The Second World War (23 page)

At night, soldiers waited in the sea with water up to their shoulders, as lifeboats and small boats edged in to pick them up. Most were so tired and helpless in their sodden battledress and boots that the cursing sailors had to haul them up over the gunwhales, grasping them by their webbing equipment.

The Royal Navy suffered just as much as the troops they were
rescuing. On 29 May, when Göring, under pressure from Hitler, launched a major effort against the evacuation, ten destroyers were sunk or seriously damaged, as well as many other vessels. This prompted the Admiralty to withdraw the larger fleet destroyers which would be vital for the defence of southern England. But they were brought back a day later as the evacuation flagged, for each destroyer could take off up to a thousand soldiers at a time.

That day also saw a furious defence of the inner perimeter by the Grenadier Guards, the Coldstream Guards and the Royal Berkshires from the 3rd Infantry Division. They just managed to hold off the German attacks which, if successful, would have put paid to any further evacuation. French troops from the 68th Division continued to hold the western and south-western part of the Dunkirk perimeter, but the strains in the Franco-British alliance became acute.

The French were certain that the British would give priority to their own men, and in fact contradictory instructions were sent from London on this point. French troops often turned up at British embarkation points and were refused permission to pass, which naturally led to furious scenes. British soldiers, irritated that the French were bringing packs, when they had been told to abandon their own possessions, pushed them off the harbour wall into the sea. In another case, British troops rushed a ship which had been allocated for the French, while a number of French soldiers trying to climb aboard a British ship were thrown back into the sea.

Even the famous charm of Major General Harold Alexander, commander of the 1st Division, was unable to deflect the anger of General Robert Fagalde, commanding XVI Corps, and Admiral Abrial, when he told them that his orders were to embark as many British troops as possible. They produced a letter from Lord Gort assuring them that three British divisions would be left behind to hold the perimeter. Admiral Abrial even threatened to close the port of Dunkirk to British troops.

The dispute was referred to London and to Paris, where Churchill was meeting Reynaud, Weygand and Admiral François Darlan, the head of the French navy. Weygand accepted that Dunkirk could not expect to hold out indefinitely. Churchill insisted that the evacuation should continue on equal terms, but his hope of maintaining the spirit of the alliance was not shared in London. There, the unspoken assumption was that, since France was likely to give up the battle, the British had better look out for themselves. Alliances are complicated enough in victory, but in defeat they are bound to produce the worst recriminations imaginable.

On 30 May, it looked as if half of the BEF would be left behind. But the following day the Royal Navy and the ‘little ships’ arrived in strength: destroyers, minelayers, yachts, paddle-steamers, tugs, lifeboats, fishing
boats and pleasure craft. Many of the smaller vessels ferried soldiers out from the beaches to the larger ships. One of the yachts, the
Sundowner
, was owned by Commander C. H. Lightoller, who had been the senior surviving officer of the
Titanic
. The miracle of Dunkirk lay in the generally calm sea during the vital days and nights.

On board the destroyers, Royal Navy ratings handed out mugs of cocoa, tins of bully beef and bread to the exhausted and famished soldiers. But, with the Luftwaffe stepping up their attacks whenever there were breaks in the RAF’s fighter cover, reaching a ship did not guarantee a safe haven. The description of the terrible injuries inflicted by air attack, of those drowning as ships sank and of the unanswered cries for help are hard to forget. Conditions for the wounded left behind within the Dunkirk perimeter were far worse, with medical orderlies and doctors able to do little to comfort the dying.

Even those evacuated found little relief to their suffering on reaching Dover. The mass evacuation had overwhelmed the system. Hospital trains distributed them far and wide. One wounded soldier, back from the horror of Dunkirk, could hardly believe his eyes when he saw out of the train window white-flannelled teams playing cricket as if Britain were still at peace. Many men, when eventually treated, were found to have maggots in their wounds under field dressings or were suffering from gangrene and had to have a limb amputated.

On the morning of 1 June, the rearguard at Dunkirk, which included the 1st Guards Brigade, was overwhelmed by a determined German offensive across the Bergues–Furnes Canal. Some men and even platoons collapsed, but the bravery shown that day led to the award of a Victoria Cross and several other medals. Evacuation in daylight now had to be cancelled because of the Royal Navy’s heavy losses and that of two hospital ships, one sunk and the other damaged. The last ships arrived off Dunkirk during the night of 3 June. Major General Alexander in a motorboat made a final tour up and down the beaches and harbour calling for any soldiers left to show themselves. Shortly before midnight, Captain Bill Tennant, the naval officer with him, felt able to signal to Admiral Ramsay in Dover that their mission had been completed.

Instead of the 45,000 troops, which the Admiralty had hoped to save, the warships of the Royal Navy and the assorted civilian craft had taken off some 338,000
Allied troops
, of whom 193,000 were British and the rest French. Some 80,000 soldiers, mostly French, were left behind due to confusion and the slowness of their commanders to withdraw them. During the campaign in Belgium and north-eastern France, the British had lost 68,000 men. Almost all their remaining tanks and motor transport, most of their artillery and the vast majority of their stores had to be destroyed.
The Polish forces in France also made their way to Britain, prompting Goebbels to refer to them contemptuously as ‘
the Sikorski tourists
’.

The reaction in Britain was strangely mixed, with some exaggerated fears but also emotional relief that the BEF had been saved. The ministry of information was concerned that popular morale was ‘
almost too good
’. And yet the possibility of invasion had really begun to sink in. Rumours of German parachutists dressed as nuns circulated. Some people apparently even believed that in Germany ‘mentally defective patients [were] being recruited for a suicide corps’, and that ‘the Germans dug through under Switzerland and came up in Toulouse’. The threat of invasion inevitably produced an incoherent fear of aliens in their midst. Mass Observation also noted in the wake of the evacuation from Dunkirk that French troops were warmly welcomed, while Dutch and Belgian refugees were shunned.

The Germans wasted little time in launching the next phase of their campaign. On 6 June, they attacked the line of the River Somme and the Aisne, enjoying a considerable superiority in numbers and air supremacy. French divisions, having got over the initial shock of the disaster, now fought with great bravery, but it was too late. Churchill, warned by Dowding that he did not have sufficient fighters to defend Britain, refused French requests to send more squadrons across the Channel. There were still over 100,000 British troops south of the Somme, including the 51st Highland Division which was soon cut off at Saint-Valéry with the French 41st Division.

In an attempt to keep France in the war, Churchill sent another expeditionary force under General Sir Alan Brooke across the Channel. Before leaving, Brooke warned Eden that, while he understood the diplomatic requirement of his mission, the government must recognize that it offered no chance of military success. Although some French troops were fighting well, many others had started to slink away and join the columns of refugees fleeing towards the south-west of France. Panic spread with rumours of poison gas and German atrocities.

Motorcars streamed forth, led by the rich who seemed well prepared. Their head-start enabled them to corner the diminishing petrol supplies along the way. The middle class followed in their more modest vehicles, with mattresses strapped to the roof, the inside filled with their most prized possessions, including a dog or a cat, or a canary in a cage. Poorer families set out on foot, using bicycles, hand-carts, horses and perambulators to carry their effects. With the jams extending for hundreds of kilometres, they were often no slower than those in motorcars, whose engines boiled over in the heat, advancing just a few paces at a time.

As these rivers of frightened humanity, some eight million strong, poured towards the south-west, they soon found that not only petrol was
unobtainable, but also food. The sheer numbers of city-dwellers, buying every baguette and grocery available, soon produced a growing resistance to compassion and a resentment of what came to be seen as a plague of locusts. And this was in spite of the numbers who had been wounded by German aircraft strafing and bombing the packed roads. Once again it was the women who bore the brunt of the disaster and who rose to the occasion with self-sacrifice and calm. The men were the ones in tears of despair.

On 10 June, Mussolini declared war on France and Britain, although well aware of his country’s military and material weakness. He was determined not to miss his chance to profit territorially before peace came. But the Italian offensive in the
Alps
, of which the Germans had not been informed, proved disastrous. The French lost just over 200 men. The Italians suffered 6,000 casualties, including more than 2,000 cases of severe frostbite.

In a decision which only increased the confusion, the French government had moved to the Loire Valley, with different ministries and headquarters established in various chateaux. On 11 June, Churchill flew to Briare on the Loire for a meeting with the French leaders. Escorted by a squadron of Hurricanes, he and his team landed at a deserted airfield near by. Churchill was accompanied by General Sir John Dill, now chief of the general staff, Major General Hastings Ismay, the secretary of the War Cabinet, and Major General Edward Spears, his personal representative to the French government. They were driven to the Château du Muguet, which was the temporary headquarters of General Weygand.

In the gloomy dining room, they were awaited by Paul Reynaud, a small man, with high arching eyebrows and a face which was ‘
puffy with fatigue
’. Reynaud was close to a state of nervous exhaustion. He was accompanied by an ill-tempered Weygand and Marshal Pétain. In the background stood Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, now Reynaud’s under-secretary of war, who had been Pétain’s protégé until they fell out before the war. Spears noted that, in spite of Reynaud’s polite welcome, the British delegation were made to feel like ‘
poor relations at a funeral reception
’.

Weygand described the catastrophe in the bleakest terms. Churchill, although wearing a heavy black suit on this hot day, did his best to sound genial and enthusiastic in his inimitable mixture of English and French. Not knowing that Weygand had already given orders to abandon Paris to the Germans, he advocated a house-by-house defence of the city and guerrilla warfare. Such ideas horrified Weygand and also Pétain who, emerging from his silence, said: ‘
That would be the destruction of the country
!’ Their main concern was to preserve enough troops to crush revolutionary
disorder. They were obsessed with the idea that the Communists might seize power in an abandoned Paris.

Weygand, trying to shift responsibility for the collapse of French resistance, demanded more RAF fighter squadrons, knowing that the British must refuse. Just a few days before he had blamed France’s defeat not on the generals, but on the Popular Front and schoolteachers ‘
who have refused
to develop in the children a sense of patriotism and sacrifice’. Pétain’s attitude was similar. ‘
This country’, he said to Spears, ‘has been rotted by politics.
’ Perhaps more to the point, France had become so bitterly divided that accusations of treason were bound to fly.

Churchill and his companions flew back to London with no illusions left, although they had extracted a promise that they would be consulted before an armistice. The key issues from a British point of view were the future of the French fleet and whether Reynaud’s government would continue the war from French North Africa. But Weygand and Pétain were resolutely opposed to the idea, since they were convinced that in the absence of government France would descend into chaos. The following evening, 12 June, Weygand openly demanded an armistice at a meeting of the council of ministers, of which he was not a member. Reynaud tried to remind him that Hitler was not an old gentleman like Wilhelm I in 1871, but a new Genghis Khan. This, however, was Reynaud’s last attempt to control his commander-in-chief.

Paris was an almost deserted city. A huge column of black smoke arose from the Standard Oil refinery, which had been set on fire at the request of the French general staff and the American embassy to deny petrol to the Germans. Franco-American relations were extremely cordial in 1940. The United States ambassador, William Bullitt, was so trusted by the French administration that he was temporarily made mayor and asked to negotiate the
surrender of the capital to the Germans
. After German officers under a flag of truce had been shot at near the Porte Saint-Denis on the northern edge of Paris, Generaloberst Georg von Küchler, the commander-in-chief of the German Tenth Army, ordered that Paris should be bombarded. Bullitt intervened and managed to save the city from destruction.

On 13 June, as the Germans were poised to enter Paris, Churchill flew to Tours for another meeting. His worst fears were confirmed. At Weygand’s prompting, Reynaud asked whether Britain would release France from its engagement not to ask for a separate peace. Only a handful, including Georges Mandel, the minister of the interior, and the very junior General de Gaulle were resolved to fight on whatever the cost. Reynaud, although in agreement with them, appeared, in Spears’s words, to have been wrapped up in bandages by the defeatists and become a paralysed mummy.