For those continuing to fight the Germans on 28 May, the Belgians were already a thing of the past. The chief consequence of Leopold’s surrender was a twenty-mile gap that had opened up between the left of Montgomery’s 3rd Division and the coastal town of Nieuport, only twenty miles east of Dunkirk. Monty’s reaction was to call on 12th Royal Lancers, a venerable cavalry regiment equipped with Morris CS9 armoured cars, with orders to demolish every bridge over the Yser Canal from the division’s flank to the sea.
This was a very timely intervention – only ten minutes after the crucial Dixmude–Furnes road bridge had been destroyed, the first party of enemy motorcyclists arrived, followed by infantry in lorries. The Germans were surprised to find the bridge blown, and more surprised to find the 12th Lancers’ armoured cars lying in wait. All the motorcyclists and many of the soldiers were killed or wounded. Had 12th Lancers arrived any later, the Germans would have swept across the canal line towards Dunkirk.
In Nieuport, however, only one bridge had been destroyed, while the other was still intact. And as 12th Lancers’ B Squadron fought an entire day to keep the Germans out of the town, no engineers could be found to blow the bridge. As darkness fell, an officer and two sergeants tried to destroy it with hand grenades, creeping as close as they dared. Just as they were about to throw their grenades, the Germans sent up a flare, and the three men became visible. They managed to hurl their grenades, but none of them damaged the bridge, and one of the sergeants was killed as the other two men ran for their lives. Before long, the town was on fire, and 12th Lancers were forced to withdraw. The way was worryingly open for the Germans to advance along the coast into Dunkirk.
12th Infantry Brigade was immediately sent to Nieuport to block the Germans’ advance – but there was confusion in arranging their transport, and hours passed before they arrived. In the meantime, two field companies of the Royal Engineers were hurriedly sent to destroy the remaining bridges, and they managed to keep the Germans at bay until 12th Infantry Brigade finally arrived. And so, to the east of Dunkirk, the Germans had not yet broken through.
To the south-west, 2nd Infantry Division had the job of keeping the Germans back from a fifteen-mile stretch of La Bassée Canal. This was a crucial task, and a difficult one. The main British forces were retreating directly behind the canal, and an astonishing variety of German forces were trying to break through – including 3rd, 4th and 7th Panzer Divisions, and the SS Totenkopf Division. Now that the halt order had been lifted, the Panzers were aching to make up for lost time.
The town of St Venant, at the north of the canal line, held by the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Durham Light Infantry, was attacked on the morning of 27 May by German tanks and infantry. Although the British battalions managed to hold the Germans off for much of the day, most of their men had been killed or captured by nightfall. A machine-gun battalion of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders* failed in its attempt to reach Merville, while further south towards Bethune, 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment (with whom Peter Barclay, Ernie Leggett and George Gristock had fought so bravely on the River Escaut) was holding the line against a ferocious Stuka and Panzer assault.
Robert Brown was a soldier in the 2nd Royal Norfolks. On the morning of 27 May, he was keeping watch near a farmhouse when he saw behind him a machine gun mounted on a German motorcycle combination. He quickly returned to battalion headquarters with the unwelcome news that the enemy had stolen in behind. For most of the day, he and another soldier took up position in an outside toilet, knocking out bricks to make loopholes. Other members of the depleted battalion had done the same in nearby stables, cowsheds and barns. Overall the battalion had created a solid defence, and they spent most of the day fighting.
Late in the afternoon, the commanding officer came round asking for opinions: should they carry on or should they surrender? Some said surrender, but Brown opted to continue. ‘Morale was so high,’ he says, ‘that I had no thought of being taken prisoner, or being killed or wounded. We were just firing, and making a joke out of it, really.’ In the end, though, the officer ordered them to stop. But he said that if anybody thought that they could escape, they were entitled to try. Brown and two friends had noticed smoke billowing down a road, so they started walking in that direction, hoping to use the smoke as cover. But they were soon forced into a roadside ditch, where they were spotted by German soldiers who shouted at them to put their hands up.
Brown stood with his hands in the air. As they reached him, he was immediately struck by their striking appearance, with their SS flashes, death’s head badges and automatic rifles. ‘But they treated us as reasonable as you’d treat an enemy,’ he says, ‘just the normal knocks and pushes and shouts.’ The rest of Brown’s battalion had been taken prisoner elsewhere – where their treatment would prove very different.
By the end of the fighting on La Bassée Canal, only about 10 per cent of the division’s strength remained. Yet it had managed to protect the British army as it retreated, with the result that, by the night of 27–28 May, the bulk of the BEF was safely north of the River Lys.
Contemporaneous German reports of the fighting make interesting reading. XXXXI Panzer Corps’ war diary for 27 May describes an enemy who ‘fights tenaciously and stays at his post to the last man’. Indeed, so tenacious was this enemy that ‘the Corps cannot gain ground to any extent worthy of mention eastwards or north eastwards.’ And XXXIX Corps’ diary records two important details. First it notes that the Germans ‘suffered considerable casualties when attacking over the stubbornly defended La Bassée Canal’, and second that ‘the flow of Anglo-French troops’ heading ‘towards the Channel could no longer be intercepted in time and with sufficient effect’.
These are the sorts of reports one might expect to read after a German defeat – yet the Germans had virtually destroyed an entire British division. In fact, had the Germans mounted a concentrated attack on the flanks, they might well have broken through and ended the war. Even without a concentrated attack, a large part of the French First Army was now trapped to the south, under simultaneous attack from east and west, unable to reach the Lys.
After 2nd Division’s heroic stand, its meagre remains joined the British exodus north, living to fight (and evacuate) another day. The majority of those captured were marched away. But for the surviving members of Robert Brown’s battalion, captured by the SS Totenkopf Division, the day would end with horrifying abruptness. In a village with the ironic name of Le Paradis, the men were stripped to the waist, marched into a meadow, lined up against a barn and machine-gunned. Only two men out of ninety-nine, Signallers Bill O’Callaghan and Albert Pooley, survived. O’Callaghan was shot in the arm and Pooley in the leg, and they both lay, covered by the shattered bodies of their comrades, as SS men walked round finishing off anybody who moved or groaned.
Both O’Callaghan and Pooley survived the war and were called as witnesses at the 1948 war crimes trial of Fritz Knoechlein, the commander of the company responsible. Explanations for his men’s behaviour have varied from a belief that the British had been using outlawed dum-dum bullets, to anger that the company had suffered heavy casualties during an earlier engagement with the Royal Scots. But no explanation could ever suffice. Knoechlein’s men were responsible for the cold-blooded murder of their prisoners. Of several SS officers present at the time, only one raised any protest at the murders, and he was dismissed as a ‘frightened rabbit’ for demonstrating concern. Knoechlein was found guilty at his trial and executed in January 1949.
And this was not a lone incident. At Wormhoudt, the following day, men of the Royal Warwickshire and Cheshire Regiments, as well as a number of artillerymen and French soldiers, were murdered at Wormhoudt by members of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler – though the company commander responsible, Wilhelm Mohnke, was never brought to justice, dying in 2001 aged ninety.
And while the German army cannot be blamed for these particular atrocities (the SS units responsible were Nazi Party organisations), the Wehrmacht was responsible for at least one massacre, at Vinkt near Ghent. Between 26 and 28 May, 337th Infantry Regiment murdered up to a hundred civilians. Some (including a man of eighty-nine) were shot dead while families and friends were made to watch. Others were used as human shields as the Germans crossed a bridge, before being executed at random. And even after the Belgian army had surrendered, some were shot dead after being made to dig their own graves.
These were dark times for the BEF. Retreating under almost irresistible pressure, its allies surrendering and fragmenting, every hour brought further difficulty and bad news. The song ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, previously sung with hope, was now sung with dark irony. Yet as the days went by, the continued holding of certain key strongpoints, such as La Bassée, meant that the Allied corridor was strong enough for British troops to pass through German-held territory, like Israelites streaming across the Red Sea. And some of these strongpoints were growing stronger. Gravelines, the town blocked to the Germans on 24 May by Bill Reeves of the Royal Tank Regiment, was now defended in far more depth by the French 68th Division.
Another strongpoint was the town of Cassel. Members of 2nd Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment and 4th Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Regiment, were ordered to hold the town – an elevated strategic point on the road to Dunkirk – against 6th Panzer Division. Companies of both battalions were scattered throughout Cassel, defending key points, and various platoons were stationed outside the town.
On 27 May, 8 platoon of the Glosters’ ‘A’ Company, commanded by Second Lieutenant Roy Cresswell, moved into an unfinished concrete blockhouse north of the town. The blockhouse already contained Belgian and French refugees, and the platoon brought with them some biscuits, a nearly-full tin of meat paste and a few eggs. For the rest of the day, the soldiers turned the blockhouse into a defensible position, blocking up doorways with sandbags and creating firing slits for Bren guns and anti-tank rifles.
That evening, Germans were seen moving forwards about six hundred yards away – and the platoon opened fire. Several Germans were seen to go down. Later that night, the enemy came back in greater numbers. A shell suddenly exploded inside the blockhouse, wounding a lance corporal in the head and throat. An attacker got close enough to start hammering at the door before he was killed by a hand grenade. Eventually, the attack was forced back. And it had given the Glosters one advantage: German incendiary bullets had set light to a nearby haystack which burned brightly, allowing the platoon to keep a careful watch throughout the night.
On the morning of 28 May, the enemy attacked again. This assault too was resisted, but the number of casualties was growing, and most had now been painfully struck by metal shards and chips of concrete knocked from the walls by ricocheting bullets. In addition, food was running low, and with no new rations arriving, the platoon was living on rum and water (except for the wounded, who were denied the rum).
The next morning, a Royal Artillery prisoner was brought to the blockhouse by the Germans to persuade the platoon to surrender. The prisoner, Captain Derick Lorraine, having been wounded two days earlier, had been sent in an ambulance to a casualty clearing station with three other wounded men. On the way, the ambulance was captured by the Germans and the driver taken away. The four wounded men were left inside the ambulance without treatment or food for two days and nights. On the third day, Captain Lorraine was ordered out of the ambulance by German soldiers, brought to the Glosters’ blockhouse, and told to walk around it and persuade the occupants to surrender. Captain Lorraine objected. His injured leg, he said, made walking impossible. But the Germans waved a gun in front of his face, making it clear what would happen if he refused.
And so the wounded and hungry Derick Lorraine hobbled slowly around the blockhouse with the help of a stick, shouting, ‘Wounded British officer here!’ Cresswell started to speak, but Lorraine quickly replied, ‘Don’t answer back!’ in an undertone, before looking down at a dead German and saying, ‘There are many English and Germans like that round here.’ Halfway through the sentence, he raised his eyes meaningfully to stare at the roof.
Cresswell understood what Lorraine was trying to tell him. Germans had climbed onto the blockhouse roof. Once Lorraine had hobbled away, there was a sudden explosion, and the blockhouse filled with acrid smoke. The Germans on the roof were trying to smoke the platoon out by unblocking a concreted observation hole, filling it with straw, rubble and petrol, and firing it with hand grenades. Cresswell and his men had their gas masks; they quickly put them on, and blocked the gap in the roof with a quilt. The fire burned throughout the night, but the smoke was just about kept under control.
Aware that the occupants of the blockhouse would not give up easily, the Germans increased the scale of their attacks the following day. When the firing became so intense that bullets were flying through the gun slits, Cresswell told his men that they would try to make a break for Dunkirk after dark. By 5.30 p.m., however, it was clear that the blockhouse was heavily surrounded, and there would be no way through. Having had no food for three days, no medical aid, some rum but almost no water, the platoon finally surrendered.
In the town of Cassel, meanwhile, the garrison had managed to hold out until an order was received to join the retreat to Dunkirk. Wounded men, along with a stretcher bearer who volunteered to stay with them, were left in local houses with some food and the hope that the Germans would treat them well. Second Lieutenant Julian Fane was one of several hundred Glosters joining the retreat. At one point, his company was spotted by the Germans, who called out, ‘Hitler is winning the war, you are beaten! Come out or we will shell you!’ Fane, who had heard stories of the SS massacres, told his men of the treatment they might receive. The men, unsurprisingly, chose not to surrender. Instead, they waited – before suddenly charging across open ground towards a wood. Many of them were killed and wounded by machine-gun fire as they ran.
After four nights of retreat, Fane and his party, reduced to just nine men and himself, arrived in Dunkirk. He had watched an officer drown in his own blood, and an NCO explode when the rounds in his bandoleer were ignited by tracer bullets. He had eaten very little food, suffered agonising pain from his boots and received a wound to his arm. On one occasion, he had walked up to a German soldier, thinking him French, and asked him for directions. Yet he had survived.
As the corridor held, the motley procession filed along. Sergeant Leonard Howard of the Royal Engineers remembers walking and running for sixteen hours. His small, dishevelled group only stopped when they came under attack from Stukas, shells, machine-gun or small-arms fire. ‘Survival,’ he says, ‘was the main object in everybody’s mind.’ And he remembers an experienced soldier, a warrant officer, walking along the road, tears streaming down his face, saying, ‘I never thought I would see the British army like this!’
Private Fred Clapham of the Durham Light Infantry remembers a more prosaic problem. As he walked down the corridor, the early summer heat caused his woollen long johns to chafe his genitals. Officers and men were marching with their legs splayed as far apart as possible. ‘It must have looked quite comical,’ he says.
The Germans, meanwhile, were dropping propaganda leaflets onto the Allied troops, encouraging them to surrender. The most common displayed a surprisingly accurate map of the surrounded British forces, and some accompanying commentary in English and French. The English section read: ‘British Soldiers! Look at this map: it gives your true situation! Your troops are entirely surrounded – stop fighting! Put down your arms!’
The leaflets were so widely circulated that most British soldiers can remember seeing them. They were dropped in huge cylinders, each carrying 12,500 leaflets and held together with long steel bands. Luftwaffe air crew would load these cylinders into a bomber through the bomb bay doors in the same way as they would load bombs. At a prearranged altitude, the aircraft would drop the cylinders, fitted with fuses set to explode a certain height above the ground, breaking the steel bands. The leaflets would then scatter, landing forty or fifty feet apart over a distance of two or three square miles – although sometimes closer together. British soldiers tended to use them as toilet paper – or as maps to guide them towards Dunkirk given the almost complete absence of official charts.
The Germans, meanwhile, were well aware that the British were trying to get away. As early as 26 May, only a day after Lord Gort had made his courageous decision, XIX Corps’ war diary was speaking of ‘the evacuation of English troops’, noting that they were ‘trying to escape in the direction of Dunkirk and that must be prevented’. Extraordinarily, the French had less knowledge of the coming evacuation than the Germans. General Blanchard, commander of the French First Army, was not officially informed of the British intention to evacuate its army until 28 May.*
Often, however, the last people to learn about the evacuation were the British soldiers themselves. Until very late, some had no idea why they were retreating – perhaps it was punishment for a misdemeanour, or possibly their unit was due a rest. Even when told that they were on their way to Dunkirk, many soldiers had no idea what this meant. A few, particularly baffled, thought Dunkirk was in Scotland.
On 27 May, Anthony Rhodes of the Royal Engineers was astonished to hear from his colonel that his unit would be evacuating from Dunkirk. ‘We are going to attempt something essentially British,’ said the colonel. ‘I daresay only the British would dare to attempt such a hare-brained scheme.’ He did not inspire much confidence in his men by explaining that plans for the evacuation had not yet been made, and that they were just going to have to chance it.
Confusing to some and disheartening to others was the fact that they were told to ditch and destroy their vehicles and equipment. Five miles out of Dunkirk, Fred Carter and his party of Royal Engineers were told to leave their trucks behind and blow them up with hand grenades, and as Peter Hadley of the Royal Sussex Regiment retreated from Poperinghe, he walked past an unbroken line of shattered vehicles. Understanding why the vehicles had been destroyed (the Germans must not be allowed to use them), he was nonetheless stunned by the sacrifice of millions of pounds’ worth of virtually unused equipment.
Working vehicles were now in short supply. On one occasion, a Bren gun carrier was stopped by soldiers asking for a lift down the corridor. When the officer in charge refused and the carrier drove away, one of the soldiers took a shot at it with his rifle. He hit the driver – who was left disabled for life.
The chaos grew so great at times that soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans managed to escape in the mayhem. One man did three days’ kitchen fatigue as a German prisoner before slipping away. Those who remained free often went without sleep: a soldier found he could stay awake by rubbing coffee grounds in his eyes – though he might be considered lucky to have had coffee in the first place. And despite being warned to leave the wounded behind, men did not want to leave their friends, but nor did they have the strength to carry them for days. This explains why the wounded were often seen in wheelbarrows.
Drawing nearer to Dunkirk, congestion on the roads became appalling. Men, horses and vehicles came together in the dark to create one huge fleeing organism. Peter Hadley found that the only way to keep his men together was to make them hold on to the man in front, while regularly shouting the name of the unit to attract those who had wandered off. But by this time, many groups of men had lost their battalions altogether, and were moving on in smaller groups. One soldier thought he was walking with four friends – until he turned round to see twenty strangers close behind. In circumstances such as these, anyone displaying natural authority became a leader. Rank was losing its influence.
On entering Dunkirk on 27 May, Anthony Irwin of the Sussex Regiment stood on a ridge above the city and looked down at the docks, all but destroyed by Luftwaffe raids. As he hurried down the hill in the sunshine, he heard explosions, and minutes later arrived at their source. A convoy of ambulances, all displaying red crosses, was strewn across the road, mangled and burning. It had been bombed. Screams came from inside the ambulances, and bodies lay beside them, but there were already people helping, so Irwin moved on.
Anthony Rhodes entered Dunkirk on the same day across a bridge over the Bergues Canal. He spoke to French civilians who seemed perfectly aware that the British were evacuating. Most of the civilians were heading out of town, nervous that the Luftwaffe would soon flatten the entire city and everyone in it. And sure enough, within moments, the sun was blotted out by German bombers whose sound grew to a crescendo. ‘A series of small earthquakes seemed to take place in succession all around us,’ Rhodes remembers. The bridge had been hit, and two large lorries next to it had disappeared, reduced to nothing in thirty seconds.
Peter Hadley, meanwhile, arrived several miles to the east of Dunkirk, at a small village. From there he could see a strip of blue directly ahead. He halted his men, ordered them to close up, and marched them a few hundred yards in perfect order. The scene they encountered – at Bray Dunes – was striking. A sandy beach reached into the far distance to the left and right. Straight ahead was the sea, behind the beach were grassy dunes, and on it were the men of the British Expeditionary Force.
Some few miles to the east was La Panne, a seaside town where Lord Gort was setting up his latest (and final) headquarters. On 30 May, Frederic Wake-Walker, a naval officer on board HMS Hebe, surveyed the scene from La Panne westwards. It was, he said:
One of the most astounding and pathetic sights I have ever seen. Almost the whole ten miles of beach was black from sand-dunes to waterline with tens of thousands of men. In places they stood up to their knees and waists in water waiting for their turn to get into the pitiable boats. It seemed impossible we should ever get more than a fraction of all these men away.
For the evacuation to have any chance at all, the perimeter around Dunkirk and the beaches would have to be defended to prevent the Germans from mopping up the soldiers who had entered down the corridor. The fighting was by no means over. Gort placed Lieutenant General Sir Robert Adam, commander of III Corps, in charge of the defences.
The perimeter would have to be large enough to protect Dunkirk, the beaches and the mass of humanity within. It would also have to be large enough to prevent the Germans from shelling the beaches with anything but their heaviest guns. Yet it would have to be small enough to allow it to be defended with limited numbers of soldiers. And it would have to take advantage of the canal lines which provided ready-made defensive obstacles.
To this end, the perimeter would be about twenty-five miles long and eight miles deep. It was agreed that French troops would man the sector from the port of Dunkirk to the west, while the British would defend the area from Dunkirk to Nieuport in the east. And the man given the critical tasks of, first, finding the troops to do the job, and then organising them, was Brigadier Edward Lawson, who in peacetime had been the general manager of the Daily Telegraph newspaper. The speed with which the perimeter forces were created and the tenacity with which the men defended their positions (in the full knowledge of the sacrifice they were likely making) are too often forgotten when the story of Dunkirk is told.
While retreating near Poperinghe, Second Lieutenant Jimmy Langley of the Coldstream Guards was approached by his brigadier. ‘Marvellous news, Jimmy,’ said the brigadier, ‘the best ever!’ Langley wondered what could be so marvellous, short of an immediate German surrender. The answer was that the battalion had been chosen to man a section of the perimeter along the Bergues–Hondschoote Canal.
Arriving on 29 May, Langley’s No. 3 Company dug in along the canal close to a large cottage which would house the company’s headquarters. The company had already been reduced by fighting to thirty-seven men, but by helping themselves to the contents of British lorries by the side of the road, they increased their arsenal, picking up twelve Bren guns, three old Lewis machine guns, an anti-tank rifle and thirty thousand rounds of ammunition. Langley also found some new battledress, a compass, a radio and five hundred very welcome cigarettes.
Over the next two days, Langley and his men watched as a continuous procession of British and French soldiers crossed the canal and moved on to Dunkirk. The men ranged from pristine Welsh Guardsmen who had been fighting at Arras, to disillusioned Frenchmen, to bedraggled British odds and ends. One corporal carrying two Bren guns whose straps had cut through to his collar bones particularly impressed Langley. When he had tried to requisition the guns, the corporal refused to part with them. His dead major, he said, had ordered him to take them back to England, where they would soon be needed. Langley poured some whisky into the corporal’s tea, put dressings under his straps, and wished him the best of luck.
Soldiers may have been pouring past Langley, but only one aeroplane flew overhead, and he fired furiously at it. Fortunately, it passed serenely on; it was a British Lysander giving Lord Gort a tour of the perimeter line.
Once Gort had moved out of range, and the stream of retreating men had reduced to a trickle, the Germans were spotted. Some of Langley’s men were positioned in the attic of the cottage, where they had removed roof tiles and created Bren gun nests. The Germans, standing in a field six hundred yards away, were easy targets. The result was, according to Langley, a massacre, and it made him feel sick.
Later that afternoon the battle began in earnest, with a German attack to the right of the cottage, a position held partly by No. 1 Company and partly by a Border Regiment company. As Langley’s Bren guns kept up a constant fire, trying to assist the neighbouring companies, the Germans wheeled up a large anti-tank gun and pointed it at the cottage. For a while nothing happened – until Langley heard a tremendous crash and a brightly coloured object started bouncing around the attic, stopping by the chimney stack. It was an incendiary anti-tank shell, and the attic occupants grabbed their guns and ran downstairs as four more shells were fired into the attic.
The German attack was growing more intense, and while Langley was seeking orders from Major Angus McCorquodale, the pair were approached by the captain in command of the Border Regiment company on the right. The captain said that the Germans were massing for an attack, and he was proposing to withdraw.
McCorquodale ordered him to stay put and fight, but the captain said this overrode his own colonel’s orders to withdraw when able. McCorquodale pointed to a large poplar tree further down the road, saying, ‘The moment you or any of your men go back beyond that tree, we will shoot you.’
The captain began to argue, but was interrupted by McCorquodale. ‘Get back,’ he said, ‘or I will shoot you now and send one of my officers to take command.’
The captain walked towards his company position in silence. McCorquodale picked up a rifle and told Langley to get one for himself. ‘Sights at two-fifty,’ McCorquodale said. ‘You will shoot to kill the moment he passes that tree. Are you clear?’
Very soon the captain appeared, accompanied by two men. They stood by the tree for a while as Langley and McCorquodale took aim. Then the captain walked beyond it. The Guards officers fired simultaneously, the captain fell, and his companions ran in the other direction. The Border Regiment battalion stayed where it was.
Shortly afterwards, artillery opened up across the length of the Guards’ position, and an attack followed – but was halted. When all had become quiet, the officers of No. 2 Company on the left came over for a visit. McCorquodale ordered his batman to fetch a bottle of sherry, glasses, and a table from the cottage. In the middle of a battlefield, four officers, three of whom would be dead within twenty-four hours, stood and toasted ‘the gallant and competent enemy’. And when firing started again, they returned to their positions and recommenced battle.
Later that afternoon, the officer in charge of No. 1 Company was killed trying to retrieve a Bren gun from an exposed position. There was now just one officer remaining on the right, Second Lieutenant Ronald Speed, who had only joined the battalion a few weeks earlier. Langley told McCorquodale that Speed wanted to withdraw to No. 3 Company’s position.
McCorquodale gave Langley his flask and told him to make Speed drink all of it. ‘If he won’t or still talks of retiring, shoot him and take command of the company,’ said McCorquodale quietly. ‘They are not to retire.’
Langley walked back to Speed’s position, handed him the flask and advised him to drink it. Fortunately, he did. Langley told him he was not to retire.
Speed nodded. He was killed half an hour later.
The next few hours were something of a blur for Langley. He remembers eating a chicken stew, allowing an old woman to take refuge in the cottage, delivering a furious rant at the Germans for taking over other people’s countries, setting three German tanks on fire with Bren guns – and crouching over Major McCorquodale as he died. ‘I am tired, so very tired,’ said the major, before smiling and ordering Langley back to the cottage with his last breath.
As he and his men made a last stand in the cottage, Langley was shot in the arm. The limb hung uselessly at his side, the wound leaving blood all over his battledress. He was brought downstairs and bundled into a wheelbarrow. He felt no pain, only thirst, as he was transferred into an ambulance, driven to the beach and then carried to the water’s edge on a stretcher. But unable to stand up, he was not allowed onto a boat. A stretcher would take the space of four fit men, he was told, and only the walking wounded were now being evacuated. Instead, he was brought to a casualty clearing station on the edge of Dunkirk. There, when the Germans finally arrived, Jimmy Langley was taken prisoner.*
Yet for all the Coldstream Guards’ efforts, and those of officers and men up and down the perimeter, there was a danger that political discussions taking place in London would leave them counting for nothing. On 28 May, Winston Churchill had spoken to Sir Roger Keyes, telling him that Lord Gort did not ‘rate very highly’ the BEF’s chances of survival. He had then spoken to Parliament, saying that the situation was ‘extremely grave’ but that Britain should remain confident in her power to make her way ‘through disaster and through grief to the ultimate defeat of her enemies’. From the chamber he went directly into meetings, first with his War Cabinet and then his wider Cabinet. It would be no exaggeration to describe these meetings as the most important political discussions to take place in Britain over the last hundred years.
With the War Cabinet, Churchill discussed Italy’s desire to act as broker in peace negotiations between Britain and Germany. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary and Churchill’s recent prime ministerial rival, believed that Britain ought to consider making concessions which did not compromise her independence. This, he felt, was common sense. Britain would receive better terms negotiating now than she would in three months’ time when her situation might have worsened. No, said Churchill. Hitler’s peace terms would put Britain completely at his mercy – whenever they were offered.
Neville Chamberlain now spoke up to say that he could not see what was so wrong with making it clear that, while Britain would fight to the end to preserve her independence, she would consider decent terms if they were offered.
The first response was pure Churchill. Nations that went down fighting rose again, he said, but those that surrendered tamely were finished. The second response, from Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee, was more practical. Once negotiations began, he said, it would be impossible to rally the morale of the British people.
Churchill’s style of oratory, usually pitched somewhere between Edward Gibbon and Shakespeare’s Henry V, could sometimes seem masterful and sometimes hollow. But nowhere was it ever used to better effect than in the meeting that followed with twenty-five members of his full Cabinet. Many of these men did not share Churchill’s views on peacetime issues. Some, such as committed socialists Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin, could never have imagined serving under him. But all now listened as Churchill set out the situation in France, and the likelihood that the Germans would attempt an invasion of Britain. They listened as he admitted having considered the possibility of negotiating with Hitler, whom he described as ‘That Man’. And they listened as he warned that any peace would turn Britain into a slave state. ‘I am convinced,’ he told his rapt audience, ‘that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island history of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us is choking in his own blood upon the ground.’
The attitudes in Churchill’s rarefied War Cabinet were one thing. But in his full Cabinet, a better microcosm of the country, he could begin to gauge the reaction his words would receive in British pubs and living rooms. And the ministers loved what they heard. ‘There were loud cries of approval all round the table,’ wrote Hugh Dalton, the Labour Minister of Economic Warfare, adding that ‘no one expressed even the faintest glimmer of dissent.’ Churchill was able to return to the smaller War Cabinet later that evening to inform them emphatically that there would be no surrender. The fight would continue. The war was not over.
Had these meetings ended differently, had Britain decided to speak to ‘That Man’, the sacrifices made by the men of the British, French and Belgian armies would have amounted to little – because the war would almost certainly have come to an end shortly afterwards. We forget nowadays how close Britain came to making peace with Hitler, how close she came to a puppet government, to round-ups of Jews, dissidents and anybody else who displeased the authorities, to the suppression of ideas and dissent, to the implementation of the kinds of laws described in a previous chapter of this book.
For Lord Halifax, Britain was a geographical entity, a place of hills, dales, moors and tors, an H. E. Bates world durable enough to resist whatever brutal regime was in effective charge. For Churchill, Britain was more than this. It was the original model of liberty, a land whose existence depended on freedom and the rule of law. If these were extinguished, her survival meant nothing. And while both views were rosy and sentimental in their different ways, the latter was closer to the truth – and a great deal more humane.