enormous blisters and he could no longer walk, two of his comrades acted as crutches, supporting him for the last five miles.
At Dunkirk nobody was ready for this impending avalanche. Admiral Jean Abrial, the French naval officer in overall command of the coast, was tucked away in Bastion 32, planning the defense of the port. Like Weygand and Blanchard, he saw Dunkirk as the base for a permanent foothold on the Continent. General Adam, appointed by Gort to organize the evacuation, hadn’t arrived yet.
Adam was supposed to act under the orders of General Fagalde, the military commander under Abrial, provided Fagalde’s orders “did not imperil the safety or welfare of the British troops”—an escape clause the size of Big Ben. Already there had been sharp disagreement over preparing various bridges for demolition.
In a try for better coordination, the British and French commanders met in Cassel at 7:30 on the morning of May 27. The town, situated on its isolated hill nineteen miles south of Dunkirk, was one of Gort’s most important strong-points, but as yet had not been attacked.
Adam and Fagalde arrived early, and before the main meeting began, they worked out between themselves how they would defend the beachhead. They would try to hold the coast from Gravelines on the west to Nieuport on the east—a distance of about 30 miles. Inland, the perimeter would make maximum use of the canals that laced the area, running from Gravelines southeast to Bergues … then east to Furnes … and finally northeast to Nieuport. The French would be responsible for the area west of Dunkirk, the British for everything east. As the troops fell back into the perimeter, the French should keep to the west, the British to the east. Nowhere was there any provision for the Belgians, who were desperately fighting still farther east; it was decided their situation was too “obscure.”
The main meeting now began in the Hôtel du Sauvage dining room, where several tables had been stripped of their cloths and bunched together. It was a bare, stark setting relieved only by a bottle of Armagnac sitting in the center. Besides Fagalde, the French commanders included Admiral Abrial, General Blanchard, and General Koeltz from Weygand’s headquarters. General Adam, representing Gort, had brought along Colonel Bridgeman and Lieutenant-General W. G. Lindsell, the BEF Quartermaster-General.
It turned out that the principal business of the meeting was not defense arrangements but a ringing order of the day from General Weygand, relayed by General Koeltz. It called on the embattled forces to swing over to the offensive and retake Calais. The French generals agreed to try, but the British considered the appeal preposterous. Survival was a matter of hanging on, not advancing. To Bridgeman, Koeltz spoke such nonsense that he stopped taking notes.
“Why aren’t you writing?” Lindsell whispered.
“There’s nothing being said worth writing down,” Bridgeman whispered back.
And so it proved. Far from retaking Calais, General Fagalde’s hard-pressed 68th Division had to pull back from the Gravelines end of the perimeter. Late on the 27th the French retired to a new line running from Mardyck to Spycker to Bergues.
But at least the beachhead was now blocked out and the responsibilities for its defense clearly defined. As the poilus hunkered down in the western half of the perimeter, General Adam began organizing the eastern half. Under Bridgeman’s plan it was divided into three sectors—one for each corps of the BEF. Specifically, III Corps would hold the Dunkirk end, next to the French; I Corps would be in the middle; and II Corps would defend the eastern end, which stretched across the frontier into Belgium. Two major canals—one running from Bergues to Furnes, the other from Furnes to Nieuport—would be the main defense line. For the most part, the line lay five or six miles back from the coast, which would protect the beaches at least from small arms fire. To command this defense line, Adam had the services of Brigadier the Honorable E. F. Lawson, a competent artilleryman.
There was only one ingredient missing—soldiers. As of 8:00 a.m. on the 27th, when the Cassel meeting broke up, the British defense line existed only on paper. Lawson would have to man it with troops plucked from the horde tumbling into Dunkirk, taking pot luck from what turned up. Later he could replace these pick-up units, when the regular divisions holding open the corridor fell back on the coast; but for the moment improvisation was once again the order of the day.
For immediate help he depended largely on artillerymen who had destroyed their guns during the retreat and could now serve as infantry. Several units manned the line between Bergues and Furnes, bolstered by a party of nineteen Grenadier Guards, who had somehow been separated from their battalion. Farther east, the 12th Searchlight Battery dug in at Furnes, and a survey company of Royal Engineers moved into Nieuport.
While Lawson patched together his defense line, Colonel Bridgeman concentrated on getting the troops back to the coast. Basically his plan called for three main routes—III Corps would head for the beach at Malo-les-Bains, an eastern suburb of Dunkirk … I Corps for Bray-Dunes, six miles farther east … and II Corps for La Panne, four miles still farther east and across the Belgian frontier. All three towns were seaside resorts and provided an unlikely setting of bandstands, carousels, beach chairs, push-pedal cycles, and brightly painted cafés.
Of the three, La Panne was the logical place to establish headquarters. It was where the telephone cable linking Belgium and England entered the Channel, and this meant direct contact with Dover and London not available anywhere else. Adam set up shop in the Mairie, or town hall, and it was from here that Bridgeman did his best to direct the withdrawal.
Naturally his plans meant issuing orders, and this in turn meant paper, and this in turn raised a brand new problem: there was no paper. GHQ’s entire supply had gone up in flames, as the BEF destroyed its stores and equipment to keep them from falling into enemy hands.
Major Arthur Dove, a staff officer under Bridgeman, finally managed to buy a pad of pink notepaper at a local stationery store. It was more suitable for billets-doux, but it was the only thing available. In payment Dove needed all his diplomacy to persuade Madame the proprietress to accept French instead of Belgian francs.
It’s doubtful whether many of the addressees ever saw the Major’s pink stationery. Dispatch riders did their best to deliver the orders, but communications were in a bigger shambles than ever. While the three corps did stick basically to their allotted sectors of the beachhead, many units remained unaware of any such arrangement, and thousands of stragglers went wherever whim—or an instinct for self-preservation—took them.
They swarmed into Dunkirk and onto the beaches—lost, confused, and all too often leaderless. In many of the service and rear area units the officers had simply vanished, leaving the men to shift for themselves. Some took shelter in cellars in the town, huddling together as the bombs crashed down. Others threw away their arms and aimlessly wandered about the beach. Others played games and swam. Others got drunk. Others prayed and sang hymns. Others settled in deserted cafés on the esplanade and sipped drinks, almost like tourists. One man, with studied indifference, stripped to his shorts and sunbathed among the rocks, reading a paperback.
And all the time the bombs rained down. The 2nd Anti-Aircraft Brigade was charged with protecting Dunkirk, and soon after arriving at La Panne, Colonel Bridgeman instructed the Brigade’s liaison officer, Captain Sir Anthony Palmer, to keep his guns going to the last. Any spare gunners to join the infantry; any incapacitated men to go to the beach. Palmer relayed the order to Major-General Henry Martin, commanding all Gort’s antiaircraft, but somewhere along the line the meaning got twisted. Martin understood that all antiaircraft gunners were to go to the beach.
He never questioned the order, although it’s hard to see why any force, as hard-pressed from the air as the BEF, would begin an evacuation by sending off its antiaircraft gunners. Instead, he merely reasoned that if the gunners were to leave, there would be no further use for their guns. Rather than have them fall into enemy hands, he ordered his heavy 3.7-inch pieces to be destroyed.
Sometime after midnight, May 27-28, Martin appeared at Adam’s headquarters to report that the job was done. With rather a sense of achievement, one observer felt, he saluted smartly and announced, “All the antiaircraft guns have been spiked.”
There was a long pause while a near-incredulous Adam absorbed this thunderbolt. Finally he looked up and merely said, “You … fool, go away.”
So the bombing continued, now opposed only by some light Bofors guns, and by the troops’ Brens and rifles. In exasperation some men even cut the fuses of grenades and hurled them into the air hoping to catch some low-flying plane. More were like Lance Corporal Fred Batson of the RASC, who crawled into a discarded Tate & Lyle sugar box. Its thin wooden sides offered no real protection, but somehow he felt safer.
Their big hope was the sea. The Royal Navy would come and get them. Gallipoli, Corunna, the Armada—for centuries, in a tight spot the British had always counted on their navy to save the day, and it had never disappointed them. But tonight, May 27, was different. …
Private W.B.A. Gaze, driver with an ordnance repair unit, looked out to sea from Malo-les-Bains and saw nothing. No ships at all, except a shattered French destroyer beached a few yards out, her bow practically severed from the rest of the hull.
After a bit, a single British destroyer hove into view … then three Thames barges, which moored 400 yards out … and finally fourteen drifters, each towing a couple of small boats. Not much for this mushrooming crowd on the beach.
The prospect was even worse to the east. At La Panne Captain J. L. Moulton, a Royal Marines officer attached to GHQ, went down to the beach to see what was going on. Three sloops lay offshore, but there were no small boats to ferry anybody out.
After quite a while a motor boat appeared, towing a whaler. As a Marine, Moulton knew something about boats and rushed to grab the gunwhale to keep the whaler from broaching to the surf. The skipper, sure that Moulton was trying to hijack the craft, fired a shot over his head.
Somehow Moulton convinced the man of his good intentions, but the incident underscored the ragged inadequacy of the whole rescue effort at this point. More ships were needed, and many more small boats.
Going to General Adam’s headquarters, Moulton reported the shortage of vessels. Adam phoned London, hoping to stir some action at that end, and then approved a suggestion by Moulton that he go to Dover, armed with a map showing where the troops were concentrated, and speak directly with Admiral Ramsay.
Moulton now went back to the beach, got a lift to one of the sloops lying offshore, and had the skipper take him across the Channel. Perhaps he could explain the true dimensions of the job. Without enough ships, all the time so dearly bought in Flanders would be wasted.
5
“Plenty Troops, Few Boats”
IN HIS OFFICE JUST off the Dynamo Room Admiral Ramsay listened politely as Captain Moulton described the desperate situation at Dunkirk, and the need for a greater naval effort if many men were to be saved. Moulton had the sinking feeling that he wasn’t getting his point across … that this was one of those cases where a mere Marine captain didn’t carry much weight with a Vice-Admiral of the Royal Navy.
His mission accomplished, Moulton returned to France, reported back to General Adam’s headquarters, and went to work on the beaches. Meanwhile, there were still few ships, but this wasn’t because Ramsay failed to appreciate the need. Relying mainly on personnel vessels—ferries, pleasure steamers, and the like—he had hoped to dispatch two every three and a half hours, but the schedule soon broke down.
The first ship sent was Mono’s Isle, an Isle of Man packet. She left Dover at 9:00 p.m., May 26, and after an uneventful passage tied up at Dunkirk’s Gare Maritime around midnight. Packed with 1,420 troops, she began her return journey at sunrise on the 27th. Second Lieutenant D. C. Snowdon of the 1st/7th Queen’s Royal Regiment lay in exhausted sleep below decks, when he was suddenly awakened by what sounded like someone hammering on the hull. This turned out to be German artillery firing on the vessel. Because of shoals and minefields, the shortest route between Dunkirk and Dover (called Route Z) ran close to the shore for some miles west of Dunkirk. Passing ships offered a perfect target.
Several shells crashed into Mona’s Isle, miraculously without exploding. Then a hit aft blew away the rudder. Luckily, she was twin-screw, and managed to keep course by using her propellers. Gradually she drew out of range, and the troops settled down again. Lieutenant Snowdon went back to sleep below decks; others remained topside, soaking in the bright morning sun.
Then another rude awakening—this time by a sound like hail on the decks. Six Me 109’s were machine-gunning the ship. All the way aft Petty Officer Leonard B. Kearley-Pope crouched alone at the stern gun, gamely firing back. Four bullets tore into his right arm, but he kept shooting, until the planes broke off. Mona’s Isle finally limped into Dover around noon on the 27th with 23 killed and 60 wounded. Almost as bad from Ramsay’s point of view, the 40-mile trip had taken eleven and a half hours instead of the usual three.
By this time other ships too were getting a taste of those German guns. Two small coasters, Sequacity and Yewdale, had started for Dunkirk about 4:00 a.m. on the 27th. As they approa
ched the French coast, a shell crashed into Sequacity’s starboard side at the waterline, continued through the ship and out the port side. Another smashed into the engine room, knocking out the pumps. Then two more hits, and Sequacity began to sink. Yewdale picked up the crew, and with shells splashing around her, headed back for England.
By 10:00 a.m. four more ships had been forced to turn back. None got through, and Admiral Ramsay’s schedule was in hopeless disarray. But he was a resourceful, resilient man; in the Dynamo Room the staff caught his spirit and set about revamping their plan.
Clearly Route Z could no longer be used, at least in daylight. There were two alternatives, neither very attractive. Route X, further to the northeast, would avoid the German batteries, but it was full of dangerous shoals and heavily mined. For the moment, at least, it too was out. Finally there was Route Y. It lay still further to the northeast, running almost as far as Ostend, where it doubled back west toward England. It was easier to navigate, relatively free of mines, and safe from German guns; but it was much, much longer—87 miles, compared to 55 for Route X and 39 for Route Z.
This meant the cross-Channel trip would be twice as long as planned; or, put another way, it would take twice as many ships to keep Ramsay’s schedule.
Still, it was the only hope, at least until Route X could be swept clear of mines. At 11:00 a.m. on the 27th the first convoy—two transports, two hospital ships, and two destroyers—left Dover and arrived off Dunkirk nearly six hours later.
The extra effort was largely wasted, for at the moment Dunkirk was taking such a pounding from the Luftwaffe that the port was practically paralyzed. The Royal Daffodil managed to pick up 900 men, but the rest of the convoy was warned to stay clear: too much danger of sinking and blocking the harbor. With that, the convoy turned and steamed back to Dover.