Getting Away
FROM THE MOMENT Churchill won his personal battle with Halifax, Britain’s fortunes took a perceptible turn for the better. There was no getting away from the scale of defeat in France, but although Hitler’s halt order had been lifted on the afternoon of 26 May, the BEF’s gradual retreat to the Dunkirk perimeter had worked and the perimeter itself was holding. The land round about was perfectly dry, but it was flat as a board, advancing panzers could be seen for miles, and the area was riddled with canals and dykes that were impassable to tanks. All the BEF was inside the perimeter by 30 May, and all bridges were blown. What the Germans discovered was that it was a slow and difficult business budging an enemy that was well dug in and determined not to be budged.
Among those trying hard not to budge were Bill Cheall and his comrades in the 6th Green Howards. Bill reckoned morale was good after their encouraging brush with the enemy at Gravelines, and he, for one, had faith in their officers. On the 29th, their positions were in the process of being taken over by the Welsh Guards when they were attacked and almost an entire platoon in D Company killed. However, the attack was successfully beaten off and the men were ordered to head for the beaches.
As they neared them, the degree of destruction increased. A huge pall of black smoke hung over the town from the oil depots which had been hit by bombs, but there were burning vehicles and thousands more abandoned, and bodies, both troops and civilians, were lying unburied. Dead livestock lay bloated, while packs of dogs, mad and feral, scavenged greedily. Above them, somewhere beyond the pall, the sound of aircraft could be heard, while all around them guns boomed and small arms chattered and rang out.
They reached the promenade at Bray-Dunes, then walked along until they were among the dunes and clambered down on to the beach. They had been told to congregate at the 23rd Division assembly point, but they couldn’t find it and suddenly no one knew what to do for the best, so they stood about, waiting, hoping, until darkness came. The following morning, they were finally told to head to Dunkirk itself, a few miles along the beach. As they were trudging along, a German fighter swooped down low, machine-gunning. They fired their rifles, but without success.
Eventually, they reached the East Mole. This was a narrow wooden pier which had not been hit by the Germans and lay directly under the pall of smoke. It had initially been thought it would not be strong enough to take ships, but early on the 28th a destroyer had pulled alongside it successfully and since then it had been in constant use. As a result, the numbers of men lifted off had dramatically increased. One bomb had hit it but not exploded, going straight through and out the other side. Planks had been strung across the hole. It was another stroke of luck. At last, Cheall stepped aboard a ferry, called The Lady of the Mann. At around six o’clock on 31 May, the boat slipped its moorings and set sail for England.
Also getting away were thousands of French troops, including Capitaine Barlone. By 29 May, he had lost all contact with division headquarters but was still with some of the fighting units. The 13th Rifles had been fighting, but only had 500 men left and most of the officers had been killed. It was a similar story for the 22nd Rifles, but Barlone was impressed with the way the NCOs were holding the men together. Despite the immense congestion, despite artillery fire, and despite being knocked by a horse himself, they trudged on towards Dunkirk. ‘At some distance we see a soldier who appears to be quietly sitting in the road leaning on a sack,’ he noted. ‘The unfortunate fellow has had half his head blown away – a body crowned with an awful mass of mangled flesh.’
They reached Bray-Dunes and carried out a head count: there were just 1,250 men. ‘That is all that remains of our fine North African Division of 18,000 men,’ he scribbled. ‘The rest: killed, wounded, prisoners, missing.’ They made their way to the town, took shelter in bombed-out buildings as more and more German shells came crashing over, then at around 9 p.m. received orders to head for the Mole. Smoke filled the air, above planes were still circling, then sticks of bombs began falling. They fell flat on the ground, then picked themselves up again and dusted themselves down, although four of Barlone’s men were killed and others wounded. It seemed they weren’t ready to embark just yet, so they took shelter in the dunes until finally they were called back and at three o’clock in the morning on the 31st they boarded two ships, the Keremah and the Hebe, Barlone getting on the latter. By noon that day, 165,000 men had been successfully lifted off. It was already many, many more than had been feared a few days earlier.
Norman Field and the 2nd Royal Fusiliers were among those still defending the perimeter. Their positions were on the eastern edge, just west of Nieuport. There was no sign of any enemy troops, but the shelling was getting worse and worse. At one point, one of the most popular men in the battalion, Captain Malcolm Blair, who had been missing, turned up along with some others, giving them all a much-needed morale boost. A few hours later, however, he was dead, killed instantly by a direct shell blast. ‘Tears came to my eyes,’ admitted Field. ‘It was bloody awful.’
Meanwhile, René de Chambrun had successfully made it back to Paris after his long, round-about trip via boat from Dunkirk to England and then by plane back to France. Having hurried to Vincennes and safely delivered the papers for Général Weygand, he had hastened to his home in the Place du Palais Bourbon. Every time he had felt in any real danger during these past weeks, he had immediately thought of his wife and wondered whether he would ever see her again, so it was an enormous relief to discover she was there. She was every bit as relieved to see him; she’d not received one of his letters and had had no idea whether he was even still alive. ‘I believe that my unexpected return to Paris,’ he wrote, ‘was the happiest moment in our lives.’
No sooner had he walked through the door, however, than his wife was rung by William Bullitt, the US Ambassador. When she explained her husband had just arrived, he asked to speak to him and invited him to the embassy for a talk. Chambrun duly did as he was asked, and after he had given an account of what had been going on as he had seen it, Bullitt suggested he might go to Washington to talk to the President.
Early the next morning, 2 June, Chambrun answered the telephone to discover one of Weygand’s aides-de-camp on the line, ordering him to report to the general at seven o’clock that evening. He added that Chambrun should be ready to take the first Clipper and fly to the United States.
Meanwhile, at Dunkirk, it was not until late on the 31st that the Royal Fusiliers had finally received orders to pull back to La Panne on the coast; their part of the perimeter was being abandoned. Only 150 men survived from the 800-strong battalion, and under cover of darkness, and having immobilized their remaining vehicles by wrecking the engines, they headed off. On reaching the beach, they saw the evacuation taking place directly off the sands, but they soon came under fire once more. Field took cover in a broken house but was hit by a piece of white-hot shrapnel in his hand. ‘I realized I’d been clobbered,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t feel a thing, not then.’ The shelling halted the evacuation, but there were around 7,000 men from the 3rd and 4th Divisions on the beach at La Panne. The intense barrage eventually stopped, and the evacuation began once more. With his wounded hand, Field was lucky enough to be put on a canvas rowing boat and ferried on to a minesweeper, HMS Speedwell. He fell asleep almost immediately, to be woken by the violent zig-zagging of the ship and the sound of crashing bombs. ‘We were being dive-bombed by eight Stukas,’ he recalled. ‘They missed us. All I could see out of the corner of my eye were the spikes of water going up as some bombs landed in the sea only ten or fifteen yards away. Very scary.’
A handful of British and French battalions continued to successfully hold the bulk of the perimeter against four German divisions. Again, they were showing what determined defence in a good position could achieve, and that these comparatively few men, so outnumbered, held out so long was proving just what could and should have been achieved at Sedan and Dinant and Monthermé.
All senior British officers had now left. Commanding the rearguard was Major-General Harold Alexander, late of the Irish Guards and for much of the campaign commander of I Corps. Surely one of the most phlegmatic, calm and measured men in the British Army, he also happened to be one of the most experienced. Alexander was forty-nine, debonair and a much-decorated hero of the last war. He also had the unique qualification of having commanded men in combat at every level of rank up to major-general, including Germans, when, following the end of the Great War, he had been asked to command the Baltic Landwehr in Latvia against the Russians. He was fluent in seven languages, including, naturally, French, was amusing and self-effacing, and was in every way the ideal man to guide the final stages of the evacuation. Working together with the French Amiral Jean-Marie Abrial, he decided to continue the evacuation through the night of 2–3 June and try and lift all the remaining men. By this time, the perimeter had shrunk and it was now only the French who were making a last-ditch stand as German troops finally crept within spitting distance of the town. By that last night, there were just 30,000 French and 5,000 Tommies remaining. Naval demolition parties blew what remained of the port during the day while by darkness Vice-Admiral Ramsay back in Dover had assembled a mixed ensemble of some twenty-four destroyers and personnel ships and a host of further minesweepers and other vessels. The first troops began embarking at 9 p.m., with the harbour already being shelled by German guns. Burning fires didn’t help, but still the Mole had not been hit – or rather, had not been put out of action. At around 11.30 p.m., Alexander and his Senior Naval Officer boarded a motor launch and sped down the length of the beach calling out for any stragglers. Satisfied they had now got the lot, Alexander sent one last signal: ‘BEF evacuated. Returning now’, and set sail for home. Operation DYNAMO was over, and some 338,000 troops, including nearly 140,000 French, had been safely lifted and taken back to England to fight another day. It was almost as much a miracle as the scale of the German victory.
The Italian leadership in Rome had been watching the events in France and the Low Countries intently, and by the last week of May Mussolini had decided the time had at last come to intervene and enter the war on the side of their Axis partner. The decision had been prompted not only by the sweeping gains made by the Germans but also by the increasingly desperate diplomatic offers made by the French, whose ambassador, André François-Poncet, was reeling off names of French possessions in Africa they would be willing to barter in order for Italy to keep out of the war. Indeed, much of Reynaud’s visit to London had been taken up with what Britain and France might jointly offer Italy. Very reluctantly, Churchill had even agreed to Reynaud’s suggestion to ask President Roosevelt to contact Mussolini and suggest both Britain and France were ready to barter both possessions and economically in return for Italy staying out. Roosevelt did as he was asked, but his ambassador in Rome was given short shrift. It was too late, Ciano told him. Italy was now set on war.
Mussolini had rejected the last-ditch overtures safe in the knowledge that France believed itself to be finished – which meant, to all intents and purposes, she was finished. Britain was still talking tough, but its Army had been defeated and humiliated and over 85,000 vehicles and more than 2,500 artillery pieces had been left behind on the Continent. Many of its men had been rescued, but what would they fight with now? Surely, Mussolini gambled, Britain would follow France. Before long, both would be suing for peace. Even if Britain didn’t, it would be so weakened that even Italy would be able to take it on and win.
Mussolini did not want to miss out. Egypt, he knew, was lightly defended. If he could take Cairo and the Suez Canal, the sea link with his East African possessions would be open once more. Libya could be joined at the hip to Egypt, Egypt to Sudan, Sudan to Abyssinia. He wanted a north-east African colonial empire. Furthermore, through the Canal, Italy could access the world’s oceans.
On the other hand, if he left it until both Britain and France were beaten, then Germany, not Italy, would have claim to Egypt and the Suez Canal, and that was not worth thinking about. To earn his place at the peace table, and to have his chance to take Egypt, he needed to strike soon and delay no longer.
His generals were as unenthusiastic as ever, but he fobbed them off with talk of going on the defensive and using the opening stages of the war to attack British naval bases using naval and air power only. The importance of maintaining influence was the reason he gave them for declaring war – a line they appear to have swallowed. Certainly Badoglio, the Chief of Staff, did. The Duce also secured new authority over the armed services from a reluctant King Vittorio Emanuele.
Count Ciano had broadly come round to Mussolini’s line of thinking, although he was concerned by the British stance. ‘A painful conference with Sir Percy Loraine,’ he noted on 28 May.
The British Ambassador was unequivocal: ‘We shall answer war with war,’ Loraine told him bluntly, ‘but, notwithstanding this, my heart is filled with sadness to think that blood must flow between our countries.’ Ciano replied that it was sad for him too, but he could see no other way out.
Ciano’s comment revealed the dilemma Italy faced. Mussolini’s ambition was both for Italy to be a great power but also for a reconstructed and peaceful Europe in which Fascism dominated. He wanted Italy to grow and develop, but the country was resource-poor, its industry under-developed compared with Germany, Britain and France, and agriculture was still the biggest employer, accounting for around 47 per cent of the workforce. At the same time, the population was growing; it was around forty-three million, a little larger than France and some four million smaller than Britain, but with much less living space. Overseas expansion was a means of solving this problem, as well as offering potentially vast economically exploitable territory. In any case, a country, and indeed regime, was simply not going to be taken seriously as a world power without imperial possessions. So for Mussolini there were a number of very good reasons to try and create a new Roman empire.
Mussolini had also enjoyed playing the role of arbitrator at Munich nearly two years earlier and had set himself up to play a similar role the previous summer. War had changed all that. The British blockade was hurting too. On the other hand, if Germany beat France and dominated all of Europe, not only would Italy’s influence dwindle but the country would become an irrelevance and possibly even a vassal Nazi state, which would be disastrous for both him and the regime.
Therefore Mussolini felt he had no choice but to actively enter the war, and to do so before the fighting was over. His armed forces were not ready, it was true, but with France all but beaten, and Britain, he hoped, sure to sue for peace too, this would not matter. He viewed Hitler and the Nazis as allies, but his war would be a parallel one for dominance in the Mediterranean and African sphere. In other words, if Italy stayed out of the war, the regime would be finished; but if it entered the war, albeit without being remotely ready, there was a good chance it could gain much for not a huge amount. It was, however, a risk, as Ciano was all too well aware.
Events in the West had brought Mussolini’s plans forward, and after negotiations with Hitler over the precise date, Monday, 10 June, was agreed upon as the day for Italy’s entry into the war.
‘The decision has been taken,’ Ciano wrote on 30 May. ‘The die is cast.’
In their appreciation of 29 May, Britain’s Chiefs of Staff had warned that there was a good chance that the Germans would stabilize the front in France and concentrate right away on a major assault on Britain. This, of course, was a report tinged with panic and mostly drawn up during the dark early days of the Dunkirk evacuation. Clearer, calmer heads may well have realized that the logistics of bringing up air forces to the Channel coast, reorganizing a weary Army and gathering together enough shipping for an invasion would mean no such thing could happen in the short term, and to leave France, now on its knees and waiting for the executioner’s axe to swing, with the chance to regroup, made no logical sense whatsoever. Be that as it may, the country was to be brought to a state of high alert.
Already, on 14 May, Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, had called for men aged seventeen to sixty to form a new force of ‘Local Defence Volunteers’. They would be organized and armed and expected to help defend the country in the event of a German invasion. Some quarter of a million volunteered within a week, including the Wiltshire farmer A. G. Street. Beaches, normally just readying themselves for a summer of holidaying, were mined and strewn with barbed wire, and signposts were taken down. Pillboxes were built along the coast, by rivers and at road junctions in huge numbers. New batteries of guns and searchlights were also put in place along the south coast.
From her flat in Hampstead, Gwladys Cox had been following events on the Continent. London, she thought, was now ‘curiously calm’, although the city seemed quieter. ‘The theatres,’ she noted, ‘partly on account of the black-out, partly through fear of air-raids, are not booming as in the last war – that was a soldiers’ war; this, we know, is a civilians’ war as well.’
On 4 June, the Prime Minister addressed the House of Commons, warning them that while the evacuation of Dunkirk had been a ‘miracle of deliverance’, it was still a terrible defeat. Watching was Jock Colville, whose earlier grave concerns about Churchill’s suitability to lead the country were rapidly melting away. So impressed was he by the speech, he even copied out a long extract for his diary. Later it was broadcast to the nation too and around the entire free world. ‘Even though large tracts of Europe have fallen into the grip of the Gestapo, and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,’ Churchill told them. ‘We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’
The speech sent out an important message of British intent and served as a rallying cry for the entire free world. Rhetoric like this was priceless. Even so, there was one place they would not be fighting the Germans for much longer, and that was Norway, where the decision had now been made, with the French, to evacuate Narvik, the last Allied bastion there. Narvik – the most important objective for the Allies – had been captured, with the German mountain troops there successfully pushed back. It was the one part of the land campaign that had actually witnessed an Allied victory. However, with disaster unfolding in France, sustaining Narvik was no longer a priority. The Allies were getting rather good at evacuating troops and a clean and swift operation to pick up the 24,500 troops from this northern Norwegian port was put in place and began on 4 June. Three days later, it was complete.
It was not, however, the end of the battle for Norway. Mirroring the opening of the campaign, German naval vessels were steaming towards the Leads at the same time, and unobserved. The idea had been Admiral Raeder’s, who was given consent by Hitler to mount an attack on British shipping protecting the entrance to Narvik as a means of relieving the pressure on the mountain troops stranded there.
While Allied troops had been lifted from Narvik without the Germans knowing, so Raeder’s force had slipped out of Kiel and into the North Sea without detection. All the Kriegsmarine’s remaining heavy warships were now at sea: just two battle cruisers, one heavy cruiser, four destroyers and two torpedo boats. One of those battle cruisers, the Scharnhorst, was an enormous vessel not much smaller than the Bismarck and Tirpitz battleships. Capable of 31 knots and armed to the teeth with nine 11-inch guns and fifty-two further guns of smaller calibres, as well as six torpedo tubes, there was no doubting her firepower.
On board was Hans-Hellmuth Kirchner, just twenty years old and undergoing his officer training as a midshipman, or Fähnrich zur See. He had been born and brought up in Neubrandenburg; his father served as a U-boat commander in the last war and so, having completed school and then his stint with the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the Reich Labour Service, it was perhaps not surprising that Kirchner had chosen to follow in his father’s footsteps and joined the Navy. After sailing training, including a lengthy journey around much of the world, he was given extensive naval artillery training, which was why, when posted to the Scharnhorst, he had been attached to the anti-aircraft guns. He was at his post when news quickly went around the ship that the British aircraft carrier Glorious had been spotted with an escort of two destroyers.
There was no question that Glorious had been caught napping. Since the Kriegsmarine had received its bloody nose at the start of the Norwegian campaign, naval engagements had all but ceased in the North Sea. Glorious was steaming back to Scapa at just 17 knots, and with none of her aircraft armed or ready. This was tragic complacency.
From his gun position, Kirchner could see the British aircraft carrier frantically signalling, flashing Morse signals, ‘What ship? What ship?’
Moments later, Scharnhorst’s 11-inch heavy guns opened fire, striking the aircraft carrier and immediately wrecking the main flight deck. ‘As we approached the enemy formation, getting closer and closer,’ noted Kirchner, ‘the Glorious sustained hit after hit and finally went up in flames.’ The two British destroyers Ardent and Acosta were under fire too, but still surged forward through their own smokescreen. Ardent launched eight torpedoes before being pummelled and sunk, and then Acosta managed to get a torpedo into the side of the Scharnhorst. Kirchner felt the entire superstructure waver and shake. The blast killed forty-eight of the crew, knocked out two of the engine rooms and reduced her speed to just 20 knots. Glorious, ablaze and rapidly filling with water, sank soon after, as did Acosta, but the destroyers’ fearless attacks had put yet another of Germany’s battleships out of action. Only around forty men out of 1,559 from the three British ships survived.
Scharnhorst limped to Trondheim, as the crew desperately tried to contain the damage. Many of the dead men had to be left floating in the flooded sections. Meanwhile, the last of the Allied troops had been lifted, as was the Norwegian King Haakon and his government. The Germans had been hunting for them since the invasion, but the King had repeatedly eluded capture. Also taken to Britain were most of the Norwegian Government’s gold reserves. From Britain, the Norwegian King-in-Exile would continue the fight.
While the Scharnhorst was at Trondheim, Royal Navy torpedo-bombers from another carrier, Ark Royal, attacked her unsuccessfully, but a week later, on 20 June, the Scharnhorst’s sister ship, the Gneisenau, was also hit by a torpedo from a British submarine. Both would be confined to dry docks for the rest of the year.
Losing any ship was a blow to the British, especially an aircraft carrier, but for the Kriegsmarine, the losses of the Norwegian campaign were disastrous. One of 2 heavy cruisers, 2 of 6 light cruisers, 10 of 20 destroyers, one torpedo boat and 6 U-boats had been sunk. A number had also been damaged and were undergoing costly and time-consuming repairs, which meant that by 20 June the Kriegsmarine had just one heavy cruiser, two light cruisers and a mere four destroyers ready for action. Britain was simply not going to be subdued with quite so small a naval force.
On one level, the Norwegian campaign had proved a great success – after all, it had achieved its main objective of creating naval bases and denying the Allies the chance to sever German iron supplies. However, the passage of such ore via Narvik still remained fraught with risk, and much of the Kriegsmarine’s surface fleet – upon which it had based its prewar naval strategy – lay either at the bottom of the sea or in dockyards undergoing repairs that were using money and materials needed elsewhere. Luftwaffe losses amounted to 242 aircraft, which was also no small number.
It is hard not to agree with Warlimont that Hitler would have been better off knocking out France and the Low Countries first, in which case they would have been able to storm into Norway without much of a fight; Britain would have been in no position to contest it on land at all. And had the attack in the West failed, Norway would not have done them much good anyway.
When Hitler invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war, the Führer was forced into a conflict that required absolute victory and nothing less. The run of victories had been impressive; to defeat France had been an astonishing achievement. But in the long run these victories would mean nothing if Germany did not defeat Britain too. And to do that, Britain’s Air Force and Navy had to be defeated as well as its Army. How this was going to happen with a surface fleet that had been largely destroyed and just a handful of U-boats was something Hitler did not appear to have yet thought through.