TO WINSTON CHURCHILL, CALAIS was the key. The ancient French port, 24 miles west of Dunkirk, was besieged but still in British hands. The Prime Minister decided that it must be held to the last man. Taking it would chew up Rundstedt’s troops, slow down his advance, and buy the time needed to get the BEF back to the coast.
Still, it was not an easy decision. It meant deliberately sacrificing 3,000 highly trained troops at a time when Britain could ill afford to lose them. Rescuing any large part of the BEF was a long shot at best. Might not these men be better used on the home front in case of invasion?
For Anthony Eden the decision was especially bitter. He had long served in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, one of the regiments at Calais. Ordering them to fight to the end meant condemning to death or captivity some of his best friends.
It was a gloomy dinner at Admiralty House on the evening of May 25 when the step was finally taken. Churchill silently picked at his food, and on leaving the table, remarked to no one in particular, “I feel physically sick.” At 11:30 a last telegram went off to Brigadier Claude Nicholson, commanding the Calais garrison:
Every hour you continue to exist is of greatest help to the BEF. Government has therefore decided you must continue to fight. Have greatest possible admiration for your splendid stand.
For Brigadier Nicholson this was the latest in a bewildering series of messages that had tugged him this way and that. Until late April, his 30th Infantry Brigade had been slated for Norway. With the collapse of that campaign, Churchill decided it should be used to raid the German flanks along the French coast, the way his old Marine Brigade did in World War I.
The 30th was a brigade that should give the Germans a lot of trouble. Two of its three battalions—the 2nd King’s Royal Rifle Corps and the 1st Rifle Brigade—were crack regulars. The remaining battalion—the 1st Queen Victoria’s Rifles—was a Territorial unit of weekend soldiers; but one of the best in England. All were mechanized. To beef them up still more, Churchill added the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, already heading for Calais under separate orders.
The tank squadrons and the Queen Victoria’s Rifles left first, sailing from Dover for Calais at 11:00 a.m. on May 22. In the rush to get going, the QVR left all their vehicles behind. The 3rd Tank Regiment brought their tanks, but they were stowed in the bottom of the ship, and unloading them at Calais seemed to take forever.
This work had scarcely begun when a disconcerting figure arrived on the scene. Lieutenant-General Brownrigg, Gort’s Adjutant General, had been in Boulogne setting up a rear GHQ. Now he suddenly appeared in Calais, en route to England. Acting on his own authority as senior officer present, he ordered the tanks to head west for Boulogne and join the troops defending that port. It was just as well that the battalion was still unloading, since Boulogne was already cut off.
Later that night Major Ken Bailey arrived from Gort’s headquarters with entirely different orders for the tanks: they were to head south, not west, and join the BEF at Saint-Omer. Then from Brownrigg, now at Dover: they were to go to Boulogne, as previously ordered. Pulled this way and that, a squadron of the tanks finally set out for Saint-Omer at 1:30 p.m. on the 23rd, but were hurled back by a panzer column blocking the way.
That afternoon Brigadier Nicholson reached Calais with the rest of the 30th Infantry Brigade. He too had orders from General Brownrigg to head west for Boulogne, but while his troops were still unloading, the War Office ordered him to head east for Dunkirk (the opposite direction) with 350,000 rations for Gort’s army. During the night of May 23-24 the convoy set off, but soon ran into the inevitable panzers. In a slam-bang night action three of the escorting tanks broke through to Gort’s lines, but the rest of the convoy was destroyed or thrown back to Calais.
Clearly the town was cut off. Whatever Brownrigg or the others ordered, there would be no forays in any direction. Nicholson would have his hands full holding Calais itself. This he proposed to do, deploying his own three battalions, plus the 21 remaining tanks, plus some scattered units to form an “outer” and “inner” perimeter defending the port.
Some 800 French troops also rallied around, manning the town’s ancient Citadel and four old forts. Built in the seventeenth century by the great French military engineer Vauban, they were still amazingly strong. A few antique coastal defense guns, worked by French marines, completed the garrison.
Nicholson’s plan was to stand fast as long as possible. When enemy pressure became too great, he would gradually pull back toward the harbor. He would then be in position for a fast getaway, since a new message sent by the War Office at 2:48 a.m. on the 24th said that evacuation had been agreed on “in principle.”
By afternoon his orders had changed again. During the day Churchill had agreed to the appointment of French General Fagalde as overall commander of the defense of the Channel ports. Adhering to Weygand’s idea that these ports should be held indefinitely as fortified bridgeheads on the Continent, Fagalde forbade any evacuation of Calais. Normally British commanders were given some loophole in such a situation, but not this time. At 11:23 p.m. on the 24th, the War Office sent Nicholson new instructions:
In spite of policy of evacuation given you this morning, fact that British forces in your area now under Fagalde who has ordered no repeat no evacuation, means that you must comply for sake of Allied solidarity. Your role is therefore to hold on, harbour being for present of no importance to BEF. …
When Winston Churchill saw this message on the morning of May 25, he exploded in indignation. To him, the role of Calais was to tie up as many Germans as possible. The French said no evacuation, and that could well mean no escape. If so, “Allied solidarity” and calling Calais harbor “of no importance” were not the arguments to use to make troops fight to the end.
Churchill now drafted the kind of message he felt was needed. It was full of ringing phrases, which Anthony Eden deftly edited into a strong personal appeal from himself to Nicholson. As a former member of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, Eden carried special weight:
Defence of Calais to the utmost is of highest importance to our country as symbolizing our continued cooperation with France. The eyes of the Empire are upon the defence of Calais, and H. M. Government are confident you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.
Nicholson understood without being told. At the very moment when Eden was sending his message—2:00 p.m. on the 25th—a Lieutenant Hoffmann of the 10th Panzer Division was being escorted under a flag of truce into the British lines by a French officer and a Belgian soldier. They guided Hoffmann to Nicholson’s headquarters, now at the Citadel. The Lieutenant came to the point immediately: unconditional surrender, or Calais would be destroyed.
Nicholson was equally quick in writing his reply:
1. The answer is no, as it is the British Army’s duty to fight as well as it is the German’s.
2. The French captain and the Belgian soldier, having not been blindfolded, cannot be sent back. The Allied commander gives his word that they will be put under guard and will not be allowed to fight against the Germans.
The weary garrison fought on. For three days they had battled the Wehrmacht’s tanks and Stukas, gradually yielding inch by inch. Now they were holed up in Calais-Nord, the old part of town by the harbor. The noise of battle gradually faded—Germans have to sleep too—and the only sound was the incongruous trill of nightingales in the Jardin Richelieu.
London’s last message had wider distribution than anyone in Whitehall thought. It was picked up and read with the greatest interest by German radio intelligence—especially the ringing exhortation, “Every hour you continue to exist is of the greatest help to the BEF.” It was the first convincing evidence that the British planned to evacuate. Until now there had been much speculation that the increased shipping activity in the Channel might be due to some Allied plan to make a surprise landing behind the German advance. Others felt that it meant preparations for a permanent Allied beachhead based at Dunkirk. But this new message seemed to rule all that out. The phrasing pointed to evacuation and nothing else.
The message was interesting for another reason, too. The British obviously regarded holding Calais as more important than the Germans did. Army Group A had warned Guderian not to get involved in costly house-to-house fighting there. Guderian himself regarded the port as a distinctly secondary objective—of “less military than prestige importance.” He had taken it from the 1st Panzer Division, leading his advance, and reassigned it to the 10th Panzers trailing behind because it had “only local importance and no influence upon general operations.”
And now this curious intercept. For some reason London was calling on Calais to fight to the end. Around noon on May 26 Colonel Blumentritt, Operations Officer at Army Group A, phoned 10th Panzer Division headquarters, where Guderian was conferring with the Division commander, General Lieutenant Ferdinand Schaal. Blumentritt reminded them that the Division must not be wasted on Calais. If the going got tough, Calais should be left to the Luftwaffe.
Schaal felt that wouldn’t be necessary. He said his attack was “promising” and asked to be kept in the fight. He expected to have Calais by nightfall.
He had good reason for optimism. The day had begun with a devastating Stuka raid. Most of the British had never been through this ordeal before, and the screech of the planes was predictably terrifying. Private T. W. Sandford of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps ran for a cellar, scooping up an equally frightened small dog. Sandford and his mates crouched in the dark, while the dog lay cowering in a corner. They patted it and fussed over it, until it finally wagged its tail, which somehow made them feel better.
After the raid, they emerged into a street littered with bricks and broken glass. The bombing broke up many of the defending units, and Sandford never did find his own company again. At 10:50 a.m. the Germans broke into Calais-Nord and began systematically splitting up the defenders into pockets of resistance.
Communications collapsed, and Brigadier Nicholson was soon isolated in the Citadel with his staff and a handful of French defenders. By 3:00 p.m. it was completely surrounded, and around 3:30 a detachment of Schaal’s infantry broke through the south gate. That did it. With the enemy inside the walls, resistance vanished. Hands up, Brigadier Nicholson emerged from his command post to meet his captors.
Down by the harbor a few isolated units fought on. Colour Sergeant Fred Walter of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles found himself in a tunnel that ran through Bastion 1, a strong-point near the docks. Troops from other units were packed in here too, milling around, totally disorganized. An ever-growing number of wounded were also crowding into the place, part of which had been set aside as a first aid post.
A cool-headed officer finally appeared and sorted the men out. Some he sent to a nearby fort; others, including Walter, he stationed on top of the tunnel with a French machine gun. They kept it firing as the Germans drew steadily closer, mopping up resistance. The Gare Maritime went; then the nearby fort. At last a British staff officer appeared and told Walter’s group to cease fire: arrangements were being made to surrender.
They refused to obey. Lieutenant-Colonel L. A. Ellison-McCartney, commanding the QVR, now appeared, and the men appealed to him. Did he know of any cease-fire order? Ellison-McCartney said no; in fact he understood that if they could hold out another half-hour, the Navy would come in and get them. He asked if the group wanted to give in, and received a rousing “NO!”
Ellison-McCartney then left to find out who had given the cease-fire order … and why. He soon returned, and his news was all bad: they were the last group holding out; the Germans had them completely surrounded. Enemy guns enfiladed both ends of the tunnel, which was now choked with wounded, and these guns would immediately open fire if there was any further resistance. In addition, the Germans had all their artillery and tanks in position, and the Stukas stood ready to pay a return visit.
The surrender terms had already been concluded by another officer, the Colonel added, and the only thing he could do was follow along. The men must lay down their arms.
The group began breaking up their weapons, until a German officer suddenly appeared brandishing a pistol. He angrily told them to stop, and to march out of the bastion, hands up. In this way the surviving troops filed out, stumbling between two lines of German infantry, every other enemy soldier holding a machine pistol.
To Fred Walter, it was the most humiliating experience he could imagine. He didn’t even dare glance at his comrades, for fear he would see in their faces the same utter hopelessness he felt in all his heart and body.
Yet there were British soldiers still free in Calais. Signalman Leslie W. Wright had arrived from Dover on May 21 for communications duty. By the 26th his wireless set was destroyed and he was fighting as an infantryman with the QVR. Midafternoon, he found himself on the eastern breakwater of the harbor. A Red Cross launch had tied up there, and Wright was helping load it with wounded.
He and his mates saw the launch safely off, then started back along the breakwater toward the docks. But before they reached the jetty that led to the shore, the Germans captured that part of the harbor, marooning Wright’s group on the breakwater. They settled down among the piles and supporting beams, where they hoped they would be less conspicuous.
They forgot about the tide. It was rising, and soon the men would be forced into the open. Discouraged, the rest of the group headed for shore to surrender—but not Wright. He had heard the Germans didn’t take prisoners; so he decided to hang on a little longer. If discovered, at least he would die a free man.
Half an hour, and he changed his mind. He grew so lonely he decided he’d rather die with his friends. He too might as well give up. He worked his way among the piles toward the shore, where a large swastika flag now flew from the jetty. He had almost reached the first German outpost when a couple of British destroyers standing offshore began shelling the jetty.
This put new hope into him. In a flash he again changed his mind. Turning around, he now clambered seaward, scrambling from pile to pile at irregular intervals in order to confuse the enemy. At one point, where mortar fire had cut a gap in the breakwater, he tumbled into the sea. Swimming across the gap, he climbed back among the piles and continued on.
At the seaward end of the breakwater he was overjoyed to find a cluster of 46 British servicemen, hiding like himself among the piles and beams. Over their heads stood a small structure, normally used by port authorities, which served as an observation post. This had been taken over by a Royal Marines captain who was the senior rank present.
The sun was going down now, and it turned bitterly cold. Wright, still wet from his tumble into the harbor, suffered dreadfully. His new companions pulled off his clothing and crowded around him, trying to keep him warm. One young subaltern literally hugged him, and their helmets came together with a fearsome clang that seemed certain to attract the attention of every German in Calais.
But they were still undetected at nightfall, when Wright and most of the others climbed an iron ladder and joined the Royal Marines captain in the port authorities room. Clearly an enterprising man, he somehow made hot coffee for them all. Outside, a signalman with a lamp kept flashing an SOS, hoping some British ship would see it. Wright, warm at last but now hobbled by a badly bruised foot, dozed under a table.
“They are coming!” was the cry that woke him up. It was around 2:00 a.m., and a small British vessel was entering the harbor. It failed to spot the men on the breakwater and tied up down by the jetty. A landing party went ashore but wasn’t gone long. German machine guns opened up, and the shore party raced back to the boat. It slipped its lines and headed back to sea.
As the vessel again drew near, the men on the breakwater whooped and yelled and frantically waved their light. Never mind if the Germans saw them; this was their last chance. The boat again passed them by … then at the last possible moment turned and eased alongside the breakwater. Wright and the others scrambled aboard. Next instant they were off, pounding into the open sea, as every gun in the harbor erupted behind them.
Their craft was the naval yacht Gulzar, commanded by Lieutenant C. V. Brammall. Not knowing that Calais had fallen, he had taken his boat into the port, hoping to pick up some wounded. He was too late for that, but not for the little group on the breakwater. As the Gulzar chugged toward Dover, someone handed Wright a snack and some coffee. Safe at last, he decided it was the best meal he had ever had in his life.
Lieutenant Brammall wasn’t the only man that night who failed to realize Calais was gone. The top command in London were as much in the dark as ever. At 4:30 a.m. Winston Churchill telegraphed Gort suggesting—as he had so often done before—that “a column directed upon Calais while it is still holding out might have a good chance.”
Finally, at first light on the 27th, a force of 38 Lysanders flew over Calais on a drop mission. They lost three planes but managed to drop 224 gallons of water, 22,000 rounds of ammunition, and 864 grenades. Waiting below, the Germans were appropriately grateful.
The British people were deeply moved by the stand at Calais. For 400 years they had felt a special tie to the place. Every schoolchild knew how Queen Mary—“Bloody Mary”—had lost the port in 1558 through monumental carelessness, and how she died “with the word Calais written on my heart.” Now the city had been lost again, but this time in the noblest way for the noblest cause—to buy time for Gort’s army.
Yet that certainly wasn’t the original goal. At various times Nicholson’s force was to be used for raids on the enemy flanks … for relieving Boulogne … for defending Saint-Omer … for escorting rations to Dunkirk … for demonstrating “Allied solidarity.” It was only in the last 36 hours that buying time became the guiding purpose.
And how much time did it really buy? The best evidence suggests very little. The Germans used only one division at Calais, the 10th Panzer, and it could not have reached the Aa Canal Line before the “halt order” was issued. The advance did not resume until after Calais had been taken. The other panzer troops were idle throughout the siege.
One panzer division, the 1st, did take a passing swipe at Calais, as it led the dash eastward on the 23rd. It hoped to take the port by surprise without a fight. Finding this was impossible it was told not to waste any more time, but to continue the advance east. Calais, never considered very important, could be cleaned up by the 10th Panzers, still trailing behind everyone else.
Even after Calais had been taken, the 10th was not rushed forward to join the troops attacking Dunkirk. It was, in fact, sent the other way for the almost nominal task of guarding the coast from Calais to Audresselles. Another 24 hours would pass before Guderian decided that maybe he could use the Division’s tanks at Dunkirk after all.
Actually, OKH felt they already had enough troops to take the port. And this was certainly true at the time the “halt order” was issued. Six crack panzer divisions were poised on the Aa Canal Line, with the 1st and the 6th Divisions less than twelve miles from Dunkirk. This was easily enough to overwhelm the sprinkling of Allied defenders.
All these panzer divisions were still in place when the halt order was lifted on May 26. In the interim the French 68th Division had moved into the Gravelines area, and Gort had set up his system of “stops” and strong-points. But most of the BEF were still deep in France and Belgium, reeling back toward the coast.
To save them it was still necessary to buy time, but it would not be bought by the heroic defenders of Calais. That was all over. The job would have to be done by the troops holding the strong-points along the escape corridor. None of these towns and villages had the emotional pull of Calais; some were little more than dots on the map. …
At Hazebrouck on the morning of May 27 a discomforting report reached the 229th Field Battery: the panzers had turned the British flank, and there was nothing between the battery and the German Army. High time to get out, but one gun was detached and wheeled into position at a road junction just south of town. A forlorn hope, it might briefly cover the exposed flank. Captain John Dodd, second in command of the battery, climbed to the top of a nearby farmhouse to scan the horizon for any sign of the enemy.
A German tank stood half-hidden behind a hedge 200 yards away. Dodd rushed down the stairs to lay the gun, but Sergeant Jack Baker already had his crew of four giving a drill-hall performance. They got off two rounds before the German tank even replied. Then came an answering hale of machine-gun bullets. Two more tanks rumbled up, and all three blazed away at Baker’s gun.
Another British field piece joined in. It was under repair some yards off, but the battery sergeant major found several volunteers, including a cook and a motor mechanic. They swung the gun around and hammered away until they ran out of ammunition.
Baker’s gun carried on alone, giving as good as it got. Two of the crew fell; now there were only Baker and his layer left. Then the layer was hit, and there was only Baker. He continued firing, getting off six more shots on his own. Then he too ran out of ammunition.
But the issue was already decided. The three tanks turned and lumbered away. Baker had won. Captain Dodd rushed up, to be greeted by the wounded layer. Excitedly shaking the Captain’s hand, he cried, “We got the bugger, sir!” At Epinette, another Gort strong-point eight miles farther south, the determination was the same, but the weapon was different. Captain Jack Churchill had gone to war with three “toys”—his bagpipes, a sword, and a bow and arrow. On the 27th the bagpipes and sword were packed with his gear somewhere, but he had the bow and a few arrows with him as he and about 80 others, mostly 2nd Manchesters, prepared to defend the village.
When the German advance came in sight, Churchill climbed into the loft of a granary and peered through a vertical opening normally used for hauling up sacks of grain. There, only 30 yards away, he saw five enemy soldiers sheltering behind the corner of a house. He quickly fetched up two British infantrymen and ordered them to open rapid fire, but not until he had loosed an arrow at the center man. He lifted his bow, took aim, and let fly. Hearing the twang, the riflemen blasted away.
Churchill had a brief, satisfying glimpse of his arrow hitting home—right in the left side of the center man’s chest. The rifles brought down three of the other Germans, but the fifth escaped by dodging around the corner of the house. For perhaps the last time in history, the English bow—the weapon that turned the tide at Crécy and Poitiers six hundred years earlier—had again been used in battle.
Tradition was also in evidence at La Bassée, the southern anchor of Gort’s Canal Line defense system. The 1st Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, holding the town, were the last Scottish regiment to wear kilts in action. It was against regulations, but the Camerons wore them anyway, and in one case, at least, they served a practical purpose. The battalion adjutant, Major Peter Hunt, was hit in the leg, but the bullet’s effect was diminished by a fold in his kilt.
For two days the Camerons had been holding out, hurling back every German attempt to cross the canal. But it was a costly business. After one counterattack A Company had only six men left—nowhere near enough to hold the ground so dearly bought.
Now, on the morning of May 27, the enemy again stormed across the canal, and La Bassée was soon engulfed in flames and smoke. “Next door” at Festubert the 2nd Dorsets heard a last faint radio signal: the Camerons were completely surrounded and wanted permission to destroy their wireless.
The Dorsets sensed their turn was next. As the panzers approached, a strange cheerfulness—almost bravado—swept C Company headquarters. Someone wound up an ancient gramophone, and it ground out “Ramona” over and over again. For most people the tune might conjure up visions of moonlight and waterfalls, but 2nd Lieutenant Ivor Ramsay would always connect it with Festubert and those beetlelike tanks.
Making clever use of the village buildings, the Dorsets managed to hold out till dark, when orders were to fight their way back to Estaires. They were now deep in enemy-held territory; using the roads was impossible. They would have to go cross-country—at night, without maps. All that the battalion commander Lieutenant-Colonel E. L. Stephenson had was a compass.
At 10:30 p.m. they started out. Stephenson took the lead, followed by about 250 Dorsets and miscellaneous “odds and sods” who had lost their own units. It was a black, cloudy night, and the men soon had their first contact with the enemy when Stephenson ran head-on into a German infantry sergeant inspecting his own outposts. The Colonel pulled his revolver and killed the man with a single shot. Hearing the commotion, a nearby enemy sentry called, “Heinrich?”—but did nothing else. Relieved, the Dorsets stumbled on through the dark.
Next, they came to a road running directly across their line of retreat, packed with enemy tanks and motor transport. A whole armored division was driving past. Stephenson’s little troop lay down in the stubble and watched the show for over an hour—the German vehicles didn’t even bother to turn off their lights. Finally, there was a break in the flow, and the Dorsets scooted across the road, plunging back into the underbrush just as the next echelon rolled into view.
Guided by Colonel Stephenson’s compass, the men struggled on across ploughed fields, over barbed-wire fences, through ditches waist-deep and stinking of sewage. At dawn they came to a canal too deep to wade. The swimmers formed a human chain to help the nonswimmers across. Somehow they managed it, then had to do it all over again when the canal looped back a quarter-mile further on.
But Stephenson’s compass never failed them. Just as he had calculated, at 5:00 a.m. on the 28th the Dorsets stumbled into Estaires, completing an eight-mile odyssey. French troops were defending the town and cheerfully shared their flasks of vin rouge with the exhausted newcomers.
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.