Chapter One

Return

5 September 1939–10 May 1940

‘We were led up to the edge of the cliffs by one of our officers and told, as he pointed towards France, ‘That’s where the enemy are .... shake your fists at them, like this!’ Whereupon we obediently shook our fists at them in like manner, although I shouldn’t think that it caused any misgiving amongst German armed forces!’

Private Bert Jones, B Company 5th Battalion

East Kent Regiment, 12th Division.

War became more of a reality for Captain Cyril Townsend and the 2/Durham Light Infantry (2/DLI), on 23 September 1939 when the 569 officers and men of the battalion crossed from Southampton to Cherbourg on a former ‘Irish cross-channel boat packed with hundreds of RAF personnel and Brigade Headquarters’. Barely three weeks earlier the monotone voice of Neville Chamberlain announced to the nation that Germany’s military incursion into Poland on 1 September 1939 had now resulted in a formal declaration of war. His address brought to an end the twenty-one years of uneasy peace that had elapsed since the Armistice of 11 November 1918 ended the First World War. For Chamberlain the declaration of war was also a personal failure ultimately leading to his resignation eight months later on 10 May, the very day German forces unleashed Blitzkrieg on the allied armies in the west.

Britain’s undertaking to have two full army corps assembled in France thirty-three days after mobilization went remarkably smoothly and the Durhams were part of that initial movement of troops and equipment. With 6 Brigade Headquarters also on board the SS Ulster and a number of senior officers and NCOs wearing medal ribbons from the previous conflict, it would not have been far from Townsend’s mind that the second battalion had made this short journey across the Channel in September 1914 en-route to joining the BEF in the Aisne Valley. Now, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Victor Yate, who as a young man had served as a subaltern with the battalion in 1914, Townsend must have been well aware that history was repeating itself.

The stark reality of another war with Germany did not begin to surface amongst the British public until after the Munich Crisis of 1938. Rearmament then forced its way into the mindset of a population amongst which memories of 1914–18 still lingered. It also pushed its way onto the political agenda when the Territorial Army was doubled in size on 29 March 1939 by the War Minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, by requiring each of the existing Territorial Army units to form duplicate units. A matter of weeks later he reintroduced conscription and so kitted out a new generation of young men in British uniform.

The question of just how a sudden influx of recruits were to be trained and equipped was one that had been very much on the minds of those entrusted with the formation and training of the Kitchener New Army units in 1914. The same question was now repeated as Territorial units began receiving a flood of willing volunteers. While the introduction of conscription and the increase in the numbers of Territorials served to accelerate the War Office’s headache, in political terms the gesture bolstered the Franco-British Entente. The British were at last – albeit reluctantly – taking the prospect of war seriously.

Major Graham Brooks, commanding 366/Battery of 140/Field Regiment, found himself on the receiving end of an influx of these new recruits:

‘On 1 May 1939 the Regiment had been formed as part of the doubling up of the Territorials. On that day it consisted of CO, Adjutant, and the expectation of recruits enlisted by the ‘parent unit’. Joining as senior battery commander, I was given a list of two hundred and fifty names and the assurance that officers would be found. Soon the names materialized into bodies and the grand fun of building something out of nothing began.’1

Brooks’ light hearted attitude masked his apprehension at exactly how these men were to be equipped and trained and he was the first to admit that in those early days the battery was akin to a ‘band of children’ fumbling their way through a ‘new world of black-out and adventure’. Even those who had served in the previous war found it strange, for soldiering was, as Brooks pointed out, ‘vastly different to what it was twenty-five years ago’.

Whether the 53-year-old Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, General Lord Gort, shared this opinion is debatable, but he was a man who was certainly familiar with the battlefield. As a highly decorated Grenadier Guards officer he had served in the First World War with some distinction, wounded on four occasions he had been decorated with the Military Cross (MC) and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and two bars. His award of the coveted Victoria Cross (VC) came whilst he was commanding the 1st Battalion during the battle on the Canal du Nord in 1918.

Gort had certainly been a first class battalion commander, but as many such men did after the Armistice in 1918, he lost his command and reverted to his substantive rank of major. As promotion slowed to its pre-war pace, brigade command eluded him until 1928 when he was appointed General Officer Commanding the Guards Brigade. Thereafter his rise to the top was nothing if not spectacularly rapid. By 1935 he had been promoted to major general and three years later, after a short tenure as Military Secretary to Leslie Hore-Belisha, he was appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). There is no doubt that his appointment as CIGS had a great deal to do with his war record and Hore-Belisha’s misplaced desire for the army to be led by a man of proven courage on the battlefield.

If Gort’s appointment as CIGS was met with a degree of bewilderment then his subsequent confirmation as Commander-in-Chief of the BEF on 1 September 1939, drew gasps of disbelief, particularly from General Sir Edmund Ironside who had been confidently expecting command of the BEF and now found himself appointed CIGS in Gort’s place. ‘The Army was certainly amazed’, wrote Major General Bernard Montgomery, and was ‘even more amazed when Ironside was made CIGS in place of Gort.’2 But despite the barrage of criticism that greeted his appointment, it has to be said that whatever his faults may have been, when the situation facing the BEF became desperate in the last days of May, Gort maintained his composure and grasp of the situation.

As Cyril Townsend had noted, many of the men now landing in France with the BEF were wearing medal ribbons from the previous war. This was certainly the case with the two corps commanders, both of whom were older than Gort and had been senior to him before his recent promotion. Commanding I Corps was General Sir John Dill, an individual who had served with distinction under Douglas Haig and who many felt had been repeatedly passed over for the top appointments until he succeeded Ironside as CIGS on 27 May 1940. Dill, who was at Neuve Chapelle in 1915 as brigade major of 25 Brigade, was no stranger to the rigours of the battlefield and did not hide his anxieties over a possible attack by massed German armour.

After Dill’s recall, command of I Corps was passed to Lieutenant General Michael Barker; an appointment that caused the outspoken Montgomery to remark that ‘only a madman would give a corps to Barker’, another comment that was to prove prophetic in the dark days ahead. Brigadier Charles Norman, commanding 1/Armoured Reconnaissance Brigade was no less complimentary and was of the opinion that Barker was only given the appointment because he was the next major general on the list, even though he was ‘quite unsuited to command in the field’.

In command of II Corps was the energetic and able Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, a gunner who had risen from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel during the First World War. Brooke was not convinced that the Allies could hold a German offensive in the west, an observation not shared by Gort who regarded Brooke as too much of a pessimist. Both Brooke and Dill had drawn Gort’s attention to the potential weaknesses of an advance into Belgium, views that were seemingly dismissed by the commander-in-chief. Dill is also known to have discussed his fears with Cyril Falls on his return to England in April 1940, but both men could never have anticipated the speed, ferocity and penetration of the German panzer advance.3

The BEF frontage in France took the form of a 45-mile-long salient formed by the Franco-Belgian frontier with its left flank on Armentières and the right flank resting on the village of Maulde, where the frontier cut across the River Escaut.⁴ Within the salient lay the important industrial complexes of Lille and Roubaix. The French 51st Division, which had been placed under Gort’s command, had already taken up position in the left half of the sector and was covering Tourcoing and Roubaix. This left the British II Corps (3rd and 4th Divisions) guarding the eastern approaches to Lille whereas I Corps (1st and 2nd Divisions) was deployed in more open country further to the east. Between the BEF and the Germans was neutral Belgium and in the months that followed the British Army settled down to build up its strength in both men and in fortifying the line of the frontier in depth – fortifications that became known as the Gort Line.

In overall command of allied forces was General Maurice Gamelin, who, like Gort, had excelled during the First World War. Gamelin was a small, plump individual whose vision for the defence of France was very much bound up with the static Maginot Line, construction of which began in earnest in 1930 along the Franco-German border. Political and financial considerations determined that it was ‘incomplete’ by 1939, however, the chain of mutually supportive fortifications petered out north of Montmedy, and therein lay the Achilles heel of French fortunes.

Consequently, when the BEF arrived in France, one of their principle tasks – along with the French – was to extend the Maginot Line defences along the border with Belgium to the North Sea. British General Headquarters (GHQ) was opened at Habarcq some 7 miles west of Arras and it was from there that the progress of the British military build-up in France was directed. By the end of 1939 a third regular division had been formed – the 5th Division – and in January 1940 the first of the Territorial divisions arrived – the 48th (South Midland) Division – followed closely by the 50th (Northumbrian) Division and the 51st (Highland) Division. April saw the arrival of the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division and the 44th (Home Counties) Division giving rise to the formation of III Corps under the command of the very capable Lieutenant General Sir Ronald Adam, an individual who was already well known to the commander-in-chief. When Gort was appointed CIGS, Adam was made Deputy Chief of the Imperial Staff and when Gort assumed command of the BEF in 1939 he understandably wanted Adam as his Chief of Staff but in the event Major General Henry Pownall was appointed, a man described as having an ‘unruffled imperturbability’. Charles Moore in The Road to Dunkirk writes that Pownall brought with him an atmosphere of professionalism into a situation that increasingly became more and more chaotic and, given the huge strain on Gort, it is a tribute to Pownall that he was able to support his chief in those last desperate days of May 1940.

By the end of April 1940 the BEF had increased its strength to ten divisions, a force that had been added to by the departure from England of three incomplete Territorial divisions – 12th (Eastern), 23rd (Northumbrian) and 46th (North Midland) – to ease the manpower shortages. Neither equipped for a combat role nor fully trained, the intention was to use these divisions as pioneers in constructing marshalling yards, airfields and depots. Since there was no question of using such untrained units for fighting, it was stipulated that in each brigade one battalion should undertake training while the other two laboured. When the German attack opened on 10 May these ‘digging divisions’ which had allowed Hore-Belisha to claim in the House of Commons that Britain had fulfilled her military commitment to France, found themselves unavoidably drawn into the fighting.

The winter of 1939/40 was the period of the so-called Phoney War, a period which Second Lieutenant Anthony Irwin, serving with the 2/Essex Regiment (2/Essex), described as ‘incredibly cold’ as his battalion laboured each day building the Gort Line. Second Lieutenant Hugh Taylor, who commanded 7 Platoon in A Company, 1/Suffolk Regiment (1/Suffolks), was another who hated working on the Gort Line and, like his men, imagined this was where they would first encounter the Germans. ‘We had been constructing pill-boxes and a large anti-tank ditch, the ditch being about fourteen feet deep and thirty feet across. It was defended by pill-boxes, there being one for every section of the infantry ... This was going to be the Battalion line.’5

While Irwin’s and Taylor’s experience was typical of the units who had arrived in the late Autumn of 1939, for Lieutenant Michael Duncan, a Territorial officer with the 4/Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (4/Ox and Bucks), it was ‘a relatively pleasant interlude’. The 4/Ox and Bucks had only been in France since mid January 1940 and as one of the three battalions in 145 Brigade were part of the 48th Division. Based at Attiches, a few miles south of Lille, Duncan had joined up in 1934 for no better reason than he liked horses and most of his friends were already part-time soldiers. ‘There was,’ he wrote, ‘the rather pleasant sensation of feeling that in some obscure way we were being heroes without having to do anything particularly unpleasant or dangerous to earn the title.’ For 145 Brigade the unpleasant and dangerous task was yet to come.⁶

While the Maginot Line was under construction, Belgium was still an ally of France and any material extension of the line along the Franco-Belgian border was in danger of offending the Belgians and altering the balance of collaboration between the two countries. Critical to the French was the defence of the industrialised region around Lille, a region which had been denied them when the Germans seized and held it during the First World War. So when Belgium received a guarantee of neutrality from Germany in 1937 and attempted to steer a path away from any formal alliance with the French, it became clear in French military and political circles that, in the event of war, if the Germans entered Belgium from the east, their own forces would have to counter such a move from the west. The French were correct in suspecting a German attack would come through Belgium, a plan confirmed in January 1940 when a German Army major, Hellmuth Reinberger, crash-landed in a Messerschmitt Bf 108 near Mechelen-sur-Meuse, instigating the infamous Mechelen Affair.

Reinberger was carrying the first plans for the German invasion of Western Europe which, as Gamelin had expected, involved an advance which closely resembled the 1914 Schlieffen Plan and a German thrust through Belgium. Although the Belgians were suspicious and suspected deception they eventually concluded that the documents were genuine and even convinced the German government that the plans had been destroyed in the crash and thus remained unseen. At this point it was believed by Belgian military intelligence and Colonel Georges Goethals, the Belgian Military Attaché in Cologne, that the German High Command would not now pursue its original plan. Goethals even went as far as suggesting that a revised plan of attack might draw the Allied armies into north-eastern Belgium before the Germans redirected their main thrust further south.

Warning the French and British of their concerns, the Belgians at least expected some alteration to Allied strategy. But, despite the evidence to the contrary, Gamelin remained convinced that the main German effort would be between Maastricht and Liège, while Gort and the British Government – still apparently subservient to French military thinking – fell into step behind him by not questioning the wisdom of his decision.

In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that the Germans would rethink their invasion plans. German military planners now took the opportunity to issue a revised plan that not only caught the imagination of Adolf Hitler but reflected the boldness and momentum that came to be associated with Blitzkrieg. Alfred Jodl’s personal diary records the drastic changes that were made to the German plans after the Mechelen Affair; plans which were masterminded by the 53-year-old Erich von Manstein. While Army Group B under General Fedor von Bock would continue to attack through north eastern Belgium as the French expected, the main thrust of the German panzer divisions – Army Group A – under Gerd von Rundstedt would be redirected through the Ardennes to turn north and cut through the British and French – exactly as predicted by Georges Goethals.7 Dubbed ‘the Matador’s Cloak’ by Basil Liddell Hart, Manstein’s plan was masterly in its simplicity and was known as Fall Gelb – Plan Yellow.

With Gamelin continuing to ignore any thoughts of a German change of strategy, his first proposal for countering the threat of invasion focussed on the less risky ‘Plan E’ which called for Allied forces to advance to the line of the Escaut. Despite this plan being the more sensible, defending the line of the Escaut was discarded in favour of holding the line of the more easterly River Dyle; Gamelin successfully arguing that the anti-tank defences built by the Belgians would allow for a rapid deployment and facilitate the French Seventh Army linking-up with the Dutch via Breda.

Thus, the strategic plan – which became known as ‘Plan D’ – was for French and British forces to cross the border in the event of a German attack and occupy the line of the River Dyle, which runs roughly north and south about 30 miles east of Brussels. The BEF were to deploy between Louvain and Wavre with the French First Army under General Georges Blanchard on the right in the Gembloux Gap and the Belgians – who, it was anticipated, would fall back into the gap between the left wing of the BEF and the right of General Henri Giraud’s Seventh Army.

It was a plan that certainly puzzled many in the BEF who had spent the whole of the previous winter preparing defences behind the Belgian frontier. Now as soon as Germany invaded Belgium all that was to be abandoned and the enemy was to be brought to battle from positions that were unfamiliar and where the defences were already thought to be of poor quality. If that wasn’t bad enough, there was considerable doubt over the fighting quality of the Belgian forces and their ability to stage a stout resistance.

With the benefit of hindsight there is little doubt that Plan D was a fundamental flaw in the Allied strategy and must certainly be regarded as one of the principle factors in the Fall of France. As early as 13 May, three days after the advance into Belgium had begun, Captain Phillip Gribble, an air liaison officer with the Advanced Air Striking Force, was concerned as to why the Luftwaffe had been so restrained in their bombing. ‘It looks almost as if the Germans want us where we are going. Has the French High Command forgotten that the encounter battle is the risk we have always been told to avoid at any cost?’8

It was a question that had also been put to Gamelin the previous day by his military advisor, Lieutenant Colonel Paul de Villelume, who apparently begged his commander-in-chief to halt the advance while there was still time to do so – a view shared by a number of officers in the BEF. Captain John Nelson, commanding 1/Guards Brigade Anti-Tank Company felt they had been ‘enticed forward from well prepared positions on the French Frontier ... and now were to be cut off from our allies before we had a chance to strike a blow’.⁹

But whatever fears and concerns may have been apparent in the minds of the advancing British it was too late: the trap had been sprung and Gamelin’s rather lame reply to de Villelume that it was a fait accompli was perhaps symptomatic of the air of helplessness that clouded French thinking. It was a response that would hardly have impressed Captain John Horsfall, commanding D Company of the 1/Royal Irish Fusiliers (1/RIF), whose opinion of Plan D was voiced in his diary. ‘I have not yet seen strategic reasons ever given for that speculative unplanned [sic] surge into Belgium – reasons yes, but not military ones.’ As a junior officer he kept his opinions to himself, expressing his amazement that the BEF, despite knowing that severe defensive fighting lay ahead, chose to leave ‘the ground of our choosing and [take] up positions which offered only encounter battle at the enemy’s bidding’.10