Amere 25 years elapsed between the retreat from Mons and the Anglo-French declaration of war on Hitler’s Germany, as short a time span as separated the invasion of the Falklands from the last months of the Blair government. The majority of adults in Britain and France retained clear memories of the earlier conflict, and there was a widespread feeling that the new clash of arms arose from a need to resolve business left unfinished by the Armistice of exhaustion welcomed in November 1918.
Most Great War commanders and statesmen had died before 1939, but some familiar names were soon back in the headlines. On the day war was declared Winston Churchill returned to the Admiralty as first lord, the post he held in 1914. Across the Channel the 73-year-old Marshal Pétain was still active, serving as France’s ambassador to Franco’s Spain, and General Weygand, Foch’s wartime ‘shadow’, was fetched out of retirement to command France’s armies in mandated Syria and Lebanon, with his headquarters in Beirut. One survivor from the early Great War battles held even higher office. General Maurice Gamelin, Joffre’s head of operational planning at the Marne, was chief of the general staff; he automatically assumed command of French land forces on the coming of war. Gamelin, once an enterprising innovator, was now aged 67, and he seemed cautiously conservative, looking back for inspiration to Joffre the Imperturbable. It was his misfortune to recall the problems of 1914 all too clearly, refighting in his mind a campaign that had come close to defeat. Although King Leopold insisted on observing strict neutrality, Gamelin assumed from the outset that soon there would again be heavy fighting in Belgium, and ways to advance across western Flanders to the rivers Scheldt and Dyle dominated his strategic planning in the first months of the war.1
A British Field Force began crossing the Channel on 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared. Before the end of the week it was renamed the British Expeditionary Force at the instigation of King George VI, who believed his subjects would find the familiar name heartening, as he did himself. Within three weeks 152,000 officers and men were in France, with General Viscount Gort VC as the latter-day Sir John French and Sir John Dill and Sir Alan Brooke as corps commanders. Field Force was, perhaps, a more appropriate name than Expeditionary Force, for the second BEF unlike its predecessor was essentially defensive in character. Although boosted in the new year by eight Territorial divisions and eventually including more than 300 tanks, at first the BEF lacked any armour and could count on only 12 squadrons of aircraft in support. Gort’s troops were, however, integral to Gamelin’s plans. He proposed they should be ready to advance as far forward as Louvain as soon as Hitler invaded Belgium. Meanwhile, true to Joffre’s belief that les Anglais should be kept well away from the sea and from home, the BEF was concentrated around Lille, sandwiched between the French 7th Army by the coast and the 1st Army between Valenciennes and Maubeuge.
This was familiar ground to many veterans. Men recalled to the colours or volunteering once more from a sense of duty indeed felt they were taking the stage for Act Two of an unfinished drama. Among regular officers was Major-General Sir Bernard Montgomery, commanding 3rd Division: he had been present at the liberation of Lille, after serving on Plumer’s staff in 1917 and ten years later brought four fledging subalterns from his old regiment to hear him expound his views on the Ypres battlefields. General Sir Alan Brooke, too, recalled that earlier war, with mixed feelings of nostalgia and dismay. On 13 October he wrote in his diary, ‘Had tea in Sir John French’s old billet’ at St Omer. Three weeks later Brooke saw ‘the window I used to look out of at headquarters during the battle of Vimy. It brought back floods of memories, and made me feel that the war had never stopped. It had only been interrupted by a happy dream of 20 years.’2
The first winter of war was the coldest in Europe for many years; there was little fighting along the Western Front. Hitler, however, insisted that the Army General Staff (OKH) should prepare for an early offensive, designed to knock out France and force ‘England’ to sue for peace. The first plan, ‘Fall Gelb’ (Operation Yellow), was a variation on the original Schlieffen theme, including a march through the Netherlands. A series of postponements, due mainly to the weather, gave General von Manstein, an Army Group chief of staff, the opportunity to put forward drastic changes, in effect combining the 1914 strategic concepts of Moltke and of Falkenhayn. While the offensive would still begin with an invasion of Belgium and Holland, Manstein proposed that the most powerful assault would be made by armoured panzer divisions advancing through the forested Ardennes, now no longer seen as an obstacle to modern tanks and providing an opportunity of outflanking France’s Maginot Line forts. The armoured divisions would go forward swiftly around Sedan. One group would then wheel northwards across Artois in a dash for the Channel ports, encircling the allied northern armies in Belgium. The second panzer group would strike due westwards down the Somme to Amiens and Abbeville, subsequently descending on Paris, which, it was assumed, would be defended by weaker forces. Hitler approved this ‘sickle slice’ plan on 20 February 1940. With minor changes it provided the key to the astonishing German victory in the West three months later.3
Meanwhile, by chance, the Belgian General Staff had gained details of OKH’s original Operation Yellow. On 9 January a small plane ferrying a German major to a conference in Cologne was carried off-course and crashed in deep snow at Mechelen, just across the Belgian frontier. Partially burned papers carried by the major alerted Belgian intelligence to German intentions to march on Paris through the Low Countries.4 The Dutch and the French were duly warned. Gamelin took the revelations so seriously that he modified his plans. He now proposed that when the Low Countries were invaded no less than 30 French divisions, together with the BEF, should pour into Belgium. The motorized columns of the French 7th Army would then speed across Flanders and into the Netherlands north of Antwerp, with Breda as their objective. Once established at Breda they would bolster Dutch defence before the German right flank could wheel down to the coast and envelop King Leopold’s army. This ‘Breda Variant’ was incorporated in France’s operational plans on 10 March. Had the German high command closely followed the pre-1914 Schlieffen Plan, Gamelin’s strategy might have checked the invaders and saved Antwerp and all of Flanders from occupation. But it was already out of date. Hitler had given his approval to the ‘sickle slice’ project 19 days earlier.
War returned to Belgium in the small hours of Friday, 10 May. Heavy air attacks were made on airfields in the Low Countries and northern France, and 16,000 airborne troops parachuted into The Hague, Rotterdam and Leiden. Some 100 picked troops, intensively trained for the operation, landed silently in eleven gliders near Belgium’s Albert canal and seized the vital bridges. As dawn broke, paratroopers landed on the roof of Eben Emael, rated the most formidable modern citadel in the world. They brought with them explosive charges, which were dropped down apertures under the outer steel shell or, in two instances, lodged in the barrels of guns projecting from the turrets. Airborne assault was a military innovation as unexpected and as revolutionary as the coming of tanks in the Great War: it was the one eventuality the builders of the fort had failed to consider. Throughout the Friday and on into Saturday the Belgian garrison held out in Eben Emael and the neighbouring defences along the canal. But at noon the survivors were forced to surrender. The protective shield on which Belgians had confidently counted to prevent ‘it happening again’ was in the invader’s hands. Hitler is said to have hugged himself with delight on hearing Eben Emael had fallen.
The allied troops duly moved forward in fulfilment of Gamelin’s plan. The French mechanized division reached Breda in record time but no contact was made with the Dutch army, for what remained of its best divisions had swung northwards away from Breda and the Scheldt, desperately seeking to defend Rotterdam. By Saturday evening Gamelin’s hopes for the Netherlands were shattered. The mechanized division, woefully short of fuel and with no arrangements made for replenishment, pulled back across the Belgian border to the far from adequate defensive line along the Dyle. That night the BEF completed their planned advance from Lille to Louvain. As General Brooke reached his new headquarters east of Brussels he ended his diary with the ominous comment, ‘A day of ceaseless alarming rumours of Belgians giving way!’5
During the next fortnight the rumours multiplied. Too often they were found to be true. The Belgian army was soon demoralized, with the fragile bonds linking Dutch-speakers and francophones beginning to wear thin. On Sunday, 12 May, the Germans struck their decisive blow. General Heinz Guderian, the foremost German advocate of armoured warfare, had massed the tanks of his crack XIX Corps in the Ardennes. They now emerged from the reputedly ‘unpenetrable’ forests and, backed by hundreds of Stuka dive-bombers, secured bridgeheads across the Meuse over the following three days.6 A French counter-attack failed, and the breach in the allied line broadened into a German corridor 60 miles wide. The BEF began pulling back through Brussels to the Charleroi canal, its commanders already alarmed by the mounting German threat on both flanks. In Paris the prime minister, Paul Reynaud, turned in despair to two First World War ‘saviours’. Marshal Pétain reached the capital early on 18 May, to enter Reynaud’s government as vice-premier. Even earlier on that Saturday, General Weygand set out by air from Beirut, summoned home to replace the discredited Gamelin as commander-in-chief.7
During the 30-hour flight Weygand jotted down notes of possible military options, based upon experience of the earlier war for he knew nothing of what was happening in the current battle. Most comments were generalities, echoes of Foch at his pinnacle of power, but the notes are more specific over the needs of Belgium, where Weygand had spent much of a mysterious boyhood, with his parentage unknown but the Boulevard Waterloo in Brussels registered as his place of birth. High among his priorities was the need for King Leopold’s army to maintain contact with the French and the BEF, defending Flanders and the coast, though ready to open once more the sluice gates and fall back on a line of defence behind the Yser.8
By Sunday afternoon (19th), when Weygand reached central Paris, such thoughts were largely academic. That afternoon Guderian’s panzers were crossing the old battlefield of the Somme, fighting off a series of persistent incursions by tanks of the French 4th Armoured Division, commanded by a General de Gaulle, a name as yet unknown to the public. Next day the panzers leapt forward another 60 miles, entering Abbeville in the evening, with an Austrian tank battalion reaching the Channel coast. Weygand found this ‘lightning warfare’ as puzzling to comprehend as the first months of the Great War had seemed to Kitchener but, within 30 hours of arriving in Paris, he was in the air again, making a courageous flight across the new panzer corridor to an airfield near Béthune and on to Calais.9 He was determined to confer with King Leopold, General Gort and General Billotte, commander of the French Army Group. From Calais, Weygand was driven to Ypres, down 60 miles of road crammed with refugee columns, as in the dark days of 1914. By 3 p.m. he was in the town hall, looking out across the Grand Place at the still incomplete restoration of buildings levelled by the shells of that earlier war. Leopold, with General van Overstraeten at his side, reached Ypres three-quarters of an hour later. The congested roads delayed Billotte even longer, while Gort did not arrive until 8 p.m. That was an hour after Weygand, angered by his absence, had set out for Dunkirk and a hazardous voyage to Cherbourg by motor torpedo-boat.
The Ypres conference on 21 May was not a success.10 Weygand elaborated his plan: the Belgians must pull back from their current positions on the Scheldt and establish a line along the Yser and the Lys, to protect the rear of a southward thrust by Billotte’s First Army intended to link up, around Bapaume, with a counter-attack launched by General Georges northwards from the Somme; the panzer corridor would thus be sealed. King Leopold, unlike his father on such occasions, said little: he left Overstraeten to explain that ‘after the forced marches the army had made, it was too weary’ to retreat back to the Yser: ‘at least two days of rest’ were needed. Leopold went so far as to tell Weygand that he ‘would think it over’ (réfléchirait). Billotte was more positive, although he admitted that the fighting had thrown the French First Army into confusion. Weygand’s proposed southward thrust would, he thought, have to be undertaken primarily by the British. The French and Belgians thus downloaded responsibility for cutting off the panzers on to the absent commander of the BEF.
It is small wonder that when Gort arrived he treated Billotte’s proposals with considerable reservation. One reason for his absence from the afternoon session was that he had been co-ordinating a counter-attack launched on that Tuesday southwest of Arras. Some 83 tanks in General Mattel’s 50th Division penetrated 10 miles into the panzer corridor, with their further progress checked by the failure of the French First Army to provide the flank cover on which Gort had counted. He pointed out to Billotte that the BEF’s reserves were already committed to battle, and he doubted if a major attack could be made for another three or four days. When the Ypres meeting broke up only Billotte retained any confidence in Weygand’s plan. Overstraeten’s account of the conference ends on a note of hopeless despair.11
A few hours later General Billotte was fatally injured when the car in which he was travelling skidded in heavy rain outside Ypres and in the black-out was hit by a lorry. For 48 critical hours the French Army Group was left without a C-in-C. The BEF was by now for the most part back on the starting line the troops had left ten days previously. Gort’s Corps commanders were convinced the Belgians were about to drop out of the battle: ‘Nothing but a miracle can save the BEF now, and the end cannot be far off,’ Brooke wrote in his diary at Armentières on 23 May. During that Thursday the Germans entered Boulogne. Next morning they were attacking Hazebrouck and closing in on Calais.12
As late as noon on 25 May, Gort still hoped to send his 3rd Corps southwards to cut through the panzer corridor, but by the evening he realized such action would court disaster: some 14 German armoured divisions and at least a dozen infantry divisions packed the corridor. He was alarmed too by the claws of the two German army corps threatening to encircle his battle-weary 11 divisions and cut them off from the sea. On 26 May, Gort ordered the BEF to head for the coast and embark: ‘all guns, vehicles, stores etc. would be abandoned’.13 There was no possibility of retaining a foothold in Belgium.
General Brooke sought to establish a perimeter line protecting Dunkirk, running from Gravelines through Ypres to Nieuport, where he hoped the Belgian army might still be capable of checking the advance of German forces coming down from the north. Momentarily it seemed as if the Belgians might rally. On 25 May a proclamation in King Leopold’s name called on his troops to wage war ‘with all our power and energy on the same ground on which we victoriously faced the enemy in 1914’. There were instances of courageous resistance, notably at Hill 60, where the Belgians put to good use trenches preserved in memory of the earlier clash of arms. But both Gort and Brooke recognized that the king felt little commitment to the common cause.
On the morning of 26 May, General Brooke drove through Ploegsteert and into Ypres. No Belgian troops were to be seen in the familiar streets; the only French soldiers were postal clerks overlooked in the general exodus. British sappers stood by to demolish the bridges, on one occasion almost leaving their corps commander on the wrong side of the canal. From the eastern ridges, beyond the Menin Road, artillery fire gave warning of a German approach. General Martel was ordered to prepare for a delaying action if the Germans mounted an all-out assault on Ypres itself, and General Montgomery, whose 3rd Division still lay southwest of Lille, was assigned a night march of some 30 miles to take up positions along the Yserlee canal northwards from Boesinghe through Steenstraat to Dixmude.
No sooner had Montgomery reached the Yserlee, early on 2 May, than he learnt that King Leopold had accepted German demands for Belgian capitulation. The army was ordered to end all resistance. The king personally surrendered his sword, choosing to remain with his people. He believed that even as a prisoner of war he might find means to lighten his subjects’ burden. The Belgian ministers dissociated themselves from their sovereign’s action and maintained a government in exile.
The immediate effect of the capitulation was to open a gap in the northern fringe of Dunkirk’s outer perimeter of defence. Hurriedly, Brooke and Montgomery improvised a force to hold the line of the Yser down to Nieuport and the sea. No attempts were made to open the sluice gates.
Most towns on either side of the border were by now being heavily bombed, Poperinghe and Armentières in particular, but central Ypres remained unscathed. Brooke visited Martel again on 28 May, when the silence of the streets was broken by the sound of shells exploding on the outer suburbs. Later that day the last troops left Ypres along the road and railway route to Poperinghe, where fires still raged from the recent bombing. Ahead lay ‘the deliverance of Dunkirk’ when, between 27 May and 4 June, 338,000 British and allied troops were brought across to England from Dunkirk harbour and the 15 miles of beaches running northwards to La Panne.14
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In the first week of June, even before the opening of the second phase of the battle that brought Germany victory over France, Hitler visited Ypres. His Mercedes paused at the Menin Gate and then drove out to Langemarck, where he paid homage to the ‘innocents’ mowed down in 1914. He returned for a longer visit to the Salient after the French capitulation on 24 June, accompanied on this occasion by two of his wartime comrades. They toured the battlefields they had known – Gheluvert, Comines, Wytschaete, Messines – as well as again honouring the dead of Langemarck. Few Belgians saw them or were aware of Hitler’s presence.15
Ypres, Poperinghe and the surrounding villages remained under German occupation for more than four years. Many families had their younger and fitter menfolk taken to Germany as forced labourers. The shadow of the Gestapo was present everywhere. Local dignitaries, lawyers, high-school teachers and other ‘intellectuals’ were at first arrested. Most were soon released after questioning. Many subsequently supported the Resistance, secretly or passively, but the Germans also played on Flemish Francophobes to recruit collaborators: even before the close of 1940 some Flemish nationalists enlisted in the Westland Regiment of the Waffen-SS Germania Division.
The Jewish community in this region of Flanders was small but, as elsewhere in Belgium, Jews were rounded up and detained in holding camps while their business affairs were investigated before confiscation of their property. Brialmont’s Fort Breendonck, on the road from Malines to Antwerp, became a concentration camp to which non-Jews, too, were sent for ‘punishment’. The guards became notorious for their sadistic practices. After the war 16 Belgians who had collaborated with the Nazis at Breendonck were executed, shot with their backs to the firing squad as a sign of their infamy. By midsummer 1942 the Final Solution, that appalling crime of genocide, was sending Jewish survivors eastwards to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. At least 25,000 Belgian Jews perished in the Holocaust.
Throughout the occupation the Commonwealth war cemeteries were treated with respect, though specifically anti-German inscriptions were erased from plaques and monuments. The most treasured fittings of St George’s Memorial Church in Ypres were removed for safe keeping by regular members of the congregation before the town fell. During the occupation German Protestants occasionally held services in the church, fatigue parties having unscrewed commemorative brass plaques on the chairs in advance: all were returned after the war.
At Poperinghe the contents of Talbot House were hidden by a group of friends before the German authorities requisitioned the building and its outhouses as billets for a predominantly Austrian regiment. Other units moved in for periods of recuperation until in 1941 it served for several months as a discreetly managed brothel for officers of the German navy. Respectability returned before the end of the year with Talbot House becoming the residence of the senior local German commander. The chapel in the Upper Room remained inviolate.16
The 3rd Polish Armoured Division, attached to Field Marshal Montgomery’s Second Army, liberated both Poperinghe and Ypres on the same day, 6 September 1944. A bugler is said to have sounded the Last Post that evening under the Menin Gate while firing could still be heard coming from across the canal. Three days earlier allied troops had entered Brussels, and there were hopes the war would end rapidly as in 1918, but the enemy resistance stiffened. In mid-December an unexpected German offensive in the Ardennes momentarily raised fears of a breakthrough to Antwerp and the lower Scheldt. A pincer movement by Montgomery and the American general, George C. Patton, won ‘the Battle of the Bulge’ in the new year. By the end of January 1945 the kingdom was clear of Hitler’s armies.
In post-war Belgium the public mood was angry, as in so many lands where the Resistance hunted down alleged collaborators. The most dramatic act occurred in March 1946 when extremists opposed to Flemish nationalism blew up the original IJzertoren at Dixmude – only for it to be replaced 19 years later by the present, even higher, peace monument. King Leopold III, whom the Germans had kept under virtual house arrest at the palace of Laeken for the first four years of the occupation, was widely unpopular. He was deported to Germany in the late summer of 1944 with his family including his second wife, the Princess de Rethy. It was all too easy to make him a scapegoat for Belgium’s misfortunes in 1940, and he was alleged, unfairly, to have collaborated with Hitler. Leopold settled in Switzerland, his brother Charles serving as regent. In 1950 a referendum showed 57 per cent of voters favoured Leopold’s return. Although he came back to Brussels, the parties of the left remained hostile. There were serious riots, and in July 1951 he abdicated in favour of his elder son by Queen Astrid, Baudouin I. On Baudouin’s death in 1992, Leopold’s second son acceded as Albert II.
This acrimonious public debate over the monarchy was waged against a background of economic and constitutional change that continued through four decades. There was a dichotomy in Belgian political life. Externally, positive statesmanship brought the kingdom more and more into Europe, with interdependence offering a profitable substitute for strict neutrality. Internally, the chronic language disputes ensured that the emphasis in domestic legislation was on devolution. In 1958, the year in which Brussels staged a world fair and the city skyline gained the Atomium, the Belgian capital also welcomed the European Economic Community, while in 1967 NATO headquarters moved from Fontainebleau in France to the Brussels suburb of Evere. But during the EEC’s first years, the local language question brought Flemish radicals out on the streets of Brussels and several other towns. Three constitutional amendments during Baudouin’s reign ceded the control of education and cultural affairs to regional governments. Finally, soon after Albert II’s accession, Belgium became a federal monarchy, with five community assemblies, each with its own minister-president (prime minister).
In theory the person of the king has served to unite a polyphonic nation, as in the opening months of the Great War. Old tensions, however, come readily to the surface. Thus, in August 2006, Yves Leterme, minister-president of the Flemish community, gave an interview to a Parisian newspaper in which he dismissed the concept of a Belgian nation. Belgium, he claimed, was ‘an accident of history’: it was little more than ‘the king, the national football team and certain brands of beer’. He ridiculed ‘the difficulties francophone leaders, and even the king of this country, have in speaking fluent Dutch’.17 Significantly the interview coincided with the annual IJzer Pilgrimage, four days in which passions over past struggles tend to run as high as in the Apprentice Boys parades of Northern Ireland.
Fewer tourists crossed to Flanders from Britain after the Second World War than in the 1930s: they had more recent battlefields to visit, and the purchase of foreign currency was restricted. Numbers picked up again in the late 1950s and 1960s. There were several reasons for this revival of interest. The availability of new source material encouraged scholars with experience of modern soldiering to reassess the Great War critically, though retaining admiration for the heroism and endurance of the troops: two best-sellers, Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields (1958) and Alan Clark’s The Donkeys (1961) were devoted to the Salient and northwest France. Clark provoked controversy by his contempt for brass-hat leadership. So, too, did the sustained irreverence of Joan Littlewood’s satirical Oh! What a Lovely War (1963). The public’s rediscovery of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, both through Britten’s War Requiem (1961) and Cecil Day-Lewis’s edition of his collected poems in 1963, broadened the cultural search for understanding the men of the trenches; a definitive edition of Siegfried Sassoon’s collected poems had appeared two years earlier, in 1961. Greatest influence of all, however, was the impact of television. The BBC’s Great War series (1964) projected images of Grandad’s war into the sitting room and in many instances prompted ageing survivors to download long repressed memories. The personal immediacy of their tales of living history gripped a younger generation, an experience to be repeated at the change of the century through interviews with the last veterans.
Contemporary Ypres, though a lively market town with attractive walks along the old ramparts, is no longer the slumbering city whose medieval grandeur charmed Francis Bumpus a century ago. Poperinghe continues to brew fine beer, and out at Passchendaele there is an annual cheese festival, but along familiar roads radiating from Ypres are factory pig-farms and business ventures, some benefiting from the silicon-chip revolution. The town has absorbed surrounding villages, while to the north an industrial park covers old trench lines at Boesinghe. But the Salient has not receded into a remote past. German bunkers and pillboxes remain on farmland where ploughing may be halted by the discovery of unexploded shells, grenades or parts of weapons. An army disposal unit, based at Houthulst, regularly garners the yield of this ‘Iron Harvest’. Battlefield archaeologists and licensed amateur ‘diggers’ have worked on sites where building contractors unearth the relics of war, including human remains and shreds of uniforms, notably at Boesinghe.18 A soldier’s identity is rarely established. Occasionally the discoveries are reported in the daily newspapers or feature in television programmes, keeping the Salient topically in the news.
Modern battle bears little resemblance to the fighting in Flanders. The campaigns against the Ottoman Empire afford more relevance to today’s conflicts than the war on the Western Front. There was trench warfare in Korea in 1952–3 and during the Iran–Iraq conflict of the early 1980s, when Iraqi defence lines repelled waves of infantry as fanatical as the German assault on Langemarck in October 1914. For the most part technological innovation has ruled out calls for cannon fodder. Strategic planning for major conflicts seeks swift and decisive results from precision-guided missiles, the ultimate artillery barrage perfected by other means. It is not surprising that Yprians readily identify themselves with the people of historic towns that have suffered bombardment and partial destruction, notably Mostar and Dubrovnik.
For many of us war is abhorrent with whatever weapon it is fought. It remains ‘vile wicked folly and a barbarism’, as Churchill once declared. The silent message of the panels on the Menin Gate and the ranks of gravestones on parade at Tyne Cot is the need to strive patiently for reconciliation between peoples and nations. Some who come to the Salient today find hope and inspiration in the Island of Ireland Peace Tower and Park on Messines Ridge or the Pool of Peace created from the mine crater at Spanbroekmolen. It matters little where one gains the inner calm that brings reflective understanding. There can be no one visiting Ypres for any length of time who fails to sense the heart lifting with pride and pity at the courage of those who diced with death as shells fell among them while they trudged the long roads of Flanders or endured the horrors of trench warfare in Flanders fields.