GENERAL GORT HEARD THE news by chance. Hoping to confer with General Blanchard about the evacuation, he had driven to Bastion 32 around 11 o’clock on the night of May 27. No sign of Blanchard, but General Koeltz from Weygand’s headquarters was there, and casually asked whether Gort had heard that King Leopold was seeking an armistice.
Gort was amazed. He felt sure that the Belgians weren’t capable of prolonged resistance, but he didn’t expect them to crumble so soon. “I now found myself suddenly faced with an open gap of 20 miles between Ypres and the sea through which enemy armoured forces might reach the beaches.”
General Weygand was even more astonished. He got the word during a conference at Vincennes, when somebody handed him a telegram from his liaison officer with the Belgians. “The news came like a thunderclap, as nothing had enabled me to foresee such a decision, no warning, not a hint of it.”
Even Winston Churchill, who had his own special man, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, at Leopold’s headquarters, seems to have been caught off-guard. “Suddenly,” the Prime Minister told a hushed House of Commons a few days later, “without prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his ministers, and upon his own personal act, he sent a plenipotentiary to the German command, surrendered his Army, and exposed our whole flank and means of retreat.”
The mystery is why they were so surprised. As early as May 25 Leopold had telegraphed King George VI that Belgian resistance was on the point of being crushed, “and so the assistance which we can give to the Allies will come to an end if our Army is surrounded.” He added that he considered it his duty to remain with his people and not set up a government in exile.
On the 26th and 27th both Gort and the War Office received from their Belgian liaison contacts seven separate messages warning that the end was near, unless the British could counterattack—which was clearly impossible. In addition, Admiral Keyes telephoned Churchill on the morning of May 27 that “he did not think that the Belgian army’s resistance could be maintained much longer.” Keyes then wired Gort that Leopold
fears a moment is rapidly approaching when he can no longer rely upon his troops to fight or be of any further use to the BEF. He wishes you to realize that he will be obliged to surrender before a debacle.
Leopold, on the other hand, had been told nothing about Allied intentions. Although Gort felt that an active, fighting Belgian Army was “essential for our extraction,” its leaders were never consulted, and not one ship was allocated for the use of Belgian troops.
Finally, after a nudge from Eden, Churchill telegraphed Gort on the morning of May 27, “It is now necessary to tell the Belgians. …” He then included a personal message for Admiral Keyes, spelling out the approach to take with Leopold: “Impart following to your friend. Presume he knows that British and French are fighting their way to coast. …” Thus London explained away its failure to inform the King by simply “presuming” that he already knew.
Churchill’s message also urged Keyes to make sure that Leopold left the country and ended with a vague offer to include Belgian troops whenever the BEF returned to France.
The message never reached Keyes, but it didn’t matter By now Leopold had other ideas. Never an attractive personality—a haughty, aloof man who made his ministers stand in his presence—the King nevertheless had a strong sense of duty. On the mistaken assumption that he would continue to have influence under German occupation, he decided to surrender and remain with his people.
At 5:00 p.m. on the 27th a trusted staff officer, Major-General Derousseau, set out with a white flag for the German lines. Any hopes he had for favorable terms were quickly dashed. The Fuehrer insisted on unconditional surrender. Leopold agreed, and at 4:00 a.m. on May 28 Belgium formally laid down her arms.
Here and there a few fought on. After an exhausting day of retreat, Captain Georges Truffaut of the 16th Infantry Division was sleeping in the great hall of the chateau at Ruddervoorde when he woke up with a start at 4:30 a.m. The lights were on, and people were moving about. “The army has capitulated,” somebody explained.
“What?”
“The liaison officer attached to Corps headquarters has just brought the order.”
“Then I’m deserting.” Truffaut, a member of Parliament and one of the young leaders of the Walloon Socialist Party, was no man for blind obedience to military orders.
He “borrowed” a staff car and was soon on his way to Dunkirk. Coming to a French outpost, he learned that staying in the war would be no easy matter. Enraged by the Belgian surrender, the officer in charge called him a traitor, a coward, and warned that the guard would start shooting if he came any closer.
Turned back, Truffaut now tried another road farther south … and ran head-on into a German column. Racing north again, he reached the sea at Coxyde. Here he cautiously approached a British officer and carefully explained he was no traitor. Could he enter the lines?
“I’m afraid it’s impossible, sir. Sorry.”
On to Nieuport, which he found full of Belgian soldiers, some as frustrated as himself. Here Truffaut and a few others appropriated a fishing smack lying in the fairway. They had trouble with the engine, with the sail, and with a lone German plane that swooped down and buzzed them. It apparently decided they weren’t worth the ammunition, for it flew off and they safely reached the open sea.
It was now dark, and to attract attention they lit rags soaked in petrol. There were plenty of ships, but no one wanted to stop in these dangerous waters. Finally a British destroyer did pick them up, and once again Truffant faced a hostile reception.
This time he managed to sell his case. In fact, the destroyer was on its way to Dunkirk and could use these sturdy Belgians with their boat. It had been a long, hard day, but Georges Truffant was at last back in the war.
There were not many like him. Private W.C.P. Nye of the 4th Royal Sussex was on sentry duty at the Courtrai airfield when he saw a mass of men coming down the road away from the front. Hundreds of Belgian soldiers on bicycles swept by, shouting that the war was over. Tramping toward the coast from the River Lys, the men of the 2nd North Staffordshire passed swarms of disarmed Belgians standing by the roadside watching the retreat. Some looked ashamed, but many shouted insults and shook their fists at the weary Tommies. At Bulscamp a plump gendarme appeared at British headquarters, announced that Belgium had surrendered and he had been ordered to confiscate all British weapons. There is no record of the language used in reply.
All over the countryside white bedsheets blossomed from windows and doorways. At Watou Lieutenant Ramsay of the 2nd Dorsets started to enter an empty house to get a bit of rest. A woman who lived nearby rushed up crying, “Non, non, non!”
“C’est la guerre,” explained Ramsay, using the time-honored expression that had served so well in two world wars to explain any necessary inconvenience.
“C’est la guerre, oui, mais pas pour nous!” she retorted.
To most Belgians it was now indeed somebody else’s war, and they were relieved to be out of it. Many felt their country had become just a doormat, to be stamped on by larger, stronger neighbors in an apparently endless struggle for power. “Les anglais, les allemands, toute la même chose,” as one weary peasant woman put it.
Technically, the Belgian surrender suddenly created a huge gap at the northeastern end of the Allied escape corridor. Actually, the gap had been steadily growing as Belgian resistance crumbled, and for the past 48 hours Lieutenant-General Brooke, the II Corps commander defending the line, had been juggling his forces, trying to fill it. He worked miracles, but on the afternoon of May 27 (just when Leopold was tossing in his hand) there were still no Allied troops between the British 50th Division near Ypres and some French on the coast at Nieuport—a gap of over twenty miles.
All Brooke had left was Major-General Montgomery’s 3rd Division down by Roubaix near the bottom of the pocket. To do any good, it would have to pull out from its position near the right end of the line … move north for 25 miles across the rear of three other divisions … then slide back into place on the far left. The shift would be that most difficult of military maneuvers: a giant side-step by 13,000 men, made at night along back lanes and unfamiliar roads, often within 4,000 yards of the enemy. And it all had to be completed by daylight, when the moving column would make a prime target for the Luftwaffe.
Montgomery wasn’t in the least fazed by the assignment. Although virtually unknown to the public, he was probably the most discussed division commander in the BEF. Cocky, conceited, abrasive, theatrical, he had few friends but many admirers in the army. Whatever they thought of him, all agreed that he was technically a superb soldier and a master at training and inspiring troops. All winter his men had practiced this sort of night march. They had drilled and drilled, until every detail was down pat, every contingency foreseen. Now “Monty” was sure he could pull it off.
Late afternoon, his machine gunners and armored cars went ahead as a light advance force. Then at last light the red-capped Military Police moved out to mark the way and keep the traffic properly spaced. Finally, after dark, the main body—2,000 vans, lorries, pick-ups, staff cars, and troop carriers. There were, of course, no regular lights. Every driver had to watch the rear axle of the vehicle in front of him. It was painted white, faintly illuminated by a small shielded lamp. Monty himself was riding in his regular Humber staff car, with his bodyguard Sergeant Elkin close by on his motorcycle. On their right the front, running parallel, was marked by the constant flicker of guns. On their left some British artillery kept up a lively fire from Mont Kemmel. Shells and tracers were passing overhead in both directions, forming a weird archway for the moving troops. Once a British battery, positioned by the roadside, let loose just as Monty was passing. It practically blew the Humber off the road, but the General didn’t bat an eye.
By daylight on the 28th the 3rd Division was moving into position. Thanks to Montgomery’s giant side-step, British troops now held the eastern wall of the escape corridor as far north as Noordschote. For the rest of the way to the sea—some thirteen miles—he counted on the remaining Belgians, for they were still in the war, as far as he knew. Then, shortly after 7:30 a.m., he learned for the first time of Leopold’s capitulation.
“Here was a pretty pickle!” Montgomery later recalled in his memoirs. “Instead of having a Belgian Army on my left, I now had nothing. …” He quickly slapped together a scratch force of machine gunners plus some British and French armored cars. These fanned out and held the line until more substantial help could be mustered. It was often touch and go. Lieutenant Mann of the 12th Lancers barely managed to blow the bridge at Dixmude before Bock’s advance entered the town.
Then, in the afternoon, more bad news. The Germans were at Nieuport, the eastern anchor of the perimeter. The Belgians were gone; Montgomery was stretched to the limit; there was no organized unit to defend the line from Wulpen to Nieuport and the sea.
Once more, improvisation. Brigadier A. J. Clifton happened to be available. Brooke packed him off to Wulpen to organize the defense. On arriving, he took over a scratch force of 200 artillerymen, bolstered from time to time by “unemployed” fitters, surveyors, transport drivers, and headquarters clerks. The unit never had a name; the officers came from five different regiments. Most of the men had never seen their officers before, and the officers had never worked with Clifton.
Somehow he welded them together and they marched off to the front in amazingly good spirits. Along the way, they met the disbanded Belgians trooping back. The Belgians were throwing away their weapons and shouting that the war was over. Taking advantage of the windfall, Clifton’s men scooped up the discarded rifles and ammunition, and added them to their own meager arsenal. Positioned along the Furnes-Nieuport canal and the River Yser, they kept the enemy at bay for the next 30 hours. The hottest fighting swirled around the bridge at Nieuport. The Belgians had failed to blow it before the cease-fire, and the British sappers couldn’t reach the demolition wires at the eastern end. Again and again the Germans tried to cross, but Clifton concentrated all his “heavy stuff” (four 18-pounders and some Bren guns) at this point and managed to fend them off. Once again the eastern wall held.
The west held too. At Wormhout, a strong-point twelve miles south of Dunkirk, the British 144th Brigade held off Guderian’s troops all May 27 and most of the 28th. Every man was used. At the local chateau that served as Brigade headquarters, Private Lou Carrier found himself teaching some cooks and clerks how to prime a Mills bomb—even though he had never seen one before in his life.
Successfully completing this hazardous assignment, he was ordered to help man the chateau wall. As he made his way through the garden, he heard a terrible scream. Thinking some poor blighter had been hit, he spun around … and discovered that it came from a peacock perched in a tree.
“That is one bird who will frighten no one else,” Carrier said to himself as he raised his rifle to bring it down. Before he could fire, a young lieutenant knocked the rifle aside, saying that he should know better. Didn’t he realize it was unlucky to shoot peacocks? The officer added that Carrier would be courtmartialed if he disobeyed and shot the bird.
The next step was predictable. Carrier waited until the lieutenant moved out of sight, then took careful aim and fired. If shooting a peacock brought bad luck, he never noticed it.
But a large dose of bad luck did come to some men defending Wormhout who had probably never harmed a peacock in their lives. After a hard fight most of the 2nd Royal Warwicks were broken up and forced to surrender around 6:00 p.m. on the 28th. Prodded by their captors, the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment, about 80 men and one officer were herded into a small open-ended barn just outside the village.
As they crowded in, the officer Captain J. F. Lynn-Allen protested that there wasn’t enough room for the wounded. Speaking fluent English with a strong American accent, one of the SS guards snapped back, “Yellow Englishman, there will be plenty of room where you’re all going to!”
With that, he hurled a stick grenade into the barn, and the carnage was on. For fifteen minutes the guards blasted away with grenades, rifles, tommy guns, and pistols. As an extra touch two batches of prisoners were brought outside and executed by an impromptu firing squad. Amazingly, some fifteen men somehow survived amid the jumble of bodies.
Eight miles farther south Cassel continued to hold. Perched on its hill, it had become—as Colonel Bridgeman foresaw—the “Gibraltar” of the western wall. For two days Kleist’s tanks, artillery, and mortars battered the town … waves of Stukas pounded it … and still it stood. It was a minor miracle, for the principal defenders—the 5th Gloucesters—had little to fight with. Told to build a barricade, Lieutenant Fane could find only one farm wagon, one plough, a pony trap, and a water cart. When a tank broke into a nearby garden, he tried to stop it with a Boyes rifle—and watched his shots bounce off the armored plate.
The town was surrounded, yet on the evening of May 28 the Gloucesters’ quartermaster Captain R.E.D. Brasington managed to get some rations through. The defenders settled down to an odd meal of bully beef washed down by vintage wine.
All the way south, at the bottom of the pocket, units of General Prioux’s First Army still held Lille. In contrast to most of the French, they fought with passionate commitment, holding off six German divisions … meaning six fewer divisions to harass the BEF farther up the corridor.
Most of the escaping troops were now well on their way. The time had come to abandon the strong-points farthest south, and pull the defending units back toward the coast as a sort of rear guard.
On the morning of the 28th Corporal Bob Hadnett, in charge of dispatch riders at 48th Division headquarters, was ordered to get a message to the troops holding Hazebrouck, one of these southern strong-points. The defenders were to disengage and make for Dunkirk that night. Hadnett had already lost two messengers on missions to Hazebrouck; so this time he decided to go himself.
The main roads were jammed with refugees and retiring troops, but he had been a motorcycle trials driver in peacetime and had no trouble riding cross-country. Bouncing over fields and along dirt lanes, he reached Hazebrouck and delivered his message at 143rd Brigade headquarters. After helping the staff work out an escape route north, he mounted his motorcycle and started back.
This time he ran smack into a German column that was just moving into the area. No way to turn, he decided to ride right through. Bending low over the handlebars, accelerator pressed to the floorboards, he shot forward. The startled Germans scattered, but began firing at him as he roared by.
He almost made it. Then suddenly everything went blank, and when he came to, he was lying in the grass with a shattered leg and hand. An enemy officer was standing over him, and a trooper was holding a bottle of brandy to his lips. “Tommy,” the officer observed in English, “for you the war is over.”
As the British troops streamed up the corridor toward the coast, General Gort’s headquarters moved north too. On May 27 the Command Post shifted from Prémesques to Houtkerque, just inside the French border and only fourteen miles from the sea. For the first time since the campaign began, headquarters was not on the London-Brussels telephone cable. It made little difference: Gort wasn’t there much anyhow.
He spent most of the 27th looking for General Blanchard, hoping to coordinate their joint withdrawal into the perimeter. He never did find him, and finally returned to Houtkerque weary and frustrated at dawn on the 28th. Then, around 11:00 a.m., Blanchard unexpectedly turned up on his own.
There was much to discuss, and Gort began by reading a telegram received from Anthony Eden the previous day. It confirmed the decision to evacuate: “Want to make it quite clear that sole task now is to evacuate to England maximum of your force possible.”
Blanchard was horrified. To the amazement of Gort and Pownall, the French commander hadn’t yet heard about the British decision to evacuate. He still understood that the strategy was to set up a beachhead based on Dunkirk which would give the Allies a permanent foothold on the Continent. Somehow Churchill’s statement to Reynaud on May 26, Eden’s message to the French high command on the 27th, the decisions reached at Cassel and Dover the same day, the information given Abrial and Weygand early on the 28th—all had passed him by. Once again, the explanation probably lay in the complete collapse of French communications.
Now that Blanchard knew, Gort did his best to bring him into line. He must, Gort argued, order Prioux’s French First Army to head for Dunkirk too. Like the BEF, they must be rescued to come back and fight again another day. With the Belgians out of the war, there was no longer any possibility of hanging on. It was a case of evacuation or surrender.
Blanchard wavered briefly, but at the crucial moment a liaison officer arrived from Prioux, reporting that the First Army was too tired to move anywhere. That settled it. Blanchard decided to leave the army in the Lille area.
Gort grew more exasperated than ever. Prioux’s troops, he exclaimed, couldn’t be so tired they were unable to lift a finger to save themselves. Once again, evacuation was their only chance.
Blanchard remained adamant. It was all very well, he observed ruefully, for the British to talk evacuation. “No doubt the British Admiralty had arranged it for the BEF, but the French Marine would never be able to do it for French soldiers. It was, therefore, idle to try—the chance wasn’t worth the effort involved.”
There was no shaking him. He ended by asking whether the British would continue to pull back to Dunkirk, even though they knew that the French would not be coming along. Pownall exploded with an emphatic “OUI!”
Down at French First Army headquarters at Steenwerck a somewhat similar conversation took place that afternoon between General Prioux himself and Major-General E. A. Osborne, commanding the British 44th Division. Osborne was planning the 44th’s withdrawal from the River Lys and came over to coordinate his movements with the French, who were on his immediate left. To his surprise, he learned that Prioux didn’t plan to withdraw at all. Osborne tried every argument he knew—including the principle of Allied solidarity—but he too got nowhere.
Yet Prioux must have had second thoughts, for sometime later that afternoon he released General de la Laurencie’s III Corps, telling them to make for the coast if they could. He himself decided to stay with the rest of his army and go down fighting.
The idea of a gallant last stand—saving the honor of the flag, if nothing else—seemed to captivate them all. “He could only tell us the story of the honor of the drapeaux,” Pownall noted in his diary after hearing it from Blanchard one more time.
“I am counting on you to save everything that can be saved—and, above all, our honor!” Weygand telegraphed Abrial. “Blanchard’s troops, if doomed, must disappear with honor,” the General told Major Fauvelle. Weygand pictured an especially honorable role for the high command when the end finally came. Rather than retreat from Paris, the government should behave like the Senators of ancient Rome, who had awaited the barbarians sitting in their curule chairs.
This sort of talk, though possibly consoling at the top level, did not inspire the poilus in the field. They had had enough of antiquated guns, horse-drawn transport, wretched communications, inadequate armor, invisible air support, and fumbling leaders. Vast numbers of French soldiers were sitting around in ditches, resting and smoking, when the 58th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, passed by on May 28. As one of them explained to a French-speaking Tommy, the enemy was everywhere and there was no hope of getting through; so they were just going to sit down and wait for the Boches to come.
Yet there were always exceptions. A French tank company, separated from its regiment, joined the 1st Royal Irish Fusiliers at Gorre and proved to be a magnificent addition. The crews bristled with discarded British, French, and German weapons and were literally festooned with clanking bottles of wine. They fought with tremendous élan, roaring with laughter and pausing to shake hands with one another after every good shot. When the Fusiliers were finally ordered to pull back, the tank company decided to stay and fight on. “Bon chance!” they called after the departing Fusiliers, and then went back to work.
General de la Laurencie was another exuberant Frenchman not about to fold his tent. Exasperated by the indecision and defeatism of his superiors, on two separate occasions he had already tried to get his III Corps transferred to Gort’s command. Now, released by Prioux, he hurried toward Dunkirk with two divisions.
The first of the fighting contingents were already entering the perimeter. The 2nd Grenadier Guards moved into Furnes, still marching with parade-ground precision. The steady, measured tread of their boots echoed through the medieval market square. Here and there a uniform was torn, a cap missing, a bandage added; but there was no mistaking that erect stance, that clean-shaven, expressionless look so familiar to anyone who had ever watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.
Not far behind came the 1st/7th Middlesex. They were a Territorial unit far removed from the professionalism of the Guards, but raffishly engaging in their own way. They too had seen their share of rear-guard action. Now they continued through Furnes, finally halting at Oostduinkerke three miles to the east. Here they were a mile or so from Nieuport, the eastern anchor of the perimeter and the point most exposed by the Belgian surrender. Colonel Clifton’s “odds and sods” were already in position, but spread very thin. The Middlesex battalion would beef up the line.
Spreading their camouflage nets and digging slit trenches, the new arrivals settled down in the dunes and scrub. As yet there was no sign of the enemy, and it was wonderful to flake out at last and sleep undisturbed. The war of movement had ended, and until the Regimental Sergeant-Major, “Big Ike” Colton, caught up with them and devised some new torment, it was a chance to soak up oceans of missed sleep. Private Francis Ralph Farley only hoped that “Big Ike” didn’t find them too soon.
General Gort was also moving into the perimeter. At 6:00 p.m., May 28, GHQ opened up at La Panne, housed in a beachside villa at the western end of town. The place was well chosen. It had been the residence of King Albert during the dark days of the First War, and later served as a summer home for the old King during the twenties. As a result it had a large, reinforced cellar, ample wiring, and the London-Brussels telephone cable, which ran practically by the front door. Once again Gort was only a phone call away from Churchill, the War Office, and Ramsay at Dover.
The Corps commanders also moved into the perimeter on the 28th: III Corps at Dunkirk, II Corps at La Panne, and I Corps in between at Bray-Dunes. Lieutenant-General Michael Barker, commanding I Corps, was by now utterly exhausted. An elderly veteran of the Boer War, he was no man to cope with a blitzkrieg. Reaching corps headquarters at the western end of the beach promenade, he retired to the cellar. From here he constantly called up to his assistant quartermaster, Major Bob Ransome, to come and tell him what was going on.
Ransome found the scene on the beach appalling. A mob of officers and men from various service units milled around, firing haphazardly at German planes. Ransome tried to get the crowd into some sort of order but had no luck, even though he jammed his pistol into some very senior ribs. Finally he sent for Captain Tom Gimson, an assistant operations officer at III Corps headquarters. Gimson was an old Irish Guardsman, and his solution was to order the mob to fall in, as on parade. He then solemnly drilled them, running through all the usual commands. Surprisingly, the men complied, and order was soon restored. To Ransome the incident revealed not only what drill could accomplish but also the workings of that most austere of human mechanisms, a Guardsman’s mind.
Reports of the confusion at Bray-Dunes soon reached Captain Tennant, busy organizing the embarkations at Dunkirk. So far he had no naval shore parties operating that far up the beach. But the eastern mole and Malo-les-Bains were now under control, and clearly Bray was the next problem to tackle. There were said to be 5,000 troops there, most without officers or any leadership.
Around 5:00 p.m. on the 28th Tennant met with Commander Hector Richardson and two of his other officers, Commanders Tom Kerr and Campbell Clouston. He explained that he wanted an officer to lead a party to Bray and embark the 5,000 men waiting there. At the moment all three commanders were available; so they decided to cut a deck of cards for the assignment—loser to get Bray-Dunes. Richardson lost, but said it was such a big job he really needed another officer to go with him. Kerr and Clouston then cut again. This time Kerr lost. Clouston, the “winner,” took what all three considered the easiest assignment—pier master of the mole.
Richardson and Kerr then set off for Bray with fifteen men in a lorry. It was only seven miles, but the roads were so clogged with traffic and pitted with craters that it took an hour to get there. Arriving around 9:00 p.m., the party headed down to the beach to start organizing the embarkation.
It was dusk now, and in the fading light Seaman G. F. Nixon saw what he first thought were several breakwaters, extending from the sand out into the water. Then he realized that the “breakwaters” were actually columns of men, eight thick, leading from the shore right into the sea. The men in front were standing up to their waists, and even to their shoulders, in water.
Five thousand troops? It was more like 25,000. Richardson immediately signaled the situation to Dover and the Admiralty via a destroyer hovering offshore. Once again, an urgent appeal for small boats and motor launches.
Meanwhile they must “make do.” Richardson set up headquarters in the back of the lorry. Some of his seamen began breaking up the troops into batches of 50; others rigged lifelines running down into the sea. The beach shelved so gradually that even small boats had a hard time getting in close.
“What a terrible night that was,” Kerr wrote his wife a few days later, “for we had got hold of the odds and ends of an army, not the fighting soldiers. There weren’t many officers, and those that were, were useless, but by speech and promise of safety and the sight of our naval uniforms we got order out of the rabble.”
Those manning the boats were having an equally difficult time. The skoot Hilda had arrived early in the afternoon, and because of her shallow draft, her skipper Lieutenant A. Gray managed to nurse her within wading distance of the shore. Troops swarmed out, surrounding the boat completely, trying to scramble up ladders tossed over the bow. But the ladders weren’t firmly secured; the men were exhausted; and the tide was rising. They began falling back into the sea. It took superhuman efforts by the Hilda’s, crew to haul them up and over the rail—a collection of inert, sopping bundles.
By 7:00 p.m. Gray had 500 men aboard—not many, considering that 25,000 were waiting—but all he could carry. These he ferried to a destroyer lying farther out, then returned for another load. The tide was now ebbing, and the Hilda soon sat on the sand in only two feet of water. Some 400 soldiers surged aboard, and he had another full load by the time the next tide refloated him around 1:30 a.m.
Not far away the skoot Doggersbank was doing similar work. Earlier her skipper Lieutenant Donald McBarnet had let go a kedge anchor, then ran himself aground. But he drew more than the Hilda, and he still lay in six feet of water—too deep for wading. He lowered his boat and a raft to ferry men out to the ship. On reaching shore, both were immediately mobbed and swamped. Bailed out, they went to work, and by 8:00 p.m. McBarnet had about 450 aboard. Enough. He then used the kedge to pull himself off the beach. Once afloat, he too carried his load to a destroyer farther out, then returned for more.
This became the pattern all along the beach—Bray, Malo-les-Bains, and La Panne as well. Dinghies, rowboats, and launches would load at water’s edge and ferry the troops to small ships waiting offshore. These would then ferry the men to the growing fleet of destroyers, minesweepers, and packets lying still farther out. When filled, these would head for England—and one more bit of the army would be home.
It was a practical, workable scheme, but it was also very slow. Each skoot, for instance, averaged only 100 men an hour. No wonder nerves were frayed.
Most of the troops were not up front where they could see what was going on. They stood far back in line or waited in the dunes behind the beach. They couldn’t imagine why it all took so long. In the blackness of the night they could see nothing, except the occasional silhouette of some boat caught in the glittering phosphorescence of the water. They could hear only the steady rhythm of the surf and every now and then the clank of oarlocks.
They were tired, cold, and hungry. May nights are chilly along the coast of Flanders, and the men longed for the greatcoats they had thrown away during the hot, dusty retreat. Regular rations had vanished, and it was no longer possible to live off the land. When Corporal R. Kay, a GHQ signalman, found a seven-pound tin of peas near the beach, it was a major discovery. He and a few lucky mates ate them with their fingers, like expensive chocolates.
At Malo-les-Bains Lieutenant-Colonel John D’Arcy was another who fretted over the seemingly endless delay. He had gathered his artillery regiment in a brickyard behind the dunes—splendid cover but no place to see what was going on. He finally ordered one of his officers, Lieutenant C. G. Payne, to take a signal lamp and “go down to the beach and call up the Navy.”
Payne had no idea how to go about this, but he did find a signal manual with a section headed, “Call to an Unknown Ship.” Pointing his lamp to sea, he carefully followed the instructions, little expecting any results. To his amazement, an answer came flashing out of the night. Instructed to bring the unit to the beach, he hurried back to the Colonel in triumph.
Around 1:30 a.m. on the 29th a stiff breeze sprang up, meaning much greater surf and even slower going. At Bray-Dunes Commander Richardson was making so little progress that he decided to suspend any further embarkations and began sending the troops back to Dunkirk. Maybe the mole would be faster.
Indeed so. Over 24 hours had now passed since Captain Tennant began using the eastern mole or breakwater of Dunkirk harbor as an improvised pier, and the gamble was paying off. A steady stream of destroyers, minesweepers, ferries, and other steamers eased alongside, loaded troops, then backed off and headed for England. The flow of men was regulated by Commander Clouston, who had won the “easy” assignment—pier master of the mole—when he, Richardson, and Kerr cut cards to decide who would be stuck with Bray-Dunes.
Clouston was a Canadian—big, tough, athletic, amusing. He was a fine ice hockey player, and when stationed at Portsmouth, typically he had organized the staff into a hockey team. He was a man bursting with energy, and in his new job he needed all of it.
Word of the mole had gotten around, and now thousands of disorganized troops were flocking there, queuing up for a chance to embark. To Private Bill Warner, a headquarters clerk with the Royal Artillery, it was like the endless queue at the cinema when talkies first came in. To others it was more like London at rush hour or a rugby scrum. Planting himself at the foot of the mole, Clouston squarely faced the crowd. Megaphone in hand, he shouted instructions, matching the flow of men to the flow of ships.
At first they were mostly destroyers. During the morning of May 28 no fewer than eleven loaded up, and Commander Brian Dean of the destroyer Sabre showed how fast they could work. Earlier he had lifted 100 men off the beaches in two hours. His turn-around at Dover took only 58 minutes, and now he was back again, tying up at the mole at 11:00 a.m. This time he loaded 800 men, and headed back to Dover at 12:30 p.m.—a rate of 540 men an hour, compared to 50 men an hour at the beaches.
And he wasn’t through yet. Reaching Dover at 6:20 p.m., he refueled and was on his way back to the mole at 10:30—his third trip of the day. This time he stayed only 35 minutes, picking up another 500 troops.
Dusk on the 28th, and the destroyers were joined by an assortment of other craft. The fleet minesweeper Gossamer arrived at 9:45 p.m., departed half an hour later with 420 aboard. The sweeper Ross loaded another 353 about the same time. The skoot Tilly, leading a procession of six small motor vessels, tied up at 11:15; they took on hundreds more. The paddle steamer Medway Queen arrived around midnight and picked up nearly 1,000. Her skipper Lieutenant A. T. Cook had warned Chief Cook Russell to expect “several hundred men who will no doubt feel somewhat peckish.” The warning scarcely prepared Russell for the assault on his galley. These men weren’t “peckish”—they were ravenous.
All through the night of May 28-29 ships kept coming, while the men streamed out the long wooden walkway like an endless line of ants. For a while the ebb tide slowed the pace—it was hard for untrained soldiers to crawl down the makeshift ladders and gangplanks—but the flow never stopped. Tennant estimated that Clouston was getting men off at a rate of 2,000 an hour.
At 10:45 p.m. he sent Dover his first optimistic situation report:
French general appreciation is that situation in port tomorrow will continue as for today. Provided aircraft fighters adequate, embarkation can proceed full speed. …
The Dynamo Room began to hope that more than a handful might be saved. The total evacuated on May 28 reached 17,804—more than twice the figure for the 27th. They would have to do far better than that, but at least they were moving in the right direction.
There was other good news too: the Admiralty had now released to Ramsay all destroyers in home waters. … Route X had at last been cleared of mines, cutting the passage to Dunkirk from 87 to 55 miles. … The beachhead was holding despite the Belgian surrender. … The surf was subsiding; a threatening storm veered away. … Smoke from the blazing oil refinery hid the port from the Luftwaffe. … Casualties were mercifully low.
Besides the Queen of the Channel, the only serious loss of the day was the little paddle steamer Brighton Belle. A charming antique looking like something out of a toy store, she was thrashing her way home with 800 men plucked from the sea at La Panne. Sapper Eric Reader huddled in the boiler room drying off, when the ship hit a submerged wreck with a frightful jolt. “Never touched us,” an old cockney stoker called out cheerfully, but the sea gurgled in and the Brighton Belle began to sink. The troops tumbled on deck as the whistle tooted an SOS. Happily other ships were nearby and took everybody off—even the captain’s dog.
If casualties could be kept at this level, there were valid grounds for the Dynamo Room’s optimism. On the whole the evacuation was proceeding smoothly, and the greatest crisis of the day—the gap created by the Belgian surrender—had been successfully met. For the troops still pouring up the escape corridor, there was additional reason to hope. On either side of the raised roadways, the fields were beginning to fill with water. The French were flooding the low-lying land south of the coast. Even German tanks would find the going difficult.
But already a new crisis had arisen, shifting the focus back from the land to the sea. It had been brewing for several days without anybody paying much attention. Now, in the early hours of May 29, it suddenly burst, posing a fresh challenge to Admiral Ramsay and his resourceful staff.