AS THE TROOPS defending the perimeter were pulled back, they all experienced a sense of defeat, together with the shock of seeing the crowded beaches for the first time. Early on Wednesday, May 29, Henry de La Falaise records his first sight of his regiment’s destination: “Overturned trucks, equipment, broken cases with thousands of unopened cans spilled out, heaps of cigarette packages and clothing are strewn everywhere in the mire. As the day lightens, we can see many freshly-dug graves and bloated horses left putrifying in the fields. Long lines of worn-out troops trudge wearily on amidst the wreckage.”
Now within sight of the dense black cloud of smoke over the town of Dunkirk, he writes, “The moment we all dreaded has finally arrived.” The remaining armored cars of the 12th Lancers are stripped of their weapons, backed into a muddy canal, and blown up. Afterwards the men gather in an open field and start a large bonfire, into which they throw all their kit and their personal equipment, and are soon under “strong and savage air attack.” There is no place to shelter. Dozens of abandoned French artillery horses gallop aimlessly in terror as the bombs fall. “The din is terrific. . . . I have taken refuge in a shallow ditch. To quiet my nerves more than anything else, I, too, am shooting [at the German dive-bombers] with a borrowed rifle.”
Not far away Gunner Bowman and his sergeant-major went about the drastic, “shameful” task of destroying their gun. “The procedure,” Bowman wrote, quoting the toneless flat prose of the gun’s manual, which every gunner knew by heart, “is set out in the Gun Drill for Q. F. [quick-firing] 25pr. in Appendix IV under ‘Disablement.’ ‘The extent of the disablement ordered will depend on the time available and the probability of recapture. To destroy the gun, place an HE [high-explosive] shell in the muzzle. Load with HE. Fire the gun from under cover by means of a length of rope or telephone wire attached to the firing lever.’ ”
This drill was almost the unthinkable for a gunner. Neither the sergeant-major nor Bowman was able to look back on the wreckage they had created, nor to speak. “There was firing all around us. Shell bursts, mortar fire and bullets from light weapons were closing in. It really was time to go.” In silence they mounted their quad truck* and made for the beach.
The day had not started on a high note for anyone. At 10 Downing Street the prime minister began it by sending a stern message to his cabinet ministers and all senior officials: “In these dark days the Prime Minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in the Government, as well as high officials, would maintain a high morale in their circles, not minimizing the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war until we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination. . . .”
In Berlin, in perfect spring weather, General Halder fumed that the British were being allowed “to get away to England right under our noses,” no doubt a dig at Göring’s promise that the Luftwaffe could destroy the BEF at Dunkirk all by itself. In Paris the GQG continued to calmly release daily communiqués that totally contradicted the reality of General Weygand’s growing defeatism and the government’s search for a way to negotiate an armistice without alienating its British ally: “The French and the British troops that are fighting in Northern France are maintaining with a heroism worthy of their traditions a struggle of exceptional intensity. . . . Nothing important to report on the rest of the front.”
Despite the chaos and improvisation on the beach, Captain Tennant’s naval shore party had by then managed to set up a kind of order, while “the little boats” that were so desperately needed began to make their way to Dunkirk, some manned by naval crews, some by civilians. One soldier of the 2nd/5th Leicesters managed to scrounge a lift from a party of sappers, until they were stopped by an MP and told “to dump the truck in a field,” where there were already hundreds of them—the roads into Dunkirk were choked with abandoned vehicles of every kind. Recognized as an infantryman, he was sent back to fight in the rear guard (unlike some, he had evidently retained his rifle, bayonet, and ammunition pouches), “then told to get into town and down to the docks.” Getting into town was an ordeal—“it was in ruins . . . and still being bombed and shelled.” An officer of the same regiment wrote that the chaos in the center of Dunkirk was “indescribable.” “No one knew what was happening and the town was being heavily shelled and bombed. Someone said they thought we were being evacuated so we made for the beach. There were thousands of men in long queues. We met some people with food and about 9.00am we had a breakfast of chocolate and tinned asparagus.”
As the BEF concentrated on Dunkirk, troops of all kinds massed there, the “odds and sods” of every unit. That extremely odd member of Field Security Personnel Lance-Corporal Arthur Gwynn-Browne, possibly the only admirer of Gertrude Stein’s prose at Dunkirk, arrived there with his unit on the night of May 26. His surrealist vision, idiosyncratic faux naïveté, and curiously detached point of view, at once terrified and coldly objective, makes his description of Dunkirk unique. The men of Gwynn-Browne’s FSP unit parked their motorcycles meticulously, with the precision beloved of the British Army, within a hundred yards of the burning oil tanks in Dunkirk Harbor. Their next order was to destroy them with hatchets. Having done so, they watched “great black bunches of smoke and rubble bursting up . . . from Dunkirk” for some time, under a lurid sky. Then they were told to take what food they could and go to the beach. Gwynn-Browne took packets of biscuits and a tin of milk. “Everybody was destroying everything,” he writes, adding, “It was not exhilarating.”
Dunkirk was still less so.
We joined the stream of troops and walked on into town. We came to a wide open cobbled space by the docks and there we sat down. . . . A short way off a warehouse was blazing. There was a continuous crackle coming from it. It was a store for small arms ammunition. . . . We walked through more streets. They were full of broken tiles and brick ends. We passed some groups of burnt out searchlights and smashed up A. A. guns. . . . We crunched glass under foot. The shops stood deserted, their contents strewn higgledy piggledy on the cobbles and pavements. We reached a big open space of sand dunes. It was dotted with troops. We sat down in the sand.
Even less literary souls than Lance-Corporal Gwynn-Browne found the sight of Dunkirk hallucinating, like a real-life three-dimensional version of Picasso’s Guernica. Gunner Bowman experienced “a brilliant flame and tremendous crash,” then recovered to find himself in a kind of erotic nightmare, “sprawled out alongside what looked like a naked woman.” He stood up to see more naked women, “some with fragments of flimsy clothing attached.” He had been blown through the glass window of a ladies underwear shop, the figures were mannequins dressed in samples.
Guernica by Pablo Picasso.
Over the years “the Spirit of Dunkirk” has largely erased the reality of it—the sight of Dunkirk in the last days of May appalled everyone, even hardened soldiers. The air was dense with burning oil, “which stung the eyes and burnt the throat,” choking everyone and covering everything with greasy black soot, the sea was covered in oil slick and floating debris from sinking ships, unburied bodies lay everywhere on the streets and beaches, and the smell from broken sewage pipes and the burning rubber from thousands of vehicles that were being destroyed “assaulted the senses.” One writer compared it “to a scene from Dante’s Inferno,” and went on to add,
Drink was freely available from a dozen or more smashed cafes, and there had been much looting. The chief memory for many who passed through the wreckage of the town . . . was of the copious quantity of free cigarettes. Thousands upon thousands of cartons were available from bombed warehouses, and the bedraggled survivors filled their pockets. Drunken soldiers occupied cellars and doorways, a mass of British, French and Senegalese,† some of them lying in the road in their stupor, surrounded by vomit. British soldiers were seen staggering through the streets wearing women’s hats and other apparel looted from abandoned shops.”
Photographs taken by the Germans after they captured Dunkirk show a shocking chaos of abandoned British guns and heavy equipment, dead British soldiers lying amid the rubble, endless piles of abandoned clothing and small arms, dead horses, the town itself a picture of desolation and annihilation, hardly a house standing with a roof and windows intact, the harbor and the foreshore dotted with sunken ships and overturned boats, the waves and each incoming tide bringing in the flotsam and jetsam of an army, pools of sodden clothing, wooden duckboards, discarded tins and cans, endless man-made driftwood. War has seldom produced a more desolate sight, bringing to mind the Duke of Wellington’s famous remark about Waterloo, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.”
Although liquor was plentiful for those who cared to risk prowling through the town’s rubble to find it despite constant air raids, most of the soldiers suffered worst from raging thirst—the water works had been bombed, taps produced nothing, many men had long since emptied their water bottle, some still more unwisely had filled it with liquor filched during the retreat. One of the first tasks of the navy was to bring in water, which was, however, impossible to distribute on beaches that were packed with thirsty men who were being bombed and machine-gunned. Food was a problem too, except for scavengers who prowled through the ruins of grocery shops and the immense stores of abandoned NAAFI goods. One soldier remembers hacking away at a huge lump of corned beef covered in diesel oil, another of opening a carton of jars only to find that they contained caviar, presumably destined for some senior officer’s mess, a torment for a man suffering from acute thirst. The ruins of Dunkirk’s warehouses contained immense masses of foodstuffs in bulk, meat, rice, flour, but there was nothing to cook them in, and no organized attempt to put together a functioning open-air cookhouse on the beach.
All the same, for others the grim horror of the town was relieved by their first sight of the beach and of the open sea beyond. Robert Holding, 4th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment, passed through “the eerie ghost town . . . lit by a fiery red glow from the burning dock area,” to confront an “extraordinary” sight:
There before me, lit to an almost daylight brilliance by a large passenger ship that blazed from end to end . . . was a long sandy beach that stretched as far as the eye could see. . . . It was the men that riveted my attention. They lay in their hundreds, huddled along the edge of the dunes or in long columns stretching down to the sea. Most of them were sleeping the sleep of sheer exhaustion—many were sleeping their final sleep. I wandered around for a while, trying to find someone that I knew. Unsuccessful, I made my way to the dunes to find a place to sleep.
On May 27 and May 28 “the bulk of the evacuation effort was focussed on the beach [to the east of Dunkirk]. However, the process of embarking men into whalers at the water’s edge, rowing them out to [naval] ships that they then boarded by scramble nets, while the whalers returned to the shore for more men, was painfully slow—” many of the whalers and small boats could take only ten or fifteen men at a time out to the larger ships offshore—the more modern destroyers could take up to a thousand men once they were loaded, packed shoulder-to-shoulder like sardines in a can above and below deck, although the crowded deck gravely inhibited the use of the destroyer’s guns. Waiting while the boats were rowed back and forth was not only slow but dangerous. The naval ships, some of them irreplaceable destroyers, were constantly bombed (or attacked by German submarines and E-boats) as they waited offshore in shallow water to load up. On May 28 alone the Royal Navy lost two destroyers, HMS Wakeful and HMS Grafton, off the beaches, together with all the troops that were on board them. Wakeful was cut in half by a torpedo and went down in fifteen seconds. By Wednesday, May 29, Admiral Ramsay, following Captain Tennant’s advice, had decided to concentrate the evacuation on the eastern mole of Dunkirk harbor—there, makeshift and precarious as it was, ships could tie up and the process of loading them could be better controlled and above all speeded up. Not that the mole was safe either, Mona’s Queen, a modern 3,000-ton liner of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company loaded with canisters of water, hit a German mine as she approached the eastern mole and went down in minutes, taking fourteen of her crew with her. The Isle of Man Steam Packet Company lost three of its ships that day.
Ramsay at Dover.
In fact the two contradictory processes would continue to the last. In the end more than half the number of men evacuated were embarked from the eastern mole of Dunkirk harbor by destroyers, while only a mile or two away a fantastic array of lifeboats, motorboats, yachts, whalers, and dinghies brought men off the beach to an equally improvised fleet of passenger liners, fishing trawlers, cross-Channel ferries, and the like waiting offshore. To this day the romantic legend of Dunkirk centers on the “little ships” and the beach, but Captain Tennant, as senior naval officer Dunkirk, strove to rectify that view of events shortly after the event. “The destroyers put up by far the finest show of any of the forces concerned with the evacuation,” he wrote. “After them I would put the personnel ships [he means passenger steamers], closely followed by some of the officers and men of the beach parties, who worked waist deep in water getting men away until they practically dropped in their tracks.” This was not always an easy or pretty process, either. Small boats approaching the beach were often swamped or even capsized by soldiers struggling to board them, having waded out until they were chest deep in the surf—some hardy souls even stripped down to swim out to the boats, carrying their boots around their neck knotted by the laces.
By the twenty-ninth the first of the famous “little ships” were arriving to take men off the beach and out to bigger ships waiting farther offshore, or in some cases all the way back to the English Channel ports. Known as the Côte d’Opale, or Opal Coast, probably an attempt to compete with the more glamorous Mediterranean Côte d’Azure, the beach stretching from the east mole or breakwater of Dunkirk harbor to Nieuport is the longest in Europe—over twenty miles—and the widest, hence its popularity as a tourist destination, then and now. Even in the late nineteenth century the wide, flat, firm beach was famous as a place to race “land yachts,” as it still is today. Although there are a number of modest summer resort towns along the beach—starting from west to east Malo-les-Bains, with its casino, Bray-Dunes, La Panne, and Nieuport—none of them has a port. La Panne was the final headquarters of the BEF in May 1940, and had been the headquarters of King Albert I during the First World War, since it was on the last small part of Belgian soil not occupied by the Germans from 1914 to 1918. The water off the beach is shallow even at high tide, and behind it there is a strip of sand dunes topped with spiky tufts of beach grass, and cut by drainage ditches. Behind the dunes, in the careful way of Belgium and northern France, agriculture and husbandry begin at exactly the line where the sand ends, so not a square inch of arable land is wasted. By May 29 over two hundred thousand men were massed on the beach and dunes, with more arriving all the time. They could look out toward the sea at the passenger liners, ferries, and fishing vessels waiting for them, but there was no way to get them there. Ships lowered their own boats to row back and forth, but it was an agonizingly slow procedure. Clearly, the only way to get the men off the beach was to bring in boats with a shallow draft in large numbers, just as Admiral Ramsay had foreseen.
The Admiralty’s initial approach to recruiting civilian sailors was, perhaps deliberately, low-key. During the BBC evening news a matter-of-fact announcement, one of several, was read in the cool, mid-upper-class voice of the BBC: “The Admiralty want men experienced in marine internal combustion engines for service on yachts and motorboats. Others who have had charge of motorboats and have good knowledge of coastal navigation are needed as uncertified second hands. Applications should be made to the nearest Registrar, Royal Naval Reserve, or to the Fishery Officer.”
This was something less than an urgent or thrilling call to arms, but it had a major impact on the small world of boat owners and amateur sailors. Much like the Admiralty’s earlier request for registering small boats and yachts, it would have been easy to overlook in the shadow of more sensational news, but there existed, in fact, a kind of “bucket shop” at the Admiralty known as the Small Vessels Pool, which was responsible for the normally humdrum job of providing auxiliary ships to the Royal Navy as needed. They moved at once to respond to Admiral Ramsay’s urgent requests for small boats and the people to man them. Consisting of fewer than a dozen, the staff of the Small Vessels Pool was overwhelmed with offers of boats and volunteers to man them, but they organized themselves quickly, and with remarkable efficiency. Armed with a list of those who had offered their boat, they set out immediately to examine small boats “at places like Teddington, Kingston, Hampton Wick, Ranelagh, Chiswick and everywhere at the anchorages of the Thames yacht clubs,” as well as in other ports and harbors of the south coast, and to get in direct touch with the owners.
At first, the process of finding the crews had about it something reminiscent of the Royal Navy’s infamous eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century press-gang, which brutally impressed likely-looking civilians from seaside towns by force to serve on His Majesty’s ships. John Osborne,‡ who worked at the Royal Primrose Soap Factory in East London and took a ferry across the Thames to get there and home, was an enthusiastic amateur sailor, a devoted follower of the national passion for “messing about in boats,” in the immortal phrase from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, who had volunteered for the Royal Navy the day after war broke out, only to be told that volunteers would be enlisted as cooks, which he did not fancy. He then learned that possession of “a Yacht Master’s (Coastal) Certificate” might qualify him to join the Royal Navy as a midshipman, and enrolled at Captain O. M. Watts’s famous Navigation School in Albemarle Street, London, to study for this certificate. Osborne was surprised when he was told one afternoon that all students should report to the Port of London Authority Building, near the Tower of London, that evening; supposing that he was to be interviewed about a Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve Commission, he went home and put on his best suit before reporting to the PLA building.
There was no such interview. Instead, he found himself part of a large crowd that was brusquely instructed to “Pay attention!” A naval officer then told them “a secret, and probably dangerous, operation was being mounted, which called for the short-term services of anyone, of any age, with some knowledge of small boats and their handling.” Those who did not choose to withdraw (nobody did) were allowed to contact their family, then taken by bus to Tilbury, a port on the north bank of the mouth of the Thames, where they were issued a steel helmet and signed on as “Merchant Service Deckhands.”
“I was in a party who were then taken to the quayside where, alongside, was a large number of ships’ lifeboats, the traditional type carried by all ocean-going passenger liners pre-war, each at least 30 ft long,” Osborne recalled.
We were determined to man these lifeboats in crews of about seven hands in each. . . . The lifeboats with their crews on board, were then formed into “trots” (a trot is a line of small boats secured one behind, or astern of, the other, ready for towing) of four or five boats, and taken in tow by a tug. . . . The tug towed trots alongside each other, so the helmsman [of each boat] had to steer in order to keep clear of the boats in the line alongside, and avoid collision when under way.
By this time it was quite late in the evening and it was dark when we set off, so we were told, for Southend pier. . . . We arrived there . . . and were issued with basic provisions of bread and tinned meat.”
The boats were then towed to Ramsgate, the crews were given their orders, and they were finally towed by zigzag course through the minefields across the Channel to Dunkirk beach.
What Osborne saw there under a pall of smoke was an incredible array of boats:
barges, train ferries, car ferries, passenger ferries, RAF launches, fishing smacks, tugs, motor powered lifeboats, oar propelled lifeboats, eel-boats, picket boats, seaplane tenders . . . yachts and pleasure vessels of all kinds, some very expensive craft, some modest DIY conversion of ship’s lifeboats . . . Thames River excursion launches with rows of slatted seats and even a Thames River fire float.”
“Our tug,” Osborne writes,
was able to get quite close before we were cast off and left to our own devices to row to the beach and pick up some soldiers who were patiently waiting by their thousands, continually under bomb and shell fire. Six of the crew rowed, an oar each and one steered. The troops were very well disciplined, just waiting in long columns, hoping to be taken off. . . . We were able to get right to the sandy beach and took on board 30 soldiers. . . . We rowed away from the shore and took our “passengers” to the nearest craft lying off shore that we could find, a tug, a trawler, anything that could risk coming so close.
Osborne and his crew made more trips than he could count—at one point the lifeboat ran aground and he was obliged to get into the water up to his neck in his best “interview suit,” all of the time surrounded by “ships being sunk and survivors rescued,” bombs falling and shellfire. He spent three days and nights doing this until he and his boat were finally returned to Ramsgate by a tug. There the Royal Navy efficiently signed him off, he was paid five pounds as compensation for the damage to his best suit, and returned to Tower Bridge by launch.
Osborne finally managed to join the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman, was then commissioned as a temporary sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and saw action at sea from 1941 to the end of the war. His well-organized and calm account of what he did at Dunkirk typifies the experience of thousands of those who manned the boats and vessels of the evacuation; also typically, he was back at work and his afterwork lectures on navigation the day after the evacuation ended as if nothing had happened, and with nothing to show for it but his ruined suit.
Those who had registered their boats were called at home, among them Charles H. Lightoller, the sixty-six-year-old former second officer of the Titanic, who was swept overboard as she went down. Commander Lightoller was famous for construing the customary “Women and children first” as “Women and children only,” lowering some of the ship’s lifeboats half empty rather than let men aboard. Lightoller received a call from the Admiralty to come down to his fifty-eight-foot motor yacht Sundowner at once. He was met there by a naval officer who asked him to take the boat around to Ramsgate, where a naval crew would take her on to Dunkirk. This was to underestimate Lightoller, a tough customer who had maintained order and decorum on the Titanic with his revolver as she sank and rescued thirty survivors from the water in a flimsy, folding canvas raft, ordered them to sway back and forth in time with the waves during the night, both to keep warm and to balance the raft, then went on to be awarded the DSC in World War One for engaging a German zeppelin.
Interviewed on the BBC about Dunkirk ten years later, Lightoller still sounds in 1950 like a formidable and crisply no-nonsense figure. He told the naval officer that he “had another guess coming,” and that he and his eldest son would take Sundowner to Dunkirk themselves. In the event, he added an eighteen-year-old Sea Scout to his crew, and the three of them took her down the Thames to Gravesend, Southend, and eventually Ramsgate. The other motor vessels gathered there seemed to Lightoller too slow, so he “pushed off” on his own. The interviewer asked whether he was attacked on the way over.
Lightoller matter-of-factly replied that he had been. “Yes, we had lots of fun on the way,” he said without irony, “the first one was [when] a couple of enemy bombers had a shot at it, and fortunately . . . H. M. S. Worcester [a W-class destroyer] was just passing us at the time, and she drove them off. But then we had lots of other escapes from bombing and machine-gunning until we got over to the other side.” Lightoller paused to pick out of the sea the crew of another motor cruiser that was “well on fire” and shortly exploded, then entered Dunkirk harbor, which was being shelled and bombed, and went on board the Worcester to tell the captain that he “could take off a few men.” “ ‘He said, how many?’ Well, I once had twenty-one on board, I didn’t tell him that, I told him, ‘Oh, about one-hundred,’ and he said, ‘Right, take them,’ and they started to pour on board.” A naval rating was counting them, and when they got to fifty down below, Lightoller asked whether it was getting a bit crowded. His son shouted up, “Oh, plenty of room yet,” and they finally got one hundred thirty men on board, packed in like sardines in a can, seventy-five below and the rest on deck. “She was getting pretty tender,” Lightoller recalled, “so I called a halt and cast off, and started on my way back.”
Sundowner was attacked several times on the way home, but, Lightoller explained, “she’s very quick on the helm,” despite her load. Every time a German fighter aircraft dived low to machine-gun him, he “put the helm over hard . . . and dodged him.” Zigzagging every time a fighter came in to machine-gun Sundowner, Lightoller managed to get his boat and his passengers back unharmed. “Got back to Ramsgate, went alongside, they started to pile off then, and the Chief Petty Officer was tallying them ashore, and as the last ones went over the side his remark stays in my mind: ‘My God, mate, where did you put them all?’ ”
The master of a Thames tugboat reflected on Dunkirk for the BBC years later, “At 8:50 p.m. we were hailed by the S.S. Prague to tow her clear of the eastern arm [of the harbor]. She was loaded with troops . . . and having great difficulty in getting clear. We took hold of her at 9:00 p.m. and towed her out into the roads.” Having done this, the tugboat returned to the harbor under heavy shelling, and was hailed by a destroyer moored alongside the mole “to assist him because of the dense smoke caused by the fires on the quayside.” The tug pulled the destroyer clear, then went back to load up with men, despite a heavy barrage and shrapnel, and steamed away with them to Dover. “There was no mistaking Dunkirk from a distance for fairyland,” the tugboat master recalled.
Hundreds of similar feats in Dunkirk harbor and on the beach enabled 47,310 men to return to Britain on May 29, more than three times the number on the previous day, and gave hope that a far greater number of the BEF might be evacuated than had been anticipated. German reaction at sea to the evacuation was still somewhat hampered—the English Channel from Dunkirk to Dover is shallow, with many treacherous shoals and sandbanks, not an ideal hunting ground for U-boats, and the German E-boats (fast motor torpedo boats) operating from newly occupied ports in Holland met with fierce resistance—but the bombing and machine-gunning from the air took a frightful toll on the boats and ships. Still, the day’s results enabled the prime minister to express the hope at the War Cabinet that men might be evacuated at the rate of two thousand an hour. This did not necessarily comfort those who still had doubts about him. Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, noted in his diary, “News unpleasant. We have got off 40,000 men. . . . But the end will be awful. A horrible discussion of what instructions to send to Gort. WSC [Churchill] rather theatrically bulldoggish. Opposed by NC and H [Neville Chamberlain and Halifax] and yielded to a reasonable extent. Fear relations will become rather strained. That is Winston’s fault—theatricality.”
The instructions to General Lord Gort were constantly being revised, since it was recognized by everyone that Gort would prefer to remain with those of his troops who could not be saved rather than to be evacuated himself, and at the same time that the capture of the British commander in chief would mean handing the Germans an unnecessary propaganda coup. In the end, Churchill was persuaded, much against his instinct, to send a rather bland hortatory message to Gort, marked “Personal,” leaving it up to him to decide who should surrender and when, and ending with a typical Churchillian flourish: “His Majesty’s Government are sure that the repute of the British Army is safe in your hands.” This was clearly a concession to Chamberlain and Halifax. The prime minister continued to mull over Gort’s instructions for the next twenty-four hours—he was still enough of an old soldier himself to understand that Gort would need (and obey) precise orders, but he was not yet certain what they should be.
His mood must have improved that evening. He was “in great form” at dinner, and afterwards composed a gracious and comradely message to Premier Reynaud assuring him that French troops would “share in evacuation to the fullest possible extent,” and attempting to calm French anxieties about the removal of British heavy equipment south of Amiens. “This is only to get into order and meet impending shock, and we shall shortly send you new scheme for reinforcement of our troops in France.”
Sir Alexander Cadogan.
Finally, he paid a late-night visit to the War Room at the Admiralty, where he and Mrs. Churchill were still living until the Chamberlains moved out of 10 Downing Street. While he was examining the maps, Captain Richard Pim, RNVR, who was “in charge” of the Map Room, came up to him and asked “for four days leave to enable me to give a hand in the evacuation.” Later he would write, “Mr. Churchill not only approved my request, but said, and I remember his words, ‘God bless you; I wish I were going with you myself.”
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* The Morris “Quad” was the four-wheel-drive vehicle used to tow the limber and the gun.
† The French had brought in large numbers of colonial troops, notably from Algeria and Senegal.
‡ This is based on Mr. Osborne’s account, prepared for the BBC’s WW2 People’s War homepage, 10/15/14, www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/user/39/u1497339.shtml.